As the first in-person edition of the Sundance Film Festival since 2020, this year’s festival came as a welcome reminder of what it’s like to mingle with fellow film fanatics in the cold air and pristine mountain beauty of Park City. In fact, most everyone at Sundance was so glad simply to be there that the real revelation of this year’s festival — what maybe few were even expecting — was how supremely good the movies were. The year after a Sundance movie (“CODA”) went on to win best picture at the Oscars, the programmers offered up a mix of independent films that were bold, sharp, daring, exciting, challenging, amusing and relevant, not to mention (in a number of key cases) relatively commercial. If this is what the first month of 2023 has to offer, then it looks like film lovers are in for a promising year. Here are the Variety critics’ picks of the Sundance discoveries that loomed over all the others.
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Beyond Utopia
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival When you watch Madeleine Gavin’s staggering documentary about what really goes on in North Korea, and about a handful of desperate souls who attempt to defect from it, you witness the glum dystopia of Kim Jong-un’s cult prison state — the full nightmare of it — as never before. The forbidden footage we see (torture, an execution) achieves a quotidian terror. But the movie, which won the Sundance documentary audience award, also follows the five members of the Roh family as they leave this bad dream of a nation, and their escape story has a suck-in-your-breath suspense that’s scary and inspiring. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
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Cassandro
Image Credit: Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video Thanks to the dream casting of Mexican star Gael García Bernal as “the Liberace of Lucha Libre,” “Cassandro” arrives with a kind of instant credibility. The stakes are high in this portrait of an openly gay fighter whose outsized personality and atypical success changed the face of Mexican wrestling. The more famous Cassandro becomes, the more fearful of being discovered his closeted lover (Raúl Castillo) grows. In their relationship, the movie presents its own “Brokeback Mountain”-esque glimpse at gay men in a hyper-masculine arena. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)
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Cat Person
Image Credit: Courtesy of StudioCanal The New Yorker short story “Cat Person” invited debate, engaging directly with the gray areas of modern dating. Susanna Fogel and screenwriter Michelle Ashford make the surprising choice of treating the material more as genre fare than as a traditional rom-com, where the meet-cute isn’t and what follows is no one’s idea of a date movie. The result is a film that’s funny in places, horrifying in others and all but destined to be a reference point in future discussions about courtship. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)
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The Disappearance of Shere Hite
Image Credit: Mike Wilson/Sundance Institute “Crip Camp” director Nicole Newnham’s extraordinary new documentary is an astonishing, beautifully made corrective to the cultural amnesia that has for decades surrounded the author of “The Hite Report” — a former model who had a casual, soft-spoken way of deploying words like “clitoris,” “penetration” and “masturbation” that, back then, seemed to make everyone uncomfortable but her. In reclaiming Hite from obscurity, the film is put together with such visual verve and creativity that even its most prickly passages are compulsively enjoyable to watch. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
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Eileen
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Sundance Institute In William Oldroyd’s deliciously deranged second feature, Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) goes from being a withdrawn penitentiary secretary to an independent young woman. Perhaps “Eileen” is what happens when a disregarded background extra thrusts herself into the spotlight role in her own life. The catalyst arrives in the Marilyn-esque shape of Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), the facility’s improbably glamorous new prison psychologist. The parallels with Todd Haynes’ “Carol” are obvious, though “Eileen” is like a cursed, curdled version of it. (Read the full review by Jessica Kiang.)
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Fair Play
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Sundance Institute Chloe Domont has made the rare drama set in the financial world that nails everything about it — the numbers jargon, the risk/reward systems, the bro camaraderie and treachery — so that we believe what we’re seeing. Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) work at a New York hedge fund as analysts, but they’ve kept their romantic relationship under wraps (because it violates company policy). Then Emily gets a promotion, with Luke assigned to work under her. Is he jealous? “Fair Play” is full of sex and money and corporate backstabbing and a lot of other things that are great fun to watch, yet it’s also an intensely resonant exploration of the post-#MeToo age. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
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Flora and Son
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute In the latest spiky wistful Dublin pop-rock bauble from writer-director John Carney (“Once”), the star quality just about spills out of Eve Hewson. She plays a dissolute single mother who’s swimming in problems, most of them of her own devising. Then she takes a guitar lesson on Zoom from Jeff, a mellow dude played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who seems to be channeling Keanu Reeves and the young Kris Kristofferson. Carney weaves the music into the story with a romantic spontaneity that can leave you laughing with pleasure. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
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Kokomo City
Image Credit: D. Smith Tired of the kid-gloves approach to trans identity, director D. Smith convinced four trans sex workers to go on camera — two unapologetic Atlanta natives, plus a pair of equally witty New Yorkers — and open up about the stuff that more mainstream trans-empowerment movies (such as “Disclosure”) tell us should be off-limits, like their bodies and what they do in the bedroom. The questions may not be pre-approved by GLAAD, but they’re coming from a trans woman actively working against the usual feel-good talking points; the responses she gets are frank, funny and frequently shocking. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)
(Winner of the NEXT audience and Innovator awards)
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A Little Prayer
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Angus MacLachlan’s third film shares much of the sensibility — and sensitivity — that made “Junebug” so special. Once again, he’s written a modestly scaled drama about a North Carolina family. The movie even shares a matriarch in Celia Weston, though on-screen husband David Strathairn is the focus here after he discovers that their son is having an affair. With empathy and grace, MacLachlan depicts a couple quite willing to concede that their adult children are now in charge of their own lives. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)
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Little Richard: I Am Everything
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute The enthralling documentary that Little Richard deserves. He was a total stone freak, and a rock ‘n’ roll fireball of such insane vibrance that he could light up a city. Yet director Lisa Cortés also understands what a transgressive artist he was: a Black queer man who somehow, in the straitlaced 1950s, made the brave and genius decision that he was going to take everything he was inside and wear it on the outside. To watch this jubilant documentary is to realize that Little Richard had a talent that no one on earth, including himself, could contain. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
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Magazine Dreams
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Killian is a bodybuilder with an awesome physique and a wounded rage he carries around like a weight. The film’s star, Jonathan Majors, became a bodybuilder for the role, but as an actor he’s less Dave Bautista than Brando, with an inner silent pensive quality that’s transfixing. Elijah Bynum, highly influenced by “Taxi Driver,” writes and directs in a hypnotically deliberate but flowing style, putting us inside Killian’s dreams and obsessions, his insecurities and violence, most of which spring from his perception that a racist society has been stacked against him. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
(Winner of the U.S. dramatic jury award for creative vision)
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Milisuthando
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Thirty years on from its dissolution, the legacy of apartheid still weighs heavily on South African cinema, as a new, outspoken generation of Black filmmakers grapples with truths and wounds that they once had limited scope to voice. But rage over the past fuses remarkably with assertive, forward-looking investment in the future in Milisuthando Bongela’s duly self-searching documentary, which probes her experience as a millennial Black woman who only began reckoning with apartheid as her country was stumbling out of it. — Guy Lodge
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Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
Image Credit: Dogwoof A tantalizing portrait of Nam June Paik, the revolutionary Korean-born video artist who, in the late ’60s and ’70s, did nothing less than invent an art form. The film explores the meaning of what he created, and everything that his museum installations foresaw (from the Internet to the all-distraction-all-the-time society). But the key thing about Paik’s video art is that it was beautiful. He turned the TV screen into a canvas, so that it buzzed and pulsated was a liquid mutating psychedelic splendor. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
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Passages
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Queer auteur Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is used to calling the shots. On set, the cast and crew put up with his tantrums. At home, longtime partner Martin (Ben Whishaw) humors his needy husband’s caprices. But this time, Tomas may have gone too far, hooking up with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) after the wrap party for his latest film. The subsequent implosion is something to witness, like watching a toxic supernova collapsing in on itself in Ira Sachs’ most brutally honest film since “Keep the Lights On.” (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)
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Polite Society
Image Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features If “Polite Society” were a Jane Austen novel, a big wedding would be the happiest of endings, but in the eyes of the film’s feisty teenage protagonist, Ria Khan (Priya Kansara), watching her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) trade her art career for a husband feels like Game Over. Writer-director Nida Manzoor’s rowdy feature debut channels everything from Sergio Leone to “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” in Ria’s wild and frequently outrageous attempts to spare Lena the indignity of an (almost) arranged marriage. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)
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Past Lives
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Born in South Korea, playwright Celine Song draws on her own history and culture for a feature debut that is at once achingly autobiographical and disarmingly universal. For all the films that have been made about love triangles, Song has fashioned hers in the form of a circle, defying so many of the clichés in her quietly devastating way. “Past Lives” is about a feeling other than passion: one that evolves over the years, and which allows one life to contain multiple loves. (Read the full review by Peter Debruge.)
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You Hurt My Feelings
Image Credit: Jeong Park When the writer-director Nicole Holofcener is on her game, the sparkle of her dialogue is like neurotic champagne; it gives you a lift. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an author, and Don (Tobias Menzies), a shrink, have a long and happy marriage. He has told her how much he loves her new novel — but then she eavesdrops on him saying that he actually disliked it. Why did he lie? Clearly, he was trying to support her. The key to “You Hurt My Feelings” is that the whole movie is a sly satire of our fetishistically supportive and oversensitive therapeutic culture of positivity. (Read the full review by Owen Gleiberman.)
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