Lest you get too comfortable thinking back on last year’s movies following this morning’s Oscar noms, the 41st Sundance Film Festival is kicking off tonight in Utah. Last year’s lineup brought us indie favorites like I Saw The TV Glow and Between the Temples, and this year’s festival promises a number of oddities and originals.
From Ayo Edebiri’s turn as a music blogger (too close to home) in Opus to mumblecore renegade Mary Bronstein’s sophomore feature after a 17-year(!) break to a two-part documentary on Pee-wee Herman, here are the 15 movies we’ll be lining up in the snow to see.
Atropia
Filmmaker, actress, and journalist Hailey Gates makes her feature film debut with Atropia starring Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner as actors on opposite sides of a military role-playing simulation who fall in love by accident. Gates is a fascinating emerging figure in the industry, recognizable to cinephiles for her brief turns in Twin Peaks: The Return, Uncut Gems, and Challengers as the poor woman in estate law who matches with Patrick Zweig on Tinder, as well as being the granddaughter of screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury. Atropia is kind of giving something between Black Mirror and Westworld, sure, but with a supporting cast that boasts Tim Heidecker, Chloë Sevigny, and Ivy Wolk, there’s room for Gates’s debut to be one of the fest’s funniest flicks.
All That’s Left of You
Cherien Dabis returns to Sundance for the third time with All That’s Left of You, in which she also stars, about three generations of a Palestinian family. It’s been nearly a year since No Other Land debuted at the Berlin Film Festival, setting off a chain of hesitancy and urgency around films that address the ongoing conflict between Israeli and Palestine. There is a dearth of Palestinian filmmakers making narrative films that feel as urgent and necessary as documentary ones, and Dabis’s latest promises “heart and soul while also contending with Palestinian history, collective grief, anger, and intergenerational trauma.”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
It’s been 17 years since Mary Bronstein’s Yeast (starring Greta Gerwig, the Safdie brothers, Sean Price Williams, and Bronstein herself) made waves across the burgeoning mumblecore scene, her debut feature an acerbic comedy that would predict a decade of work to come. Bronstein’s sophomore feature, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (already a title for the ages), stars Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, and Conan O’Brien — three people who have maybe never shared a sentence until now. It’d be pleasurable enough to see any one of those people in a movie, but the combo working together in Bronstein’s sharp milieu guarantees laughs; whether those are laughs of genuine pleasure or nervous unease, we’ll just have to see.
Pee-wee As Himself
It’s been 18 months since Paul Reubens passed away, but prior to that, director Matt Wolf began a series of conversations with the actor about his work as an artist and as Pee-wee Herman, Reubens’s beloved alter ego. For all that we know and saw of Herman, Reubens worked hard to protect his personal life — right up until he lost control of everything. The two-part documentary is an intimate look into Reubens’s body of work, along with the uneasy clash between character and man, as well as a capstone of a creative life built around excitement and joy.
Rebuilding
Okay, unfortunately, there has to be more to this blurb than “press still features Josh O’Connor in a cowboy hat,” but imagine if that’s all it said: Press still features Josh O’Connor in a cowboy hat. Rebuilding is the sophomore feature from Coloradan filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman, whose debut film, A Love Song — starring Dale Dickey and Wes Studi as old friends reconnecting — was a touching, romantic work. Rebuilding tells the story of a family putting their lives back together after a wildfire, a film with far more resonance than anyone could have predicted in the months leading up to the festival. With Walker-Silverman’s humanist touch in this “loving portrait of the American West,” Rebuilding could be one of the festival’s most prescient and moving films.
Train Dreams
Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley’s Sing Sing is in the Oscar conversation this year, but the duo is back already with an adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella about a logger named Robert Granier in the early 20th-century West. With Bentley directing this time around, Train Dreams promises a “naturalism to this historical drama, love story, and metaphysical meditation that wrestles with our sense of being, and how we reconcile the immensity of our lives with our barely discernible place in the world.” If it’s as dreamy and moving as its source material, then Train Dreams will be a marvel to behold.
The Wedding Banquet
Andrew Ahn’s remake of Ang Lee’s queer romcom is one of the festival’s buzziest titles, chockablock full of people we know and love: Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, and Lily Gladstone. For one, it’ll be nice seeing Gladstone in a movie where hopefully she doesn’t have to suffer and yearn quite as much as she did for Martin Scorsese and Kelly Reichardt. It’ll be interesting to see how Ahn reinvents Lee’s film — which wound up being a major awards player back in 1993 — and whether his take on The Wedding Banquet can cement it as one of the decade’s great rom-coms.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Bill Condon, who once brought us Dreamgirls, Chicago, and whatever was going on with the live-action Beauty and the Beast, arrives in Park City with a remake of the 1980s musical starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh, and Jennifer Lopez. Can this cult classic find a new audience in the 2020s? What will J.Lo be wearing in Park City? Can Condon summon a real Sundance spectacle? This flashy musical feels very un-Sundance-y in the best possible way, which makes it one of the festival’s most curious anomalies.
Peter Hujar’s Day
Ira Sachs (Passages, Little Men) is one of our great directors of actors, and this one seems like a perfect one for his sensibility and talents. It’s a recreation of a now-legendary 1974 interview between writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and downtown photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw). The interview is remarkable for its unremarkable-ness: Hujar relates the occurrences of an ordinary day to Rosenkrantz, who had planned to put together a book of interviews with people about their average days, though eventually she published this one as its own standalone book. Sachs’s ability to convey lives in miniature should serve him well with such an intimate, subtle premise, especially given the power of these two actors.
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Gianluca Matarrese’s documentary focuses on two subjects that have recently become politically fraught: It follows the work of a Milan doctor who specializes in fertility treatments and gender-confirmation surgeries. Actually, he does more than that: Dr. Bini lends a sensitive ear to a diverse group of patients and their concerns, and he advises them about all matters relating to their situations. That he’s doing all this in Italy, still quite a conservative country, makes the subject doubly fascinating, potentially explosive, and maybe even inspiring.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin
A teacher in a remote Russian town, tasked with recording school assemblies, secretly begins filming the transformation of his school into a nationalistic and militaristic propaganda machine in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. There have been a lot of documentaries about various aspects of the Ukraine War and the situation in Russia; some have admittedly been extraordinary. This unique perspective, shot over many months by someone who is not a professional filmmaker, could break out in ways that more polished work hasn’t of late.
The Ugly Stepsister
Every year at Sundance there are at least one or two genre breakout titles originating in the Midnight Section. Here’s one that could pull off that trick this year: It retells the story of Cinderella (with some additionally gnarly tweaks) but from the perspective of one of her much-maligned stepsisters, Elvira, whose struggles with body image are even hinted at in the original fairy tale. Alternate and irreverent versions of legendary fables are nothing new nowadays, but this one seems uniquely promising and fun.
The Zodiac Killer Project
A true-crime doc that takes aim at true-crime docs? Director Charlie Shackleton takes us through a film about the Zodiac Killer that he never got to make — but maybe he sort of still did, albeit in somewhat experimental, interrogative fashion. With its familiar tropes, its faux-suspense, its boilerplate reenactments, the genre has taken over not just nonfiction streaming series but also the world of documentary in general, like a kind of uncontrollable cinematic weed. The idea of a film that deconstructs true crime and its clichés — and maybe us viewers in the process — is too delicious to resist.
The Things You Kill
Iranian American director Alireza Khatami goes to Turkey with this one, a psychological thriller about a university professor who begins to suspect that the sudden death of his elderly mother might have some unstated, troubling causes. Privy to his suspicions and intentions is a mysterious gardener who seems to come out of nowhere with myriad solutions to our hero’s problems. The Turkish cast is excellent, and the idea of Khatami mixing his ambitious stylistic markers with a genre-inflected drama is beyond promising.
Opus
John Malkovich plays a legendary pop star (we’re in), and Ayo Edebiri is the young writer (we’re in) who gets invited to his sinister estate (we’re in) and discovers sinister, cultlike goings-on (we are so in). But seriously, the culture has been sick with thrillers about young people getting invited to remote locales for bizarre rituals among the wealthy of late. Surely one of them will eventually prove to be good. Maybe it’s this one?