BEST OF THE FEST
From a double shot of Kristen Stewart in love to the definitive Devo documentary — the movies we can't wait to see at this year's fest
The phrase “indie film” means little to nothing now — it feels like a marker for a bygone era à la “college rock” or “backpack rap,” even if truly D.I.Y. filmmakers continue to tell stories with consumer-grade technology, scrappy microbudgets, and a dream. Yet the words “Sundance movie” still carry a certain currency, whether someone is using that descriptive as praise or a snarky putdown. Ever since Robert Redford’s Park City film festival officially changed its name to Sundance in 1991 — a few years after Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape put the annual event on the map and introduced the idea of a new independent-film revolution truly being underway — the moniker has been synonymous with something other than the usual studio fare. It’s been co-opted and commercialized and slapped onto a cable channel, while the festival itself has gone through at least a half dozen evolutions over four-plus decades. So much has changed. And somehow, despite the odds, so much of what Sundance matter in the first place has remained the same.
That comes down to the movies themselves, which continue to make the Utah-based film fest a peerless place to discover new voices, new vision, and the next generation of artists so vital to keeping the movies alive. (Should you doubt that notion, remember that Past Lives debuted at Sundance last year.) The 40th annual edition is no different: There are directorial efforts from a host of first-time filmmakers, as well as hyphenates like Jesse Eisenberg (A Real Pain) and Chiewetel Ejiofor (Rob Peace) and returning conquerors like Ryan Flack and Anna Boden (Freaky Tales), the Zellner brothers (Sasquatch Sunset), and even Soderbergh himself (Presence). There are documentaries on everything from missing software-program icons (Seeking Mavis Beacon) to WNBA basketball all-star Sue Bird, Brian Eno, and Devo, respectively; midnight movies that run the gamut from old-school slasher flicks to psychotronic mind-melters; and a number of unclassifiable projects that frankly have us salivating.
In other words, there’s a lot to look forward to when Sundance 2024 kicks off it’s 10-day run on Jan. 18 — and these 20 titles are among the movies that we can’t wait to catch once we hit the snowy ground in Park City.
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‘The American Society of Magical Negroes’
Image Credit: Tobin Yelland/Focus Features Let’s assume you’re aware of the regrettably popular film trope revolving around a Black character whose sole purpose in a film is to teach white people valuable life lessons. Actor-turned-writer-director Kobi Libii takes that notion one step further by imagining an actual secret society of Black people who magically help make white people feel more comfortable — and are thus less volatile — in real life. When a young man (Justice Smith) with a gift for such niceties is recruited to join by an older member (David Alan Grier), he’s assigned to a uptight tech bro (The Other Two‘s Drew Carver). Complications ensue when he falls in love with a coworker (An-Li Bogan) whom his client also likes. The trailer for this satire/rom-com gives us a good feeling about this Premieres selection.
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‘Devo’
Image Credit: Janet Macoska/Sundance Institute Are they not men?! They’re D-E-V-O — the legendary pre- and post-punk band, the pride of Akron, Ohio, and now the subjects of a doc by Chris Smith (American Movie, Fyre). This portrait of one of the defining New Wave groups of the 1980s traces its de-volution from a reaction to the massacre at Kent State (where founding members Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale, and Jim Lewis were students) to their brilliantly confounding SNL appearance, “Whip It,” and beyond. We’re told that wearing energy dome hats and spuds costumes at festival screenings are optional but not mandatory.
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‘A Different Man’
Image Credit: Matt Infante/Sundance The latest from writer-director Aaron Schimberg (Chained for Life) follows Edward (Sebastian Stan), an actor with neurofibromatosis who’s shy, socially awkward, and self-conscious about his condition. An experimental surgery essentially puts his facial disfigurement into remission and causes him to look like, well, Sebastian Stan. He changes his identity. Then his former crush (The Worst Person in the World‘s Reinate Reinsve) writes a play about the old Edward, which sparks an unhealthy obsession in the new Edward. We sense a “beauty is skin deep, true ugliness is bone deep” metaphor in here somewhere.
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‘Eno’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute Brian Eno has rewritten the rules of being a musician-producer, invented new genres (you have him to thank for modern ambient music), and treated his 50-year career as an ongoing, ever-morphing work in progress. So it makes sense that when it came time to make a documentary about the ex-Roxy Music member turned Renaissance man, filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) decided to do something completely different. He’s gathered original interviews with Eno, archival clips, live footage, and various unreleased recordings from the prolific artist’s vault. Then the assemblage is run through a customized software program, completely remixing and reshuffling scenes for every screening. True to its namesake, you never get the same Eno twice. Genius.
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‘Freaky Tales’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute There is no film we’re genuinely more psyched about catching at this year’s festival than the new project from Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, a.k.a. the duo that gave you the previous Sundance best-in-shows Half Nelson (2006), Sugar (2008), and Mississippi Grind (2015). Set in the Bay Area during the late 1980s, this multi-narrative drama follows a quartet of different stories involving skinheads, Oakland battle rappers, criminals, pro athletes, and all sorts of NorCal misfits rockin’ in the free world. Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, Dominique Thorne, Insecure‘s Jay Ellis, Normani, and the late Angus McCloud star. Fingers crossed that this classic gets needle-dropped at least once.
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‘Girls State’
Image Credit: Apple/Sundance Institute Amanda McBaine and Jess Moss’s Boys State, which chronicled a longstanding program designed to teach young men how the political sausage gets made via setting up a faux government, was one of the highlights of the 2020 festival. Now the directors return with a look at the XX-chromosome version of the experience, with dozens of young women gathering in Missouri to get a taste of what it’s like to campaign for office, establish a fair and balanced Supreme Court, etc. The fact that it’s happening concurrently with a Boys State session nearby is not lost on the filmmakers — or among the program’s participants, who begin to see how gender inequity tends to be an IRL factor in governance as well.
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‘The Greatest Night in Pop’
Image Credit: Netflix Or: Everything you ever wanted to know about the making of “We Are the World” but were afraid to ask. Documentarian Bao Nguyen (Be Water) chronicles what happened when, on Jan. 28, 1985, producer Quincy Jones asked a who’s who of pop superstars to “check your egos at the door” and record a song to help raise money for starving children in Africa. According to talking heads Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper, co-writer Lionel Ritchie, and others, the evening was truly a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of legends. It was also something that required a D-Day level of planning, some tricky co-ordination with artists’ schedules, and the blind faith that — charitable intentions or not — the whole thing wouldn’t devolve a chaotic free-for-all. Personally, we’re here for the Prince-versus-Michael Jackson shade.
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‘I Saw the TV Glow’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute Sundance helped introduce Jane Schoenbrun to a much larger audience with their 2021 “emo horror” movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Now the filmmaker returns to the festival with what looks like another singular, low-fi waking nightmare, about a teen named Owen (Justice Smith) who discovers a late-night TV show that may or may not be giving him a glimpse into another world. Soon, he’s not sure what’s real, what’s fake or what’s simply alternative after-hours programming. So it’s a Videodrome for Gen Z? We’re all in.
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‘Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza’
Image Credit: Sundance Institue It started with Perry Farrell wanting to do something special for what would be the final tour of the original Jane’s Addiction lineup. It ended up becoming a traveling festival that blew minds, broke down cultural barriers, helped sell the notion of “alternative” music to the masses, and established itself as a brand name. Sundance is showing the first two episode of a three-part docuseries on the origins of Lollapalooza, with Farrell and Co. detailing how they mounted those early iterations, why the mix of genres and acts was crucial to their modus operandi, and how it evolved (or devolved — your call) into what it is today.
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‘Love Lies Bleeding’
Image Credit: Anna Kooris/Sundance Institute The hot ticket at this year’s Sundance, British filmmaker Rose Glass’s follow-up to her brilliant 2019 debut, Saint Maud, spins a torrid tale of love, sex, and crime, possibly in that order. Lou (Kristen Stewart) runs a gym in New Mexico and falls hard for Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder hoping to make it big on the competitive circuit in Las Vegas. Their romance is threatened by the fact that Lou’s dad (Ed Harris) has connections to the underworld, which ends up dragging the couple into some dangerous situations. We get the sense that the “bleeding” part of the title is well-earned.
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‘Love Me’
Image Credit: Justine Yeung/Sundance Institute The fest’s press notes describe Sam and Andy Zachero’s feature debut thusly: “Long after humanity’s extinction, a buoy and a satellite meet online and fall in love.” That’s about it in terms of plot; the fact that Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are playing the two respective inanimate objects (!) conducting a cyber-courtship has us very, very intrigued. So is this how machines imagine each other, as hot award-winning TV and movie stars? Is everything online on the future, what with those pesky Homo sapiens being a thing of the past? Will this kick off a whole wave of movies centered around “star-crossed, web-paired metallic protagonists”? We have so many questions.
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‘My Old Ass’
Image Credit: Shane Mahood/Sundance Institute An 18-year-old woman named Elliott (Maisy Stella) goes on a magic-mushroom trip and soon finds herself hanging out with an unlikely companion: her future self (Aubrey Plaza). Filmmaker Megan Park (The Fallout) has found a premise that seems destined to not only take advantage of Plaza’s slightly jaded screen persona, but also spark a conversation about what happens when youthful idealism butts up against the slings and arrows that life throws your way as you edge into your 40s. Personally, if we were to meet up with our 18-year-old self, we’d tell that ridiculous, overly righteous kid to drink more water, don’t forget the importance of moisturizing, and to seriously consider buying Apple and Oracle stocks.
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‘The Outrun’
Image Credit: Roy Imer/The Outrun Film Ltd/Sundance Institute Character-driven dramas about overcoming addiction have been a Sundance staple since the mid-1990s, and they have run the gamut from brilliant (looking at you, Half Nelson!) to Unclean! Unclean!!! We have high hopes that this adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir is closer to the former, especially because the great Saoirse Ronan is the one going through the stations of the cross here: drinking and drugging, bottoming out, leaving London for her hometown in the Scottish Isles, enduring rehab, putting her life back together one shattered piece at a time.
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‘Presence’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute Steven Soderbergh returns once again to the Park City to screen his latest, a haunted-house story set in the suburbs and written by screenwriting legend David Koepp (Carlito’s Way, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Panic Room, the first Spider-Man movie). That’s all we know, other than the fact that Lucy Liu and Julia Fox are both in the cast alongside a number of first-time actors. You had us at Soderbergh.
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‘A Real Pain’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute Actor turned auteur Jesse Eisenberg comes back to Sundance with his sophomore movie, in which two cousins (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) decide to take a trip to Poland together to visit their grandmother. Soon, some long-simmering tensions between the two relatives hit a full boil. They’re also forced to reckon with their familial history and the ways in which WWII and the Holocaust left a massive impact on their bloodline.
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‘Sasquatch Sunset’
Image Credit: Square Peg/Sundance Institute Back in 2011, David Zellner did a short film called Sasquatch Birth Journal 2, which observed one of those mythical hairy creatures giving birth while squatting on a tree. Apparently, the indie director didn’t get the Bigfoot obsession completely out of his system, so he and his brother/longtime filmmaking partner Nathan Zellner are back at the festival with a feature-length chronicle of a year in the life of a family of Sasquatches. Whether it’s the same family from the earlier work is unclear, but we can tell you that Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough star in it.
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‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story’
Image Credit: Warner Bros/Sundance Institute A New York native, a Julliard alum, an actor, an author, an activist — Christopher D’Olier Reeve was all of these things. You probably know him best as the man in the red cape with the “S” on his chest, a role that defined his screen career and made his quest to debunk the myths around disabilities after his 1995 accident that much more poignant. This portrait from filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui (the duo behind the extraordinary 2018 Alexander McQueen doc McQueen) uses never-before-seen archival footage to tell the story of how Reeve defined Superman for a generation of moviegoers and became a real-life hero in the fight for funding medical research for spinal injuries.
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‘War Game’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute Let’s play a game: First, gather together a number of intelligence-agency wonks, U.S. defense department veterans, and some of the best and brightest political minds from both side of the aisle. Then give them a scenario in which “rogue” members of the military attempt to overthrow the government in the wake of a presidential election. They have to figure out a plan of action in real time, and as realistically as possible, before the nation goes up in flames. Documentarian Jesse Moss (Boys State, The Overnighters) and Tony Gerber detail an actual what-if exercise conducted among Beltway insiders — and dear god, this sounds both exciting and absolutely terrifying.
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‘Will & Harper’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute. Will Ferrell first met Harper Steele when the two of them were hired for Saturday Night Live within the same week, and they have been close friends and creative collaborators for almost three decades. When the latter came out as a trans woman in 2022, the two decided to go on a cross-country road trip — something Steele had done many times over the years. It would be the first she’d encounter the nooks and crannies of Middle America as a woman, however, and the result ended up being a barometer of the country’s attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, human rights, celebrity, tolerance, and a lot more. Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Start Go to Del Mar) tags along and documents their coast-to-coast trek.
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‘Winner’
Image Credit: Sundance Institute All Reality Winner wanted to do was use her facility with Arabic languages to help people in political hot zones and make the world a better place. Which is how she found herself working for the NSA and getting access to their shared servers, including one on Russia and possible interferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and, well … you know what happens next. Director Susanna Fogel reunites with her Cat Person star Emilia Jones to give us the full 411 on the whistleblower, from her days as a precocious teen raised by a righteous dad to the government’s public enemy No. 1. Zach Galifinakis, Connie Britton, and Kathryn Newton costar.
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The 20 Most-Anticipated Movies From the 2024 Sundance Film Festival - Rolling Stone
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