Every winter in Utah, the Sundance Film Festival becomes the ultimate gathering of original storytellers and audiences seeking new voices and fresh perspectives. If you care about cinema, you take the Sundance Film Festival for granted at your peril. Despite some early-in-the-festival grousing, this was the kind of year that didn’t allow you to take the festival for granted. The sheer range of vibrant filmmaking on display extraordinary dramas about exotic dancers on a wild ride of a descent, or an old man caught in the throes of dementia, or one woman’s visionary revenge against rape culture was too powerful. And the documentaries, as always, were eye-opening and enthralling. Will these movies have as vibrant a life on the outside world? Stay tuned. (variety)
What’s inarguable is that they confirmed the festival as a launchpad for artistry of the most up-to-the-minute excitement. Here are the 9 best films at Sundance this year.
- The Dissident
Bryan Fogel, director of the Oscar-winning Russian-doping documentary “Icarus,”
has now made a gripping investigation into the assassination of Jamal
Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian Washington post journalist whose gruesome murder,
on October 2, 2018, was in all likelihood conceived and ordered by the highest
levels of the Saudi monarchy. When it comes to edge-of-your-seat intrigue, this
is a documentary thriller that has everything. It’s got mystery and conspiracy
coalescing around men of unfathomable power. It’s got a freedom-fighting
martyr-hero Khashoggi himself, a worldly
and ebullient but increasingly isolated 60-year-old man who occupied a
precarious middle ground between the Saudi regime, which for years he claimed
loyalty to, and the freedom of the West, which he breathed in like oxygen. And,
at its sinister center, it has a political murder carried out like a Mob hit.
“The Dissident” is as riveting as it is disturbing (it suggests that the Saudi
leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is maneuvering to become the Vladimir
Putin of the Middle East), but the film is also a moving testament to a man
whose courage burned too brightly to die with him. (variety)
- The Father
Anthony Hopkins, in a brilliant, mercurial, and deeply touching performance,
plays 80-year-old Anthony, who is charming and cantankerous and sliding into
dementia. As he fights his daughter (Olivia Colman) over whether or not he
should go into a nursing home, the French playwright Florian Zeller, making his
debut as a feature-film director, finds a way to place us right inside the mind
of someone who is losing his. The film’s ingenious gambit is to engross us in
perfectly realistic and plausible scenes that turn out to be events that
Anthony has hallucinated. As the solidity of what we’re watching turns to quicksand,
“The Father” does something that few movies about mental deterioration in old
age have brought off. It reveals the landscape of dementia to be a place of
vividly rational and coherent experience. At times, the film seems to be
putting King Lear in the Twilight Zone. (variety)
- The Glorias
In Julie Taymor’s pinpoint-timely yet rousingly old-fashioned biopic about the life and times of Gloria Steinem, the legendary feminist leader is portrayed by four different actresses at four different stages of her life. Alicia Vikander plays her as a young woman planting her flag as a writer in the insanely male-centric world of 1960s New York journalism, and in her formative days as an organizer and rising star of the women’s liberation movement. Julianne Moore plays her in her activist and celebrity-spokeswoman-of-the-movement 1970s heyday and beyond. As much a biography of second-wave feminism as it is of Steinem.
“The Glorias” is an almost startlingly conventional movie, told with the sprawl and, at times, the paint-by-numbers psychology of a sidewinding cradle-to-grave biopic. Yet the approach, at its best, works stirringly well, since the spirit of radical invention is there in every step of Steinem’s journey. (variety)
- Herself
When the patriarchy fails, sometimes a woman has to take matters into her own hands, as “Mamma Mia!” director Phyllida Lloyd demonstrates in this timely, empowering Irish movie about a battered wife (Clare Dunne) who builds her own house, and the decent folks who come to her aid in that endeavor. Many filmmakers mistakenly think that exploiting tragedy is the way to jerk tears from their audience, when in fact, gestures of spontaneous kindness shown by near-strangers can be most moving. Don’t be surprised if people are still talking about “Herself” this time next year, when Lloyd could be the sixth woman to break the Oscars’ glass ceiling. If the story sounds tiny, think of it instead as a kind of metaphor for all the single women struggling against a system that’s tilted against them which is as true today of Ireland as it is of the film industry, and the world at large. (variety)
- Kajillionaire
In her third feature, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” director Miranda July
finds a fresh way to explore the universal human craving for connection,
focusing on 26-years-young Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), the oddly named
daughter in a dysfunctional family of scammers. A metaphor for homeschooling
gone horribly wrong, Old Dolio has been raised so far outside the acceptable
mold of American parenting that it was all bound to backfire one day. Her
parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) are con artists, who’ve enlisted her
in their small-time hustles. But after meeting a relatively extroverted new
friend, Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), Old Dolio slow-motion short-circuits, finally
expressing the desire to experience all that she’s been denied, sparked in part
by a relatively extroverted new friend, Melanie (Gina Rodriguez). It all
builds, in a wonderfully roundabout way, to one of the great, albeit
unconventional romances in cinema history. (variety)
- The Killing of Two Lovers
Nobody dies in Robert Machoian’s piercing relationship drama, not literally, although the movie concerns a marriage on life support, and sets audiences on edge with an opening scene in which a man looms over an unidentified couple’s bed, revolver drawn. David (Clayne Crawford) is desperate, trying to keep it together after agreeing to a trial separation from his wife Niki (Sepideh Moafi), though the movie’s own sense of icy neutrality with its long shots, rigid Academy ratio and atonal anti-score reinforces the surrealism of the arrangement, wherein a father of four becomes an outsider to his own family. Though Machoian’s style can feel distancing at times, his characters are unusually candid when it comes to communicating. A major breakthrough played in a minor key, “Killing” wrestles with tough questions about when to call it quits. How do we, when confronted with love on the rocks, reconcile ourselves with the potential of reconciliation? (variety)
- On the Record
Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s shattering documentary, which presents the former
music executive Drew Dixon’s accusations of sexual harassment and rape against
the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, is a searing, at times shocking exposé of
alleged criminal acts. Not just the facts but the meaning of these crimes comes
scarily alive in the emotional details of their telling. Dixon’s testimony is
powerfully convincing, and the film is sophisticated enough about the social
import and sexual braggadocio of the hip-hop world to celebrate its bad-boy
artistry and, at the same time, to call its bitches-and-hos misogyny on the
carpet with an honesty you rarely encounter in music documentaries. “On the
Record” plunges deeper than perhaps any #MeToo narrative we’ve seen into the
tortured ambivalence that women who’ve been victimized feel about calling out
their abusers. But the movie also looks at the particular conundrum that black
women face in spotlighting predatory behavior by black men. (variety)
- Promising Young Woman
How is this for change, Harvey Weinstein, once the biggest newsmaker of the Sundance Film Festival, spent this year’s edition generating headlines halfway across the country, in court. Meanwhile, in Park City, first-time writer-director Emerald Fennell delivered a shock to all the bad hombres (so many of whom identify as “nice guys”) who’ve so far escaped the #MeToo reckoning: Her heroine, Cassie (played by “An Education” star Carey Mulligan), has dropped out of med school and spends her weekends “educating” douchebags on the principles of consent. What begins as a high-concept revenge thriller grows increasingly provocative as it unfolds, challenging a system in which misogyny and victim shaming appear to be the norm. No one would mistake Fennell’s film for subtle, and yet, it may surprise you to learn that, if anything, her ultra-stylized, in-your-face revenge thriller doesn’t go far enough. If you’ve ever wondered, “What would it take to ‘trigger’ a predator?” here’s your answer. (variety)
- Zola
The most audacious film at Sundance this year, and maybe the most powerful. Based on a true story that came to prominence through a notorious tweetstorm, Janicza Bravo’s hypnotic drama tells the story of Zola (Taylour Paige), a stripper who’s got her head screwed on straight, and Stefani (Riley Keough), a stripper who doesn’t. The two ride down to Tampa for a weekend engagement at an exotic-dance emporium, crowding into an SUV along with Stefani’s doltish boyfriend (Nicholas Braun) and her imperious pimp (Colman Domingo), and the film takes a slow dive through the looking glass into the mind-bending tawdriness of the sex-industry inferno. Yet this is no mere spectacle of voyeurism. It’s a profound study of a world ours in which everything has been commodified, and where role-playing is now the coin of the realm. Bravo invests each scene with such an electrifying sense of discovery that she emerges from Sundance as the new minimalist Scorsese. (variety)
Compiled by Micheal Osuji
Featured Image credit to IndieWire
