Last week, as the Sundance Film Festival and the Donald Trump administration premiered in tandem, it seemed reasonable to ask: Will the festival even matter? From the opening night political documentaries Whose Streets? and An Inconvenient Truth to the Park City Women's March and the premieres of surprisingly timely genre films like Get Out and The Big Sick, the festival almost angrily answered: Yes.
Sundance may have premiered just one universally-praised masterwork this year, Call Me By Your Name, but a strong lineup stood up to the challenge of this moment with articulate outrage, pointed satire, crucial documentary reporting, and the sort of humane, optimistic empathy that Trump seems incapable of mustering. Nobody sees every film (and I particularly regret missing the well-reviewed City of Ghosts, The New Radical, and The Force). This year I saw twenty-nine in eight days, only hated a few, and I can highly recommend these nine.
Call Me By Your Name
The best film of this year's Sundance Film Festival, Call Me By Your Name is a romantic, sexy, deeply empathetic masterwork, which is sure to figure in this year's Oscar race and make a star out of newcomer Timothée Chalamet. Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) adapts André Aciman's novel about a witty, wry, horny teenager who can't stop thinking about the handsome American scholar (a surprisingly convincing Armie Hammer) who has come to live with his family in Italy for the summer. Beautiful in the extreme, the film is an extraordinary coming-of-age romance, a deeply humane coming-out story, and, as the title suggests, a big-hearted, anthemic tribute to the idea that, by reaching out and loving others, we learn to love ourselves.
The Big Sick
The "it'll make you laugh and it'll make you cry" movie is the triple-lutz of cinema: Often attempted, and usually an embarrassing disaster. Yet Michael Showalter's hysterical film, produced by Judd Apatow, earned its festival-topping $12.5 million Netflix sale by confounding all expectations. The film is based on the difficult interracial romance of the film's co-writers: Pakistani American star Kumail Nanjiani and his white wife Emily V. Gordon (played by Zoe Kazan in the film), who fell seriously ill and was placed in a medically-induced coma right after the two broke up. There are a thousand ways this film could have gone wrong, but, moment by moment, it's hysterical and wise enough to justify every risk. Somehow, Nanjiani managed to both deliver the funniest 9/11 joke I've ever heard and leave audiences in tears.
Get Out
Jordan Peele's steak-knife-sharp, bloody funny horror flick starts off as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and ends like a gory Stepford Wives. When a black boyfriend (the terrific Daniel Kaluuya) gets invited to visit the parents of his lily-white girlfriend (Allison Williams), all hell breaks loose. Explosively hysterical (The T.S.A. officer gags alone are killer), the film plays out like a scabrous satire of polite society's racial politics, revealing the monstrous threat that lurks in the suburbs, beneath the tasteful façade of entitled white liberalism.
A Ghost Story
One of the strangest films at a festival known for strange films, David Lowery's audacious film shouldn't work: Casey Affleck plays a man who dies and then haunts the house where he lived with his wife (Rooney Mara), all while wearing an almost comically clichéd white sheet. There are a few laughs, but Lowery doesn't play the film for jokes, and gradually the spectral premise begins to gather real-world weight and the film becomes a surprisingly moving, phantasmagorical study of grief.
Icarus
Much like Laura Poitras's excellent Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, Bryan Fogel's thrilling documentary takes viewers inside a world-rattling, whistleblowing controversy. The film begins as a stunt documentary, as Fogel starts juicing under laboratory technician's supervision, in order how easy it is to avoid doping regulations. The film pivots when Fogel realizes that his advisor, Grigory Rodchenkov, is sitting on a trove of information about Russian athletes that will lead to one of the most scandalous stories in sports history. Fogel and Rodchenkov end up exposing a vast system of corruption, infuriating Putin and disqualifying Russia's track and field athletes from the 2016 summer games. Were this year's Sundance cyberattacks a Russian response to the premiere? We'll see.
Landline
Screwing up, screwing around, and living with the consequences, Jenny Slate finally found a role that fit her spazzy mania in Gillian Robespierre's frank and hilarious debut "Obvious Child." She's even better in Robespierre's latest, acting opposite a terrific John Turturro and Edie Falco, as her foul-mouthed parents, and the wise-ass scene-stealer Abby Quinn, as her younger sister. The film shares Obvious Child'svulgar wit and empathy for the very many damn ways we manage to mess up our lives and still, somehow muddle through. Set in a period-perfect 1995 New York, there are affairs, drugs, clubbing, awful erotic poems, and some horrific lies—and just about nothing you can't imagine screwing up yourself.
Marjorie Prime
Michael Almereyda's new film is anything but gimmicky, despite its Black Mirror‑esque premise: To soothe an elderly, Alzheimer's-stricken woman (a wonderful Lois Smith), her family purchases a holographic recreation of her late husband and programs him with their own memories of him. As the film evolves, we see the woman's daughter (Geena Davis) and son-in-law (Tim Robbins) use holograms of their own, imprinting each with their own fallible memories. Based on Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, it's aesthetically spare but intellectually abundant, and one of the quietest and most thoughtful films of the festival, asking fascinating questions about grief, memory, and identity.
Mudbound
Based on Hillary Jordan's novel, the third film by Dee Rees (Pariah, Bessie), is a huge step forward in ambition and scale: an intergenerational story of two families (one black, one white) in rural Mississippi, as two sons (Garrett Hedlund and Straight Out of Compton's Jason Mitchell) head off to World War II and return home as changed men in a segregated country that, seemingly, hasn't changed at all since they left. Stacked with strong performances (Jason Clarke, an unrecognizable Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, and Carey Mulligan) this difficult film pulls no punches and feels pointedly relevant.
Patti Cake$
In the most ridiculously entertaining debut performance of the festival, Australian big girl Danielle Macdonald plays New Jersey rapper Patricia Dombrowsky, a.k.a. Killa P, a.k.a. Patti Cake$. Jeremy Gasper's debut film brought down the house at its premiere and made it rain afterwards, with a $10.5 million acquisition by Fox Searchlight. Though the misfit comedy veers dangerously close to becoming a lesser, quirkier 8 Mile or Hustle & Flow, it never takes itself too seriously and, most important, welcomes a true new star in Macdonald.
