It’s the last dance for Sundance in Park City as the indie-focused festival prepares to relocate to Boulder, Colorado, next year. It’s also the first fest to go on without its legendary Oscar-winning founder Robert Redford, who died in September.
The event’s 42nd edition kicked off January 22 and runs through Sunday, February 1, with a lineup that features 105 projects — including 90 features and seven TV episodes — screening in Park City, nearby Salt Lake City and online.
Below is a compilation of our reviews from the fest. Click on the movie’s title to read our full take.
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Buddy
Section: Midnight
Director: Casper Kelly
Cast: Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt
Deadline’s takeaway: Casper Kelly plays with form in ways that some might find exasperating, but there is always a method to his madness. An ingenious slasher movie with crowd-pleasing moments of gross-out comedy, it’s about what TV means to us — how much we invest in what’s clearly fake and not what it actually is. — DW
Carousel
Section: Premieres
Director: Rachel Lambert
Cast: Chris Pine, Jenny Slate, Abby Ryder Fortson, Sam Waterston, Katey Sagal, Jessica Harper, Jeffrey DeMunn, Helene York
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s a story about love lost, love found again and the cost of both with the baggage from the past, the tentativeness of the present and the questions of a future. Chris Pine is a fine actor not often given the chance to play this kind of reflective adult role, and it is perfect for him. — PH
Chasing Summer
Section: Premieres
Director: Josephine Decker
Cast: Iliza Shlesinger, Garrett Wareing, Lola Tung, Cassidy Freeman, Tom Welling, Megan Mullally
Deadline’s takeaway: The film gives Iliza Shlesinger the space to flex a more dramatic muscle. It does a good job of fleshing out its characters’ histories and relationships with one another, one inevitable “twist” was easy to predict by the second act but still quite satisfying.
Fing!
Section: Family Matinee
Director: Jeffrey Walker
Cast: Taika Waititi, Penelope Wilton, Iona Bell, Mia Wasikowska, Blake Harrison, David Walliams, Richard Roxburgh, Robyn Nevin, Sidhant Anann, Matt Lucas
Deadline’s takeaway: Fing! flies firmly in the tradition of whimsical and beloved family movies like Paddington, Nanny McPhee, Stuart Little, Peter Rabbit and the offbeat Hunt For the Wilderpeople. Featuring a standout turn by Taika Waititi, the Australian-British production proves one of the festival’s unexpected delights. — PH
Frank & Louis
Section: Premieres
Director: Petra Biondina Volpe
Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Rob Morgan, René Pérez Joglar, Rosalind Eleazar, Indira Varma
Deadline’s takeaway: Dementia is the ultimate in solitary confinement, and this two-hander prison drama is the movie equivalent of Gil Scott-Heron’s haunting song “Pieces of a Man.” It’s one of the best new films at Sundance and one of the best of the year so far. — DW
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Section: Premieres
Director: David Wain
Cast: Zoey Deutch, Jon Hamm, John Slattery, Ken Marino, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Ben Wang
Deadline’s takeaway: Zoey Deutch nails every joke in this slapstick comedy that keeps the out-of-pocket zingers coming nonstop. Although this movie is not going to win any awards or be studied in elite liberal arts colleges, it has the kind of comedic power that ends up becoming a mindless comfort watch for generations to come. — GG
The Gallerist
Section: Premieres
Director: Cathy Yan
Cast: Natalie Portman, Jenna Ortega, Sterling K. Brown, Zach Galifianakis, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Catherine Zeta-Jones
Deadline’s takeaway: The art world is easy to mock, and The Gallerist doesn’t really say very much that’s new. Natalie Portman, however, keeps our focus on the task in hand, and the film is fun while it lasts, with the female-skewed script offering food for thought about the male dominance of the art space while making serious points about value and self-worth. — DW
Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Director: Josef Kubota Wladyka
Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Alberto Guerra, Alejandro Edda, YOU, Yoh Yoshida, Damián Alcázar
Deadline’s takeaway: Wladyka paints a beautiful picture of life and love, grief and closure, using dance as a universal language to express all of the above, with help from a talented ensemble of Japanese and Latin actors led by Rinko Kikuchi. — GG
The Incomer
Section: World Dramatic Competition
Director: Louis Paxton
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O’Rourke, Michelle Gomez, John Hannah
Deadline’s takeaway: Against the odds, and largely thanks to the core trio, The Incomer pulls together, finally addressing the story’s dark well of sadness and ending on an upbeat yet surprisingly mature and even emotional note that absolves the film for most — if not all — of its frequent forays into silliness. — DW
The Invite
Section: Premieres
Director: Olivia Wilde
Cast: Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton
Deadline’s takeaway: Coming off the polarizing reception to her last directorial outing Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde’s newest work more than makes up for any gripes with a film that explores the dynamics of sex and relationships with raw and endearing honesty, as a once-head-over-heels couple blows up their marriage in the course of one dinner and maybe attempts to repair it again. — GG
I Want Your Sex
Section: Premieres
Director: Gregg Araki
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs, Charli XCX
Deadline’s takeaway: Forget the ball-gags, the dildos, and the vagina made of bubblegum, I Want Your Sex is surprisingly relatable at its core: Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with? — GG
Josephine
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Director: Beth de Araujo
Cast: Mason Reeves, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, Philip Ettinger, Syra McCarthy, Eleanore Pienta
Deadline’s takeaway: Josephine is a tough watch right from the beginning, when a rape is graphically presented onscreen and is witnessed by an 8-year-old girl. But it effectively offers a different POV on the human cost of rape and the frustration in the legal system and might help others who’ve endured childhood trauma. — PH
The Moment
Section: Premieres
Director: Aidan Zamiri
Cast: Charli XCX, Rosanna Arquette, Kate Berlant, Jamie Demetriou, Hailey Gates, Alexander Skarsgård
Deadline’s takeaway: A time capsule of 2024, that brief moment of optimism in which the world was painted brat green, Charli XCX opted for this meta satire, as opposed to churning out another concert film into the world. What fans got instead of the oversaturated music doc genre the film so deliciously satirizes is a spiritual sequel to Spice World (1997) as a psychological thriller. — GG
Run Amok
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Director: NB Mager
Cast: Alyssa Marvin, Margaret Cho, Sophia Torres, Elizabeth Marvel, Bill Camp, Yul Vasquez, Molly Ringwald, Patrick Wilson
Deadline’s takeaway: Small, flawed but still pertinent film set at a school 10 years after a fatal shooting there takes a different way of looking at it, even with dark comedy blended in. It also shows the difference between kids and adults; this is a generation looking for something more than “thoughts and prayers.” — PH
Saccharine
Section: Midnight
Director: Natalie Erika James
Cast: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden
Deadline’s takeaway: It feels like an appropriate metaphor when the main character in this graphic, overlong body horror pic for the Ozempic era performs surgery on herself in a giant dumpster. The filmmaker appears to be unpacking so much of her own emotional experience, she’s not seeing the garbage for the dumpster. — GG
The Sh*theads
Section: Premieres
Director: Macon Blair
Cast: Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Mason Thames, Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun, Peter Dinklage
Deadline’s takeaway: Macon Blair’s The Sh*theads always feels organic not matter how outlandish — not to mention scatological — the digressions become. It would be a stretch to interpret it as a biting political satire, but, like Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, there is a definitely strong and very intentional vein of social comment here. Also, the casting couldn’t be better. — DW
undertone
Section: Midnights
Director: Ian Tuason
Cast: Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michele Duquet
Deadline’s takeaway: What makes this work so well is what it leaves to us to see, hear and feel. The movie is almost completely dependent on the art of sound in all its gradations, and even if toward the end it gets a little more familiar with the usual stuff of the horror genre, it remains a complete original.
English (US) ·