Another Sundance Film Festival is in the can, and I for one am grateful that I didn’t have to brave the cold Utah winter to participate. We at Paste worked through about 40 of the fest’s features—which numbered over 100 as their roster increases every year—to find the best movies of Sundance 2023. This workload is in order not only to get a clearer picture of what’s in store for cinema over the coming months, but to understand what kinds of movies are being made by indie and early-career filmmakers. And, even more importantly, which of those movies are welcomed with open arms by festival programmers and by the critical majority.
Sundance’s awards, as always, are seemingly designed to make you wonder if those voting were getting enough oxygen up there in the mountains. Many of the films honored (The Persian Version, The Accidental Getaway Driver, Scrapper, Fantastic Machine) just aren’t good. Many were fine, yet shoved out more deserving candidates. For everyone’s sanity, we won’t list them all here. Instead, we ask you to put your faith in our selections.
For our part, we went after a blend of documentary and fiction, both from around the world and right down the street. What follows is the cream of that cross-section’s crop, curated based on our own tastes rather than buzz or big names. We’ve got horror, queer romance, wrestling movies, poetic trips into sense memories, and even a documentary about the high-intensity world of competitive piano performance—seriously, there’s something for everyone in here. If you didn’t get to catch some of these, add them to your watchlist. If you’re wondering where your favorite is, well, imperfect as Sundance is, not every movie was available for at-home viewers. And also, we didn’t like some of them. But we liked a lot, and we hope this is an informative and excitement-building look at what’s coming to movies in 2023.
Here are the 20 best movies we saw at Sundance 2023:
Raven Jackson’s debut feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, has a southern sense of memory that I adore. It’s not that the coming-of-age film—which ambles around Mississippi, dipping its fingers into the sun-warmed river of time—is full of particulars. At least, not like that usually means. There aren’t any Whataburgers or Ward’s, no recognizable football teams or radio-favorite needledrops. In fact, the movie is so poetic as to be nearly faceless, which means it could apply to so many of us. But it’s all specific to its central force. An opening moment sees young Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) fishing with her father. It’s quiet, simple. Slow enough to allow memories of my own dad taking me fishing to bubble to the surface of my consciousness. The delicacy and patience, the youthful aggravation tainting the natural sensations all around. The film encourages this kind of dual awareness, where you hold both this movie’s memories and your own in your mind, and asks for the same kind of patience and quiet dedication as a parent on a fishing trip. If you assent, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is endlessly rewarding, a tactile sense-memory tapestry of all the things that matter. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt announces a confident, arresting new artist who’s willing to lean on more experimental techniques and structures to arrive at the honesty she seeks. Raven Jackson’s created a beautifully specific ode to a life fully lived, which helps make it an elegant instrument of subjectivity. Like the water from which it draws so much thematic meaning, its fluid motion and form can contort to fit whatever experiences you’ve encountered, whatever events you dread, whatever hopes you still nurture. And it’s all so closely observed you can almost reach out and touch it.
Is there anyone in this country looked down upon and misunderstood more than Indigenous people and journalists? It’s not a hypothetical—the answer is yes: Indigenous journalists. Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler’s engrossing documentary Bad Press clearly lays out the plights faced by an Indigenous news team and, in its hyperfocus on Mvskoke Media and the Muscogee Nation, finds hard, broad truths about both the relationship between the people and the reporters that serve them and the ease with which those being reported upon manipulate that relationship. Bad Press is wonderful, tightknit political and journalistic non-fiction, about a place and people close to my heart. It does what small-scale documentaries do best, and have been doing exceptionally since Harlan County, USA: Finding the global in the specific, and finding the personal in the ideological. Where Barbara Kopple found feminism, solidarity, tradition and rampant, violent corporate greed at the heart of her Kentucky miner’s strike, Landsberry-Baker and Peeler find vigilance, accountability and the systems in place to discourage both in the heart of a Muscogee newsroom.
What if everything went right for Dr. Frankenstein and Igor, and they became the platonic parents of a beautiful, bouncing, (reanimated) baby Monster? Director Laura Moss and their co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien imagine a sharp, modern version of this best-case scenario (at least, until its own problems come to life) with the horror Birth/Rebirth. With dark irreverence, their transposition is a bolt of lightning into the undead subgenre that’s tight script keeps the two-hander as fresh as the day it was buried. Put your fan-fiction aside: Mad scientist/forensic pathologist Rose (Marin Ireland) and loving mother/maternity nurse Celie (Judy Reyes) don’t need any nudging to forge their lives together. Just the untimely death and untimelier resurrection of Celie’s young daughter Lila (A.J. Lister). As the two crash together, jammed into a single apartment-laboratory when they’re not taking shifts at their hospital, they become a wry reminder that a family can look like anything: Even two women trying to bring an elementary schooler back to life. Moss’ creation is more than a sentient pile of parts with a fresh coat of mortuary makeup: It’s a savvy, gross, black-hearted gem with a humanity all its own.
In a dark stadium, an empty alleyway, a trashed and red-washed hotel room, a slight wrestler feels the weight of the odds stacked against him. Whether it’s homophobia, abandonment or grief, his approach remains the same: Use his opponent as a ladder. The crueler they are, the higher he goes, buoyed by the sheer determination that his own star will shine so brightly that others may as well revel in his light. If he believes in his own freedom fiercely enough, maybe everyone else will, too. In Roger Ross Williams’ triumphant narrative feature debut Cassandro, such a star rises in the shape of certified charmer Gael García Bernal playing Saúl Armendáriz, better known as real-life luchador Cassandro, the exótico who first toppled the hierarchy of heterosexuality in 1980s lucha libre wrestling. Williams’ direction takes two distinct styles for the film, shuffling between a softer approach to Saúl’s introspective puzzling through his inner life, and the explosive, hard-hitting fun of the ring. The softer side of Saúl is engaging and compassionate, but the matches are where the entire film comes to life. The real Cassandro is the subject of one of Academy Award-winning Williams’ previous documentary projects, and while his billowing mane isn’t quite captured by García Bernal’s bleach job, the film does use Williams’ intimate knowledge—and an impressive roster of Mexican American film workers—to pay a complex, thoughtful and warm homage to Cassandro’s person and shaping of the landscape.—Shayna Maci Warner
Some people want to tough things out no matter what, come hell or high finance. For the Gordon Gekkos of the world, it’s not just that greed is good, it’s that greed is omnipresent. They can’t imagine life defined by anything else. Two of those Wall Streeters, Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), have to hide their love because they work at the same investment firm. It’s a sexy little problem to have, a lot of running around and taking different routes to work, that’s snowballed. Naturally, they’ve got their cake and they’ve already saved room. But now, they’re in so deep that they live together and, at the beginning of the thrumming, damning relationship thriller that is writer/director Chloe Domont’s Fair Play, have gotten engaged. What were they thinking? Obviously this is only going to make their “get up at 4 AM to be verbally abused by an Ivy League asshole by 6 AM” lifestyles harder. But they’re the same kind of cutthroat, power-hungry strivers as the rest of their coworkers—as Emily asks her notoriously ruthless boss (Eddie Marsan), “Who wants it easy?” But, as Emily should know by now, half a decade out of Harvard and deep in the big firms’ weeds, the magnifying lens of the Financial District makes everything more intense—the money, the stress, the drug use, the sexism. It becomes unbearable. People burn out. That long fuse doesn’t seem dangerous to our couple (Just look how long it is! Plenty of time to deal with it) until Emily gets promoted over Luke.
There’s a permeating dryness to Fancy Dance. Not of climate, though the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in northeast Oklahoma is just as dusty as the rest of the area, but of culture. Those that live there face outrageous cruelties at a methodical pace, so generationally familiar as to be preordained. Mundane. When a woman disappears, the only one with any sense of urgency is her sister, Jax (Lily Gladstone). Even Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), the niece now under Jax’s care, doesn’t quite grasp the implications. With quiet charm and an everyday gravity, filmmaker Erica Tremblay tracks the women’s journey, navigating their search in a society that would rather they sit down, shut up and accept that this just Happens Sometimes. Fancy Dance’s coming-of-age investigation is the cinematic equivalent of a low-speed chase, intimately documented from the shoulder, right alongside the busted-up pickup making the pursuing cops rethink their priorities.
From Filipino filmmaker Kenneth Dagatan comes a fantastical horror with the spirit of Guillermo del Toro and the brutality of Joko Anwar. In My Mother’s Skin blends a child’s chance encounter with a tricky fairy—elaborate and ornate in her insectile ensemble—with a World War II backdrop to craft a thoroughly haunting midnight tale. Rich with subtext and warring cultural iconography, it’s got body horror, religious doubt, and enough delicious flesh to leave gorehounds completely sated.
Heartbeats and cumshots are the alpha and omega of Brandon Cronenberg’s vacation in White Lotus hell, where the tourists loosen their collars and let loose their lizard brains. The limbic system and the most basic biological processes of life dominate Infinity Pool, the filmmaker’s descent into a slimy, sexy, terrifying world where death is just another game for rich people. It’s a hit-and-run satire of Western nonsense, dismantling the havoc our destination-hopping upper-crust wreaks on other cultures and the faux-mystical enlightenment hawked by gurus and Goop fools—those too wealthy to have real problems, those aspiring to achieve this status, and those taking lucrative advantage of both. In this tropical trial, they spill into each other, forever and ever. Ego death has nothing on Brandon Cronenberg’s brilliantly warped resort. The dangled, juicy lure isn’t subtle: A seemingly normal couple being approached by weird (probably swinging) Europeans always leads to trouble. We’d be fools not to be suspicious of Gabby (Mia Goth) and Al (Jalil Lespert) when they come up to their estranged hotel-mate couple James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman). One of them is played by Mia Goth, which is a sure sign to hightail it back to your room and flip the “do not disturb” sign. But James is a novelist, with one bad book to his name (The Variable Sheath, a fantastic fake title) that only got published because he married the rich publisher’s daughter. Gabby’s proclaimed fandom strokes the part of his ego that’s all but shriveled up and crumbled to dust—he’s weak, he’s hungry for it, he’s the perfect mark. When the white folks inevitably do something irreversibly horrible to the locals of Li Tolqa, their unprepared alienation in their culture is disturbingly hilarious. They don’t speak the language, and can’t read the forms the cops ask them to sign. But it’s stranger than that. Brilliant production design, location scouting and cinematography lock you into a late-night freakout. Getting too deeply into what exactly happens in Infinity Pool is like outlining the recirculating edge of its title’s horizon-flouting construction. It won’t take away from its pleasures, but you can’t really understand until you’re in it. Until Cronenberg drives you down an unlit backroad, long enough that you start wondering if you’re dreaming or awake. But what’s clearest in this gallows comedy is that its characters exist. The people who think they’ve solved reality, the conceited class with the luxury of being horny for death, because death has never been real to them. Infinity Pool’s inspired critique of this crowd is fierce and funny, its hallucinations nimble and sticky, and its encompassing nightmare one you’ll remember without needing to break out the vacation slideshow.
One of the most exciting non-fiction entries to this year’s Sundance is a radical, on-the-ground pulpit from which four Black trans sex workers talk their shit. Putting transphobia within and without Black culture on blast, Kokomo City raises a curtain to reveal four stars: Daniella Carter, Dominique Silver, Liyah Mitchell and Koko Da Doll. Actually, make that five stars. Filmmaker D. Smith, a trans musician making her feature debut, keeps the rollicking conversations and righteously indignant monologues barreling along in beautiful black-and-white as we laugh, cry and commiserate with women whose experiences and insights are only outweighed by their personalities.
A virtuosic performance from Kiti Mánver is just the beginning of what Mamacruz’s glimpse at a woman’s third-quarter life crisis has to offer. A grandmother’s sexual (re)awakening in a tight Catholic community puts all the symbolic dominoes in play, and filmmaker Patricia Ortega knocks them down with sweet charm, unflinching sensuality, and touching honesty. A vibrant and lovely character study, Mamacruz makes the most of its horny matriarch.
As characters debate spirituality in West African Pidgin, and lights pop to enhance a dreamy mid-forest sequence’s bold black-and-white, you find yourself fully immersed in the mystic fable of Mami Wata. Stray English words and images that almost feel like they’ve been taken from a postcard, or seen flipping through the channels late at night, contribute to a film ready to wash you away into its uncanny world. Filmmaker C.J. “Fiery” Obasi brings us to the shoreline of Iyi, where technology stops with the tide and a religious leader is under threat. Shot with a striking, Expressionist style by the Nollywood staple, Obasi’s story of a village, its water goddess, the women channeling her and the men trying to wrest control is a beautiful, stark fantasy.
Imagine the most inconvenient day of your life. Not the worst, not the most devastating, but a day so interminable and frustrating that it seems like the universe is playing a cosmic joke. Now throw in a tense family reunion and run-in with your ex, just for kicks, and you have the winding 24 hours covered by the thoughtful day-in-the-life drama Mutt. Writer/director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s solid feature debut drops its protagonist Feña (introspective and deft big screen newcomer Lío Mehiel), a sensitive twentysomething trans guy, right into an emotionally turbulent scavenger hunt through New York City where everything and almost everyone that he’s been hoping to neatly avoid collides. Through director of photography Matthew Pothier’s pretty compositions that can romanticize even the most commonplace views of NYC, and earnest performances from a small cast of complex, brooding characters, Mutt makes space for the sadness, mundanity and possibility of life in transition.—Shayna Maci Warner
With Passages, Ira Sachs brings beautiful devastation. The thorny relationships he usually explores push on boundaries of monogamy, of commitment, of what it means to be with someone and stay with them through the complexity of years. The pressure he exerts on these limits—necessarily drawn (but not always happily accepted) with more give for queer people, particularly gay men—the love that ebbs and flows throughout this adversity, and the limits themselves stagger us with their realism. Passages is this close, painful, sexy twisting of the screws at its best, as Sachs and his frequent co-writer Mauricio Zacharias observe the havoc wreaked by a bisexual brat’s latest dalliance. Sachs so deftly avoids the stereotype of the greedy have-it-all bisexual that he comes back around on it, creating a perfectly punchable narcissist (who’s sexy enough to back up the bad behavior) in Tomas (Franz Rogowski). Given to whims and his own ego, Tomas leaves his bookish, quiet husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) behind at his film shoot’s wrap party in order to hook up with a rebounding extra, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Passages brilliantly and brusquely blows through the low-key, embarrassing, engrossing questions permeating non-monogamous queerness, encapsulated by the singularly focused story of a taker running rampant over the other people in his life. We’re allowed the dignity of applying the themes ourselves, Sachs subtly nudging us with the details of his brash three-way blow-up. It’s a dark thrill, real enough to open our own old wounds. A bittersweet reckoning deftly illustrated by a duo on opposite ends of a relationship’s chaotic twists and turns, Passages revels in the fallout of fucking around and finding out.
I don’t know a lot about Warsaw’s International Chopin Piano Competition, the subject of Jakub Piatek’s electric and affecting documentary Pianoforte, but I do know a lot about musical competition. I’ve been playing the trumpet since 2003, in massive marching band smackdowns, in the crowd at the Fiesta Bowl, in pin-drop quiet concert halls, and in intimate solo performance rooms. No matter the venue, it’s always the same pressure. Eyes are on you. The silent vacuum of potential that it’s your responsibility to fill, and fill well. If you think about it, if your mind is more active than your instincts, your body can seize up. Pure adrenaline threatens to overwhelm the notes. Your lips refuse to vibrate. Your fingers turn to lead. Music? What’s music? Miraculously, the young maestros overcome the intensity (mostly) and Piatek is there, watching the heartbreak and passion. Pianoforte’s understanding of musical competition and of those artists dedicating their lives to performance is so thorough as to teleport you back in time to the moment when you were faced with your first obsession. Effortless and hands-off in conducting the process of the event, it excels in doing so while ingratiating us towards its competitors. It’s a conventional documentary, but if the Chopin Competition teaches us anything, it’s that a tune everyone knows, performed with elegance and personality, can say something new every time it’s played.
Facing normal teenage problems with grace and acceptance is just unrealistic. Jumping headfirst into the deep end of conspiracy, ridiculous plotting and over-the-top genre-hopping pastiche is a far more relatable way to deal with growing pains. The world of musicals belts this angst out. Punk kicks that world’s ass, to similar ends. But when the enthusiastic force behind Peacock’s We Are Lady Parts (a show well-versed in both), writer/director Nida Manzoor, faces this moody madness on the big screen, she retaliates with Polite Society, a silly, energetic headrush of action-comedy. Playing in the stylish, piss-taking space of Gurinder Chadha and Edgar Wright, Manzoor’s feature debut attacks adolescent fears—failing to achieve your dreams, settling for less, fading from loved ones—with spin-kicks, fake mustaches and evil plots so absurdly sinister that even the most jaded, monosyllabic teens will have to crack a smile. The exploits of Ria (Priya Kansara) and her entourage of high school dorks (Seraphina Beh and Ella Bruccoleri, sidekicks who get all the punchlines and weaponize them accordingly) are simply ridiculous, and in this ridiculousness, they transcend the kung-fu movie parodies and the Bond-villain schemes filling Polite Society to inhabit the Teenage Sublime. Ria looks up to her big sis, Lena (Ritu Arya), whose art school passions and shag haircut scream “cool role model.” Even when she drops out, that’s something to admire—she’s a badass, living by her own rules. So when Lena meets a guy, a handsome rich guy at that, it sinks Ria. In the real world, she’d feel like the world is ending. In Polite Society…the world might actually be ending. That’s where Manzoor finds her biggest success: Reflecting how heightened and out-of-control everything feels when you’re young, translating it to genre tropes and sitcom sidequests. She’s gotta stomp their relationship into the dust, one outsized mission at a time. It’s exceptionally cute, and sharp enough that even the more predictable gags do some damage.
“There wasn’t a real character in the whole thing,” grouses Ben (Justin H. Min) to his girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki) as they leave a movie screening Miko has just organized, clarifying that he was looking in vain for a normal, flawed human being. Though the movie is unnamed, its closing scene, which doubles as the opening scene of Shortcomings, is patterned with hilarious clarity after Crazy Rich Asians. It’s an early signal that Ben will not acquiesce to saying something nice and supportive when something more caustic or cranky enters his head. It’s also one of the few minor changes actor-turned-director Randall Park and cartoonist-turned-screenwriter Adrian Tomine have made in adapting Tomine’s graphic novel of the same name (originally published in 2007, after being serialized in Tomine’s seminal comic book Optic Nerve). Tomine has updated the book’s pop culture references—basic film bros check Christopher Nolan rather than Fight Club; porn appears on browser tabs, rather than DVDs—while keeping the episodic, conversational structure of his story almost completely intact. It’s a tribute to the quietly unflinching nature of his writing—and, at times, the understated role his artwork, absent in this live-action adaptation, plays in bringing that writing fully to life. While Shortcomings doesn’t turn Ben into a misanthropic hero or excuse his often-terrible behavior, it does stick to the ethos he espouses early in the picture: This is a movie full of people who are flawed, and real.—Jesse Hassenger
The Russian bath across the street from where I used to live in Chicago, once owned by the mob and now known as Red Square, is a cultural rarity. There are very few saunas in the U.S. retaining its form: The water sizzling on the hot rocks, the swollen wooden benches, the whole “get smacked by some branches” thing (note: I haven’t done this). But it’s a far cry from the community and conversations generated by the smoke saunas in Võrumaa, a southern county of Estonia bordering Latvia and Russia. With its traditions captured in delicate, sweaty vignettes by filmmaker Anna Hints, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’s anecdotes fill your lungs and engulf you, until its women’s secrets drip down your body. Hints films a year’s passage, with seasons passing over a log cabin isolated in the forest. Some months, fog rolls off the nearby lake. Others, the ice is so thick, the woman tending the sauna has to smash a hole and drop down a wooden ladder for her clients’ cooldown dip. But no matter the weather, the building is filled with steam and women, baring it all. Literally and figuratively: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood constructs gorgeous topographies from the naked, relaxing bodies, while they expunge some of their biggest stresses.
Chiloé, the largest island of an archipelago off the coast of Chile, rose from the volcanoes populating the far southern sea. In Sorcery, its Indigenous Huilliche people claim to be from the sea as well. Heaven, the invention brought over by the colonizing Europeans, isn’t for them. They’ve got different designs and a different fate, especially when the Christians repress them. Shapeshifting warlocks practice a magic closely tied to the natural world, deployed in dire circumstances—something that appeals to the teenage Rosa (newcomer Valentina Véliz Caileo) after her father is murdered by their white employer. The dark, brooding coming-of-age drama can be ponderous and blunt, but its liberating magic casts an infectious spell. Christopher Murray bases his fantastical period piece on a real trial that took place in 1880, where an alleged tribunal of warlocks were put on trial for ruling the island as a kind of shadow government. Adding in a burgeoning mystic as our eyes and ears through the hardship, racism and pain afflicting her people, Murray simplifies the setting by turning it into a revenge tale. We still get a sense of the island—its damp forests, foreboding caves, and bountiful beaches, as well as the gulf between the sheepskinned natives and the suited intruders—but the larger community is reduced to Rosa’s pain, those that inflicted it and Mateo (Daniel Antivilo), the gruff warlock leader who takes her in
Adapting Terry Pratchett’s Carnegie-winning Discworld book, The Amazing Maurice is a successfully wry, odd, utterly British spin on the Shrek-like self-aware fairy tale. Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together. This isn’t pristine, groundbreaking, photoreal CG, but cartoonishness that suits its oddballs—and might even give a kid a stray nightmare or two. As a former kid with a lot of affection for the animated movies that used to freak me out, that’s a compliment. Turning the Pied Piper story on its head, and then flipping it around again so that it’s right-side up but utterly disoriented, The Amazing Maurice asks plenty of its young audience. They’d better be able to keep up with Malicia’s (Emilia Clarke) rapid sledgehammer blows smashing through the fourth wall, because the narrator finds herself wrapped up in her own story; they’d also better be able to parse the nested myths explaining how some of the tale’s animals came to grasp such intelligence. But, because the film has faith in its young viewers, it’s completely achievable. While it cuts some of Pratchett’s most incisive and dark components (like the intelligent rats navigating relationships with regular rats) in favor of cinematic comprehension, it’s still a faithful enough translation to win fans over—and introduce kids to a welcoming literary world that takes the piss out of everything around it.
As Theater Camp opens, you may find yourself saying, “Oh look, it’s Evan Hansen.” You may instead find yourself saying, “Oh no, it’s Evan Hansen.” You might even say, “Look, it’s Tony-winning nepo baby Ben Platt, an ex-Evan Hansen who is now engaged to the actor who replaced him on Broadway as Evan Hansen (who is also in this film).” If you say any of those things, you’re immersed enough in the world of musical theater to get a kick out of Theater Camp. If you say the last one, mouthful that it is, you’re exactly obsessed enough to appreciate the rapidfire, insular, dweeby humor hurled at you by the loving farce. Everyone else, your mileage may vary. But if you’re down for a light comedy with a very specific audience, pitched somewhere between Wet Hot American Summer and John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, AdirondACTS welcomes you (and your prepared monologue—you did prepare a monologue, right?) with open arms. AdirondACTS is the scrappy upstate New York theater camp (naturally facing bankruptcy and a hostile takeover from the far more posh camp nearby) created by the writing team of Platt, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman and Noah Galvin (that other Evan Hansen from before). Gordon and Platt are childhood friends, while Lieberman (son of Marilu Henner) directs Platt’s music videos. It’s obviously a tight group who grew up in the industry, and their shared sense of humor and appreciation for their form keep things consistent as they expand their short film. Like many pet projects about cherished subject matter, it can veer off in strange directions, clueing you into the jokes that cracked its collaborative team of creators up the most. There’s a lot of charm to that, mostly because the team backs up their upbringing in this world with quick wits, comedically weaponized musical ability and an irrepressible willingness to be the butt of the joke.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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