2024 was the year Sundance pretended in earnest that COVID didn’t exist, as it not only restricted its online access to a select number of films from its full program, but delayed that access until halfway through the festival. It was the year that, despite high-profile (and well-loved) movies from trans filmmakers playing the festival, Sundance stayed silent on its home state of Utah passing a law mid-festival that banned trans people from legally accessing public restrooms. It was the year that, despite all its land acknowledgements, Sundance platformed Zionists on panels while pro-Palestine protesters calling for ceasefire marched outside its theaters. These tone-deaf at best, cowardly at worst conditions nagged at me as I watched 40 of Sundance 2024’s feature films, nipping at my brain stem as I watched another cutesy dramedy or AI-centric piece of sci-fi speculation. I don’t expect institutions to be perfect, but one so prominently centering Indigenous, queer and disabled artists should learn a thing or two from those it so happily places front-and-center of its cinematic program. These voices permeate the best movies of Sundance 2024, which spread across its categories, encompassing documentaries and narrative films from all over the world and right next door. The ones that stuck with me had a vitality and relevance that was often lacking from the year’s festival.
What follows is the cream of that cross-section’s crop. They didn’t depend on big names or buzzy acquisitions, just what struck us as honest and exciting filmmaking. We’ve got POV-flipped horror, family-infiltration thrillers, love stories, hate stories, backcountry hiking trips, and war reporting from ceramics artists. There’s a flavor for everyone in here, even if you’re allergic to indie directorial debuts from actors (like I so often am). If you didn’t get to catch some of these, add them to your watchlist. If you’re wondering where your festival favorite is, well, imperfect as Sundance is, not every movie from the program was available to those unwilling or unable to cram themselves into a tight theater full of sniffling moviegoers. And also, I didn’t like some of them. But I did like a lot of them, and this list looks forward to a great group of movies breaking free from a festival that had an uninspiring 40th edition this year. As for the festival itself, if it just listened to the people making the movies that draw people to Park City in the first place, it’d already be in a better place, considering how many of those artists signed the solidarity statement offered by Film Workers for Palestine.
Here are the 15 best movies we saw at Sundance 2024:
Between the Temples
“A widower and his old music teacher prepare for a late-in-life bat mitzvah” sounds a bit like the set-up for a joke. A bartender in Between the Temples deadpans about as much, undercutting the hilarious, vigorous, emotionally rich movie with exactly the right amount of wry self-awareness. Filmmaker Nathan Silver re-teams with his Thirst Street co-writer C. Mason Wells (not to mention cinematographer Sean Price Williams and editor John Magary; this thing is an indie talent smorgasbord) for an endlessly energetic look at two lost souls’ desperate search for something to hold onto. Ben (Jason Schwartzman) isn’t looking for love, or even purpose, really. He just needs to get through the day. Carla (Carol Kane) isn’t here to help him, but to knock herself out of a rut. Their spark, never cloying and always quippy, matches all the heat radiating from Between the Temples‘ grainy ’70s aesthetic into its snowy setting. Its quick and clever script, enhanced by plenty of improvisation, is matched by a movie that never quits reaching into its bag of invigorating tricks. The movie looks fantastic, and it never stops looking fantastic in new ways, with fun flourishes of style juicing up every sequence: We zero in on these two lives through iris shots and reflections, zipping around alongside them like Benny Hill, getting more in their heads with intense zooms, jump cuts, split diopters and split screens—Between the Temples has it all. And all this flash piles up underneath the two engrossing central performances to build a light-hearted foundation from which yearning can naturally blossom. As Ben teaches Carla for her upcoming coming-of-age, we’re swept away by genuine connection, convincingly sung from the bimah.
Black Box Diaries
All stories documenting the personal anecdotes making up the #MeToo movement are courageous. Speaking up about a painful truth, knowing that if society at large was going to listen with generosity or empathy, well, it wouldn’t need a movement to get these tales told. They are brave alliances between survivors and journalists, battling entrenched sexism with unrelenting professionalism and mutual trust. Black Box Diaries tracks a moving #MeToo story that brought the movement to Japan, from the crime itself, through the journey of going public and to the uneasy closure of its long war of attrition. Its devastation is familiar. But because filmmaker Shiori Itō is both survivor and journalist, and recorded her own investigation into her assault in real time, the documentary becomes a thrilling testament to her exceptional, tenacious agency in the face of a hostile world. A bit like how Navalny saw Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny pursue the men Vladimir Putin sent to assassinate him, there’s a macabre adrenaline running through the first-person perspective of Black Box Diaries. Nobody has the same incentive to bring about justice than the survivors themselves. There’s also the same interconnectedness of sinister power on the other side: Itō’s attacker is Noriyuki Yamaguchi, biographer of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose government maintained the same sexual assault laws for over a century. Yamaguchi’s political and police connections protect him from arrest at least once, and gets a helpful detective removed from Itō’s case. If all sexual assault cases are uphill battles, Itō’s is a Sisyphean conspiracy. And we get a front-row seat to the endless struggle. Not shying down from the crushing interconnectedness of powerful forces set against her, Itō’s journalistic rigor and personal vulnerability prevents a landmark moment in a movement from becoming a simple summary in a history book.
Brief History of a Family
The kind of psychological thriller crafted with such delightful tension that you can’t help but smile as you squirm, Brief History of a Family is an infectious good time about a Chinese family slowly succumbing to the (possibly) sinister affections of their son’s quiet classmate. Writer/director Jianjie Lin’s feature debut pulls from plenty of genre influences (its class dynamic and affluent apartment setting will be familiar to Parasite fans) to construct a tight dramatic metaphor encompassing Chinese parenting values and the end of the country’s one-child policy. With eerie framings and excellently tense performances from Feng Zu and Keyu Guo as parents with plenty of secrets, Brief History of a Family will keep you guessing throughout its crisp 99-minute runtime.
Eternal You
It stands to reason that if there’s money to be made in biotech, there’s an equal amount to be made in necrotech. Eternal You explores the sectors of the artificial intelligence business that’s wasted no time adopting the psychological tricks of the spiritual trade and applying them to chatbots and CG models. Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You observes the burgeoning industry around techno-spiritualism with wry skepticism. While AI in general is currently being sold as a miracle do-it-all to the most credulous among us, this specific use of AI is targeted towards an even more vulnerable demographic: The credulous and grieving. And those working behind the scenes are used to grifting. As Eternal You listens to those in charge of these startups, like Project December founder Jason Rohrer, we hear self-assured PR exaggerations. It’s showmanship. It’s the crystal ball, the velvet curtains, the copious candles. It’s the stuff that gets you funded by the rich and attracts comfort-seekers to your website. The filmmakers then immediately rebut with people like Carl Öhman, who are willing to cut through the bullshit about this segment of the AI gold rush pursued by “the most skillful in turning the dead into a business.” Their straight talk is an oasis, especially when the topic involves one people are inclined to be too hurt to be anything but trusting around: Death. It’s all existentially depressing, housed in a bleak aesthetic. A glitchy score from Gregor Keienburg and Raffael Seyfried harmonizes reversed and edited vocalizations in an aural replica of Eternal You’s central concept, its soothing inhumanity haunting cold drone shots. Block and Riesewieck aren’t afraid to show off a little style, which goes a long way when covering subject matter that inherently entails a lot of sitting at the keyboard, staring at a screen. Wide shots, giving a broader montaged context to human experience, go a long way to underscore the impossible concept of replicating consciousness. Balancing this is an icy off-handedness. Even cathartic, emotional moments are filtered through imperfect technological lenses: Reality TV, computer monitors, iPhone speakers, text on a screen. Eternal You is a necessary warning klaxon for our culture’s increasing inability to accept death, just as it finds a techno-economic structure happy to oblige it.
Exhibiting Forgiveness
A textured and heartfelt debut from writer/director Titus Kaphar, best known as a painter, Exhibiting Forgiveness is a showcase for André Holland as an artist whose painful childhood plays out on canvas. While Tarrell (Holland) works on evoking the inhumanity of impoverished youth with brushes and oils, his father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) works on righting his path from a fearsome drug addiction. As the two try and fail to reconnect, with both Tarrell’s wife (Andra Day) and mother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) falling to the wayside as the wounded men wage war with their own emotions, patterns emerge in action and in artwork. Kaphar is a stunning visual stylist, even when his writing fails to keep up with the honesty of his images. Complimenting Kaphar’s colorful palette, close-ups of process and naturally filled frames is Holland’s traumatized, perseverant, indignant, principled performance. He is resolute that he will not become his father, though the way he’s working through his issues is clearly heading towards combustion. Flowing easily backwards and forwards in time while peering into the unhealthy parts of artistry with uncommon insight, Exhibiting Forgiveness is a layered mural of a man.
Girls Will Be Girls
A tangible takedown of patriarchal hypocrisy, and how these larger social forces impact women in specific ways, Girls Will Be Girls is a bold and thoughtfully shot debut from writer/director Shuchi Talati. Complicating the story of Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) and Sri’s (Kesav Binoy Kiron) boarding-school romance with erotic thriller psychology and cultural observation, Girls Will Be Girls documents coming-of-age moments with refreshing spirit and explicitness. Adding in the complex role of Mira’s wannabe cool-mom Anila (Kani Kusruti) can make the movie seem like it’s juggling quite a bit, but within Talati’s confident, cramped, physically intimate frames, the latent energy is enough to carry us forward through the movie’s sometimes-warring interests. With beautiful colors, lived-in performances and a searing perspective on Indian society, Girls Will Be Girls is a heightened, beautiful, painful return to high school—with enough uncomfortable twists to make you squirm in your seat.
Ghostlight
Ghostlight opens with darkness smothering the rustle and whispers of an audience making its way to their seats before the show starts. Then: The rattling hiss of the stage curtain opening. We expect to see actors, a set, props. Instead, we just see a suburban backyard, the property of Dan (Keith Kupferer), who’s awake much too early for his or his wife’s liking, but helpless to do anything about his REM cycles apart from stare forlornly outside. Life, the film tells us up front, is a show we all perform in, but in the rest of the telling, Ghostlight argues that acting specifically, and the arts broadly, are necessary tools for understanding it. Like Saint Frances, Ghostlight was written by Kelly O’Sullivan, who played the lead in the former and went behind the camera with Alex Thompson to co-direct on this one. Dan is haunted by a year-old tragedy that goes unspecified for the film’s first hour; the choice to dole out pieces of that lingering incident, which weighs on Dan as surely as his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and their daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), gives the filmmakers scaffolding that mimics the way Dan dances around his grief rather than face it. It’s a heartbreaking bread crumb trail leading us bit by bit to the worst possible ordeal a family can endure, an injury inflamed by an insult to Dan’s self-esteem: Mandatory leave from his construction job following a volcanic physical outburst on site. Happily, misery loves company, and though Rita (Dolly de Leon), an erstwhile Broadway actress now doing community theater, isn’t miserable herself, exactly, she can pick a miserable soul out of a crowd like a hawk tracking mice through grass. She invites Dan to join her troupe; they’re putting on a production of Romeo and Juliet, and they’re down a man. Ghostlight could easily cultivate these characters as guides to one another, a group of lost souls who find redemptive catharsis through their friendships; this is, after all and in fairness, the role Rita plays to the reluctant, chagrined Dan. But the film’s thesis is about not human connection but humans’ connection to art, how we benefit from the presence of art in our lives, and what lonely, repressed existences we’d be damned to lead without it. Ghostlight’s argument in favor of art as essential to the soul is also a statement honoring creative endeavors as noble professions. — Andy Crump
Good One
India Donaldson’s Good One trades in voyeurism, but not necessarily the type you’d expect from a nervy Sundance debut. Low-key in approach but deeply observant, much of the movie involves Sam (Lily Collias), a 17-year-old girl, watching and listening in plain sight. Sam’s dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) know that she’s there; sometimes, they even address her directly, or solicit her opinion about this or that, as the three of them embark on a camping trip. But neither of them are quite accustomed to how clearly Sam sees them, and how attuned she is to their middle-aged weaknesses, whether she’s amused or deeply disappointed. Chris and Matt seem to take their status as the adults in the room (or, in this case, in the woods) for granted, even as they’re giving lip service to Sam’s maturity. The audience better understands Sam’s watchfulness because Donaldson zeroes in on the face of her young lead, catching Collias in a range of expressions that far eclipse the stereotypical teenager repertoire of eyerolls and glowers. Those are there too, sometimes, but Sam also exhibits a kind of flickering skepticism over whether she can give these men the benefit of the doubt – or, in her father’s case, years of both love and frustration. Much of Good One plays like a cross between Kelly Reichardt and Noah Baumbach – with further crisscrossing between multiple modes of each filmmaker. There’s the modest, verdant-scenery male bonding of Reichardt’s Old Joy, plus the seething, stranded dynamic of Michelle Williams’ character in Meek’s Cutoff; similarly, the banter of a Baumbach comedy – the dialogue between Chris and Matt is often very funny – intersects with a lower-key version of Marriage Story tensions. Donaldson is closer to Reichardt in terms of incident and quiet; not overmuch of the former and plenty of the latter. Yet the movie does turn on a betrayal – a couple of them, even – with the clarity and grace of a perfectly wrought short story. Collias is a find, and Le Gros has become an expert at playing a certain type of muddling-through family man who convinces himself that certain selfish decisions are actually just him doing his best. The flipside of Donaldson’s close and careful observation is that even smaller developments start to feel inevitable in a quasi-literary sort of way. Once the story makes its biggest turn, the movie becomes more predictable, just a tiny bit easier to chart out, right up to its open ending – one moment that probably would work better with just the right closing sentence, rather than the particular image the movie lands on. Still, this is a striking introduction to Donaldson’s unflinching eye.—Jesse Hassenger
Handling the Undead
A zombie tragedy of false hope and brutal realizations, Handling the Undead adapts John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow-up book to Let the Right One In with contemplative quiet. Director and co-writer Thea Hvistendahl positions three families afflicted by the sudden resurrection of a newly dead loved one as isolated units, staring in disbelief at the thing we’ve been trained since birth to avoid. A grandfather and mother care for a boy whose distended belly and unseeing eyes are like punishments inflicted upon them. An elderly woman jabbers away about her garden with the wife that walked back from her funeral. A comedian and his children ride an emotional roller coaster after his wife doesn’t stay dead after a car accident. Each is shot in strict compositions defined by straight lines, distancing angles and obscured frames. Hvistendahl’s lovely yet unnerving aesthetic is as cold and tangible as its corpses, paced with plenty of time for us to think. In this telling, the realities of death don’t go away with the unreality of revitalization, and the cannibalistic motivations that drive similar genre stories to crisis are avoided in favor of a creeping, omnipresent desperation. Where Let the Right One In‘s austere and icy vampire tale played more to our sympathies for its characters, Handling the Undead allows us to project our own fears and sadnesses onto its unaware zombies—just like those still living in its world.
In the Land of Brothers
An expansive, three-act observation of Afghan refugees struggling to make their lives under the oppressive discrimination in Iran, In the Land of Brothers is an assured dramatic debut from filmmakers Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi. Bolstered by an impressive cast playing across time-jumps, In the Land of Brothers’ entrancing script and evocative settings sweep you up in the tragic yet steely vignettes. As the stories connect across themes and families, building to a cathartic climax, the resoundingly tragic and consuming humanism is woven with enough subtlety to avoid melodrama. A brutal, beautiful depiction of life under discrimination, filmed with a painterly eye and a compassionate heart.
In a Violent Nature
While shifting into the eyes, bodies and mindsets of killers has long been a disruptive tool in the ambitious horror filmmaker’s bag of torture implements, the commitment to this perspective-switch rarely involves a total shift in form. These gambles usually manifest as single montages that jolt us out of our seats, or short film gimmicks briefly impressing video store gorehounds sniffing through anthologies for promising new blood. Writer/director Chris Nash cut his teeth on at least one of these short showcases—ABCs of Death 2—before making his feature debut with In a Violent Nature. How do monsters like Jason or Michael Myers teleport behind their hapless, horny co-ed victims? Where are they before being awakened by this hormonal hubris? What is the murderer up to in the moments before or directly after the music shrieks and the blood hits the wall? With grim patience, vibrant realism and genre-nodding humor, Nash marches us one plodding bootstep at a time through the procedure of slashing. A gorgeous, quiet and still horror film, In a Violent Nature is as methodical as its unstoppable lead, filled with gruesome, delightfully disgusting kills. The rhythms are right, the gags all land, the deaths are absolutely massive and the craftsmanship is the very reason Fangoria was established.
Malu
An extra-venomous examination of matrilineal relationships that’s like someone scrubbed all the beautiful artifice from an Pedro Almodóvar film with steel wool, Malu pits its family of three women against each other in a volatile intergenerational cage match. Balanced with snappy, incisive realism by first-time writer/director Pedro Freire, the conflicts and affections shared by former actress Malu (Yara de Novaes), her elderly and conservative mother (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha), and her daughter Joana (Joana Duarte) whip us around with the same energy the characters use to flog each other. Biting jealousies and pent-up frustrations explode in an instant, leaving behind emotional debris and, still intact, the kind of love that only build up over a lifetime. It’s a sharp character study that never feels too acidic to enjoy, nor too enamored with its conflict to have something meaningful to say. The setting—mostly Malu’s dilapidated Rio de Janeiro home, where all three are staying—is filled with the ramshackle bric-a-brac of poverty. This backdrop grounds even the most heightened screaming match between the impressively acted women. As the family falls into and attempts to avoid vicious cycles, we realize how buffeted we’ve been by their whirlwind.
Porcelain War
Slava Leontyev and his wife Anya Stasenko are porcelain artists in Ukraine. Slava makes the objects, Anya paints them with intricate figures navigating miniature worlds. Slava is also an ex-Special Forces soldier who trains civilians to take up arms to defend their homes against Russian invaders. This dissonance adds a poignant and inescapable friction to Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo’s war documentary Porcelain War. Anya and Slava tour their local forest, picking mushrooms from around the landmines and helping clear the wilderness of unexploded missiles from Putin’s forces. The rubble of their cities, shattered across the streets, is echoed in their delicate artwork. Getting to know the fighters in Slava’s unit (a milk farmer, furniture sales manager, home contractor, graphic designer, weapon designer and IT worker fill out the force) on top of the warm, indomitable couple at the doc’s heart, makes the reportage’s more intense moments — including a bodycam segment that’s one of the most heart-pounding moments of the war I’ve seen caught on tape — all the more affecting. Porcelain War‘s questions around how we cope, and what’s worth fighting for, are as vital as ever with the world still full of ignored pandemics, government-sponsored genocide and ongoing invasions. Its answers, quiet and bittersweet, hit like a drone strike.
Sugarcane
The last few years have seen both fiction and nonfiction reckonings—ranging from the poetic reeducation of Lakota Nation vs. United States to the genre work of the late filmmaker Jeff Barnaby—with the brutal, federally-mandated violence of residential schools. Few cinematic takes have been as beautiful and compassionate as Sugarcane. From subject/director Julian Brave NoiseCat and director/journalist Emily Kassie, the documentary gives faces, names and histories to those affected by the residential schools—and looks, bracingly, towards a future where healing is possible. The impact of these schools is so pervasive and lasting, that even this couched optimism can feel impossible. This is especially true when zeroing in on the members of the Williams Lake First Nation. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the WLFN, whose main reserve is British Columbia’s Sugarcane, who wasn’t affected by the violence and sexual assault at the notorious St. Joseph’s Mission residential school. This school in particular featured such rampant, prolific abuse that an anecdote of its evils led to the Canadian holiday National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Sugarcane allows the full extent of this tragedy to play out in details, like Chief Willie Sellars buying an awareness-raising box of orange donuts, and in asides, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau facing criticism after he speaks at a local event. NoiseCat and his father Ed are our two closest subjects during Sugarcane. Their confrontational yet loving trip through the latter’s past embraces the double-edged joy and pain of intimacy. The other two men we spend the most time with are Chief Sellars and former Chief Rick Gilbert, who act as perfect symbols of their eras as well as endearing individuals. Alongside these men, others share their pasts, the trauma weaving a nearly visible web between the community members. NoiseCat and Kassie bring us close enough to touch it through the images they shoot. So many documentaries dealing with crimes like these can be cold, clinical reporting assuming a tactful distance from the whole affair. Sugarcane, warm and sad, knows it all hits harder if we’re living there. Inside the dilapidated shell of the schoolhouse are carved messages in the wooden walls; upstairs, sunlight filters through an asteroid belt of dust motes. The remnants of the past are still physical, and still present.
Thelma
Every good action hero knows you’ve got to stick to your guns. Ethan Hunt is a marathon-running master of disguise. John Wick has never lost count of his remaining bullets. Jackie Chan’s various inspectors and agents view the world as their personal set of monkey bars. When writer/director Josh Margolin’s debut Thelma keeps its sights trained on its rogue granny on a mission (June Squibb), its hilarious geriatric reframe of action-movie tropes has a game champion. Like its absentminded hero, the film can sometimes get sidetracked right when things are getting good, wandering down schmaltzy or twee narrative paths. But when it lets Thelma (and Squibb) do her thing, the comedy is perfectly cute and a stellar showcase for what an actor’s late career can offer. There’s novelty in the comedic turns from the 94-year-old Squibb and her 81-year-old co-star, Richard Roundtree (in his final film role). These actors get to tap a well that’s unique to their age and the genre without sticking them into the boxes that generally contain old performers. They’re not utterly dignified, wisdom-dispensing elders. They’re not tragic victims of time. And they’re certainly, blessedly not the dreaded “rapping grannies” who are more punchline than performer. As the pair abscond on their quest to retrieve Thelma’s stolen savings, solicited from her cookie jar and mattress by phone scammers, they’re clearly complex, pulling off warm humor, endless charm and impressive stunts. A 94-year-old doesn’t have to ride a motorcycle off a cliff to make you gasp. Thelma’s emphasis on the unique pleasures found at different stages of life works because we can see the trust it places in Squibb as its front-and-center star.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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