Movies you’ll want to see from the Sundance Film Festival
This year’s Sundance, which played out entirely virtually due to the COVID-19 surge driven by the omicron variant, meant less evocative screening circumstances: Laptops, digital links and Zooms.
But even in reduced form, the films were often hypnotic, thrilling and urgent. Here are a few films that stood out to AP Film Writers Lindsey Bahr and Jake Coyle from their virtual Sundance, which wrapped Sunday.
⏩ “Fire of Love”: Katia and Maurice Krafft were married French volcanologists who spent their lives documenting the world’s volcanoes and died during one such expedition in Japan in 1991. Werner Herzog used them briefly in “Into the Inferno,” but the Kraffts and their stunning photographs and 16-millimeter films get the spotlight in Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love,” a mesmerizing and almost mystical portrait of love and the extremes of the natural world to be released by National Geographic.
⏩ “Descendant”: Margaret Brown’s documentary concerns the discovery of the Clotilda, a schooner submerged in Alabama’s Mobile River in 1860, considered to be the last known slave ship to bring enslaved Africans to the U.S. But Brown’s film, which was acquired by Netflix and the Obamas’ High Ground Productions, excavates far more than the Clotilda.
⏩ “Cha Cha Real Smooth”: Aimless college grad gets hired by local mothers to be a party starter on the local barmitzvah circuit and strikes up a friendship with a young single mom of an autistic teenage daughter. And yet Cooper Raiff’s sophomore film, which he stars in alongside Dakota Johnson, is never what you expect. Sweet, funny and moving, this is a small, indie trope-defying gem that’ll be on Apple TV+ this year.
⏩ “The Exiles”: Sundance’s grand jury prize winner for documentary is a sometimes awkwardly balanced fusion of essentially two films that nevertheless makes for a profound examination of political dissent and missed opportunity for change. “The Exiles,” which is directed by Ben Klein and Violet Columbus and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, seems initially like a portrait of Christine Choy, the brash Oscar-nominated filmmaker and professor.
⏩ “Emily the Criminal”: The burden of student loan debut is taken to darkly electrifying extremes in first-time writerdirector John Patton Ford’s taut neo-noir thriller. Most of all, it’s a showcase for Aubrey Plaza, who plays a desperate young Los Angeles woman drawn into a criminal underworld through high-paying but dangerous scams (with a charming Theo Rossi) that slyly critique modern-day economic injustices.
⏩ “The Princess”: “The Princess,” coming to HBO this year, is something else entirely. Director Ed Perkins tells the story of her public life using only archival footage, including news broadcasts, man-on-the-street interviews, talk show segments, b-roll and outtakes. Looking at us looking at her is an immersive, moving and revelatory experience.
⏩ “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”: Emma Thompson plays a somewhat repressed widow who hires a handsome sex worker (Daryl McCormack) in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” a charming (and slightly blue) chamber piece about finding yourself later in life that Searchlight Pictures will release on Hulu. Sophie Hyde directs off a script from Katy Brand, that turns what could have been a cheap gimmick into a terrifically witty, sophisticated, adult comedy.