Standout movies you’ll hear about this year
PARK CITY, Utah – We’re not alone in thinking this has been a lackluster year for the Sundance Film Festival. Unlike past events, which christened future box office hits and Oscar heavyweights including The Big Sick,
Manchester by the Sea and Boyhood, many attendees have observed that there was no one movie everyone could get behind, nor any that ignited the fierce bidding wars among distributors that are characteristic of the mountainside event. Even the festival’s biggest buy ($10 million), the feminist thriller Assassination
Nation, has been subject to a swift social-media smackdown from critics. That’s not to say our trek to Sundance was a total bust. Of the more than a dozen films we managed to catch during our short, relatively snowless stay, here are the five we think everyone will be talking about when they’re released this year. Wildlife
Carey Mulligan has never been better than in this understated marital drama, exquisitely adapted from Richard Ford’s 1990 novel by Zoe Kazan and first-time director Paul Dano. As the long-suffering Jeanette, Mulligan blisteringly reveals the cracks in the facade of a stifled 1960s housewife, giving an awards-worthy performance that crackles and flares like the forest fire her husband, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), has abandoned her to fight. Newcomer Ed Oxenbould is similarly heartbreaking as 14-year-old Joe, the glue that so desperately tries to hold his parents’ irreparable marriage together.
Skate Kitchen
Far and away the most refreshing film we saw at this year’s festival. After following a group of sheltered, cinema-obsessed brothers in documentary The Wolfpack, director Crystal Moselle once again turns her camera on a mostly unseen pocket of New Yorkers for her narrative feature debut. Named for the underground allgirls skate collective, Skate Kitchen centers on a reticent tomboy named Camille (a captivating Rachelle Vinberg), who befriends a group of young female skateboarders on Instagram and joins their close-knit posse. Cast with mostly non-professional actors (with the exception of Jaden Smith), and featuring one of the most unforgettable soundtracks in ages, this is a joyful, authentic hangout movie in the vein of Kids and American Honey.
Hereditary
Sundance is a reliable breeding ground for zeitgeisty horror hits, launching The Babadook, The Witch and even last year’s Get Out, whose surprise midnight screening got the hype train rolling for the Oscar-nominated racial thriller. The fright flick that has everyone buzzing this year is Hereditary (in theaters June 8), which is far more terrifying and deliciously demented than any of those three movies. Written and directed by first-timer Ari Aster, the film begins with a seemingly ordinary family mourning the loss of a grandparent, only to devolve into an incessant nightmare of crawling ants, headless corpses and wall-scaling demons.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Too many coming-of-age movies treat their characters like cardboard cutouts — mere stand-ins for every kid you knew in high school, there expressly to help drive home some greater message about self-discovery and acceptance. Miseducation, which was awarded the festival’s top Grand Jury Prize, plays on those themes. But it does so through a unique vantage point: a teenage girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who’s sent to a gay conversion therapy center after she’s outed. Sharply observed and bitingly funny, Desiree Akhavan’s youngadult adaptation of Emily M. Danforth’s novel manages to hit you in the gut because everyone in it is a fully realized person worthy of your sympathy.
The Tale
If it hadn’t spent years in development, you might’ve thought The Tale was made specifically for the Me Too movement. This timely drama, which sold to HBO Films and will be eligible for Emmys, is as much a meditation on the power of memory as it is a shattering chronicle of sexual assault. It skips back and forth in time as writer/director Jennifer Fox (played with ferocious intensity as an adult by Laura Dern) comes to grips with being repeatedly raped at age 13 by her running coach (an uncomfortably menacing Jason Ritter). The stomach-churning scenes depicting sex with a minor are bound to launch countless think pieces, while Jennifer’s devastating realization — that she is one of her perpetrator’s many victims — is an alltoo-familiar story that resonates even more deeply today.