A Streamer's Guide to Sundance 2024
Stay warm. Prepare for the year's indie smashes.
PARK CITY, UT — Greetings from the Sundance Film Festival! (Always wanted to do a dateline on a piece, indulge me.) I’m here on the ground for the kick-off of the new year of cinema by screening the cream of the crop in American and global independent cinema. Sundance remains the cream of the crop in festival laurels for upstart filmmakers, and I cannot wait to see what audiences take to and turn into a breakout hit. (For more on how slates like this come to be, read my interview with a festival programmer from 2022.)
There may still be some select tickets to single films available online for Sundance, so you are not entirely cut off from participating in the event if you aren’t prepared to freeze your tuchus off with me in Utah. But your best bet to prepare for the year ahead is to catch up on some of the previous work made by the filmmakers at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. I’ve curated 10 films that are worth watching as a primer for what’s to come.
Boys State, Apple TV+
I adored Boys State — it wound up being my #2 movie of 2020. That appreciation grew in large part from writing a giant feature for /Film talking to co-directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine about how they made such a strong statement about the future of American politics by drilling in on a 2018 high school mock government program. One bit that didn’t make the cut: McBaine said that many of the young people in Boys State had a la carte politics that didn’t neatly align with a single ideological profile. That showed up more in the legislature, which wasn’t where much of the action chosen for the documentary unfolded. “Maybe that's what we get to do next in Girls State,” she speculated, “really dig into that kind of conversation because it's a rich text, for sure, for what goes on in the political arena.” That film did end up getting made, and it’s premiering at Sundance. I’ll be eagerly awaiting to see for myself.
Half Nelson, Freevee (free with ads via Amazon Prime Video)
If ever there was a movie that showed Ryan Gosling had the full package, it may well be Half Nelson. I prefer him in comedic mode (The Nice Guys, Barbie) over brooding mode (Drive, Blade Runner 2049), but the beauty of directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden is that they find a way for him to be a little bit of both here. Gosling projects such confidence when he dwells in his element as a charismatic history teacher, which is a fitting and necessary contrast to his moments of vulnerability to cocaine. Reconciling the highs with the lows presents a difficult task for any performer, and Gosling nailed it at just 26 years old. He’s also fortunate to create this character under the auspices of a thoughtful script from Fleck and Boden, who avoid all the pitfalls of drug addicts or other self-destructive protagonist narratives. It’ll be nice to have the directing duo back screening a human story like Freaky Tales at Sundance rather than, uhh, Captain Marvel. (Get that check, I guess.)
Kimi, Max
Since announcing his “retirement” from making feature films over a decade ago now, Steven Soderbergh sure hasn’t missed a beat in quantity or quality! He’s just such a consummate workman filmmaker, so fluent in the language of cinema that he makes a difficult and multivariate art form look effortless. His steady directorial hand makes a somewhat simple and standard-issue thriller like Kimi, which refashions ‘70s paranoia into post-lockdown claustrophobic fear of device listening, into something truly pulse-pounding. Needless to say, I’m excited to see what he has in store for us with Presence, a reteaming with the Kimi screenwriter, David Koepp at Sundance. That’s not only because it runs a taut 85 minutes, but … that doesn’t hurt.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, rental
Can you make a movie about America’s perverse relationship with prisons without actually going inside one? That’s the challenge that documentarian Brett Story sets for herself in The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. This series of vignettes showcases the insidiousness of the rot caused by mass incarceration, revealing the far-reaching effects of the system in consistently surprising ways. Don’t expect any giant revelations or postulations, just a clear-eyed look at the extent to which prisons affect daily life in the United States. I’m intrigued by how much of this obliqueness will manifest in Story’s competition doc Union, which documents Amazon’s drive for unionization.
Saint Frances, rental
This earned a shout-out in my newsletter published immediately after the Dobbs ruling given the sensitive, nuanced way in which it portrays abortion.
But unlike a lot of other movies on that list, Saint Frances is not so easily reducible to just being “an abortion movie.” It’s a coming-of-age movie that gives more grace to young women getting their lives together than just about any movie I’ve ever seen. Something about the way that director Alex Thompson and star Kelly O’Sullivan play the keys of our hearts has me eager to watch whatever they do next, such as this year’s Sundance premiere Ghostlight.
Saint Maud, Amazon Prime Video
Enough of you have joined the Marshall and the Movies fray since I initially recommended this in 2021 that I think I can recycle this blurb a bit.
Religiously themed horror flicks are extremely my jam, so Saint Maud was so incredibly up my alley. A24 really had no idea how to get this film into the world, which is a bummer — I got to see it at a screening in January 2020 a few months before they planned to release it, and they ended up just kind of dumping it in theaters at the peak of American COVID cases. This story of an increasingly zealous young nun driven to terrifying levels of self-mortification absolutely thrilled me down to its gasp-inducing final shot. It’ll have you saying OMM — Oh My MAUD. (Sorry!)
Glass is back with what might be my most anticipated screening experience, if not film, of the 2024 festival with Love Lies Bleeding thanks to that raucous trailer.
Thirst Street, Amazon Prime Video
I’ll admit that not knowing Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films probably limited my ability to fully appreciate what director Nathan Silver is doing in Thirst Street. This tale of a spiraling flight attendant in the throes of an unexplainable passion pays tribute to a particular kind of erotically-charged European drama in which I’m not particularly well-versed. But there’s enough to love in the film that doesn’t require a passing understanding of New German Cinema, such as Silver’s masterful use of color and Lindsay Burdge’s tempestuous performance. I’m eagerly anticipating how Silver will work with Jason Schwartzman, who had quite a busy 2023, as a Jewish cantor undergoing a crisis of faith in Sundance selection Between the Temples.
3000 Miles, Vimeo
I can’t very well have just done a whole newsletter on short films and not include one in this roundup, right? Sean Wang looks for a big breakout at the festival with the coming-of-age story Dìdi, and he could also score an Oscar nomination for another short film he made. That doc short, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, is sadly not available to watch online at the moment. But Wang’s 5-minute diaristic short 3,000 Miles gives me a good indication that he’s a director capable of making me cry. I got misty-eyed watching this recollection of his first year living in New York using voicemails from his mom overlaid on the footage he shot. It’s a beautiful example of isolating magnificence amidst mundanity.
The Truffle Hunters, rental
Doggos! Truffles! Truly, what more could you ask for? Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw turn their documentary eye toward the curious case of old-school Italians who keep the tradition of using truffle-hunting dogs in The Truffle Hunters. Their hands-off, observational style means it’s great to just hang out in this world and come to our own conclusions. I can’t wait to see how they shed light on the Argentine way of life in Gaucho Gaucho, which will play at this year’s festival.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Max
Director Jane Schoenbrun invites us into the mystery, terror and perverse appeal of these scary spaces online with a distinct eye towards how people consume this content. A man watching a video on his phone while crouched on a toilet is all too real, as is the extended buffering icon before a new video plays. While I’m not sure I found the slow-building tension between Casey and a protective, borderline paternalistic stranger (Michael J. Rogers) quite as convincing or compelling as just the way We Are All Going to the World’s Fair replicates that hypnotic algorithmic suck of the video-based web, this does feel like a film trying to move the goalposts for the medium. I’m curious to see where Schoenbrun nets out in her latest feature, I Saw the TV Glow.
Well, the interview I had hoped to share still hasn’t published, so just a reminder that subscribers got to read this full post, as they will the rest of this newsletter…
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