It’s the last dance for Sundance in Park City as the indie-focused festival prepares to relocate to Boulder, Colorado, next year. It’s also the first fest to go on without its legendary Oscar-winning founder Robert Redford, who died in September.
The event’s 42nd edition kicked off January 22 and runs through Sunday, February 1, with a lineup that features 105 projects — including 90 features and seven TV episodes — screening in Park City, nearby Salt Lake City and online.
Below is a compilation of our reviews from the fest. Click on the movie’s title to read our full take.
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‘Buddy’
Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Worry Well Productions.
Section: Midnight
Director: Casper Kelly
Screenwriters: Casper Kelly, Jamie King
Cast: Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt
Deadline’s takeaway: Casper Kelly plays with form in ways that some might find exasperating, but there is always a method to his madness. An ingenious slasher movie with crowd-pleasing moments of gross-out comedy, it’s about what TV means to us — how much we invest in what’s clearly fake and not what it actually is.
‘Carousel’
Sundance Film Festival
Section: Premieres
Director-screenwriter: Rachel Lambert
Cast: Chris Pine, Jenny Slate, Abby Ryder Fortson, Sam Waterston, Katey Sagal, Jessica Harper, Jeffrey DeMunn, Helene York
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s a story about love lost, love found again and the cost of both with the baggage from the past, the tentativeness of the present and the questions of a future. Chris Pine is a fine actor not often given the chance to play this kind of reflective adult role, and it is perfect for him. — PH
‘Ha-chan: Shake Your Booty!’
Sundance Film Festival
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Director: Josef Kubota Wladyka
Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Alberto Guerra, Alejandro Edda, YOU, Yoh Yoshida, Damián Alcázar
Deadline’s takeaway: Wladyka paints a beautiful picture of life and love, grief and closure, using dance as a universal language to express all of the above, with help from a talented ensemble of Japanese and Latin actors led by Rinko Kikuchi. — GG
‘The Incomer’
Anthony Dickenson
Section: World Dramatic Competition
Director-screenwriter: Louis Paxton
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O’Rourke, Michelle Gomez, John Hannah
Deadline’s takeaway: Against the odds, and largely thanks to the core trio, The Incomer pulls together, finally addressing the story’s dark well of sadness and ending on an upbeat yet surprisingly mature and even emotional note that absolves the film for most — if not all — of its frequent forays into silliness. — DW
‘Josephine‘
Greta Zozula/Sundance Institute
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Director-screenwriter: Beth de Araujo
Cast: Mason Reeves, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, Philip Ettinger, Syra McCarthy, Eleanore Pienta
Deadline’s takeaway: Josephine is a tough watch right from the beginning, when a rape is graphically presented onscreen and is witnessed by an 8-year-old girl. But it effectively offers a different POV on the human cost of rape and the frustration in the legal system and might help others who’ve endured childhood trauma. — PH
Midori Francis in ‘Saccharine’
Shudder/Sundance Institute
Section: Midnight
Director-screenwriter: Natalie Erika James
Cast: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden
Deadline’s takeaway: It feels like an appropriate metaphor when the main character in this graphic, overlong body horror pic for the Ozempic era performs surgery on herself in a giant dumpster. The filmmaker appears to be unpacking so much of her own emotional experience, she’s not seeing the garbage for the dumpster. — GG