These Films Took the Top Prizes at Sundance – Plus 11 Films NPR Loved

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, talk on the ground frequently turned to the devastating fires in Los Angeles, which have affected many attendees in the film industry. A campaign to “Keep Sundance in Utah” was out in full force in preparation for the festival’s possible move in 2027; Boulder, Colo., and Cincinnati, Ohio are in the running to become the event’s new home after the festival’s lease ends. If Sundance stays in Utah, much of the festival will relocate to Salt Lake City, though current host Park City could still host some events.

The movies are why everyone comes together each year in this snowy ski town though, and the slate offered some gems we could be talking about throughout the year, assuming they land distribution. Awards were announced on Friday, with the top prizes going to Hailey Gates’ war satire Atropia, which won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, and Seeds, Brittany Shyne’s film about Black farm workers in the South, which won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize. (You can see the full list of winners here.) I was on the ground for the first few days of the fest and then caught up with more films at home during the virtual portion. Here are a few of my favorites.

True crime is dead (long live true crime)

As the true crime genre has exploded in popularity, plenty of valid critiques have framed it as a form of morally dubious schadenfreude, murder-as-entertainment, as it were. Two excellent documentaries at Sundance this year took unique approaches to questioning the form.

For his film Zodiac Killer Project, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton initially set out to make a documentary about Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California Highway Patrolman who published a book in 2012 claiming he knew the Zodiac Killer‘s identity. Lafferty’s family ultimately refused to grant Shackleton the rights, so instead he made a film about the film he would have made … which becomes an engrossing deconstruction and affectionate skewering of the visual and narrative tropes that accompany pretty much every true crime doc or dramatization these days.

Shackleton’s narration is wry and astute but also wistful; he’s self-aware enough to know he’s drawn to this stuff just like so many of us, even as he understands its limitations and drawbacks. The film won Sundance’s NEXT Innovator Award.

Then there’s Predators, David Osit’s sharp focus on the popularity of To Catch a Predator and its present-day online descendants. Osit evaluates the mid-00s reality show’s legacy by complicating its hard-nosed perspective on vigilante justice; he wonders what was truly gained in exposing possible sex offenders, and whether the “benefits” really outweighed the costs for everyone involved, from the young actors cast as underage kids to the men who were shamed and arrested on national TV. Osit even gets the host of To Catch a Predator, Chris Hansen, to sit down for an interview, which only crystallizes how fraught the show’s mission was.

One other true crime doc was memorable in a different way: Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, about the 2023 killing of a Black woman by her white neighbor in Marion County, Fla. The majority of the film plays out through police body cam footage or interrogation room video, which captures months’ worth of simmering tensions within the neighborhood leading up to the fatal encounter, as well as the arrest and trial that followed. At times the access to such detailed documentation veers a bit too closely into feeling exploitative of Black trauma, but Gandbhir’s complication of narratives around community relationships and policing through the astounding footage still makes this worth a viewing. Gandbhir won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award.

Stars are born

The psychological thriller Lurker explores familiar themes around celebrity obsession and the trappings of fame — think All About Eve meets Ingrid Goes West meets The Other Two — yet it’s so well-executed and smart about its perspective that it feels incredibly fresh.

Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) is a retail worker who worms his way into the inner circle of emergent pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and, of course, upends the entire group dynamic to the -nth degree. Both actors have been around for a minute (Pellerin was recently in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld and Madekwe was in Saltburn), but their moody chemistry together as the star-struck barnacle and the self-serious artist crackles on screen, and could very well mark a turning point in their careers. It’s a promising feature debut for writer-director Alex Russell, who previously wrote for The Bear and Beef; the latter series’ darkly comic sensibilities definitely course throughout Lurker.

On a completely different note: Bill Condon’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Kiss of the Spider Woman — based on Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel —  was one of the splashier titles to debut at the festival this year.

In the early 1980s during Argentina’s military dictatorship, two prisoners share a cell: political activist Valentin (Diego Luna) and queer window dresser Molina (Tonatiuh). To distract from their imprisonment and abuse, Molina reimagines a movie starring their favorite actress, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), which gives Condon the chance to pay homage to classic Hollywood musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, and, more recently, Chicago (for which Condon wrote the screenplay). Luna and Lopez are great, but this is Tonatiuh’s movie — he takes a role that could easily be a caricature of queer flamboyance and pathos, and grounds it with depth and soul.

Another standout performance can be found in Cole Webley’s family drama Omaha. Set sometime in the late 2000s, a financially struggling widower (Past Lives‘ John Magaro) takes his children Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and Charlie (Wyatt Solis) on an unexpected road trip to Nebraska. The film is heavy on immaculately lit imagery of desert highway and small-town life and a little too lean on narrative details until the very end, but the adolescent Wright is particularly affecting as a child who’s old enough to sense her dad’s holding something back, yet too young to fully grasp the severity of their situation.

Sweeping ambition

Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions arrived on the back of a small wave of behind-the-scenes controversy, when it was unexpectedly pulled from Sundance just before the festival, and then added back onto the schedule a few days later. Hopefully this dustup doesn’t overshadow the work itself, which is intricate, rich, and supremely ambitious.

Borne out of Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS, the film uses the Encyclopedia Afrikana (an uncompleted project of W.E.B. Du Bois which inspired a book by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah decades later) as a basis to traverse eras, continents, and historical figures. A deliberately-paced Afrofuturistic narrative thread involving an international cruise liner is opaque and meandering, occasionally to the point of being inaccessible in a Terrence Malick-y way. But its most affecting moments are the essayistic montages of archival footage, which stitch together a clear-eyed mediation on memory, lineage, and the meaning of freedom.

Let’s get weird

I really dug the war satire Atropia, the feature debut of writer-director Hailey Gates. In 2006, wannabe Hollywood actress Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) works a gig playing an Iraqi civilian in a 24/7 U.S. military live training simulator, used to train soldiers on facing “the enemy” before they’re shipped overseas. The film (and especially the excellent Shawkat) juggles a bunch of different tones — farce, romance, social critique — and it succeeds at some better than others. But it’s scrappy and oddball enough to withstand some of its more scattered ideas around the stupidity of war.

Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a unique coming-of-age horror tale set in Argentina in the early 00s. Teenager Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) harbors a deep crush on her friend, but her plans to pursue him romantically are thrown out of whack when an older woman enters their inner circle. Casabé uses magical realism and the macabre to explore desire, jealousy, and insecurity within a protagonist who’s both extremely relatable and scary to contemplate.

Together is a fun body horror-comedy about a couple (real-life husband-and-wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie) stuck in a rut but unwilling to do anything about it. When they move to the country, they stumble upon a cursed cave that forces all of their unspoken issues to the forefront in the most visceral and icky ways possible. Writer-director Michael Shanks’ third act fumbles a bit in its predictability, but Brie and Franco lock into the offbeat humor of the film’s premise, and the special effects are a marvel.

In Twinless, writer-director James Sweeney also stars as Dennis, a snarky gay Portlander who forms a bromance with a dim but kindly straight dude (Dylan O’Brien) he meets in a grief support group for people who have lost their twins. There are some twists and turns in this dark comedy, and your tolerance for those directions may vary — but for me at least, watching these two opposites attract and trauma-bond was exciting and satisfying. It took home the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award.

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