Skywalkers: A Love Story (Jeff Zimbalist)

Part of me wishes I hadn’t waited until I got home from Park City to watch this vertiginous thriller about attractive young Russians scaling the last mega-skyscraper in the world for social clout; another part of me realizes that a big screen viewing of their breathtaking high wire romance almost certainly would’ve given me a heart attack.

Skywalkers: A Love Story played as an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 25-28.

My Old Ass (Megan Park)

A sweet Canadian coming-of-age story makes an argument for recreational psychedelics as a gateway to connecting with your most authentic sentimental self. Even as the story of the last days of summer before leaving home occasionally discards its high concept premise (coming face-to-face with one’s future self) and fades on its themes of queer representation in favor of a more conventional teen rom-com, it still pulls at all the right heartstrings. With a supporting performance from Aubrey Plaza as a meddling ghost and a star turn from Maisy Stella, Megan Park delivers a misty-eyed Sundance crowd pleaser about embracing the fleeting teenage joy of living boldly and fully in the present.

My Old Ass played an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It will be released later this year.

Didi (Sean Wang)

Set in three turbulent weeks of summer before high school, Sean Wang has made a winning semi-autobiographical story of growing up as a Taiwanese-American teen in the age of LiveJournal, MySpace, and AIM.

It’s kind of Eighth Grade for boys, except a little gentler and with a spin of second-generation immigration (including a very melodramatic grandmother) and identity discovery and creation layered on top. Izaac Wang turns in a sensitive performance as a kid trying to figure out where he fits in the world of girls, skating, hormones, and uncertain friendships. Ultimately, it’s a very good movie about how awful it is to be a teenage boy and how much worse it is to be around one with all their giant repressed emotions.

Didi played as an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 25-28.

DEVO (Chris Smith)

Chris Smith doesn’t really break any ground with this doc about the unlikely rise and fall of a band of art rock originals, but he has a knack for letting weirdos talk about their weird art in an authentic package. Told largely through Mark Mothersbaugh’s direct-to-camera recollections of the collective’s origins amid the violent protests at Kent State and the band’s unlikely and rocky road to fame, Smith ornaments the stories with an artful collage of contemporaneous images, news footage, and clips from the band’s own ahead-of-their-time video projects.

Tracing the arc of the band’s first wave (and omitting the subsequent reunions, reformations, and tours) allows a more acute focus on music as an arm of a larger philosophical project. While the film might not live up to the band’s own lofty world-changing aspirations, it’s a lot of fun to see the performances collected and to appreciate the connections with big name admirers (like David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Neil Diamond) that helped to launch them from an annoying performance art project into the collective conscience.

Devo played as an official selection of the Premieres section at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

The Outrun (Nora Fingscheidt)

There’s nothing quite like a sobriety memoir to put an actor through their paces and Saoirse Ronan goes on a full marathon as an alcoholic searching for recovery, grace, and little birds in the harsh windswept beauty of the outer Orkney islands. As Rona, she seeks solace while on leave from her graduate studies in London and her story of beating addiction plays in jarring flashbacks of so many painful regrets.

When her initial retreat to her family’s farm — a combative relationship with a religious mother, a tender bond with a father with his own mental health struggles — in her old hometown proves too much to beat temptation, she flees even further. A barely inhabited island (itself an island of an island of an island) with a storm-battered cottage, a finicky internet connection, and a small community become a sanctuary for healing. The landscape is filmed stunningly and Ronan’s performance is epic enough to match. There’s a degree to which every alcohol addiction memoir has to hit the same beats, but Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s story fragments the narrative, interleaving the good and terrible times with drinking with the strides and stumbles of righting her life far from civilization.

The Outrun played as an official selection of the Premieres Program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Look Into My Eyes (Lana Wilson)

Documentarian Lana Wilson grants a flickering glimpse into to the lives and practices of a group of NYC clairvoyants, mediums, and animal psychics. Fascinatingly impartial to the authenticity of their conduit to the spirit realm, she’s primarily attuned instead to the immediacy of the earthly connections made between medium and client, and the surprising power they hold toward resolution of deeply-seated pain.

Look Into My Eyes played as an official selection of the Premieres Program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will distribute it later this year.

Good One (India Donaldson)

Lily Collias quietly commands the center of India Donaldson’s delicate account of a teenage girl on an annual hiking trip through the Catskills with her oblivious outdoorsy expert dad and his even more oblivious self-centered pal. Slight in its scope, but nevertheless strikingly captures the way in which danger can instantly arise from the banal, transforming the mood, and drastically altering the course of lives and relationships. Not a twist, per se, but the film could’ve done more to make the dramatic turn more believable and its aftermath more credible. Even though I didn’t fully buy into the character work that motivates the turning point moment, the hype on this movie was correct in identifying an actor and director to look forward to seeing more.

Good One played as an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 25-28.

Sue Bird: In the Clutch (Sarah Dowland)

An absolute legend gets a well-deserved celebration on the precipice of her retirement. Even as Dowland’s handling of Sue Bird’s biography plays like something of an illustrated Wikipedia article, the sheer collection of facts and candor of the interviews still manage to capture the breadth of an exceptional athlete’s unprecedented career, the evolution of women’s sports, and discovering the power of growing into one’s self. One could wish for a more exciting form for telling the story, but sometimes it’s nice to get all the footage collected and on tape.

Sue Bird: In the Clutch played as an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)

Through the miracles of modern medicine, Edwin, a reclusive actor severely disfigured by neurofibromatosis, suffers the dire fate of waking up from a nightmarish facial peel with the horrific visage of Sebastian Stan.

Shot like a send-up of an eighties psycho-thriller, the transformation turns his life in a rotting apartment around overnight, with inexplicable success in real estate sales and thwarted off-Broadway aspirations. The paper thin series of inversions usher in a meta hall of mirrors, with supporting performances from Renate Reinsve as a neighbor playwright and Adam Pearson (who has neurofibromatosis in real life) as a man-about-town whose personality is the exact opposite of Edwin. Everything is flat and is often played for cringy laughs, like a facsimile of a tribute that comes across as a half send-up. I get that it’s playing into a throwback vibe and skirting the line between comic irony and actual emotions, but it was an uncanny valley that I found instantly grating and tiresome.

But I recognize I’m in the minority, at least as far as buzz on get ground goes — it’s been one of the most celebrated films of the fest. Maybe seeing it first thing in the morning, running late, and without coffee (ONLY WATER IN THE ECCLES!) wasn’t the ideal setting.

A Different Man played as an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Handling the Undead (Thea Hvistendahl)

With stars from The Worst Person in the World (Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie) and based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In), this story of three families unexpectedly revisited by recently deceased loved ones had a lot of potential.

After an anomalous electrical event, a mourning grandfather and grief-stricken mother are reunited with a dead boy whose knocks are heard from beneath the still fresh grave. An older woman reunites with her lover, whose funeral occurred the previous day. A comedian father and his two children aren’t sure what to make of a mother’s uncertain return to life after a car accident. The returned don’t speak and exist somewhere between rotting flesh and silent phantoms.

It’s a creepy and intriguing premise that undermines itself with such lugubrious pacing and intensely reserved approach, that it’s often difficult to distinguish the living from the undead in this Scandinavian zombie meditation. For a more engaging approach to similar themes, I’d instead suggest starting (or revisiting) the outstanding French television series Les Revenants.

Handling the Undead played an official selection of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 25-28.