Conceived and filmed during the pandemic, Lena Dunham’s return to feature filmmaking is the most mind-boggling misfire that I’ve seen at the festival so far.

Sundance has gained a reputation as a launching pad for documentary films that are bound to catch popular attention. Brief reviews of some of the festival’s highlights, including stories about Boeing, Kanye West, and Lucy and Desi.

most certainly dive headlong into Sundance’s ample genre programming for legitimate horror movies, but I can’t think of any or them more terrifying to the ego than sitting down for a music documentary about a bunch of “era-defining” bands as a way of being forced to confront the fact that the soundtrack from your early twenties has now aged into fodder for the archival treatment. Working from groundwork laid by Lizzy Goodman’s book of the same title, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace have assembled a clear-eyed collage of the “rebirth of rock” that exploded from New York City in the early 2000s.

After Columbus, about two people quietly getting to know each other on an impromptu architectural tour of a small town, became a surprise critical darling, many were curious about where Kogonada would go next. The answer: to the future with Colin Farrell. Seeing his new film, After Yang, during its stateside premiere at Sundance this weekend also answered the question of whether there would be any truly great movies shown at this festival and/or released in 2022.

In a return to form for filmmaking partners in crime Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Something in the Dirt leads us on a mind-melting journey that all takes place within a single room.

A deadpan delight with Karen Gillan at her best in a multifaceted performance, Dual is absolutely one of the finest works of the fest thus far.

Without a doubt, there is nothing at this year’s festival that will ever quite be like A Love Song. The serene beauty of the film’s vision rips the breath away, showing the detail in everything from the dazzling landscapes to the etchings in the faces of the kind people that inhabit them. It is a story about love, loneliness, and what life is like when you find yourself on your own.

There comes a time in every young actor’s life when he must graduate from playing the type of roles that made him famous and start directing other actors in the type of roles that made him famous. Here, in the Sundance premiere of his directorial debut, Jesse Eisenberg casts Finn Wolfhard in a Very Jesse Eisenberg Role — a precocious teen who attempts to mask soul-crushing insecurity under a thick coat of boastful bravado — as Ziggy Katz, a semi-successful TikTok Teen whose alternative-influenced emo folk music has earned him 20,000 followers on a verified top-performing account, but isn’t “political enough” to win the affections of a deeply-engaged, highly-informed girl at school who’s barely aware of his existence.