An important Sundance tradition is seeing surprisingly explicit gay sex scenes in public library. Last year it was Passages; this time it’s Sebastian, about an up-and-coming writer discovering himself through the world’s oldest profession: auto-fiction.

In a series of single cooped-up takes Steven Soderbergh gives us a ghost’s eye view of a family slowly coming undone.

Between this and last year’s Magazine Dreams, someone in the Sundance programming department sure has a thing for bodybuilder body horror.

After sitting through two hours of the Zellner brother’s long-awaited, dialogue-free, scatalogical feature, I have come to the conclusion that the quotidian existence of America’s favorite hairy cryptozooid is perhaps a topic best left enshrouded in eternal mystery.

Conjuring something between Hogwarts and Kingsman, Kobi Libii imagines an “American Society of Magical Negroes” as a real world organization behind the “supportive black friend” trope.

Remember 2020? Theda Hammel’s period piece finds John Early as Terry Goon (lol), a harried, incompetent, Covid-conscious caretaker for his exoticized model nephew who’s recovering in isolation from a broken leg.

Into each generation a new Donnie Darko is born. With Lynchian threads as applied to post-millennial trans awakenings, grounded in a deep love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and coming with its own slew of possible interpretations, Jane Schoenbrun’s eerie, visually entrancing, and sonically inventive cautionary love note to the nineties just might be it for the Zoomies.

Opening with an Ayn Rand quote, Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann’s family portrait of ultra-rich Austrian Psychos who quite literally get away with murder is almost too severe to be considered satire.