The Most Buzzed Films From This Year’s Sundance Festival

Sundance Film Festival means different things for different people. For movie studios, it’s a chance to purchase the next Whiplash. For journos, it’s an opportunity to book an interview with the next Soderbergh. For plebs like you and me, we can get excited about the slate of non-blockbuster films that’ll begin to see trickle into cinemas over the next twelve months.

No superheroes, no sequels, and no remakes – Sundance is still the best indicator of the type of film that will make you think and feel when it shows up at your local independent cinema. We can almost smell the rosemary salt-infused popcorn now…

With the curtain closing on this year’s Sundance last Sunday, here are just some of the flicks that got festival-goers gabbing up the internet over the past fortnight.

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The Kids Are Okay

A large number of the most critically celebrated films to show this year were about youth prevailing against the odds, whether it was sickness, drugs or sex.

Dope, dir. Rick Famiyuwa

Starring: Shameik Moore, Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons

Dope, which tells the tale of nerds growing up in a rough neighbourhood, was roundly praised for its zingy script and punk/hip hop aesthetic, and started the festival’s first bidding war, with studios vying for the release rights to the teen drug hustle film.

Directed by Rick Famuyiwa, the film stars Shameik Moore, Tony “Lobby Boy” Revolori, and Kiersey Clemons as alt-rap D’n’D dorks, who stumble on a backpack filled with drugs and guns. Most reviewers fell hard for Dope (it got lots of comparisons to Spike Lee and Tarantino), but the tumblr-friendly depictions of geeks in the ghetto received criticism, too. Wesley Morris slammed the film on Grantland, saying “nothing here is as fresh as the filmmakers think it is”, and that Famuyiwa is feeding audiences “black shit white people like”. It’ll be interesting to see if the conversation around the film is as racially charged when it reaches a wider audience.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Starring: Thomas Mann, Olivia Cooke, Nick Offerman, Connie Britton

Based on the 2013 book of the same name, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl sounds like the kind of nauseatingly twee film that Sundance churns out every few years (think Garden State and Little Miss Sunshine, amongst others) — but it took out the top awards and earned rave reviews. Thomas Mann stars as Greg, the titular “Me”, whose parents (played by the parental dream team of Nick ‘Ron Swanson’ Offerman and Connie ‘Mrs Coach’ Britton) encourage a friendship with a fellow student (Olivia Cooke, as the “Girl”) who is undergoing cancer treatment. Ronald Cyler II rounds out the cast as the explicitly listed Earl.

The film features the teen trio’s goofily immature recreations of cinematic classics, making it something of a mix of Michel Gondry’s mostly forgotten Be Kind Rewind and The Fault in Our Stars. Which, heck, sounds terrible, but so did ‘the mean drum teacher movie’ last year, and look what that turned out to be like… Hopefully we’ll be surprised.

Diary of a Teenage Girl, dir. Marielle Heller

Starring: Kristen Wiig, Alexander Skarsgård, Bel Powley

The keen reception to Diary of a Teenage Girl was interesting, as it deals matter-of-factly with a romance between a 15-year-old and her mother’s boyfriend. Adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel by director Marielle Heller, the film stars Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids) and Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood), but it’s newcomer Bel Powley who’ll blow up after this is released. Critics are praising her as “staggeringly good” in a tricky and taboo-laced role.

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It’s Still The End Of The World

If you thought that you’d had your fill of apocalyptic stories then I’m sorry, but prep yourself for more. At least these entries into the genre have a slightly more skewed point of view.

White God, dir. Kornél Mundruczó

Starring: A bunch of dogs.

White God, which has already shown at Cannes, grows its reputation as one to watch. A canine take on Planet of the Apes, but without any Scooby-Doo style dialogue (ron’t rorry), the Hungarian film uses dogs as a metaphor for any of Earth’s residents who get ignored and stepped on, and who might, one day, just rise up and fight back.

Also, the lead dog is doing the publicity circuit, so who’s not going to promote this movie and miss an opportunity for puppy clickbait?

Z for Zachariah, dir. Craig Zobel

Starring: Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pine

Z for Zachariah, with its lean (and attractive) cast, takes a much more intimate approach to the standard Last Man on Earth tale. It stars Margot Robbie (Wolf of Wall Street), Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave), and Chris Pine (Star Trek) as three survivors whose crossed paths lead to heated debate and confrontation. Beyond the love triangle that inevitably occurs is a rumination on faith vs science, and it’s another interesting film by Craig Zobel (Great Wall of Sound, Compliance), though perhaps a more commercial affair compared to his previous work. It received generally positive reviews, but there’s seemingly endless hunger for movies about the world gone to pot, so expect to see it get a big release later this year. 

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Middle Age Ennui

Apparently being in your late thirties sucks, or at least is sucky enough to be a rich mine for dramatically melancholic comedies about life and loss.

It also seems to be the perfect stage of life to get your dick out! Sundance was full of middle-aged sad sacks learning to love themselves, and also guest starred appearances from the penises of Adam Scott, Jason Schwartzman and Chris Messina.

The Overnight, dir. Patrick Brice

Starring: Adam Scott, Jason Schwartzman, Taylor Schilling, Judith Godrèche

Scott (Parks and Rec, Step Brothers) and Schwartzman (Rushmore, Bored to Death) star in The Overnight alongside Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black) and Judith Godrèche, as two sets of partners who hang out (literally) and learn that comparing sizes is for kids. If you ever want to read a lot of interviews with these two dork crushes about prosthetic penises, man, were you ever in very specific perv luck. The film sounds pretty great, in a middle class mumblecore kind of way, too.

Digging For Fire, dir. Joe Swanberg 

Starring: Chris Messina, Jake Johnson, Rosemary De Witt, Orlando Bloom

Chris Messina (The Mindy Project) wangs it up in Digging for Fire, the new Joe Swanberg joint. After the near perfect one-two hit of Happy Christmas and Drinking Buddies, Swanberg has made another film about relationships, with Jake Johnson (The New Girl), Rosemary De Witt (Mad Men, My Sister’s Sister), and Orlando Bloom (15 Years an Elf) filling out the cast.

The film sounds alright, but Swanberg’s movies are always in the beautifully-acted details rather than the loglines. If you haven’t seen Happy Christmas, then you don’t understand how exciting it is that Swanberg’s own son, now a toddler, is also in the film. Will his return to the silver screen finally usher in a future of Baby Oscars? Will someone please invent the Baby Oscars so that we can give this baby a Baby Oscar, already?

Sleeping With Other People, dir. Leslye Headland

Starring: Alison Brie, Jason Sudeikis

In what sounds like similarly racy fair, Alison Brie (Community, Mad Men) and Jason Sudeikis (Saturday Night Live) pair up as friends with a hook-up past, trying to navigate platonic friendships in Sleeping With Other People. Sleeping… is written and directed by Leslye Headland, the lady behind the deliciously acerbic Bachelorette, and it’s nice to see that while her follow-up might be more grounded, her humour hasn’t mellowed (the instructional finger-fucking a bottle scene has already gained some notoriety). Nor has her commitment to female characters, who unapologetically get some.

Results, dir. Andrew Bujalski

Starring: Colbie Smulders, Guy Pearce, Kevin Corrigan

Elsewhere, Andrew Bujalski has returned to his roots after the bizarre (and frankly unwatchable) Computer Chess to make Results: another improv-heavy riff on lackadaisical drifters. It stars an apparently killer cast combo of Colbie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother), Guy Pearce (Neighbours), and Kevin Corrigan (The Departed), as three Austinites getting stoned, working out, and reinventing the rom-com.

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True Stories

Finally, some of the most emotionally fraught and rich films of the festival appear to be those based on real events.

The End of the Tour, dir. James Ponsoldt

Starring: Jason Segal, Jesse Eisenberg

The long-awaited arrival of The End of the Tour had lit-nerds breathing easier, as it seems Jason Segal (Freaks and Geeks, The Muppet Movie) delivers infinitely more than just a tobacco-chewing, bandanna’d caricature of the dearly departed author David Foster Wallace.

The film, based on the interview transcripts of journalist David Lipsky, is a two hander (Jesse Eisenberg play Lipsky) that looks to waft and weave with all the dense conversational warmth and worry of Foster Wallace’s best work. James Ponsoldt’s previous work has been promising (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) and it sounds like everyone involved has worked hard to preserve something true and real about both the author and his ideas.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment, dir. Kyle Patrick Alvarez

Starring: Billy Crudup

If you’re a fan of podcasts or have done a first year psych course at uni, you’ve no doubt heard of The Stanford Prison Experiment. A college study that placed students in the roles of guards and prisoners, it famously stands as a damnation of humanity’s worst tendencies towards itself.

The big screen adaptation (directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez and starring Billy Crudup) may seem a little redundant, seeing as the story is so widely known (and available to those who aren’t already across it). The true life horror story of power corrupting is so hard to believe, however, that maybe audiences need to see it acted out in order to fully understand how exactly it could have happened.

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Matt Roden co-hosts FBi Radio’s film & TV show, Short Cuts, at 10am each Saturday. His illustration and design work can be found here.