Sundance Film Festival January 19-29, 2023

[Chris Knipp]

Sundance 2023 Best-of Lists


BEYOND UTOPIA

The YouTube "Oscar Expert" twins, back home in New York, have made a video listing their two separate "Top Ten Movies of Sundance". (There are lots of other lists, of course. But these young men have been a point of reference for me lately.) They had not reviewed all of the films on their lists previously. They saw at the festival, the Oscar Expert says, "about 26 films."

The Oscar Expert's List
10 The Starling Girl
9 You Hurt My Feelings
8 The Deepest Breath
7 Fair Play
6 Beyond Utopia
5 Fancy Dance
4 Infinity Pool
3 Joylahd
2 Rye Lane
1 Past Lives

Brother Bro's List
10 Magazine Dreams
9 The Deepest Breath
8 Theater Camp
7 20 Days in Mariupol
6 A Thousand and One
5 You Hurt My Feelings
4 Fancy Dance
3 Beyond Utopia
2 Rye Lane
1 Past Lives

This confirms the importance (to them) of RYE LANE and PAST LIVES, and that documentaries rated high with BEYOND UTOPIA (Metascore 85%), about escaping from North Korea, the outstanding doc in their view, and THE DEEPEST BREATH, about deep-sea diving, also listed by both. FANCY DANCE ranked high, the drama about treatment of Native Americans. Both list Nicole Holofcener's YOU HURT MY FEELINGS, and Brother Bro gave an impassioned endorsement of it as not slight at all but full of life lessons about the crucial need for sincerity and supportiveness with those closest to us. Cronenberg's INFINITY POOL was from left field because the Oscar Expert went to see it in a theater post-Sundance (in New York: it's showing on at least six screens around Manhattan) but it was a Sundance film that happened to open in theaters right after its Park City showing.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker lists only two favorites: PASSAGES (Ira Sachs) and ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT (Raven Jackson). These both got attention from elsewhere too. Adrian Horton gave SALT 3/5 stars in his GUARDIAN review. Jessica Kiang was effusive in VARIETY. Kiang called it a "thoughtful, fragmentary portrait of a Black woman over four decades of rural Mississippian life," and spoke of its "gorgeous 35mm imagery," and compared its "audaciously non-linear" style to that of AFTERSIUN and said it "marks the arrival of an arresting new talent."

Beyond Utopia