{"id":827236,"date":"2025-02-15T11:14:05","date_gmt":"2025-02-15T17:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/15\/does-sundance-still-matter\/"},"modified":"2025-02-15T11:14:05","modified_gmt":"2025-02-15T17:14:05","slug":"does-sundance-still-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/15\/does-sundance-still-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Sundance Still Matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tAt the 2025 Sundance Film Festival<\/a>, there were movies that provoked their share of buzz and chatter and official breathless enthusiasm. But it\u2019s fair to say that no movie this year generated half the conversation that Sundance did about itself. The buzz was all about the festival \u2014 which city it would move to in 2027 (Cincinnati or Boulder? The smart money is now on Cincinnati), as well as the question that\u2019s been the backdrop of that move: Can Sundance, a festival that in the \u201990s altered the very landscape of cinema, find a way to sustain its relevance into the 21st century?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe jury is very much out on that. Sundance still generates excitement and headlines, as well as a small handful of films that will have a chance to make an impact. But as much as I remain a Sundance believer, the festival\u2019s mojo is increasingly shrouded in a fuzzy \u201cWe\u2019re still here!\u201d blitz of incandescent self-adoration.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven the reasons that Sundance is pulling up stakes are not all that widely understood. After 40 years, many of the denizens of Park City have grown weary of the festival. And the phenomenon of high-end skiing \u2014 vacation jaunts for the one percent \u2014 now actively competes with Sundance financially. Yet the meme that took hold, the one that I kept encountering in articles about Sundance, is that the festival has \u201coutgrown\u201d Park City. Really? That sounds to me like wish-fulfillment. And if Sundance has outgrown Park City, you would never know it from the diminishing vibes the festival generated this year.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n\tIn 2023, when Sundance first returned as an in-person event after the onset of the pandemic, it felt like a shadow of itself: a thinned-down, scaled-back festival. And a lingering vestige of that reality has persisted. I didn\u2019t see the crowds on Main Street, the stalled traffic throughout Park City over the opening weekend, that I used to in the \u201990s and 2000s. During the pandemic, the festival carried on by making its films available online, and that situation has continued in a modified version, with an online showcase of Sundance movies that\u2019s made available starting midweek. So now, you can actually experience Sundance without attending it. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI watched several of the festival\u2019s most talked-about movies this year online, after I\u2019d returned home, and while that was certainly a convenience, what I didn\u2019t expect, given how much I prize the theatrical experience, is how poetically right it felt. Of all the people who will ever watch any of the 100 or so features programmed at Sundance this year, the overwhelming majority will see them at home. And the truth is that most of the films fit all too snugly into the small screen.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat really struck me, though, is that in the age of streaming, when even the two or three most celebrated American independent films of the year \u2014 the ones that get nominated for multiple Oscars, like \u201cThe Brutalist\u201d and \u201cAnora\u201d \u2014 have to work overtime to win a quarter-of-the-way decent-size audience in theaters, there are now, more than ever, two Sundance Film Festivals. There\u2019s the one that takes place in Park City and will for one more year, where every film is greeted by audiences as if it were a life-changing event (the ovations, the reverence, the momentousness). And there\u2019s the one beyond the Sundance bubble, where a handful of these movies will actually head out into the world and do\u2026what? Fight for their lives as pieces of entertainment.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve long been a religious believer in the Sundance Film Festival, but the yardstick of my devotion has been my conviction that the best films that emerge from Sundance matter because they\u2019re able to find a real place in the real world. We saw that last year, I think, with \u201cA Real Pain,\u201d Jesse Eisenberg\u2019s revelatory buddy movie. This year, there were a couple of times when I felt the old Sundance tingle, when I saw a movie so exceptional that I thought, \u201cThis has<\/em> to work in the real world. It\u2019s just too good to be ignored.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of those rare Sundance films this year was \u201cTwinless,\u201d<\/a> the tale of a kinky and devious bromance-turned-love-triangle, and a comedy crafted with so much scalding, blissed-out, puckish delight that every scene in it feels like a gift. The film\u2019s writer, director and co-star, James Sweeney, is a major talent who knows how to keep surprising the audience. And Dylan O\u2019Brien, who plays both a swaggering gay lothario and his lunkish straight twin brother, emerges as a splendid actor and a total movie star. So does Aisling Franciosi, as the Christian receptionist who becomes the film\u2019s surprise romantic foil. Sweeney, given the right resources, could make a rom-com that would have mainstream audiences lining up to see it. And maybe \u201cTwinless\u201d already is that movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were three other dramatic features I saw that leapt out. \u201cLurker,\u201d<\/a> Alex Russell\u2019s hypnotic tale of a geek who infiltrates the inner circle of a pop star, is a movie organized around the addictive lure of bad behavior. The title character, played by Th\u00e9odore Pellerin, is a parasite for our time who will stop at nothing in his quest to stay close to fame. \u201cLurker\u201d is super-charged and rivetingly suspenseful, a tasty parable of celebrity dreams in the age of social media.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there was \u201cRicky<\/a>,\u201d directed with blistering authenticity by Rashad Frett. The tale of a young man in East Hartford (the mesmerizing Stephan James) who gets out of prison after having spent half his 30 years there, it may be the most wrenching drama about an ex-offender trying to walk the line that I\u2019ve seen since Dustin Hoffman in \u201cStraight Time.\u201d And \u201cPeter Hujar\u2019s Day\u201d<\/a> is Ira Sachs\u2019 minimal but magical time-capsule leap back into the scruffy bohemian utopia of art, conversation and the meaning of life without technology.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut to return, for a moment, to my feeling that these movies are too good to be ignored: Is that a reality? A hope? Or a grand illusion? The great films of the 1970s, to invoke the period that the independent film revolution was in many ways a sequel to, were astonishing works of art, but they were not \u201cmessage movies.\u201d They embodied a social vision without preaching. And that\u2019s true, for the most part, of what I think of as the great Sundance films \u2014\u00a0movies like \u201cReservoir Dogs\u201d and \u201cMemento\u201d and \u201cIn the Bedroom\u201d and \u201cThe Blair Witch Project\u201d and \u201cWelcome to the Dollhouse\u201d and \u201cBig Night\u201d and \u201cChuck & Buck\u201d and \u201cI Shot Andy Warhol\u201d and \u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d and \u201cSecretary\u201d and \u201cWhiplash\u201d and \u201cManchester by the Sea.\u201d These were movies that didn\u2019t make you feel like you had to be a responsible citizen to sit through them.<\/p>\n

\n\tToo many of the Sundance films now fall into the trap of leading with their Big Message, which neuters their sense of dramatic danger. The filmmaking has become more insular, more preaching to the choir of social justice, in a way that one can totally agree with on a moral level yet still feel is overly earnest and limiting. I think you could sense the festival\u2019s underlying anxiety about this phenomenon in its decision to program \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman,\u201d<\/a> Bill Condon\u2019s big-ticket adaptation of the 1992 stage musical, based on Manuel Puig\u2019s novel (but really a variation on the famous 1985 movie). I had very mixed feelings about this film. It\u2019s well-acted (by Diego Luna and Tonatiuh), with crisply deluxe neo-1950s musical numbers featuring Jennifer Lopez\u2026until it descends into the endless muddle of its second half.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the real question is: What was \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman\u201d doing at Sundance? With a budget that, I\u2019m guessing, exceeded $50 million, it has to have cost 12 times as much as just about any film there. It\u2019s really an awards-bait movie. But the reason it was at Sundance was so that the festival could advertise its own relevance. It was the exception that proved the rule.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a vehicle for launching independent films into the universe, Sundance remains the beautiful apparatus it always was. And I don\u2019t expect that to change when it moves to a new city. Having voiced my own trepidation<\/a> early on about this move, I now think \u2014 or at least a part of me does \u2014 that it could revitalize Sundance. (But oh, will I miss the thin-crust pizza at Davanza\u2019s.) Moving forward, though, if Sundance is to remain relevant, both the programming and the movies that get made need to embrace a certain reality: that moviegoers today, maybe more than ever, want to be enthralled more than they want to be \u201cenlightened.\u201d There hardly needs to be a contradiction between those two things. But for Sundance to thrive into the future, it can\u2019t just be the festival of films that are good for you that almost no one ends up seeing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Owen Gleiberman
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, there were movies that provoked their share of buzz and chatter and official breathless enthusiasm. But it\u2019s fair to say that no movie this year generated half the conversation that Sundance did about itself. The buzz was all about the festival \u2014 which city it would move to in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":827237,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1441,25863],"tags":[5582,89939],"class_list":{"0":"post-827236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-still","8":"category-sundance","9":"tag-still","10":"tag-sundance"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=827236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/827237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}