Peter Howell: The 10 best films at Sundance 2023

Maybe it was because of the hybrid nature of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which wraps up Sunday, that I was drawn to movies featuring dual personalities and secret lives.

For the third year running, the annual independent film showcase in Utah had its offerings available online to journalists everywhere and, beginning in its second half, to public audiences in the U.S. But the post-pandemic fest also returned to in-person screenings at the Park City ski town that Sundance founder Robert Redford turned into a film lover’s destination.

FOMO was my constant companion as I screened the festival’s diverse offerings in the comfort of the Moon Cave Cinema, the name I give my basement home theatre. I didn’t miss Park City’s snowy, slushy streets, but I did yearn to be back among my fellow film buffs at Sundance.

I felt of two minds, as do many of the protagonists in my personal Top 10 list of Sundance favourites:

Eileen

There are shades of Patricia Highsmith novels and Hitchcock films in this icy suspenser by William Oldroyd (“Lady Macbeth”), set in 1960s Massachusetts in a town where the penitentiary is the most exciting place. Thomasin McKenzie’s meek title character toils there as a secretary, trying to forget her awful home life caring for her alcoholic and emotionally abusive father (Shea Whigham). Enter Anne Hathaway’s blond Rebecca, a Harvard-trained psychologist with agency, attitude and possibly an agenda. She befriends Eileen, who is eager for attention and Rebecca’s approval. Here’s where things start to get really interesting. McKenzie and Hathaway are superb as women subverting the prison of expectations — especially the viewer’s.

Rye Lane

The cool thing about Raine Allen Miller’s South London charmer is how it sends up rom-com tropes — would you believe a meet-cute in adjoining unisex toilet stalls? — while also celebrating them. There are affectionate nods to such date movie favourites as “Love Actually” and “Bridget Jones,” including an amusing star cameo. Yet the best thing about “Rye Lane” is the delightful pairing of David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah, whose random-encounter characters Dom and Yas go together like rye and ginger as they set out to right the wrongs of their previous relationships. The film is alive to the sights and sounds of London, which becomes a character unto itself. Bonus: the best rom-com karaoke scene ever.

The Longest Goodbye

For those of us who aren’t rocket scientists, it’s easy to assume that the biggest hurdle to sending people to Mars is vehicle propulsion. Ido Mizrahy’s riveting documentary, a Canada/Israel co-production, suggests the real issue is isolation: How will humans handle being locked inside a van-sized spacecraft, cut off from family and friends, for a three-year return journey? We meet Al Holland, a NASA psychologist tasked with solving loneliness. He employs coping techniques he contributed to the 2010 effort to rescue 33 Chilean miners, who were trapped underground for 69 days. We learn that future Mars travellers, as soon as a decade from now, might be put into hibernation before space travel and/or have AI companions to fly with.

Fair Play

A stronger term than “sharks” is needed for the corporate and courtship savagery in Chloe Domont’s arresting feature debut. Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich are brilliant as lovers and co-workers willing to slash Cupid’s throat for career advancement. It all starts sweetly enough: Dynevor’s Emily and Ehrenreich’s Luke, aflame with ardour and lust, decide to get secretly engaged, despite the no-office-romances rule of the cutthroat New York trust fund they both work at. Then Emily gets a promotion that Luke thought he deserved — she actually becomes his boss — and their ruse of platonic collegiality starts to unravel. British character actor Eddie Marsan viciously ups the ante as the fund’s overlord.

You Hurt My Feelings

Sundance veteran Nicole Holofcener (“Enough Said”) makes a welcome return to the fest with a barbed comedy about human failings and the equally human tendency not to be truthful about them. Julia Louis-Dreyfus leads a terrific ensemble cast of neurotic New Yorkers as Beth, a writer and professor whose serene life with her therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is about to shatter. Beth’s recent memoir failed to sell — if only there had been more family trauma! — and she’s having trouble getting her first novel published. She’s comforted by knowing she can count on Don for unfailing support, until she overhears him mildly dissing her work. An accidental truth snowballs into a mountain of antic excuses and dodges.

Cat Person

A cautionary and viral New Yorker story about dating in #MeToo times is brought to life and made all the more creepy in this whip-smart adaptation by “Booksmart” screenwriter Susanna Fogel. Emilia Jones (“CODA”) and Nicholas Braun (TV’s “Succession”) are the younger and jaded Margot and the older and nerdy Robert. They’re a decade or more apart in age and maturity (he lives for “Star Wars” movies and toys), but they bond over texts and move on to sex, which is great for him but not for her. Margot is reluctant to bail even as her maniac radar starts to ping as the film goes a final act further than the original tale. Sure to prompt many bad-date memories and post-screening debates, “Cat Person” adroitly balances goofy and scary, with possibly the worst screen kiss ever.

Magazine Dreams

Jonathan Majors as a lonely bodybuilder in Elijah Bynum’s tightly wound drama, raging against flesh and failure, summons obvious comparisons to “Taxi Driver” and “Joker.” But this is very much its own beast, jerking us into the jumbled mindscape of why a steroidal obsessive would risk serious injury or death to pursue the dream of magazine-cover flexing. Majors played a mellow cat in Sundance 2019 hit “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” but he’s a twitching muscle of ferocity here, alternately pitiable and terrifying as he fumbles at finding love and acceptance in a world that regards him as a freak. Majors is an actor of great range; I didn’t see a better performance at Sundance ’23.

The Persian Version

Maryam Keshavarz’s semi-autobiographical dramedy about a large Iranian-American immigrant family pinballs across decades and countries, not always to its benefit. But there’s no denying the charm of this brood, a New York family of eight older sons and one daughter. The latter is Leila, played as an adult by Layla Mohammadi, who also serves as the film’s narrator and the director’s alter ego. She’s the frequently amusing focus as the story shifts to reveal not only why the family left Iran but also the reason for tensions between the queer-identifying Leila and her strict but resourceful mother, Shirin (Niousha Noor). The film is a colourful blur of characters and incidents that somehow resolves into a satisfying dance of life, set to the improbable soundtrack rouser “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

Infinity Pool

Toronto’s Brandon Cronenberg (“Possessor”) delivers the shivers, and more than a few WTF moments, with a vacation inferno creeper that gnaws at the mind. It’s set in a luxury resort in a fictional fascist Eastern European country (it was filmed in Croatia and Hungary), where callous rich people party behind guarded gates while the hungry poor seethe outside. A calamitous encounter between the two groups lands Alexander Skarsgard’s shallow protagonist, blocked writer James, into a nightmare sci-fi realm of clones and consequences, where money can free your chains but not your conscience. Mia Goth’s mysterious Gabi steals the show as a psychedelic seductress who knows more than she tells.

Little Richard: I Am Everything

He taught Paul McCartney how to scream, Mick Jagger how to strut and heard Elvis Presley declare him the real King of Rock, yet 1950s pop pioneer Little Richard was ultimately overshadowed by his imitators. Lisa Cortés delivers the definitive documentary on a complicated icon, a man of bisexual passions and partners, who praised God yet couldn’t stop singing the “devil’s music” of censor-baiting songs like “Tutti Frutti” and “Good Golly Miss Molly.” He was tragically considered almost a novelty act at the time of his death at 87 in 2020, but this engaging doc goes a long way toward justifying the man’s famous boast: “I am the originator. I am the emancipator. I am the architect of rock ’n’ roll.”

Star contributor Peter Howell is a movie critic in Toronto. Twitter: @peterhowellfilm.

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