The Sundance Film Festival - the largest independent movie festival in the world - was fully back in person this year, and IGN's Clint Gage, Alex Stedman, and Michael Calabro flew into Park City, Utah, for a week to get the down-low on the buzziest movies of the year, as well as some fun surprises.
Some movies, like Love Lies Bleeding and Hit Man, arrived at the festival with release dates set; others, like My Old Ass and Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, got picked up by distributors during the festival; and some are still waiting to be bought. Our goal was to spread ourselves across as many movies as possible to give you all the scoop on what's worth looking out for, should they get picked up.
For a lot more from the festival, you can check out our various reviews, Alex's chat with Sundance's senior programmer, and our retrospective of Sundance veteran The Babadook. You can also listen to the chat via the video above. But below, you can find an abbreviated version of the highlights of our hour-long conversation:
Love Lies Bleeding
Release date: In theaters on March 8, 2024
Alex Stedman: I’m kind of waffling on my favorite. I really liked my Old Ass Love. Love Lies Bleeding was another one (read IGN’s review here). It's one of those ones that had a trailer, so it's not like I went into it completely blind.
Clint Gage: That one's got a release date that's coming up soon.
AS: It's kind of what I expected, in a way. I think it's being marketed almost like a lesbian Bonnie and Clyde, and there is part of that in the movie, but it kind of takes a different turn, which I don't want to spoil, but it's great. Everyone's a little psycho. Everyone's not that great of a person. It's very, very violent, very gory. Katy O'Brien's fantastic. Oh my God, I need to see her in more. She's such a little psycho. It might be my favorite Kristen Stewart role, actually.
She's definitely a little weird in some ways, but she plays kind of the POV character who just gets wrapped up in it and she's really good at that. The way it’s shot, it’s so dark and gritty and you’re just in this vibe the whole time.
CG: Well, and the director Rose Glass [directed] St. Maud, which I think was her debut, was just a really cool vibe. It's not quite a horror, but where else are you going to put it?
AS: I guess you would call [Love Lies Bleeding] a thriller. It's very tense. It's very stressful. I described it as just being a mean little movie and it's just very mean, violent, sexy. But I liked it. I dug it. It's not going to be for everyone, but you kind of go into it knowing what you're getting.
Hit Man
Release date: On Netflix on June 7, 2024
Michael Calabro: A movie that really stuck around [for me] was Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (read IGN’s review here).
AS: That’s been getting a lot of buzz.
MC: Sad that it's going to be on Netflix. The theater experience is a lot of fun.
CG: Visually speaking, it's not a movie that needs a big screen necessarily, but it was so much fun watching that with a bunch of people.
MC: The crowd reactions were great. For those of you that don't know, it’s a movie about Glen Powell – that's the actor's name, the handsome dude that gets held back in Top Gun 2, right? – he plays a philosophy teacher, adjunct professor who moonlights as an undercover cop who isn't actually a cop, but somehow he's just trying to get people to entrap themselves into hiring a contract killer who he pretends to be. And it's a great story about how he talks all these people into giving him money to murder their spouses, loved ones, etc., problem people in their lives. And it's a lot of fun and it's a really good meditation on identity and meaning and what we do with our time.
CG: And what you choose to be in becoming who you are. There's a whole conversation in there somewhere where if you just decide to be somebody else and you sort of brute force your way into being that person, at some point you become that person.
AS: I was going to say that sounds sweeter than I thought it was going to be, but it is Linklater.
CG: A sweet movie. It's very fun. It's got a hard edge to it in there somewhere, but he's just this guy that is basically accidentally pretending to be a hitman in these sting operations and he winds up being really good at it and starts taking a little pride in it, and he's putting forth creative effort, and then he gets embroiled in this whole other plot. It's great, but using his psychology and sort of philosophy background to be like, which hitman do you need?
MC: “Let me just Facebook stock you for a minute to just try and figure out what kind of hitman you'd like.”
CG: It’s about identity, kind of.
MC: It's a real Linklater movie, which is like bro philosopher. It's very clearly the guy who made Waking Life, right? There's scenes in this film where it's Glen Powell at a whiteboard in a university talking about the differences between the ego, the id, and the superego, and then it's juxtaposed against him trying to con people into murdering their, whoever they need to murder. And what makes this movie so much fun, especially in the beginning, is just all the montages from the moment he decides to continue to do this, and it's like, now we got to show everybody how good he is at it. So it's just a montage of just like, this guy's getting arrested, this guy's getting arrested, this guy's getting arrested. And just ton of really tightly edited, tightly scripted exchanges between just a bunch of random people.
CG: Glen Powell's character narrates it from a really funny safe space. Stakes wise, you're never really concerned.
AS: So it keeps it fairly light.
CG: It really does. And it's a blast.
MC: And then it gets pulpy.
CG: Yeah. It gets pulpy in a really hilarious and also kind of stakes-free way, which it's funny. This could not be a more different movie I think, but the end of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orlean, where everybody just shows up and they're like happy go lucky. “Hey, everything worked out fine! High five, see you later.” And it's so bizarre and so unrealistic and there's a little bit of that energy, but it matches the whole front half.
AS: I like seeing Glen Powell do stuff. He's very much an up and comer, I would say.
CG: This is going to do really, really great things for him.
MC: This is his star-making performance.
AS: And you mentioned it was fun to see with the crowd. Love Lies Bleeding was the same. It just getting everyone's reaction to the gross, nasty stuff.
Sasquatch Sunset
Release date: In theaters April 12, 2024
CG: One that I absolutely have to talk about is Sasquatch Sunset. I'm so enamored with this movie and talking about the Sundance Glow, being Sundance drunk on a movie – I waited two days. I tried to get you guys to talk me out of it. I gave it a 10 on IGN. (To see what we absolutely did not talk Clint out of, read his review here).
Love it. It's so bizarre and so absurd. It's a movie about a family of Sasquatch and just them living their life for a year. There's no dialogue. They grunt their way and gesture their way through everything like this primitive sort of missing link type when they're mad at each other and it's just them eating plants and arguing and getting horny and pissing and shitting and the way that, on paper, it is just the most bizarre movie that should not exist. But it does exist. And what's incredible about it is that it actually, it's funny.
MC: Oh, it's hilarious.
CG: It's raunchy and goofy. I'm not going to talk about anything specific that they do because honestly, the surprising part of this movie is one of the best things about it.
MC: I think going into it, just accepting the fact that dick humor and poop and piss – it's funny. It's just so primally funny. Don't pretend that you're above it.
CG: Right. That's a great thing that the movie does. It’s not above it and the way that the camera moves and the way it's shot – it's a gorgeously shot film also – but for every shit joke that's in there, for every dick and fart joke that they make, it turns on a dime and treats these characters. They're not just animals or whatever. They all have their individual characteristics. They're all very distinct.
AS: By the way, it’s got Jesse Eisenberg –
CG: Jesse Eisenberg. Riley Keough, yeah. I mean, they got a good cast and they cover them with honestly great, excellent makeup. Sasquatch prosthetics. The eyes are very expressive. It's incredible makeup. But for every time that they just scream at each other and shit on the ground to prove a point, they turn on a dime and they have these moments of genuine empathy and there's tragedy that they deal with. And one of the things I said in my review is like Riley Keough's character, she kind of makes a habit out of scratching her crotch and smelling it, and that is a method of communication for her later on too. She'll do that, but also she's a mother that just wants to take care of her kids and she's scared and she's discovering things that freak her out existentially. There's a lot of humanity in a movie about sasquatches and they're always treated with respect and dignity and empathy in a way that I found just very fascinating.
And we talked a little bit it about with The Babadook as well (note: the Cinefix crew revisited The Babadook in honor of its 10th Sundance anniversary, which you can listen to here). When a premise starts out as something that maybe you don't take seriously off the jump and then for it to work – this movie, more than The Babadook, certainly starts out in a hole, right? “I'm going to watch a fucking movie about Sasquatch for a year. Okay, whatever.” And then even the first act starts. It's really goofy. They eat the wrong berries and trip out for a minute and pretty basic stuff.
MC: It opens with a sex scene, not too much of a spoiler there.
CG: Right, that'll happen quick. And so for it to be elevated so thoroughly, it gets bonus points. It's all the more impressive.
AS: I wish I saw that one.
CG: In fact, I feel bad about gushing about Sasquatch Sunset this much because it needs to sneak up on you a little bit and I'm ruining that right now.
AS: Everyone listening to it will be able to see it because it does have a distributor.
CG: Yeah, don't worry. Bleecker Street bought it before it even got here, so it's premiering here. It's already got distribution, but this is another one that I'm going to be very fascinated to see: how they market it. What are they going to do with this movie to get people in the door? I think the trailers, it's going to lean into the goofy stuff. It's going to lean into the comedy aspect of it and all of that empathy, all of that tragedy, and all of the avant-garde art house stuff that's going to sneak up on people in a way that I hope people actually respond to because it's incredible what the movie does. It's experimental cinema too. It's a big experiment and everybody from the DP to the cast, to the directors obviously are so thoroughly committed to this bit to making this family of Sasquatch feel relatable.
AS: I really want to see that one. I'll get the chance.
CG: And I can't wait to talk about it afterwards where you can be like, “what are you talking about? What the hell?”
AS: All I've heard is your take on it.
CG: I’ve ruined this movie now for everybody listening to this. What else did you see, Alex?
My Old Ass
Release Date: Not set yet, but was bought by Amazon Studios
AS: My Old Ass really surprised me (read Alex’s review here). It's produced by Margot Robbie's production company, Lucky Chap, and it's Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella, and Maisy’s kind of a newcomer. It's about this 18-year-old who trips shrooms on her 18th birthday and it's the summer before college and she gets a visit from her older self, which is Aubrey Plaza. It's not super innovative. The concept, basically her older self is just like, “spend more time with your family. They're really cool and you don't treat them well enough and also stay away from this guy named Chad.”
CG: Perfect. “You'll meet a guy named Chad, and no no no no.”
AS: I don't want to spoil too much…
MC: He's named Chad, I think that says it.
AS: His name is Chad and also he's the most goofy, lovable character and he's just a Chad. And it's like, “why are we supposed to hate him?” It adds this extra level of intrigue and I feel like it wouldn't work if the main character was too much of a brat. She's very much kind of that sardonic, very funny character.
MC: Well, Aubrey Plaza plays her older self.
AS: So you kind of get the idea and they don't have much of a physical resemblance, but their mannerisms are very similar, so you kind of don't notice it, but the main character is really endearing, really funny. She's trying her best. She's still kind of a brat, but you can relate to her. You root for her. It's really, really funny. There are a couple lines that just, I lost it, but when it hits emotionally, it just hits. At a certain point I looked around and realized it was me and a bunch of other 30-something women and we were just doing the chorus of sniffles.
I was walking out of the theater and we were just like, “that was so sweet. My heart.” It's one of those movies. I feel like the other two movies I'm going to talk about are a little meaner and more cynical. This is the complete other end of the spectrum where it's just like, “oh, we're all just trying our best,” and I think it's maybe some of the best acting that I've seen from Aubrey Plaza.
CG: She keeps getting better. Since post-Parks and Rec. She is just, everything that she does, she's better
AS: And I feel like for a while she was kind of typecast.
CG: That might be the wrong way to put it, too. I think she's getting more to do.
AS: The cool thing about My Old Ass is she gets to do that kind of dry humor thing because again, she's the older version of this very clever, funny teenager, but she has this world weariness about her where she's also trying her best because she's talking to her younger self who doesn't know any better. She's like, “please try your best. Life is so hard.” And it also kind of plays with this idea is age and wisdom, stuff like that. It takes a very simple premise and makes it very affecting. My only thing was it's a little rushed. There's a couple of really good side characters that just don't get any time to shine, but that’s a small complaint. I loved it. Also a great use of Justin Bieber's One Less Lonely Girl.
CG: Yeah, Bieber needs a win. I'm glad they worked that out. Well,
AS: I read that they actually, they had to get Bieber's blessing for it.
CG: Bieber himself. It wasn't just the label song.
AS: No. Bieber himself was like, “yeah, you can use One Less Lonely Girl in this way.” But it's nice. When we talk about Sundance movies, it kind of falls in the little Miss Sunshine Camp, just like a nice little movie that makes you feel kind of good.
CG: Little bit of every genre here.
AS: Really is, which is nice. Yeah, there's a lot of docs, a lot of comedies.
CG: It is a good year for documentaries here. Great year.
AS: Really good. I saw Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story and that was good.
MC: Is this a doc segment?
CG: It can be.
Documentaries!
Movies discussed: The Realm of Satan (no release date yet, but was acquired by Visit Films); Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (no release date yet, but was acquired by Warner Bros.); Devo (no release date yet); Skywalkers: A Love Story (no release date yet, but was acquired by Netflix); Ibelin (no release date yet, but was acquired by Netflix)
MC: I'm going to talk real quick about one. If we want to talk about a Sundance movie that might be lost to time, Realm of Satan is definitely one of those, right?
AS: Oh yeah. Satanist ASMR.
MC: This movie is basically, it's a film that's supposed to be a slice of life of a bunch of satanists. The thing is, there's no real dialogue and it's basically just living portraits, immaculately composed shots of people just doing something and living their lives, but that's all you get... That's like the one that may be lost.
CG: Yeah. Where does that go? Who's going to pick that up? [Editor’s note: Realm of Satan had been picked up for distribution!]
MC: Explain to my friends how you should watch this movie. Right.
AS: But a lot of the docs I feel like have been picked up, like the one I saw, Super/Man. I never considered myself much of a Christopher Reeve gal. I like the Richard Donner movies, but I was really young when Reeve had his accident. I was born in ‘92. The accident happened I think in ‘95, and then he died in, I want to say like 2005, something like that. So I just don't remember it all that well, but watching the documentary, his family went through the wringer and they have such great access to his sons and daughter. What really got me, though, is there's a lot of Robin Williams in it, and I never realized how close they were. But I cried at least twice in that movie, and two of them were because of Robin Williams. There was some sad stuff.
Still, there's a lot of fun background about the making of that first Superman and finding Superman. They talk to everyone, they talk to all the producers. I enjoyed it not being a big Christopher Reeve person. If you are a big Christopher Reeve person, you're going to love it. It'll make you cry a bunch though.
CG: Heads up for that.
MC: Clint, what's your doc?
CG: The first movie that I saw when we got here that week was Devo from Chris Smith, the filmmaker behind American Movie, and he did Tiger King. But it's his movie about Devo and for better or worse, Devo’s legacy, I think, is largely Whip It. That's all anybody knows.
AS: All I knew.
CG: It's all about the origins of the band. I think two of the band members were at the Kent State massacre. They were there during those protests then, and that was a very formative moment for them as artists and as a band. Devo the name is another thing that I honestly I didn't know is a reference to De-evolution, which is just the idea that we are gradually devolving, getting dumber and more violent, and it's going to happen regardless. But a lot of what they represented early on was pushing back against consumerism and capitalism and everything, and then getting into the system with their records and the labels and the early days of MTV and then they sort of became the thing that they were fighting against for so many years and they just kind of crapped out after that. Two of the members of the band have passed, but they interview Mark Mothersbaugh and two of the other guys and just watching their transition from visual artists like Andy Warhol kind of catchall, just art, whatever medium capital A art.
The other doc that I saw is Eternal You, which is all about AI. There's companies – digital immortality is what they're selling – a little as five bucks a month gets you so many chats with your dead relative. It's like text-based chat stuff on top of virtual reality reconstructions of this woman's daughter and her reuniting with her and being able to say goodbye. It's stuff like that. And just the weighing everything about the commodifying of talking to snake oil of AI and talking to your dead relatives,
It's truly bizarre. We got to talk to those filmmakers too, and they’re some interesting guys. They raised a lot of interesting questions and I pressed 'em on it a little bit and I don't know that they agreed with me, but I felt like as many questions as they raised with the movie, I felt like it was the tip of the iceberg. I think there's so much more to talk about, but just in dealing with how we mourn and how there's a whole thing in the movie about cemeteries being very impersonal as opposed to an AI reconstruction. If I could just text with somebody that just recently passed as a way to mourn and how healthy or unhealthy is it for us to just never let go of people and it's a thing that's entirely possible.
Cal, you and I saw one another documentary, since we're still doing a documentary lightning round.
MC: You’re talking about Skywalkers: A Love Story.
AS: Which just got picked up, by the way, by Netflix.
MC: Unfortunately.
AS: Right, they should have a theatrical release.
MC: Yeah, we had a long talk about how AMC should just take part of the money that they made from that Taylor Swift concert, buy this, and just put this in a theater. I saw a lot of movies in that theater, and I am assuming that they don't change the temperature of that theater, yet I was sweating in this Skywalkers documentary because this is a documentary about two people who climb rooftops literally for the ‘Gram. So they're climbing spires of hundred story buildings and doing a thousand feet in the air more than that maybe. And the woman was raised in a circus, so she's, like, an acrobat standing on her head doing acrobat stuff. And they have all this GoPro footage and it's just, it's incredible. The footage that they have is incredible.
CG: The guy that intro’d the movie, the programmer, was like “just a heads up: If you have a thing about heights, here's a trigger warning.” And GoPros are such wide angle lenses anyway, and they'll have one strapped to their chest while they're climbing, and the guy will turn around and talk to the girl and he'll turn just a little bit, just a couple degrees. Just that much movement from the camera on his chest tips you out over the edge of this massive building, and it's just terrifying.
AS: Does it ever get dicey?
MC: Oh yeah.
CG: Because it’s illegal what they do, they have to break into the place. So it's like, part love story, part Ocean’s 11, part Free Solo.
MC: The third act is very much set up like a heist.
CG: My palms were sweating the whole movie.
MC: Another documentary, Ibelin, is about a kid who died of a degenerative neuromuscular disease, and it's a documentary, and it starts out with camcorder footage from the late ‘80s through the ‘90s of this kid just literally degenerating. The older he gets, the weaker he gets and just can't live his life and his parents, they feel bad about that. And the kid gets really into video games. So that's how he spends his time. He gets really into World of Warcraft. The first third of the movie, act one, is telling his whole story through the perspective of his parents and the camcorder footage they have of him as a kid. And you see this real sad life. And then they get into the gaming element. Basically, he had a blog, and when the family posted on the blog that he died, they started getting all of these messages from all the people that he gamed with. And the parents then subsequently learned that he had a really rich online life with a ton of friends in World of Warcraft.
AS: Wait, that actually sounds so sweet.
MC: It gets so much better. So the way that World of Warcraft works is that they have logs of all of his text messages and emotes and stuff like that in game. They say there was, like 42,000 pages of archived conversations and interactions with him in World of Warcraft. So then the rest of the movie is showing his relationships with his friends from World of Warcraft and how he touched their lives, and they got animators recreate these scenes in World of Warcraft, and then they just custom hand-animate them in the World of Warcraft world and got voice actors to just do voice reads of all of the dialogue. It's super touching, and it's a beautiful movie.
Freaky Tales
Release date: No release date yet
CG: What else do we want to talk about? There's a couple other buzzy movies. Alex, you and I went to see Freaky Tales.
AS: Yeah. Neither of us were that crazy about it.
CG: It’s from Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who are kind of Sundance veterans on top making Captain Marvel, the first Captain Marvel, the one that made a billion dollars. And Pedro Pascal is in it.
AS: Ben Mendelsohn. It’s also got Normani, it’s her film debut I think.
CG: And Dominique Thorne, who plays Riri Williams in the MCU. It's chock full of MCU folks.
AS: And Angus Cloud’s, unfortunately, last role. There's a good cameo that I don't want to spoil.
CG: And the movie's solid enough, right?
AS: Yeah. It’s fun.
CG: There are some legitimately really fun moments in it. There really are. It takes place in 1987 in Oakland, and there's a lot of very pulpy sort of influences on it. There's some punks versus Nazis stuff that happens that's a lot of fun. And then Pascal is in there doing his best Western.
AS: He’s great.
CG: Cal, did you see anything else you loved?
Didi
Release date: No release date yet
MC: Yeah, I saw this coming-of-age movie called Didi. That was excellent. It was just about this Taiwanese American kid living out his last year of middle school, and it's a fun movie if you grew up in the 2000s. He's a little younger than me, where a big part of that movie has something to do with MySpace and MySpace kind of came around when I was a senior in high school, so I kind of missed that part. But watching him anxiety-edit AOL Instant Messenger messages, that's been a universal thing since the mid-’90s.
AS: I’ve heard a lot about Didi. It’s won some awards too.
MC: Yeah, it won the audience awards. It's real fun. Just like an eighth grade dirtbag skater rat kid hanging out with his friends. It feels very lived in. I mean, listen, I'm a white guy from Pennsylvania. What the fuck do I know about the accuracy of Asian American households in Fremont, California in the turn of the century? I don't know dick about that, but what I can say is I grew up a shitty skate rat. I remember what it was like to be on AOL Instant Messenger at that time. Totally relate to that. Totally relate to the family. It's effortlessly relatable, laugh out loud, and really tugs at the heartstrings. It's a very, very good coming-of-age movie.
A Different Man
Release date: No release date yet, but A24 will distribute.
AS: I'll switch gears a lot and talk about A Different Man (read Alex’s review here). I saw that one last night and I reviewed it this morning, so it's kind of been on my mind a lot. It's Sebastian Stan, and he plays this man who has a physical deformity. In his mind, that’s what’s holding him back, ruining his life. It's the fact that everyone looks at him and sees, in his mind, this monster, and he does this experimental drug trial and literally sheds his skin. It rids him of his deformity and he becomes Sebastian Stan, a handsome dude. But the big twist comes in with this guy played by Adam Pearson comes in. And the actor actually does have the same deformity that Sebastian Stan's character did, and he waltzes in and he has so much charm, so much confidence. He has this comically endless list of talents and hobbies. He's just the most likable guy. Everyone loves him. He has the world wrapped around his fingers, and you just have Sebastian Stan's character like, “what the hell? You’re telling me that wasn’t what was holding me back?”
CG: “It was my fault somehow?”
AS: He gets really obsessed with the Adam Pearson character and there's a lot of cruel irony to it. It's a very cynical little movie. It's very mean. It's very, at times hard to watch, but also very funny at times. Adam Pearson is so funny just in how effortless everything is to him and he plays it so well. Also, at the center of this, without spoiling too much, there's a play that a friend of Sebastian Stan’s wrote about him before he cured himself of his condition. And it raises a lot of interesting questions about exploitation versus representation and when is it okay, when is it not? And doesn't answer any of them. It's just like, “Nope. We're just going to put this out there and you can decide if this is good or bad or not.”
Ghostlight
Release date: No release date yet, but was bought by IFC Films
CG: You're talking about a play, and that reminded me of another movie that I saw this week that I really enjoyed. It's called Ghostlight, and it's about a construction worker and his family who are dealing with a really tough tragedy, and he stumbles into a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet. It's just, and it's so sweet and earnest, and it's just sort of the healing power of community in a way. And it was starring an actual family. So the family that's going through the tragedy is a husband, wife, and their daughter, and it was a real-life husband, wife, and daughter that played the parts. And you can really tell, it comes across in all the tiny little moments that they're comfortable enough with each other that you would have to work with an actor for a year to have that level of familiarity and to get that level of trust.
The other interesting thing about the movie is it recontextualizes Romeo and Juliet. It's from the perspective of a parent. This was a completely different emotional perspective on the work, which is something that I hadn't seen before. So it was good. I hope it gets picked up. I'm not sure if it has yet or not, but I hope it gets up and out there. It gave me CODA vibes.
