Sundance Film Festival 2017: film reviews and news

What do The Farewell, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, American Factory, and Honeyland all have in common? They’re all movies that made waves last year — and all four also premiered last January at the Sundance Film Festival, the most prestigious film festival in the United States and one of the most important pieces of the movie industry puzzle.

Every year in mid-January, a mass migration to Utah happens: Critics, filmmakers, industry people, and celebrities head to the mountainous ski resort town Park City, about 30 miles from Salt Lake City, where the annual festival — a 10-day marathon of screenings, panels, parties, and more — takes place.

Not every movie that screens at the Sundance Film Festival will end up playing at your local multiplex: Distributors “shop” at the festival for movies to buy, and only then do they start making plans for theatrical and streaming release.

That means some of the films they pick up might not arrive in theaters for a year or more — no matter how good they are. (For instance, I first saw The Witch at Sundance in January 2015, but it didn’t make it to cinemas until February 2016.)

Religious topics aren’t foreign territory for Sundance movies. Maybe that’s because independent filmmakers have the freedom to explore religious topics with more nuance and even irreverence than the traditional studio system is ready to risk. And the 2017 Sundance Film Festival has its share of obviously religiously oriented films, including not one, but two about nuns — the transgressive comedy The Little Hours and the more contemplative drama Novitiate.

Two others, though, came in from a different angle, by exploring territory most commonly linked with religion: the afterlife. They’re in two different genres — The Discovery plays more like sci-fi, while A Ghost Story is a nearly experimental fable — but they both take a curiously similar tack in their treatment of the topic and its implications, and both with contemplative sensibilities.

The Oscar nominations are in, and once again, no women were nominated for a Best Director Oscar. This isn’t an anomaly: The last time a woman was nominated for the slot was 2010, when Kathryn Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker. Before that, the most recent nominee was Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation in 2004. (She lost to Peter Jackson.)

Best Director nominations aren’t the only way to measure gender diversity at the Oscars, of course, but only two women in 13 years isn’t a great record. And it’s outright ludicrous this year, when some of the most critically acclaimed films were directed by women. Two of them were nominated for Oscars in specialty categories, Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann for Best Foreign Film, and Ava DuVernay’s 13th for Best Documentary Feature. But there were plenty of others: Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe, Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come, Kim Snyder’s Newtown, Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, and Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents.

At Sundance 2017, it’s impossible to go a day without hearing someone say — in a movie, during a panel discussion, before a screening, or at a party — that it is the responsibility of artists to “speak truth to power.”

That might sound pompous, and sometimes it probably is. (As a Saturday Night Live sketch joked recently, sometimes a movie is just a movie.)

PARK CITY, Utah — On Saturday, an estimated 8,000 men, women, and children converged on Park City, Utah, to take part in the Women’s March on Main, a satellite event coinciding with the Women’s March in Washington, DC, and many others around the country and the world.

As luck would have it, the march coincided with the first Saturday of the Sundance Film Festival — when Main Street is usually clogged with premieres, parties, stars, filmmakers, and attendees. They were all there too. But that morning, the march overtook the town.

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival opened on January 19 and runs through January 29. Alissa Wilkinson is on the ground in Park City, Utah, from January 19 to 25, and we’ll be running festival diaries those days with capsule reviews and reflections on the day’s films.

The second day of Sundance was stacked with movies about the mental states of women living in constricting systems that aren’t quite their own making. One takes place in 19th-century Scotland. One is set in an American convent in the 1960s. And one is caught in the web of social media circa 2017.

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival opened on January 19 and runs through January 29. Alissa Wilkinson is on the ground in Park City, Utah, from January 19 to 25, and we’ll be running festival diaries those days with capsule reviews and reflections on the day’s films.

The first night of Sundance 2017 just happens to fall on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, and having been to a few Sundance opening nights in the past, I can tell you: The mood is weird.

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival comes at a strange time in American history. For one, the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States — a phrase almost nobody expected to be writing during last year’s Sundance — will take place in Washington, DC, just as the festival is kicking off in Park City, Utah. A documentary called Trumped, about the campaign and its results, will premiere a few days later, for those steel-nerved audiences brave enough to relive the spectacle.

While the inauguration is sure to be a huge topic of conversation in ticket lines and at cocktail parties, though, it’s not the only thing that’s remarkable about Sundance in 2017. New technologies are continuing to change the way films are made and experienced, and the festival is exploring this, with programs centered on innovations in virtual reality and shifts in marketing based on data science. The festival is spotlighting films from indigenous filmmakers and from Cuba. And with the advent of the term “post-truth,” filmmakers (and especially documentarians) are thinking about what it means to make “truthful” films.

The 2016 Sundance Film Festival opened on January 21 and screened its last movie on Sunday — one day after holding an awards ceremony where Nate Parker’s incendiary American slave melodrama The Birth of a Nation won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. Last year, the cancer dramedy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl pulled off the same sweep and then more or less faded from view, performing weakly at the box office and drawing mixed reviews. But there’s a good chance The Birth of a Nation will actually still matter to moviegoers next January, and the January after that.

For those who follow major international film festivals in hopes of predicting the Oscars race, Sundance has always been a tricky event to read. The fest has developed a reputation as the place to discover new talent, showing early work by the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino. But even the most popular Sundance movies rarely become blockbusters, and only in the past few years — thanks to Boyhood, Whiplash, and Brooklyn — has premiering in Park City, Utah, become a reliably strong first step toward becoming a major Oscar player.