Sundance Film Festival 2020: movie reviews and news

Nyles (Andy Samberg) is a nihilistic dirtbag stuck in Palm Springs for a wedding he really, really doesn’t want to attend, with a girlfriend he really, really doesn’t like. Sarah (Cristin Milioti) is the bride’s sister and maid of honor — and she wants to be there even less. They’re both frustrated screw-ups, unhappy with life and love, and thus naturally drawn to one another.

But when they break away from the wedding for a tryst out in the desert, something goes very wrong, and they find themselves stuck with one another in a way neither expected. Nyles’s lackadaisical, nothing-matters attitude seems like the only way to survive. But maybe there are life lessons to be learned here.

It’s impossible to see everything at the Sundance Film Festival, with well over 100 feature films playing to sold-out crowds for 10 days straight. But the festival tends to surface some of the most exciting new voices in cinema, both in fiction and nonfiction film, and Sundance 2020 was no exception.

Here are 13 of the best films (and one TV miniseries) that premiered at Sundance this year and how you’ll be able to see them soon.

I had to take a funicular up a steep mountain slope to a luxury resort hotel to talk to Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell about their new movie, Downhill. Appropriately, the film premiered amid the snowy peaks of Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival. It felt a bit like I was being fully immersed in the movie, which centers on an American family of four who travel to Austria for a ski vacation.

Downhill is a remake of the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure — which, years after its premiere, still sparks arguments at certain sorts of parties over whether it is a drama or a comedy. (It’s a comedy, obviously.) The tale of a couple who bring their children on a ski trip, nearly get swallowed by an avalanche, and then watch as fractures in their marriage become gaping maws won the hearts of both critics and people who love very darkly funny movies, and Downhill retains some of its predecessor’s weird humor while injecting a sensibility of its own.

It took two years for a truly great movie about the Harvey Weinstein case to come out, and The Assistant is it. (The lag time is no big surprise, since Weinstein’s close association with most of Hollywood left much of the movie industry reeling and uncertain about individual complicity in giving the alleged predator cover for decades.)

Instead of addressing the sexual assault allegations head-on, Australian director Kitty Green turned to fiction to explore what made Weinstein such a powerful, feared figure in Hollywood. Green is best known not for fiction features but for her documentaries, which explore the way bigger systems impact the lives of ordinary people. In her most recent film, 2017’s Casting JonBenét, Green looked at how the media, and cycles of violence and abuse, affect the way people think about the notorious 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey.

I first met documentarian Lana Wilson on a panel I was moderating about making documentaries in difficult and intimate spaces. Wilson was a perfect fit for the conversation — her 2013 film After Tiller, for instance, documents the lives of the only four doctors in the United States who perform late-term abortions. Her 2017 documentary The Departure explores the epidemic of death by suicide in Japan through a portrait of a Buddhist monk.

So I was a little surprised when I found out that her new film was a portrait of a very different subject: Taylor Swift, one of the most well-known people on the planet. But once you see the movie, it makes sense that Wilson would want to be involved.

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.