12 Best Films and Performances of Sundance 2023

Raven Jackson’s debut feature is the kind of rare achievement that makes festivals, and moviegoing, worth it. In its patient design and consummate sense of texture and feeling, you can sense that the great tradition of Black independent filmmaking — from Julie Dash and Charles Burnett to Kathleen Collins and Camille Billops and Bill Gunn — has a clear inheritor. Jackson’s grounded, observational film flows back and forth in time to give us a world seen through the eyes of Mack, a Black woman from Mississippi, as she grows from a child into an adult. The stuff that happens is the stuff that happens in a quiet, rural life. Love, death, life lessons, all of it is portrayed here with the impressionistic insight of memory. Jackson’s feel for rhythm — slowing the actors down to a riveting naturalism, homing in on hands and eyes and gazes and gestures, swaddling the entire film in the sounds of nature and the utter quiet that sustains her characters’ lives — proves daring. Other directors have done it, but almost none have her wisdom. Grief is announced by an image of an elder’s hand holding the hands of children. Sounds of a thunderstorm overhead, in one scene, are matched by a storm of mud in a river, as if the natural world is speaking back to itself, trying to show us that in all of its mystery, there’s a wholeness, a consistency and care. A hug between two old friends, full of longing, speaking inescapably to their shared past, lasts so long that you begin to feel it. You can still feel it later, when the film draws us back in time to the roots of that longing. There’s no way to separate image from emotion, here. As shot by Jomo Fray, Jackson’s movie makes you feel each embrace, each tragedy. Every touch in this movie counts for something. Every touch makes you miss being touched. — K.A.C.

There’s a moment in Roger Ross Williams’ biopic of Saúl Armendáriz — a.k.a. Cassandro, the “Liberace of lucha libre” — when Gael García Bernal’s future wrestling superstar is about to debut his new persona in the ring. It’s a twist on the sport’s stock “exotico” characters, those homophobic caricatures of swishy gay men designed to make the masked heroes that much more masculine. Saúl’s new creation is different, however: He’s going to make the exotico not just a mockey, but a winner. He enters the arena, climbs up to the ropes, and you see him transform into Cassandro: out, proud and ready to rumble. But you also see Saúl behind those eyes, taking it in, feeding off the energy and slightly in awe of the self-empowerment he’s just unleashed. That’s Bernal’s performance in a nutshell: a high-wire balancing act of flamboyance, smarts, ambition, hope, hurt, vulnerability, confidence and the chops to back it all up. Sometimes in the same scene; occasionally in the same glance. Bernal has always had a knack for adding unexpected grace notes and casual charisma to his characters, yet what he does for this IRL LGBTQ+ hero is amazing even by his standards. — D.F.

Laura Moss’s smart riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein pairs a somewhat asocial morgue technician (Marin Ireland) with a grieving nurse (Judy Reyes) whose young daughter has just died of bacterial meningitis — and whose body is mysteriously missing. The first crazy turn of Moss’s dark, sensitive, sometimes unexpectedly humorous script is that Ireland’s mad scientist has secreted the daughter’s body away for an experiment: She’s going to try to bring her back to life. What ensues is a complicated and entertaining film in which this odd couple pairs up to keep the reanimated girl “alive,” with all the mishaps, ethical quandaries, and emotional ups and downs you may expect, and many that you don’t. The vital thing about birth/rebirth, beyond Moss’s smart handling of tone and the actors’ insightful performances, is the way that it makes the viewer consider motherhood anew — as a role, as a biological miracle, as a pure and simple fact of the body. It’s all a matter of giving life, which, in a way, guarantees death. Death is the fate that these women, two mothers — even if in different ways — are trying to outrun. It isn’t only a matter of giving life: this is ultimately a movie about the tragedy of love. — K.A.C.

Once upon a time in the 1800s, a French scientist was able to capture an image on a bitumen-coated photo plate. By the beginning of the 20th century, it would be possible to make these types of pictures “move” in succession, capturing a world in realistic motion. Cut to: a modern era of livestream fails, YouTube clips on how to make banana bread and bombs, and lives lived and curated 24-7 through the camera eye. Swedish documentarians Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck take you on a rollicking, chaos-reigns tour of humanity’s storied relationship with image-making, and how the cinematographic invention that King Edward VII once called a “fantastic machine” went from documenting reality to manipulating it, distorting it and eclipsing it. Hilarious, scary, and essential viewing for anyone in media studies or who post more than a dozen Instagram stories a day. — D.F.

Milisuthando Bongela’s inward-looking, historically adept documentary may be — alongside Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt — the single best film of the entire festival. It is in part an interrogation of Bongela’s own experience growing up Black in South Africa, which is unique because of the specific environs of her childhood. Bongela’s family lived in Transkei: a Black, apartheid-era state in South Africa that declared its independence from the rest of the country, enabling Bongela to have a racial experience that was fully segregated, completely divorced from white South Africa and its violence, until her family left the region in 1992. The movie opens by announcing the strangeness of this. Bongela’s childhood memories are not marred by the social tumult that defined this period for most other Black people — which means, among other things, that any nostalgia for her childhood proves complicated. Milisuthando does not operate in direct contradiction to that nostalgia. Instead, it complicates it, breaking the entire narrative down into a multifaceted portrait of both one woman’s upbringing and the troubled history of the country, alternating between conceptually rich archival montages and historical interviews, poetic (truly, Bongela is a gifted writer) first-person narration, dialogues with white South Africans about their own, parallel racial histories, and a multitude of encounters with Bongela’s elders, who, like living “memories that we can throw our arms around,” carry these histories in their very bodies. “The street I grew up on has no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” Bongela tells us. With this comes the risk of being forgotten. Milisuthando not only challenges us to know and remember: it reminds us that we are inseparable from our histories. That to forget a place like Transkei would, for Bongela, be to forget herself. — K.A.C.

Director William Oldroyd’s follow-up to his 2016 debut Lady Macbeth turns co-screenwriter Ottessa Mossfegh’s novel — about a mousy prison secretary who bonds with the institution’s hot new psychoanalyst — into a warped melodrama of crime, punishment, pathology, Sappho-eroticism and ’60s blonde-bombshell iconography. (An alternate title: When Carol Met Marnie.) At the gooey center of this tweaked character study, however, is a subtle yet seismic performance from Thomasin McKenzie, who slowly turns her young, working-class caterpillar into an outlaw butterfly. Whether this progression equals her becoming socially conscious or sociopathic is a question that lingers throughout the movie, and the way that this New Zealand actor somehow lets you see what the title character is thinking and masks her intentions is what makes the movie work. There are equally wonderful performances from Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham and Marin Ireland (who turns a mother’s-lament monologue into a five-course meal), but it’s McKenzie who gives the film its unpredictable edge. — D.F.

Alongside Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s The Stroll, which also premiered at Sundance, D. Smith’s Kokomo City offers up a lively, honest tour of the lives of Black trans sex workers. The premise of both documentaries is to revel in the stories, memories, lessons and personalities of Black trans women — not only the pain. Kokomo City takes a handful of Black trans women from New York and Georgia and lets them spill it all, holding court on being Black and trans, their love/hate relationships with cis men, their relationships to their own beauty, and the full array of attitudes that confront their lives on a daily basis. D. Smith’s background is in music, and that might account for the movie’s biggest flaw: the movie’s constant soundtrack overwhelms these stories to the point of drowning them out, at times even feeling in conflict with the movie’s handsome black-and-white images. But the stories speak so well for themselves, and are often so naturally funny, that we don’t need the jaunty music. The movie’s strength is in these women, who are captivating all their own. — K.A.C.

The woman just seems like a swooning fangirl, lusting after her literary crush in the form of Alexander Skarsgard’s tall, handsome, once-promising novelist. (Really, can you blame her?) When she begins to seduce the married author, who’s staying at the same posh resort as her husband and her, it’s tempting to chalk it all up to an adulterous vacation fling. Then, like Brandon Cronenberg’s movie itself, Mia Goth’s flirty, flighty character begins to become a little wilder, a little crazier, a little more unhinged… and a lot more likely to lead a murderous cabal of one-percenters with a penchant for cloning, debauchery and various other transgressive activities. The young British actor had already established herself as one of the most intriguing, imaginative, unpredictable performers working in genre movies, thanks to the one-two punch of Ti West’s X and Pearl (the latter of which she co-wrote). Infinity Pool coronates her as a Modern Horror MVP. The way she lets her mask of mere ugly-European immorality gradually slip, and reveal someone genuinely sociopathic and anarchic, is exactly what this White-Lotus-on-acid needs. And the way she screams, at top volume, “Members of the bus! Bring us the coward James Foster!” is destined for perpetual meme-itude. — D.F.

Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos headline Ira Sachs’s subtle and involving drama, set in France, about a married gay couple whose relationship is thrown into question when one of them has an affair with a woman. This movie is committed to its actors’ energies: the roiling agitation of Rogowski, who plays a fickle, sensitive artist; the committed maturity of Whishaw, as the partner who gets left behind; and the uncertain affections of Exarchopoulos, in whose lap Rogowski lands, only for him to bounce back. Sachs has filmed the movie with his usual attention to honest, earnest emotional swings, with a sympathy for his characters to probes them in order to understand them, rather than correct or idealize them. Passages works because its sense of intimacy is tactile and often consummately visual, down to even the way that Rogowski occupies the screen, with his roughhousing, swinging moods and overall physical exertion. Never is this more clear than in the movie’s sex scenes, which — despite a discourse that is currently wary of them — prove that the best sex scenes are psychological, physical, detailed, and spacious, that they aren’t just shorthand for characters’ closeness, but rather a way of revealing who these people really are. — K.A.C.

The closest thing to a consensus pick for the strongest film to premiere at Sundance this year, playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song’s debut feature — about two childhood friends from Seoul who try to reconnect in New York after decades apart — was a perfect example of why we keep coming to the fest year after year. It’s the sort of intimate, character-based movie that’s in perilously short supply now; and it functioned as an out-of-nowhere title with little pre-buzz (although it came with the A24 imprimatur already attached) that’s perfectly in sync with Sundance’s reputation as a major “discovery” festival; and it’s an introduction to a new filmmaking voice that makes you hopeful for the medium. More importantly, it’s an emotionally resonant wallop of a movie that turns quiet little moments into landmines, and gives the great Greta Lee a role worthy of her talents. Both Decision to Leave’s Teo Yoo and John Magaro — playing Lee’s legacy object of affection and her husband, respectively — are equally wonderful, and all three understand exactly how to complement Song’s dialogue with expressions and gestures of things left unsaid. Not for nothing has this already been called “the first great movie of 2023.” — D.F.

The stars of Raine Allen-Miller’s debut feature are charged with reminding us that the rom-com is not dead — that it can still be just as effervescent and lively as ever, even when dependent on the stalwart tropes of the genre (meet cutes; sudden coincidences; drama with exes). Allen-Miller brings a healthy dose of style to this movie, inserting memories and fantasies into the narrative like something out of A Christmas Story, with the detours from reality acted out like comic miniatures within the larger film. Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson, playing Yas and Dom, respectively, are effortlessly likable, simpatico thanks to recent breakups, naturally funny, with their hearts very much on their sleeves. Watching them roam South London and get into trouble — a sudden friendship that starts, mind you, with one of them overhearing the other awkwardly bawling their eyes out in a unisex bathroom — makes the time fly. You get wrapped up in it; you get wrapped up in them. These are the kinds of young stars that can make a movie worth watching. — K.A.C.

Imagine The Witch directed by Lucrecia Martel, and you’ve got a good sense of the spell that writer-director Christopher Murray is casting with this folkloric fable. In late-1800s Chile, a young Indigenous woman named Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) watches a German-immigrant landowner kill her father in a fit of rage. Bereft and adrift, she seeks out an older Huilliche man who’s rumored to have connections to the underground bruja community. Suddenly, children go missing, mysterious dogs appear in the murderer’s household and the town’s Christian authorities begin to suspect forbidden witchcraft is behind it all. Crackdowns and counterattacks ensue. It’s both a great addition to the canon of modern slow-burn horror and one hell of a commentary on surviving the evils of colonialism, one supernatural curse at a time. — D.F.