10 Best Movies From the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

The pride of Akron, Ohio, get a long-deserved music doc, with veteran filmmaker Chris Smith (American Movie, Fyre, Wham!) dutifully chronicling the band’s evolution from Kent State art project to bizarro postpunk provocateurs to unlikely pop icons. You get lots of performance footage from every era — including their very early days, back when co-founder and Head Spudboy Mark Mothersbaugh would play long “migraine solos” — and plenty of talking head testimonials from band members and admirers. But this isn’t just a strictly-for-the-fans love letter or a bells-and-whistles Wiki page translated for the screen. Smith apes the art-damaged, collage-like aspects of Mothersburgh and Gerald Casale’s visual work, while also making manifest their philosophical approach of meeting cynicism not with optimism but a barrage of irony. It’s worth its wait in flowerpots hats. (Read the full review here.)

Everyone has such high hopes for Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), the studious young woman who’s just become a head prefect at her boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas. The presence of a handsome new student (Kesav Binoy Kiron) has sent Mira into a hormonal free fall, however, which bumps up against the school’s extremely strict rules regarding male and female student interactions. He also seems to bring out the worst in her Freudian nightmare of a mother (Kani Kusruti). Writer-director Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age film is one of those confident first features that suggests a fully formed vision from the get-go, as well as an approach to both burgeoning female sexuality and hypocritical institutional sexism that’s bold, if occasionally brutal in its honesty. A seriously impressive left-field discovery, this one.

India Donaldson’s feature debut joins the ranks of classic Sundance entries involving paternal misguidance, nature, long talks and reckonings (see also: Old Joy, Spring Forward, Leave No Trace). An 17-year-old named Sam (Lily Collias) finds herself navigating a weekend hiking trip with her dad (James Le Gros) and his longtime best friend (Danny McCarthy). The two middle-aged men keep rehashing their failures and regrets, as well as poking each other’s pressure points. What distinguishes this from your usual Brooklyn Sad-Dadbait, however, is the way that Donaldson filters all of it through Sam’s perspective — so much of the film’s quietly devastating power relies in Collias’ silent reaction shots and the subtle changes of expression that both hint at and hide seismic shifts underneath the surface. It’s the type of that revelatory performance that can make or break a film so reliant on suggestion and things left unsaid. And this is exactly the type of humanistic, character-heavy and emotionally resonant movie that we come to Sundance to see.

Imagine the Dardenne brothers got high one night and decided to make a slasher flick. That may be the best way to describe Chris Nash’s addition to the killer-in-the-woods canon, in which a hulking figure rises from the grave and vengefully slaughters everyone in his path. The catch is: Viewers are riding shotgun with this homicidal maniac for long periods of time between grisly murders, with the camera trailing behind. (Including several sequences involving actual shotguns.) You can practically hear purists yelling “elevated horror” sight unseen, but trust us: It’s a genuinely scary, splatterific take on an old warhorse of a narrative, making the notion of a seemingly unstoppable fiend gutting clueless campers feel formally fresh while still keeping one rotting foot in the genre gutter.

You’ll likely go into this documentary by Lana Wilson (After Tiller, Miss Americana) about NYC psychics with the idea that mockery and/or gotcha journalism is right around the corner. The feeling that you leave with, however, is that these alleged conduits to the spiritual realm are actually providing a service, albeit one far more earthly than they might care to admit. Embedding herself with a half-dozen or so different psychics and recording a number of their sessions, Wilson neither exposes these people who claim to talk to long-gone loved ones (and in one case, pets) as exploitative con artists, nor does she proclaim them to be the real deal. What her complicated, compassionate film ends up proving beyond a shadow of a doubt is that people need to be told that they’re forgiven, they’re loved, and they can let go and move on from trauma. The speaking-from-beyond aspect almost seems superfluous. It’s more about those who have a desire to heal by any means necessary.

The gnarliest Southwestern pulp fiction this side of Jim Thompson, Rose Glass’s follow-up to her 2019 religio-horror flick extraordinaire Saint Maud pairs Kristen Stewart’s small-town gym employee with Katy O’Brian’s would-be bodybuilding champ, drops both of them into hot water after a revenge killing, then ups the sex and violence levels to delirious levels. This is hardboiled noir served with a side of hallucinogens, and while you may wish that Glass & Co. started tiptoing into its surreal territory a little sooner, the pay-off once the film embraces its more batshit side is worth the wait. The way this crime thriller completely skews the genre’s traditional gender tropes couldn’t feel more spirited, and the chemistry between K-Stew and O’Brian could break thermometers. (Read the full review here.)

Documentarian Yance Ford (Strong Island) examines the history of police forces in America, from their beginnings as outgrowths from the “slave patrols” of the pre-Civil War era to their ongoing tenure as the strong arm of the state. Corruption, controversy and questionable codes of conduct all get lip service, but Ford isn’t interested in simply rehashing a greatest-hits compilation of moral failures on the part of cops. (That wouldn’t be a feature — that would be a marathon-length limited series.) Rather, the filmmaker dives deep into the ways that, having been handed the power to use violence against citizens from the jump, the police as a whole have become a means of control by the powers that be. Why have those who protect and serve become more militarized? Or for that matter, why have the U.S. military become more like borderless police forces? How do class and race play into who gets policed, and why? The doc may not have answers, but it demands that you think hard about these questions.

Steven Soderbergh making a contemporary haunted-house movie — scripted by the legendary David Koepp, no less — would have been enough to get moviegoers excited. The man has never met a genre he didn’t wanna deconstruct, taffy-pull or outright break apart! And, just for kicks, he’s framing the whole thing from the point-of-view of the ghost! But once you begin to pick up on how he’s using this tried-and-true horror staple as a way of dealing with the dynamics of a highly dysfunctional family, you start to understand the bigger game he’s playing here. The only thing scarier than a spirit gliding through hallways and making things go bump in the night is a house full of loved ones on the brink og falling apart. And given how deftly she handles the movie’s equivalent of a damsel in distress, we hope this gem gets actor Callina Liang a lot of work. (Read the full review here.)

Actor-writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s buddy dramedy about two cousins — one a gregarious and boundary-ignoring hippie type (Kieran Culkin) and the other an uptight neurotic (Eisenberg) — who travel to Poland to pay tribute to their late grandmother was the closest thing to a consensus pick for the fest’s strongest movie this year. It certainly confirms that the Social Network star has a definite sensibility behind the camera and a deep understanding about where the intersection between hilarious and poignant lies, as well as being the solid straight man for his let-it-all-hang-out costar. The way that Culkin turns this hedonistic, overly friendly and emotionally naked screw-up into the film’s id, and simultaneously makes you wanna hit him and hang with him, is something to behold — it’s a perfect melding of performer and role. (It premiered right on the heels of him winning an Emmy for Succession, capping off a very good week indeed for Culkin.) Add in The White Lotus‘s Will Sharpe as a detail-obsessed tour guide, an ability to delve into generational trauma without being Pollyanna-ish or maudlin, and the sort of focus on shaggy, difficult characters you associate with ’70s American cinema, and you have a real winner. Searchlight picked it up out of the festival. Hopefully it’ll be a theater near you ASAP.

A whirlwind history lesson filtered through an aesthetic of Blue Note album covers and connect-the-dots montages, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez rewinds back to the moment when American jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie were becoming ambassadors to Africa, Patrice Lumumba was attempting to liberate the Congo from colonialism, and political assassinations were being carried out right under the U.N.’s nose. This tour of 20th century international tensions and intelligence-agency dirty tricks may be one of the most footnoted docs to ever play the festival, and the amount of research and cross-referencing on display here is mind-boggling. “If Africa is shaped like a revolver,” Franz Fanon is quoted as saying in one of a gajillion intertitles, “then Congo is its trigger.” Grimonprez is essentially charting the arc of the bullets fired during the region’s ongoing tipping point in the 1960s, one bebop riff and hypocritical speech at a time.