PARK CITY, Utah — We arrived hopeful, as we do every year, to America’s premiere showcase for independent cinema — an event that will always mean much to us, even if the festival itself may be moving to a new town in 2027. And despite some overheated pronouncements declaring Sundance over, we left with a handful of wonders, movies that would stand tall in any prior year’s lineup.
Here are the titles we’ll be talking about this year.
‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’
Sometimes amid the chilly climate of the festival, all you really want is a movie that feels like a warm hug. Expanded from a 2007 short film directed by James Griffiths and written by and starring Tom Basden and Tim Key, “The Ballad of Wallis Island” is a sneaky crowd-pleaser with charm and heart to spare. A lonely lottery winner who lives on a remote island hires his favorite musical duo to reunite for a private gig, without giving them quite all the details. Key and Basden have a fantastic comic rapport, playfully exploring the stereotypes of the British eccentric and grumpy artiste. They are grounded by the earthy realness of Carey Mulligan. Featuring music written by Basden and some delicately moving singing by Basden and Mulligan, “Wallis Island” is a story about learning to move on that knows how not to overstay its welcome.
‘BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions’
Briefly pulled from the Sundance lineup over a dispute between director Kahlil Joseph and the project’s financier, the boldly transportive “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” was reinstated when a new backer stepped in. Part essay film, part noirish sci-fi-fantasy set aboard an ocean liner, the film is also a chapter of an ongoing project that wraps together the past, present and future of Black history. Structured in movements akin to an album, the film is less intimidatingly rigorous than it may appear, developing a hypnotic momentum and uninhibited energy as it weaves together found imagery with footage created for the project. Particularly in sections where Peter Jay Anderson portrays W.E.B. DuBois, there is a vivid emotional resonance that ties it all together. At one point the late art curator Okwui Enwezor describes an exhibition as “a kind of thinking machine” that can be used to examine “the state of things” and there may be no better description for the fascinating, reflexively idiosyncratic “BLKNWS.”
‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’
Already, Linda (Rose Byrne in an absolutely fearless turn) is having an awful day. The lamentations of her preteen daughter, suffering from some wasting disease, bombard her from the backseat of her car, while her useless husband — another faceless voice on a cellphone — insists that she handle everything. But it’s when the ceiling of her bedroom caves in, with a watery, violent crunch that’s more frightening than any sound in a comedy should be, that you realize this movie is going to an extremely dark place. Call it “Uncut Gems”-adjacent (a Safdie brother serves as co-producer), but writer-director Mary Bronstein arrives in a major way at her own brand of sweaty personal catastrophe, unambiguously on the side of the doomed. I came to Sundance praying for a movie to charm me. This one grabbed me, dragged me down into an abyss and wouldn’t let go for days. David Lynch is gone but his disciples carry on the work.
