Sundance 2023: After Awards, More Indie Movies to Celebrate

The awards have been handed out, but Sundance movies have a life beyond the podium. Check out our latest batch of reactions to some high-profile titles in the festival.

The Starling Girl

These days, the word grooming gets bandied out for shady political aims. Director Laurel Parmet is too intelligent to let her movie fly as a simple social problem indictment of a single predator. It keenly observes how the relationship between Jem (Eliza Scalen), a precious 17-year-old, and youth pastor Owen (Lewis Taylor) inches from warm camaraderie to full-fledged sexual abuse. It all happens within a conservative Christian community in rural Kentucky. Ironically, the stifling, repressive social order allows pathological sexuality to fester. 

The coming-of-age plot strand contrasts with the downward spiral of her father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson), formulated as a cautionary tale about turning your back to your true calling for the sake of safety. Some characters take a course of action that can seem hopelessly idiotic, but I venture people in these situations might operate like this. Overall, the movie is solidly acted and directed. Scalen is fantastic, and her performance should propel her to a new stage in her career. The Starling Girl would make a solid double feature with Palm Trees and Power Lines (Jamie Dack, 2022). This criminally overlooked 2022 Sundance offering contemplates a similar relationship in an urban, secular setting. 

* Update: "The Starling Girl" is available to rent or buy on all major digital platforms.

The Persian Version

Maryam Keshavarz’s warm comedy contemplates changing social mores within an Iranian family in New York. After a lesbian relationship, daughter Leila (Layla Mohammadi) gets pregnant through a one-night stand with a British actor (Tom Byrne) headlining a Hedwig and the Angry Inch revival. They do the deed at a drunken party while he is in full Hedwig regalia. It is too much for her beleaguered mother, Shirin (Niousha Noor). She is the perfect opposite of her daughter: an overachiever who embodies the immigrant success story.

The Persian Version articulates a call for intergenerational understanding through knowledge. As Leila learns about Shirin, we see enlightening flashbacks where young actors embody her parents at the beginning of their marriage. At just 1 hour and 47 minutes, the movie holds two lifetimes of incidents and a large cast of characters. At times, it might feel overstuffed. There is a subplot around black-sheep brother Hamid - one of five brothers! -which feels rushed in the run to the final credits. Still, this is a charming, unexpected comedy to liven up the Art House.   

Divinity

Eddie Alcazar's low budget film comes blessed by Steven Soderbergh as a producer, but this sci-fi freakout can stand alone. A smarmy Stephen Dorff plays Jaxxon Pierce, son of a scientist (Scott Bakula) who developed a serum capable of granting eternal youth. Junior turns Daddy's dream into a capitalistic nightmare. He brands the potion Divinity and builds a vapid culture where physical beauty rules supreme for those who can pay the price. Two mysterious men materialize on Earth and try to stop him.

The movie features groundbreaking visual effects through a combination of stop-motion animation and live-action images, which Alcazar calls Metascope. It is somewhat difficult for me to describe them. Either the results improve on the big screen, or they deftly fade into the retro style of the film. Still, It is an arresting piece of psychotronic cinema, with beefy muscle men and curvy vixens. They denounce the sins of worshiping beautiful flesh while showcasing it for the nerds' pleasure. Dorff is aces as the elderly villain. How far is his '90s indie it-boy phase! 

Shortcomings

Comedian Randall Park, best known for the groundbreaking sitcom Fresh off the Boat (2015 - 2020), brings a self-assured feature film debut with this adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel about romantic and existential pains among bay-area Asian-American friends. Ben (Justin H. Min) is a frustrated filmmaker, souring his relationship with over-achieving trust fund princess Miko (Ally Maki). When she flees to an internship in New York, he finds solace in his friendship with lesbian feminist scholar Alice (Sherry Cola). She has her relationship woes, which come into play as Ben faces an unexpected crossroads.

The scarcity of romantic comedies favors this prickly but warm movie. It starts by embodying Ben's worldview and then subtly turns the tables on him. Check out the mischievous put-down against Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018) and how it is turned on its head in a late-stage side joke. More winks to film fans come via Jacob Batalon playing a movie-theater employee who loves Marvel fare (Batalon played Ned Leeds, best friend of Spiderman, in the latest Spidey franchise). Ben's dead-end job as a multiplex manager eventually ends and precipitates an overdue existential crisis.

The pitfalls of navigating early adulthood, ethnicity, and the transcultural space of first-generation American-hood offer plenty of opportunities to put Ben and his entourage on the spot. The movie feels true to life and generously open. 

You Hurt My Feelings

After an unexpected collaboration with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon co-writing the script of the historical epic The Last Duel (Ridley Scott, 2021), Nicole Holofcener returns to her well-trotted milieu of middle-aged, upper-class neurosis. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies play a New York married couple with an intertwined emotional crisis. He is a therapist doubting his professional skills. She loses faith in her talent and the sturdiness of their marriage after overhearing him criticizing her latest novel. On the margins, their son (Owen Teague) dithers about writing his first play. Brother-in-law Mark (Aryan Moyaed) is fired from a stage play. His wife, Sarah (Michael Watkins), is an interior decorator unable to find the perfect lamp for a finicky client.

The stakes seem low, but they are everything to the people on-screen. You Hurt My Feelings belongs to a species in danger of extinction: gentle comedies observing human behavior and relationships. The whole cast gives solid performances, with brief but juicy supporting roles for Amber Tamblyn, Dave Cross, and Zach Cherry as a trio of patients losing patience with their doctor. There is an electric charge of novelty in seeing Arian Moayed, who plays consummate corporate jerk Stewy in the TV series Succession, as the devastatingly insecure Mark.

* Update: "You Hurt My Feelings" is available to rent or buy on all major digital platforms.

Iron Butterflies

The festival was ripe with unsparing looks at war, like 20 Days in Mariupol and 5 Seasons of a Revolution. Add to this list Iron Butterflies. The title refers to the pieces of shrapnel that tore apart the cabin of Malaysia Air Flight 17 on July 17, 2014.   

The filmmakers assuredly frame the event as an early chapter in the Russian war against Ukraine. Taking the style of a film essay, they combine data to prove their point. You get footage from the press conferences by the multi-national investigative committee, extracts from the trial in a Netherlands court, Google Earth maps, and even news media coverage from the Russian propaganda machine. 

The sturdiness of the narrative is undermined by artificial set pieces that use musicians, actors, and dancers to comment on the human impact of the tragedy. For every striking image (people lining up on the crash site as if they were passengers waiting to board a plane), there is a sequence ripe for parody, like an interpretative dance with soldiers shutting the mouths of a family of witnesses to the crash. Director Roman Liubyi is too self-conscious and enraptured by creative whims to serve its subject well. He gives creativity in the documentary medium a bad name.