The 9 Best Films I Saw At The 2015 Sundance Film Festival

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Keep your eyes peeled for these movies about New England witches, amputated legs, ’70s sexual awakenings, and gym romances. They’re all coming soon to a theater (or television) near you.

Clockwise from upper left: Patti Perrett/A24, Ryan Green/Magnolia, Radium/Magnolia, Crystal Moselle/Magnolia

There's always going to be that movie that gets away from you at a festival, even if you show up, looking increasingly disheveled and puffy, for every early morning screening and keep powering through until late into the night. At Sundance 2015, that movie was Brooklyn, a 1950s immigrant romance starring Saoirse Ronan that had people swooning and was picked up by Fox Searchlight after a bidding war — but at least it's headed to theaters shortly.

I'm also sorry I missed The Forbidden Room, the latest effort from the singular Canadian director Guy Maddin, which was singularly strange enough to prompt walkouts, as well as Leslye Headland's raunchy sex addict rom-com Sleeping with Other People and Bobcat Goldthwait's doc about his friend and fellow comedian Barry Crimmins, Call Me Lucky.

Here's a list of the best films I did see at Sundance, at an unseasonably warm year for the festival that was also unusually good, and introduced plenty of future stars and movies we'll be talking about in the months to come.

9. Mississippi Grind

Patti Perret/A24

Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds are a pair of lovable losers who both see the other as their lucky charm in this shaggy, nicely '70s-esque road trip movie from filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the team behind Half Nelson. Gerry (Mendelsohn) is addicted to gambling and Curtis (Reynolds) is hooked on being a not-quite-magical drifter, latching onto hard-luck characters and following them down to rock bottom or, hopefully, to some happy end. The two meet in a crummy corner of Iowa and make their way down toward New Orleans, where there's a high-stakes poker game that may or may not be apocryphal. Mississippi Grind manages the difficult trick of making its characters charming and totally untrustworthy — you're increasingly concerned for them, but would never leave them alone with your wallet. And like the two heroes of Robert Altman's California Split, which Mississippi Grind sometimes feels like an informal remake of, Gerry and Curtis seem to be chasing the high of desperation as much as a win. The movie tries out half a dozen endings before actually coming to a close, but it's a fun, unsettling ride until then, with Mendelsohn a bedraggled standout.

How To See It: A24 will be giving Mississippi Grind a theatrical release later this year, after an exclusive window on DirecTV.

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Why A Teen Pregnancy Movie Sidesteps Race

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A new film looks at pregnancy through two very different women — one a black teenager, one a white schoolteacher — but foregrounds class and economic issues instead of race.

Anders Holm and Cobie Smulders in Unexpected.

Dagmar Weaver Madsen / Via http://Sundance.org

PARK CITY, Utah — The biggest surprise about Unexpected, the new movie from Kris Swanberg (Empire Builder), isn't that a white high school teacher and her black star pupil are pregnant at the same time. It's that the film manages to be a subtly told work about white privilege, without resorting to tired tropes about the Mighty White savior who rescues the poor black girl who's lost. Instead, the over-arching themes that are played out are socio-economic pitfalls and cultural presumptions.

On the surface, this is a story about the struggle of the teacher, Samantha (Cobie Smulders), to come to terms with her own pregnancy. She and her live-in boyfriend (Anders Holm) haven't quite had the forever-after chat, and she'll have to forgo the pomp and circumstance of a wedding and deal with the judgmental eye of her mother. Instead, she'll rush into matrimony before having the child. She'll also have to debate her own internal issues with maneuvering career versus motherhood.

Jasmine (newcomer Gail Bean) is a senior at an inner-city high school. She had been expected to escape the destiny of her neighborhood — she would go to college, find an equally educated husband, and have a child at an appropriate age, long after she's settled into her career. Her adult life was supposed to be unlike her childhood: a drug-addicted mother and an older sister with two out-of-wedlock babies. All of them live with Jasmine's grandmother, who works and also is on public assistance.

"I did find that when I was sending the script out to agencies or to mentors of mine, or to other friends in the business for advice, people were wanting it to go the traditional way," Swanberg, a former Chicago schoolteacher herself, said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "They wanted Jasmine's neighborhood to be more like bullets flying by, and her life to really be dangerous because they wanted that promise of college to be even more of a dream."

Gail Bean as Jasmine in Unexpected.

Dagmar Weaver Madsen / Via http://Sundance.org

Instead, the neighborhood where Jasmine's family lives — while it's in an economically depressed area — it's not the same as the war-torn environment in, for example, Precious. It's an inner city pocket where residents are working-class and in some cases, need public assistance to stay just above the line. In other words, it's reflective of the lived experiences of many working-class people in America.

Swanberg, who still lives in Chicago, said she's not blind to the problems that plague parts of the city. "But that's not the whole story. There are families and communities that live in these neighborhoods that are loving and happy and kind and good, and you can show the class difference without it being a war zone," she said.

In her first major on-screen role, the 21-year-old Bean plays Jasmine very measured — strong, yet vulnerable. She's the furthest thing from a caricature; instead, she comes across as the voice of reason, and her character forces Samantha to rethink what she places value on in her own life.

Swanberg gave Bean freedom to help create a backstory of who Jasmine was, which she did by drawing on her own personal experiences. Bean grew up in the predominately black Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, and used her high school best friend (who got pregnant as a high school senior, yet is thriving, Bean said) as inspiration.

While race is an important factor here, it's not the focal point —it's never even talked about in the film. But when asked why her main characters had to be black and white, Swanberg said it was because that was her experience: a white teacher working with mostly black students. She wanted this film to reflect that, but she didn't want it to be a statement about race and race relations. Instead, she wanted this to be a story about two women from two different worlds finding common ground.

"It's a truthful story. Sometimes race has a play in truth and sometimes it's just a story," Bean said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "It's about two women going through two very different things and comparing their backgrounds."

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Jimmy Fallon Re-Created The "Fresh Prince" Theme Song And It Was Better Than The Original

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“It’s time to take The Tonight Show to sunny L.A.”

The Tonight Show was shot in Los Angeles for decades. But since Jimmy Fallon took over as host for Jay Leno last February, the show has been based out of New York. Now that the East Coast is freezing over, Fallon's co-host Higgins had an idea...

NBC

So, Fallon is shooting this week's episodes in California, and he decided to honor the occasion by channeling another famous character who moved from the East Coast to the West Coast: Will "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" Smith (Will Smith).

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The Only Movies From The Sundance Film Festival You Need To Know About

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We watched a lot in Park City, so you didn’t have to — and these are the films worth talking about.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Directed by: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Written by: Jesse Andrews

Starring: Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Olivia Cooke, Connie Britton, Nick Offerman

With that title and one of the most twee descriptions in this year's Sundance catalogue — the film, it promised, "will tickle your funny bone and tug at your heart" — Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was positioned to be a manipulative quirkfest. But it turned out instead to be the best surprise of the festival. The YA tearjerker is a vibrantly directed ode to the power of movies and to how opening yourself up to someone is worth the hurt it can bring. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl ended up dazzling crowds, winning over resistant critics, sparking a heated bidding war, and earning both the audience and grand jury awards in the U.S. dramatic competition. It's a trick that Whiplash, now a Best Picture nominee, pulled off last year, so expect to be hearing a lot more about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. —Alison Willmore

Distribution: Fox Searchlight and the film's production company, Indian Paintbrush, teamed up for one of the festival's heftier acquisition deals, and while there's no exact date yet, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl will be reaching theaters in 2015.

Chung Hoon Chung

Dope

Directed by: Rick Famuyiwa

Written by: Rick Famuyiwa

Starring: Shameik Moore, Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons, Zoë Kravitz, AS$P Rocky, Chanel Iman, Blake Anderson, Quincy Brown

Dope features a smart, fantastic young cast and introduces newcomer Moore, who gives an inspired performance as a nerdy black kid trying to navigate the unsavory streets of his Los Angeles neighborhood. In his most Sundance-y feel of a film yet, Famuyiwa aptly tells the story of a teen who feels like an outsider, and, eventually, discovers who he really is. —Kelley L. Carter

Distribution: Open Road/Sony will release the film on June 12.

David Moir

The Wolfpack

Directed by: Crystal Moselle



The Wolfpack is stranger than fiction, especially in the ways it collides with fiction. Moselle's movie, which won Sundance's documentary Grand Jury Prize, follows the six Angulo brothers, who have lived their lives trapped inside their apartment by their paranoid, unhinged father. They are movie fanatics who have constructed their identities and gotten their ideas about how people interact by watching, acting out, and filming scenes from popular films. It's an insane story, but, as we watch the boys age and come into their own, it's also a riveting, funny, and tragic one. You would think that these kids would barely be human — but instead, they're articulate, emotionally present, and charismatic. Their mother, and, yes, their father, are also fascinating characters. You will leave with questions — there are no talking heads here — but more than that, you will root for these kids. —Kate Aurthur



Distribution: Magnolia has acquired the movie and will release it in the second quarter of 2015.

Crystal Moselle

Tangerine

Directed by: Sean Baker

Written by: Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch

Starring: Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, Karren Karagulian, Mickey O'Hagan, Alla Tumanian, James Ransone

Tangerine pulses with frenetic energy from start to finish: Shot primarily on an iPhone 5s, the film follows two transgender prostitutes, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), fresh out of prison and looking to reunite with her pimp boyfriend Chester (James Ransone), and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), Sin-Dee's more level-headed best friend. Tangerine captures a side of Los Angeles rarely seen on-screen, and the seedy underbelly of the city has never looked better. The film excited audiences by being one of the most vibrant and offbeat offerings of the festival, but it's fully grounded in real human emotion. And that's all the more impressive given that the characters at its center — transgender women of color and sex workers — are so seldom given the opportunity to portray their own stories. —Louis Peitzman

Distribution: Magnolia Pictures acquired Tangerine with a deal reportedly "in the high six figures." No release date has been set.

Augusta Quirk

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