Dispatches from the Sundance Film Festival are usually accompanied by descriptions of the looming mountains, snowy premieres and frantic bus shuttles.
Dispatches from the Sundance Film Festival are usually accompanied by descriptions of the looming mountains, snowy premieres and frantic bus shuttles. This year’s Sundance, which played out entirely virtually due to the COVID-19 surge driven by the omicron variant, meant less evocative screening circumstances: Laptops, digital links and Zooms. But even in reduced form, the films were often hypnotic, thrilling and urgent. Here are 10 films that stood out to AP Film Writers Lindsey Bahr and Jake Coyle from their virtual Sundance, which wrapped Sunday. — “Fire of Love”: Katia and Maurice Krafft were married French volcanologists who spent their lives documenting the world’s volcanoes and died during one such expedition in Japan in 1991. Werner Herzog used them briefly in “Into the Inferno,” but the Kraffts and their stunning photographs and 16-millimeter films get the spotlight in Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love,” a mesmerizing and almost mystical portrait of love and the extremes of the natural world to be released by National Geographic. With a synthy indie pop score (including Brian Eno and Air), Miranda July narration and experimental editing, it’s like Mike Mills meets Terrence Malick meets Guy Maddin. — LB — “Descendent”: Margaret Brown’s documentary concerns the discovery of the Clotilda, a schooner submerged in Alabama’s Mobile River in 1860, considered to be the last known slave ship to bring enslaved Africans to the U.S. But Brown’s film, which was acquired by Netflix and the Obamas’ High Ground Productions, excavates far more than the Clotilda. In taking a wide lens to the descendants of the ship and the present-day circumstances of Africatown near Mobile, where many of the survivors settled, “Descendant” lyrically ruminates on the legacy of slavery in America, telescoping past and present like few films before it. — JC — “Cha Cha Real Smooth”: On paper, this movie looks like something that came out of a round of Sundance mad-libs: Aimless college grad gets hired by local mothers to be a party starter on the local bar-mitzvah circuit and strikes up a friendship with a young single mom of an autistic teenage daughter. And yet Cooper Raiff’s sophomore film, which he stars in alongside Dakota Johnson, is never what you expect.
