Standouts From the 2022 Sundance Film Festival

Thanks to that nefarious Omicron variant, the Sundance Film Festival this year once again went fully virtual, and your humble Nashville Scene critic was parked on the couch to check it out. 

This year’s Sundance lineup might not have been as prolific as 2021’s bombastic selection, wherein films like On the Count of Three, Flee, CODA, Summer of Soul, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mass, Passing, Together Together, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and more brought the virtual house down. The tricky nature of a film festival is always distribution, so you might not have been aware of some of these — and you almost certainly haven’t seen On the Count of Three, which isn’t coming out until this year at an unspecified date, or We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which will be on HBO Max in the spring. Both are musts. 

There were, however, some great films worthy of your attention. They range from uplifting, messy coming-of-age tales (a Sundance staple) to gripping documentaries about how past and present blend in surprising, unsettling ways (again, kind of a Sundance thing). Let’s look at some of the best films from this year’s go-round. 

The best film in this year’s crop was easily Cooper Raiff’s sensational Cha Cha Real Smooth, which absolutely takes its title from a lyric in that noxious DJ Casper middle school party anthem from the early Aughts. Raiff is emerging as a Gen Z Richard Linklater — the filmmaker who inspired his low-key, personal films, and whose bar he is already beginning to clear. 

Cha Cha Real Smooth is a special work about how difficult it is to find your footing after you graduate. Raiff is like the Duplass brothers in that he also stars in his productions, and his tenderhearted-goober performances are very impressive considering how green he is behind the camera. Here, he plays an aimless college grad who begins to fall for an engaged mother and befriends her autistic daughter, all while moonlighting as a party starter at local bar mitzvahs. If that seems like a bizarre premise, Raiff pulls it off with a sense of world-weariness, but also a striking optimism in understanding how muddled growing up is and how inherently sloppy the human experience always is as it unfolds. Dakota Johnson delivers the best performance of her career as the mom Raiff's character grows close to; she’s a disarming, sage foil to Raiff’s eager naivety. The two are fantastic together.  It’s one of the better movies to come along in quite some time and will be released by Apple later this year. Raiff’s is a career we should all be deeply invested in. 

While that’s the best in show, there were plenty of other impressive titles. Kogonada, a former Nashvillian and Belcourt supporter, is back with his sophomore film After Yang, scheduled to open at the Belcourt March 4. It's a wonderful complement to Kogonada's Columbus, providing a fresh perspective on not only AI, but on processing grief and the delicate moments that make life worth living in general. It’s got a breakout performance from The Umbrella Academy’s Justin H. Min as the titular cyborg that will leave you talking. Speaking of robots, the delightful U.K. export Brian and Charles was this year’s sweetest film by a country mile. It’s like an Edgar Wright/Mighty Boosh project thrown into a cotton-candy machine, but also one of the most surprising films about being a parent, even when your son is a 7-foot-tall robot who loves cabbages. 

If you’re looking for A24 vibes, Emily the Criminal will more than provide. It's milder Uncut Gems blended with some dark commentary on student debt, and Aubrey Plaza is fantastic as an upstart crook who must hustle her way through petty crime in order to help pay off her debts. It’s a compelling little crime thriller, and Plaza shows she’s far, far more than just a comedic talent. FRESH, out via Hulu in March, is about the horrors of online dating and features the most shocking turn by an Avenger (Sebastian Stan) since Chris Evans donned a wool sweater in Knives Out. It’s best not to know too much about the story of that one, but it’s the kind of wild ride you’d desperately love to take in with a Belcourt midnight audience. Get some friends together, go in cold and strap in.

Andrew Seman’s brilliant Resurrection would be my second favorite if I was tallying, a paranoid thriller about how a woman’s past comes back to haunt her in bizarre ways. It’s another film that’s best to go in cold for, but it’s got career-best work from Rebecca Hall and a monologue that might wind up being the best moment of acting in 2022 once it’s all said and done. Hall is that good in this movie. Speaking of great performances, 892 has a gripping turn from John Boyega, a veteran who holds up a bank in Atlanta in order to make a statement about the clerical horrors veterans face. 

Riley Stearns’ purposefully droll Dual has shades of Yorgos Lanthimos with a uniquely American twist. The film features two Karen Gillans, with the original Gillan tasked with killing her clone after that clone takes over her life. It’s the most optimistic movie about pessimism you’ll ever see and features Aaron Paul as a survivalist. It’s not always an easy one to jump into, but it’ll make you appreciate living, even when life can suck.

The festival’s Grand Jury winner in the dramatic category is Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny, and it’s going to be a conversation starter whenever it’s released. Both an eerie study of classicism and a sobering reminder of how fraught the immigrant experience can be, Jusu's pseudo-horror film is anchored by a grounded performance from Anna Diop (Atlantics). Jusu is already developing a new project with Universal and Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw, and she’s going to be a major talent. This is just the exciting start. 

Emergency, soon to be released by Amazon, won this year’s best script award, and it’s easy to see why. The film takes a nightmarish premise — three people of color discover a white girl passed out in their home unexpectedly and must figure out what to do about it. Director Carey Williams and writer K.D. Dávila try to find the humor in such a bizarre happening, as the three well-meaning college kids navigate the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to them. R.J. Cyler, one of the film’s leads, is always a hoot and is great here, and relative newcomers Donald Elise Watkins and Sebastian Chacon are the film’s beating hearts. Expect both to break out after this. 

On the documentary front, be sure to watch out for the best two I saw: The Exiles, a moving work about filmmaker Christine Choy as she tries to complete her own film about the Tiananmen Square protests and student movement, and Navalny, a shocking recounting of Russian reform leader and Vladimir Putin opponent Alexei Navalny’s poisoning. 

Also on the doc front: Riotsville, U.S.A. is like the Apollo 11 of police militarization and a stirring look at how the past repeats itself. The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales will make you want to write an angry letter to Disney as you see how one of Uncle Walt's great-nieces uncovers the shady practices of how the company treats its employees. Descendant is an urgent, powerful look at the Black citizens of Africatown in Mobile, Ala., and how they fight to reclaim the narrative of their generational suffering after the last slave ship is discovered in their backyard.