The festival was a good one for me this year, and while I didn’t see any movies that proved to be transcendent, I also didn’t run across any real clunkers, even if I wanted a lot more from a handful of the films. Here are a few of the highlights for me:
The standout this year, and a movie you’re likely going to hear a lot more about, is called A Real Pain. It’s the second movie directed by the actor Jesse Eisenberg, and it’s an enormous step up for him as a director, following a debut movie that was decidedly not good. This one, though, is heartfelt, nuanced, messy in all the right places, and features an exceptional performance from Kieran Culkin. He and Eisenberg star as cousins who travel to Poland to visit their grandmother’s childhood home, which she left during the Holocaust. The film is funny, and reverent, and understands people’s pain, whether the pain is big or small.
Another movie you’ll probably be hearing about is Kneecap, which is a biopic of a hip hop group from Northern Ireland who perform their music in the indigenous language of Ireland. The film is raucous, and rowdy, and self-deprecating, having no interest in pretending these guys are superheroes, which is made all the more apparent when we know the three men play themselves in the film. They do it quite well, too—I didn’t even realize they weren’t just actors until the very end.
But one movie I definitely want to point to quietly turned out to be one of the very best of the festival. It’s a small, human-sized film called Good One, about a 17-year-old girl who goes on a camping trip with her father and her father’s best friend. A lot of the movie is just the three talking and walking through the incredible scenery in the Catskills, but it’s all so well observed that we feel a seismic shift in one difficult moment and its aftermath, and the film becomes about a whole lot more than we expected.
You can find all of Fletcher’s Sundance 2024 coverage here.
