Sundance: Our critic picks 6 films to see at 2023 festival

Three years have handed since a few of us final set foot in Park Metropolis, Utah, the place the Sundance Film Festival has been on COVID-mandated hiatus — at the very least as an in-person occasion — since January 2020. Not that the pageant has precisely hibernated within the meantime: In 2021 and 2022, digital screenings and panel discussions helped maintain this annual occasion and its movie-hungry audiences. One in all those pandemic-impacted editions even produced the primary Sundance-premiered title (“CODA”) to win the Oscar for finest image.

Even so, what a bummer. Anybody who’s ever trudged by means of the snow from screening to screening — or slipped on black ice mid-transit — is aware of that there is no such thing as a experiential substitute, digital or in any other case, for a pageant as bodily immersive and meteorologically unforgiving as this one. And so it’s a thrill to return to Sundance this 12 months, masks and vitamin C tablets on the prepared. Will or not it’s , unhealthy or common pageant? Time will inform. The general high quality of the flicks at Sundance, as at any pageant, can fluctuate from 12 months to 12 months, however any film projected on a giant display screen stands a greater likelihood of being a extra indelible, extra affecting and extra lasting expertise.

The six motion pictures I’m recommending under are amongst only a small variety of options I used to be in a position to see forward. I’m trying ahead to seeing (and considering and writing about) far more within the days to return, however these already persist in my reminiscence — and, in the event you search them out in Park Metropolis or past, I hope they will even persist in yours.

The multigenerational story “All Grime Roads Style of Salt.”

(Jaclyn Martinez / Sundance Institute)