2023 Sundance Film Festival mid-fest highlights 

• Sundance Film Festival
• Joonam

Joonam
[U.S. Documentary]
There's a deceptive simplicity to Sierra Urich's film, but it's also a textbook example of making all the right choices. The daughter of an Iranian-born mother and American father, Urich begins exploring her Iranian heritage—partly through time spent with her mother, Mitra, and grandmother, Behjat, and partly through taking lessons to learn Farsi. That kind of personal story easily could have gotten bogged down in narration whereby Urich informs us about feeling disconnected from both sides of her identity, but there's not a moment of narration included. Mostly, she observes the interactions between these three generations of women, examining how each one thinks about Iran quite differently. Beyond all that, though, are many thoughtful moments of visual filmmaking: the subtitled Farsi of Behjat's speech abruptly disappearing into Arabic characters when Mitra (Urich's de facto translator) leaves the room; terrific use of family home movies; a simple, hilarious shot where the flop of a hand conveys Urich's embarrassment at how little Farsi she's actually learned. The final sequence feels a bit forced in its introduction of more conflict into the narrative, but it's also a way of capturing the mix of love and frustration involved in these generational relationships, and the sheer confidence of the hand behind the camera. (SR)

• Sundance Film Festival
• Sometimes I Think About Dying

Sometimes I Think About Dying
[U.S. Dramatic]
Life, for all we try to believe otherwise, is often defined by a collection of mundane moments that all fade together. It can be darkly funny, while also being terrifying as the time we have begins slipping through our fingers. It is this almost poetic predicament that Sometimes I Think About Dying captures so completely as we accompany the lonely Fran—played by Daisy Ridley of Star Wars in her best performance to date—throughout the confines of her life in a small coastal Oregon town. She largely keeps to herself as she goes to work, does her little office job and goes home, while frequently fixating on her own demise. Often short on dialogue yet still persistently mesmerizing as it dances around with darkness, it finds an honest humor in the rhythms and rituals of the everyday that accumulate into something oddly extraordinary. With a soaring score that is crossed with a patient pacing, it feels most like a fraught fairytale portrait of one person and the little discoveries they make where they thought there was none to be found. It isn't flashy, by design, but it still emerges as an absolute standout of the festival. (CH)

• Sundance Film Festival
• Polite Society

Polite Society
[Midnight]
Writer/director Nida Manzoor's frisky feature feels destined to be compared to other movies—a little bit Everything Everywhere All At Once, a little bit Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—which would overlook what's uniquely fun and culturally specific about its worldview. Ria (Priya Kansara) and Lena Khan (Ritu Arya) are British-Pakistani sisters each with unconventional career goals—Ria as a stuntwoman, Lena as a visual artist—that helps unite them. But when Lena unexpectedly ends up engaged to wealthy Salim (Akshay Khanna) after a whirlwind romance, Ria suspects something sinister is afoot. Manzoor mixes up plenty of genre sensibilities, drawing on martial-arts epics, Bollywood musical, caper comedy and more. At the same time, she's exploring familial expectations for Pakistani young women, both through Ria's need to have a partner in outside-the-norm dreams and through the evolving arc of Salim's mother (Ms. Marvel's Nimra Bucha). It's not particularly spectacular at nailing its genre elements, with fight sequences that are more functional than inspired, and some slackness in the pacing. With such solid character dynamics, though—and a thoroughly winning lead performance by Kansara—you wind up with 100 minutes of solid smiles and an entertaining delivery system for conveying a generational shift in gendered expectations. (SR)

• Sundance Film Festival
• Magazine Dreams

Magazine Dreams
[U.S. Dramatic]
The experience of watching writer-director Elijah Bynum's macabre yet mesmerizing Magazine Dreams is defined by an almost existential discomfort. A riveting reflection on how the quest for beauty can become defined by brutality, it places us in the lonely mind of aspiring bodybuilder Killian, who will do absolutely anything he can to be remembered. Played by the always incredible Jonathan Majors in rare form, Killian pushes closer and closer to oblivion in such a way that we hardly get a moment to breathe. The film unflinchingly uncovers how Killian is at risk of becoming completely lost, carrying with him a past of immense loss and increasingly less to look forward to in his present. This isn't a story that you enter into lightly, as there are several extended sequences that alone would prove to be a low point for any other character in any other film. It all could easily be too much for some—especially when there are five different moments that all could be the end—but there remains something spellbinding to it. Much of this comes from how Majors inhabits the character, but it is also the synchronicity it finds with Bynum's vision that crushes the very breath right out of you. (CH)