This year's Sundance Film Festival, which is closing this weekend, may not have launched an instantly anointed "masterpiece" on the level of last year's Boyhood, which is now steamrolling toward the Oscars. But that's an unfairly high bar. The 2015 fest may not have launched an undisputed home run, but the extraordinarily consistent lineup was stocked with well-received doubles and triples: strong debuts from no-name newcomers, hysterical sex comedies, and a jam-packed selection of topical documentaries. Very few films belly-flopped with audiences, some generated multimillion-dollar deals, plenty were warmly received and will have long lives after the festival. Out of of the 37 films I caught at the festival, I can strongly recommend the 14 below.
The Amina Profile
Sophie Deraspe's dreamy, mysterious documentary evolves like an erotic thriller, following savvy, charming Montreal woman Sandra Bagaria's evolving love affair with "Amina Arraf," a purported Syrian activist and lesbian author of the blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus." Against the backdrop of revolution, their love affair ignites, when suddenly Amina is allegedly abducted by authorities and jailed. The blogger's plight becomes an international sensation—until it is revealed that "Amina" is, well, actually a white guy. Eventually, Bagaria and "Amina" meet face-to-face, capping an unnerving story of catfishing, modern media, and betrayal.
The D Train
The modern bromance has been built on lazy gay jokes and homoerotic subtext. Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul's sharp comedy boldly takes all those bro-hugs to their logical conclusion. Jack Black plays Dan, a middle-aged loser, obsessed with looking cool, who becomes determined to bring bad-boy Oliver Lawless (James Marsden) back to town for his 20th high-school reunion. Eventually, Dan gets his guy—and it throws his career and marriage (to Kathryn Hahn) upside-down. Despite the bold, go-for-the-fences plot twist midway through, the film never settles for easy laughs, instead earning them honestly and absurdly.
Digging for Fire
Joe Swanberg's marvel of a midlife-crisis movie stars Rosemarie DeWitt and New Girl's Jake Johnson (who co-wrote the script) as a married couple who spend a weekend apart in Los Angeles, wrestling with adult responsibility—and toying with temptation. Beautifully shot in 35mm by Beasts of the Southern Wild cinematographer Ben Richardson and scored by Beasts' composer Dan Romer, it's scrappy indie pioneer Swanberg's most gorgeously constructed film yet and stocked with great supporting players, including Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, and Sam Rockwell.
Dope
Rick Famuyiwa's audacious, swaggering Inglewood, California, teen drama is a high-volume house party. Breakout star Shameik Moore owns it as Malcolm, a black nerd obsessed with '90s hip-hop in a neighborhood dominated by gang violence. When a cache of molly gets stashed in his backpack, he embarks on a ridiculous odyssey to sell the drugs, get into Harvard, and land the girl, all while staying true to his own hybrid identity. The film is packed with pop-culture references, even 'til the end, with a celebratory nod to the dance stylings of Rosie Perez in the opening of Do the Right Thing.
The End of the Tour
Based on David Lipsky's book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace and adapted by playwright Donald Margulies, his film brilliantly adapts a book that, in lesser hands, might have been nothing more than a talky, anti-cinematic conversation between two writers in the last days of a book tour. But, with the novelist Wallace played brilliantly by a soulful Jason Segel and the Rolling Stone journalist Lipsky animated by a more-jittery-than-normal Jesse Eisenberg, director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) finds the heart buried under all those mountains of Infinite Jest footnotes: the sadness, the seeds of suicide, and lightning flashes of brilliance. It's not literary hagiography; it's a human tragedy. And it launches Ponsoldt into the top ranks of American filmmakers.
Finders Keepers
North Carolina's John Wood, a recovering addict, lost his leg in a tragic plane crash that killed his father. Shannon Whisnant took ownership of that mummified leg when he found it in a smoker he bought at a storage-unit auction—and thought it was his ticket to a world of fame and fortune. This southern-fried saga about the interwoven lives of the two men stretches from local news to German talk shows, scoring huge laughs along the way, in a tragic story about the extremes we might reach to get a leg up in this world.
Going Clear
Alex Gibney's strident documentary about the Church of Scientology adapts the most incisive critiques of Lawrence Wright's bombshell-packed book, then takes them one step further. Weaving in rattling first-person testimony from former Scientology higher-ups, the film places direct pressure on John Travolta and Tom Cruise to either reform the organization (with billions in real-estate holding but just about 50,000 members) or, perhaps, renounce the organization they have promoted for so long.
James White
Former Girls star Christopher Abbott makes a convincing leap into leading-man territory in Josh Mond's harrowing drama about a frazzled, substance-abusing son grappling with the imminent death of his cancer-stricken mother (Cynthia Nixon). From the film's first, sonic-overload sequence shot in a noisy club, the film takes a familiar narrative and injects it with some unexpected, unconventional twists, as two raw-nerve performers confidently lead the way.
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Brett Morgen's documentary about Kurt Cobain, composed from private journals and videos, is a startingly personal epilogue to decades of generic worship. The film strips away the Hall of Fame hype and finds the man behind it all, wounded, brilliant, playful, and mortally self-destructive.
Me & Earl & the Dying Girl
Fans of The Fault in Our Stars should flock to this stylish, assured, and damn funny debut by the undeniably talented Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. Based on the novel by Jesse Andrews (who also wrote the screenplay), the cancer comedy follows a misfit teen kid, played by soon-to-be star Thomas Mann, whose mom forces him to be best friends with a girl (Olivia Cooke) who's dying of leukemia. More comic than tragic, the most commercial film at Sundance somehow avoids, or at least subverts, all the clichés its premise invites. This could become a new teen classic.
Sleeping with Other People
Here's one you haven't heard: Two sex addicts (Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie) walk into a recovery meeting... and fall in love. Leslye Headland's spit-take funny, ridiculously raunchy Bachelorette never found the audience it deserved, but this profane and wise sex comedy about flawed people flailing through life snaps jumper cables to the moribund genre and shocks it back to life. Unapologetic and muscularly scripted, the film rushes forward with headlong momentum, hitting you with another great line before you've had time to process the last one. Romantic comedies have been stuck in the old-fashioned, sex-shaming past; Headland's comedy plays like a torrent of the best sexts you could ever hope to receive.
The Overnight
One afternoon, a content married couple (Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling) meet a strange couple (Jason Schwartzman and Judith Godrèche) at the playground. Soon, they're all having a sleepover that keeps getting weirder and more intense: from wine to molly, and from erotic photography to skinny-dipping and more than the suggestion of a swingers' orgy. Writer-director Patrick Brice somehow finds the throbbing, unsettling humanity in all four leads: the craving for passion, and the dissatisfaction with a life less ordinary.
(T)error
On Homeland and The Americans, espionage often looks like a sexy, sophisticated science practiced by complex heroes. Surely that's true sometimes. But Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe's documentary, filmed with access to an informant's counterterrorism sting, exposes the messy and dubious American practice of paying less-than-rock-solid sources for information. In this case, the man is a 63-year-old Black Power revolutionary whose primary income is now derived from befriending, investigating, and reporting on people (read: American Muslims) of interest. As the details of his work unfurl, the film can't help but blur the line between investigation and entrapment.
The Wolfpack
At first glance, Crystal Moselle's mesmerizing documentary seems too strange to be true: Seven home-schooled children, locked inside a Lower East Side, Manhattan, apartment for almost their entire lives, learn to understand the world outside primarily through the Hollywood films (The Dark Knight, Reservoir Dogs) they lovingly recreate. But Moselle spent years earning the family's trust, and her intimate access to the unique lives of these kids results in a story that doesn't quite solve the mystery of their youth, but continually reveals it.
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