The Most Crowd-Pleasing Films Coming Out of Sundance

Some of the most broadly appealing titles are still up for grabs as the festival rounds into its final weekend. Sara Colangelo’s sober drama Worth is a well-acted and concise recounting of the creation of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a government program created to indemnify the families of 9/11 victims, with the Spotlight co-stars Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci as leads. Colangelo is less interested in the nuts and bolts of the fund than in the character arc of Kenneth Feinberg (Keaton), the attorney faced with the bizarre and harrowing task of establishing formulas to calculate the value of human life. Tucci, playing a bereaved husband fighting to make Feinberg understand the emotional responsibility of his numbers-oriented work, is the film’s standout. Any scene that Keaton and Tucci share is quietly electrifying.

Miranda July’s Kajillionaire is the closest thing to a commercial project that the performance artist has ever created (A24 is reportedly in talks to buy it). Her first film in nine years, it follows a family team of semi-homeless confidence artists (Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger, and Evan Rachel Wood) who stalk the streets of Los Angeles pulling off low-stakes scams. When they make a new friend (Gina Rodriguez), their tight-knit but mercenary dynamic is thrown out of whack, and that’s when July’s cheerful and mordant perspective comes to the fore. The film is half romantic comedy, half coming-of-age narrative, anchored by a committed Wood (who communicates her character’s strangeness in monotonous dialogue and uncomfortable physicality) and a luminous Rodriguez as the woman who begins to lure her into the real world.

One of my most anticipated films at the festival was Sean Durkin’s The Nest, given that it’s the director’s first feature since he broke out at Sundance in 2011 with the enthralling thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene. His new project is a slower-burning tale, but a thematically rich one, starring Jude Law and Carrie Coon (both doing career-best work) as a married couple whose partnership starts to rot after they move into a sprawling British mansion in the 1980s. Though Durkin is telling a fable about the personal toll of a decade of greed, The Nest never comes off as too broad or ghastly. Its horrors are subtle, its moments of cruelty embedded in throwaway lines of dialogue or grim glances.

Finally, Edson Oda’s Nine Days has high potential for this year’s coveted Audience Award. Reactions out of its first screening ranged from rapturous to highly skeptical, perhaps befitting a work that is, if nothing else, deeply sincere. Oda’s hero is a somber clerk (Winston Duke) at a sort of spiritual way station, who evaluates souls in a nine-day competition. The prize they’re vying for is the chance to be born, and the script takes these stakes very seriously. Duke is a magnetic star, and I enjoyed some of the sci-fi world-building, but I could never quite get on Nine Days’ level.

Though that film is set in a fantastical world, it reminded me most of more realist, equally precious indie dramas such as Zach Braff’s Garden State (a Sundance breakout of its own, way back in 2004). I mean that comparison both positively and negatively. Sundance has long been a proving ground for a certain kind of earnest indie crowd-pleaser, and as Hollywood continues forging ahead into the streaming era, it’s comforting to know that brand of story still exists.

David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.