A grand sense of occasion surrounded this year’s Sundance Film Festival, as the annual showcase of independent cinema celebrated its 40th edition. Now in middle age, Sundance seemed nostalgic for days gone by. A slideshow of photos from festivals past played before screenings; onetime breakouts like Napoleon Dynamite and Mississippi Masala were slotted into the schedule. It was all meant to evoke Sundance’s enduring impact. But in some ways, those reminders had the opposite effect.

It was a little sad to see a picture from 20 years ago—a celebrity, so much younger then, in their cozy winter wear—and remember when Sundance was at the white-hot center of something big, instead of functioning as it does now as a last bastion of an American movie market that is struggling to sustain itself. It didn’t help that the lineup of films—or at least, the lineup of films I saw—was a little lackluster. Several buzzed-about entries disappointed, and only a precious few titles broke out of the pack to establish themselves as early 2024 highlights. 

I Saw the TV Glow, the third feature from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, was the most significant film I saw in Park City, a dark and sad meditation on pop culture obsession and personal identity that moved Schoenbrun toward the vanguard of their generation of filmmakers. It’s bold, complicated art, the sort that Sundance exists to foster and announce to the world. The film went into the festival already under the auspices of A24, and one hopes that revered indie studio will smartly position and package the film to capitalize on its Sundance acclaim. It’s a film that deserves to be seen by a large audience, offering so much fascinating material to be tangled with and analyzed. 

Less complicated, but moving in its own way, was Megan Park’s sophomore film My Old Ass, a sprightly comedy with a wistfulness at its heart. Maisy Stella, whom some might know from her time spent on Nashville but is otherwise an exciting breakthrough actor, plays an amiably messy and self-involved teenager about to move to the city for college. A mushroom trip puts her in communication with her 39-year-old self (played by a prickly and appealing Aubrey Plaza), who urges her to take time to appreciate the bounty of her life as it already is—and warns her against pursuing an impossibly charming love interest played by Percy Hynes White. It’s a raucously funny film and also disarmingly poignant. Amazon/MGM saw the value in it and picked up My Old Ass for a cool $15 million. A theatrical release is planned, which is a relief. My Old Ass ought to speak to both teenagers and grown-ups, wise as Parks is about both stages of life. 

Sundance audiences gave two prizes to the documentary Daughters, from Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, and for good reason. A look at a program that unites incarcerated fathers with their daughters for a formal dance, Daughters is an alternately shattering and hopeful look at family and the prison system. Patton and Rae spent years following their subjects, and the resulting portraits of lives in limbo are intimate and stirring. 

The biggest documentary hits of the festival were more celebrity-driven. Super/Man, about the late actor Christopher Reeve and the accident that left him paralyzed, sold for a reported $15 million—pretty huge for a documentary. Warner Bros. Discovery picked up the film, which might be released by DC Studios, given the Superman connection. 

Will & Harper, about Will Ferrell and his old friend and former SNL colleague Harper Steele journeying across the country as Steele discusses her recent coming out as a trans woman, was a crowd-pleasing smash at the festival. The film, directed by Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar’s Josh Greenbaum, has not sold yet, but one would expect a sale to be sizable in the lead-up to a major commercial release. The film’s greatest strength is the way it grants access to a topic many are deliberately ignorant about. Ideally, Will & Harper—in all its slickness and storyboarded scenes, its movie-star selling points—will invite in the people who most need to hear Steele’s testimony. If the film proves to have the power to change hearts and minds, then we’d imagine the Academy would want to recognize that. 

Yes, it must be acknowledged that Sundance can function as an early awards launch pad, though this year’s slate was relatively quiet on that front. Jesse Eisenberg’s lauded film A Real Pain, about cousins taking a tour of Poland to learn more about their ancestral roots, features a showy performance from Kieran Culkin, who does a sadder tweak on his Succession character’s caustic instability. I was cooler on the film than others; A Real Pain is slighter than expected and is thus easily overwhelmed by Culkin’s high shtick. But again, I’m in the minority—and Searchlight, which bought the film for $10 million, will no doubt campaign hard for Culkin. 

André Holland gives an impressive turn in the semi-autobiographical drama Exhibiting Forgiveness, from painter turned filmmaker Titus Kaphar. As an artist grappling with the psychological damage done by his estranged father, Holland is a wonder of tightly contained hurt and anger. He’s got great scene partners in John Earl Jelks, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Andra Day. The film does not yet have a distributor, though I’m sure some enterprising company will see the promise in Kaphar’s confident debut. Exhibiting Forgiveness is a title that could benefit from another major festival bow—perhaps in a smaller Cannes category this spring, or at Telluride in late summer. 

I’ll also be curious to see what becomes of The Outrun, an artful memoir adaptation in which Saoirse Ronan plays a woman who travels to a remote island in Orkney as she struggles to stay sober. The film, lyrically directed by Nora Fingscheidt, is a great showcase for Ronan’s elastic range. She handles both the loud mess of her character’s boozy past and the stillness of her present tense with dexterous subtlety. The Outrun was well received in Park City, but it was perhaps not flashy enough to enjoy sustained chatter. It too might get some juice from subsequent festival stops; Cannes’s Directors Fortnight or Un Certain Regard sections would be good fits, I think.

Beyond those titles, things got rocky. Too much of Sundance this year seemed representative of an unseemly new era of filmmaking, one more concerned with vibes and meme moments than good old-fashioned storytelling. Opening-night anthology film Freaky Tales is an exhausting Tarantino pastiche that aims for cool above all else and falls woefully short. Ditto, sadly, for Love Lies Bleeding, an erotic thriller (of sorts) about a gym employee (Kristen Stewart) falling in love with a bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) and running afoul of local crime lords. The film looks and sounds great, but its plot is familiar and formulaic. It attempts to shock us with gore and absurdity, but we can see too much of the strain. (Stewart’s other film at the festival, Love Me—a millennia-spanning romance between a satellite and a buoy whose digital consciousnesses have long outlived humanity—was also disappointing in its curiously narrow gaze and clunky emotional exposition.) 

I was similarly put off by A Different Man, in which Sebastian Stan plays a man with a severe facial deformity whose life is upended by something of a miracle cure. The film is dyspeptic and, ultimately, kind of pointless, a petulant little screed about vanity that punishes the viewer’s patience. It’s an interesting concept put mostly to waste as the film fumbles for meaning. 

All told, I left Utah feeling a little glum. Sure, I Saw the TV Glow and My Old Ass were both riveting in their particular ways, and there was a host of other good stuff to savor—the aching performances at the center of Ghostlight, Jay Will’s strong work as a doomed prodigy in Rob Peace, the dazzling technique (if not storytelling) of Steven Soderbergh’s ghost movie Presence. But there were also a lot of letdowns. 

Thank technology (for once) for the Sundance digital platform, then, which screened many films online during the last days of the festival, when many of us were already back home. That’s where I caught Daughters, and it’s where I watched Thelma, a lively and decidedly mainstream comedy about an elderly woman, played by 94-year-old June Squibb in her first-ever lead role, who sets out across the San Fernando Valley to track down the men who cruelly scammed her out of $10,000. Writer-director Josh Margolin ingeniously tweaks action- and crime-movie clichés to tell this rather quaint little story. But Thelma is not overly saturated in reference-y irony. It’s sincere and sensitive, gracefully acknowledging the losses and indignities of later life, but also its pleasures. 

Thelma is, in some ways, a quintessential kind of Sundance movie: idiosyncratic, crowd-pleasing, and offering a cherished character actor the rare chance to show us the full breadth of their ability. It’s not the most daring of films; it breaks little new ground in terms of form or style. But it’s sturdy and warming, which was just what was required after so many days spent trekking through the snow to see movies that failed to deliver. Sundance is by no means in existential crisis—this was likely just an off year—but the industry surrounding it has been in a bad state of flux. Who knows, then, what the future of the festival holds. Let’s at least hope that more and better independent cinema is being made right now, so that Sundance 2025 will prove, once and for all, that things can actually improve in one’s 40s.