Best Sundance 2023 Movies: Polite Society, Past Lives, and More
The buzziest and best Sundance 2023 movies opened up new worlds and challenged genre categories, giving us dynamic characters like aspiring stunt woman Ria Khan in the action-comedy Polite Society, or complicated young parent Inez in A Thousand and One.
This year’s Sundance Film Festival premiered some of the most exciting movies coming out this year, screening films in-person in Park City, Utah, as well as online. The selection was vast, though already some have risen to the top after the festival’s first in-person awards ceremony since 2020. The Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition went to filmmaker A.V. Rockwell for “A Thousand and One,” while the World prize went to Charlotte Regan’s “Scrapper.”
Though not every movie that premiered at Sundance won a prize, you can rest assured these will be films that people won’t stop talking about this year as they’re picked up by streamers and studios — and you can keep up with the zeitgeist by delving into the best and most-discussed Sundance movies of 2023 below.
Polite Society
London teenager Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) dreams of doing professional stunts and has an inner fury that doesn’t always measure up to her physical skill — at least until catalyzed to rescue her sister Lena (Ritu Arya) from an awful fate: marriage. Polite Society is a “loving, anarchic mashup of genres (action comedy, heist, martial arts, Bollywood, social horror),” per the plot synopsis, and as a viewer, it’s such a delight to see filmmaker Nida Manzoor (We Are Lady Parts) cleverly fuse all of those elements in her splashy, unique feature debut. The stunts are often funny yet fully intense, capturing that specific brutality between sisters in over-the-top fight scenes. Meanwhile, Lena’s future mother-in-law is played by Nimra Bucha as the ultimate villain, whose cheshire cat smile only makes the dynamic between her and Ria more fun to watch on screen.
Theater Camp
Mockumentary comedy Theater Camp combines a truly perfect cast and an embrace of the cringey theater kid hiding inside all of us into a self-aware, yet ultimately charming spoof. When longtime camp director Joan (Amy Sedaris) becomes comatose, her bro-y son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) reluctantly takes over the camp and must rescue it from dire financial straits, with the help of a crew of camp instructors (Ben Platt, Molly Gordon, Nathan Lee Graham, Noah Galvin, Owen Thiele, and more) who take their work very seriously. (They often spout off lines like, “Acting is remembering, and then choosing to forget.”) Ayo Edebiri’s Janet, meanwhile, is starkly funny as a new teacher with no acting experience and a heavy skepticism of her often insufferable new colleagues. If you love Glee, Camp Rock 2, the Lady Bird musical theater scenes, and Patti Harrison, this is the movie for you.
