The coming-of-age story has a fairly consistent structure: A young person living a difficult home life must learn to grow past certain obstacles, including possibly forgiving their parent(s), if they hope to reach maturity. Two films in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition are trying to retool the genre through different eyes.…

“American Star” is an art house variant of the familiar story of an old hitman facing his mortality while doing what might be his last job. Filmed on the gobsmackingly gorgeous Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, it takes a soft-spoken, slowed-down contemplative approach to the material, omitting things whenever it can, rarely depicting…

Music docs have become an increasingly prominent part of the Sundance landscape, but it truly felt like the programmers for 2024 intentionally sought out films about people pushing the boundaries of the form this year. Far more than the one-hit wonder label that’s often incorrectly applied to them, Devo altered…

The 2024 U.S. Dramatic Competition program at Sundance this year featured the expected variety of voices from the independent film scene, stories from different backgrounds, classes, races, and genders. The three films from the program in this dispatch could all be called character studies, but what’s invigorating is how wildly…