The 13 Best Films of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival

Tom Paul can finally exhale. At the end of each November, for more than 20 years, the New York-based sound designer turns nocturnal. Forgoing sleep means he’ll have just enough time to complete the sound edit and mix for the multitude of films he was hired to work on that are premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the most recent edition of which wrapped on Sunday.

“Giving Voice” has won the Festival Favorite Award, selected by audience votes from the 128 features screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Andy Samberg time-loop comedy “Palm Springs” broke sales records (by the cheeky sum of 69¢), and “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” inspired a mini mob scene at an otherwise star-starved Sundance. But in the end, the film that defined the 2020 edition of America’s most important indie-movie showcase was a #MeToo revenge thriller called “Promising Young Woman.”

Filmmaker Tabitha Jackson has been named the incoming director of the Sundance Film Festival, succeeding outgoing director John Cooper.

The Sundance Film Festival awards are underway.

PARK CITY, Utah — What do “Reservoir Dogs,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Clerks” and “Wet Hot American Summer” all have in common? The Sundance Film Festival.

Anne Hathaway enjoyed a rare public night out with her husband, Adam Shulman, on Monday night. 

Sony Pictures Classics has teamed with Sony’s Stage 6 Films to oversee the global release of Heidi Ewing’s feature narrative debut “I Carry You With Me (Te Llevo Conmigo),” a gay love story about two men who immigrate to the United States. The deal follows the movie’s enthusiastic reception at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The romantic drama debuted to multiple standing ovations in Park City, where it was shown in the NEXT section. It will be released later this year.

The tale of the McDonald’s Monopoly-game heist was one hell of a story. Indeed, it seems to have been too much story for “McMillions,” a documentary series premiering at Sundance ahead of a bow on HBO, to tell — even with the benefit of six episodes.

Benh Zeitlin hasn’t made a film in seven years since he exploded onto the scene with his Best Picture Oscar-nominated “Beasts of the Southern Wild” in 2013. Coming out of hibernation, the director’s “Wendy,” a take on J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Sunday. Well, was his eagerly anticipated followup worth the wait?

Imagine a high-ratings, high-stakes game show that trivializes a convict’s life-or-death fate for public consumption. As wild as it sounds, a version of this reality TV entertainment apparently really exists in modern-day Iran, where writer-director Massoud Bakhshi’s “Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness” is set, and where a wildly popular edition of it has been airing for nearly a decade.

Amazon Studios has bought “Uncle Frank,” an acclaimed drama about a closeted gay man forced to come out to his Southern family in the 1970s. The film debuted this weekend at the Sundance Film Festival.

Back home in Bogota, teen brothers Carly and Mateo — played by siblings (and Disney Channel veterans) Mateo and Moisés Arias — are metal-blasting, skateboard-riding punks, and reluctant partners in crime. Carly, the sensible one, can’t prevent Mateo from dynamiting a dollhouse.

Writer-director Danny Madden’s “Beast Beast” clatters to life with organic percussion: a stick rat-a-tatting against an iron fence, a skateboard scraping on concrete, a rifle pinging bullets against a defenseless tin plate. Together, these sounds combine into jazz, despite the discordance of the three teens making such a ruckus.

After two days of buzzy cameos out and about in Park City, Hillary Clinton finally took the main stage at the Sundance Film Festival.

A study by the Time’s Up Foundation and USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has found that women and people of color are vastly underrepresented at film festivals worldwide.

PARK CITY, Utah — At long last, a movie based on Twitter. Well, a movie based on an article based on Twitter. OK, a movie based on an article based on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and a partridge in a pear tree.

Taylor Swift arrived at this year's Sundance Film Festival in style and was met with a really warm welcome.