Comment on Sundance Film Festival: The thrum of thrill seeking

PARK CITY, Utah — Every January at the Sundance Film Festival, a movie or two will pop, exciting a cinematic congregation that descends on this resort town praying for the next big thing and at times finding it. No single title has dominated this year’s event, yet after a slow start that had some writing off the event before it really got going, good and great movies — from coming-of-age tales like “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” to documentaries like “Prophet’s Prey” and “Welcome to Leith” — affirmed that, once again, this was the place to be. Richly packed with archival material, including interviews with the performer and some of her intimates, the movie tracks this American genius — crowned the “high priestess of soul” — from her early years as a classically trained prodigy through the civil rights movement and into her later exile, creating an affecting political portrait of an American artist at odds with her country and herself. In the intensely creepy “Prophet’s Prey,” the director Amy Berg offers an overview of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a polygamous Mormon sect that exists as a world apart in several states. The real horror story in “Welcome to Leith” proved scarier than the fictional boos in “The Witch,” a period tale about a colonial family in New England that breaks away from a settlement with bloody consequences. The writer and director Robert Eggers skillfully torques the tension with shrieking music, eerie silences, shock cuts and one hard-charging goat, but never breaks the skin of his sleek surfaces. Famuyiwa blithely traffics in toxic stereotypes and some dubious comedy (there’s a deadly shooting played for laughs and a corrupt black Harvard graduate), only to then wag a finger at the audience for ostensibly buying into the kind of stereotypes the movie has just deployed. The writer and director Marielle Heller, working from Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel and using some lovely animation (and a little help from the great cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb), pulls off the tricky feat of honoring Minnie’s sexuality without exploiting it or her. The unpromising title and catalog description for Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” kept a lot of critics away from the first public screening, but the good word and a bidding war brought them running, laughing and sniffling.