My second dispatch from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Nathan Silver’s Between The Temples, Josh Margolin’s Thelma and India Donaldson’s Good One.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES

dir. Nathan Silver, U.S. Dramatic Competition, 112 minutes.

If I told you my favorite film at Sundance was about a grieving cantor who finds his voice again thanks to a relationship with his kooky childhood music teacher, chances are the movie conjured in your head by such a synopsis would bear little resemblance to Between The Temples. Director Nathan Silver’s antsy, anxious comedy stars Jason Schwartzman – who between this and Asteroid City is racking up so many dead movie wives he should audition for Christopher Nolan – as a downcast bundle of neuroses shaken out of his funk by Carol Kane’s loopy, lonely widow, who despite her advanced age has decided she’d like to have a Bat Mitzvah. There are echoes of Elaine May and a little Harold And Maude here, with Sean Price Williams’ gorgeously grainy 16mm cinematography recalling traditions of ’70s cinema, but from more jagged, unexpected angles. This isn’t a movie overly beholden to its influences like The Holdovers was, instead metastasizing similar inspirations into something jarring and original. Co-scripted by Silver and C. Mason Wells, the film feels exciting and free, with John Magary’s propulsive, anarchic editing either stretching out the awkward encounters or clipping them abruptly short, keeping the viewer on the back foot throughout. A graveside erotic interlude of Philip Roth-ian dimensions is already in the running for scene of the year, and any movie in which Robert Smigel plays a rabbi is an automatic must-see.

THELMA

dir. Josh Margolin, U.S. Dramatic Competition, 89 minutes.

94-year-old June Squibb came late to the movies, making her film debut in Woody Allen’s Alice back in 1990. Yet she’s never played a leading role until now, starring as a stubborn matriarch on a mission in writer-director Josh Margolin’s twee tribute to his own grandmother (who we see actual footage of in the closing credits, like this was a celebrity biopic or something.) Squibb stars as a feisty, recently widowed biddy who dotes on her slacker grandson (Fred Hechinger) and gets suckered out of ten grand by phone scammers. Our Thelma does some unconvincing detective work and enlists the assistance of an old friend she doesn’t like very much – the late Richard Roundtree, giving a performance far more dignified than the material – to help her go get it back. Neither the scam operation nor Thelma’s adventure make the slightest bit of sense, cartoonishly undermining the glimpses we get of a more honest picture about aging and the damnable passage of time. There’s touching work here from Squibb and Roundtree, plus expert comic turns by Parker Posey and Clark Gregg as helicopter parents babying both her elderly mother and their underwhelming adult son. Thelma’s not a hard movie to watch but it’s an easy one to resent, given that Margolin had excellent actors and the opportunity to make something real here, instead of a silly fantasy about an old lady doing dumb action movie stuff.

GOOD ONE

dir. India Donaldson, U.S. Dramatic Competition, 91 minutes.

There’s a moment about two-thirds of the way through writer-director India Donaldson’s first feature that’s so deftly played it took my breath away. It’s an offhand line during a boozy, campfire confessional on a Catskills hiking trip taken by seventeen-year-old Sam (Lilly Collias) with her arrogant, pushy father (James Le Gros) and his shambling wreck of a best friend (Danny McCarthy), and it shatters whatever illusions the young girl had left about these older men in her life, serving as a rude welcome to the adult world. But Donaldson doesn’t oversell it – if I remember correctly Collias’ face is half-obscured in the frame – yet the emotional aftershocks resound through the remainder of the film. Everything else in Good One is similarly subtle and well-judged, quietly accumulating character details along the trail and in the spaces between the lines. (As I said to a friend after seeing Annie Baker’s Janet Planet at NYFF last year, I love that Kelly Reichardt is a genre now.) Collias, whose only previous credit was a small role in 2022’s harrowing Palm Trees And Power Lines, is a remarkable discovery, with haunted, watchful eyes that listen better than most more seasoned actresses. McCarthy brings a touching regret to his reflexive loutishness, playing the kind of guy slowly realizing a few years too late that his antics aren’t funny anymore. It’s a striking, assured debut, and very close to a great one.