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Have Sundance Movies Lost Their Danger?
As the Sundance Film Festival approaches, a look at its legacy reveals how much the promise of danger has been the calling card of independent cinema.
When “Down and Dirty Pictures,” Peter Biskind’s indie-film sequel to “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” was published in 2004, the book argued that the independent-film movement was entering its sunset era just as the ’70s glory days of the New American Cinema had come to an end. The brilliance of the movie is its fantastic and fearless ambivalence: Lili Taylor, dressed like a downtown version of one of the Bowery Boys, plays Valerie as a lumpen loser who believes so fervently in her manifesto of patriarchal injustice that she’s at once psycho and visionary. Back in 2020, there were actually two of them: “Promising Young Woman,” a movie that feels like an underground exposé of what “nice guys” do at frat parties, and one that dances on the high wire of heartbroken revenge (I think it’s Carey Mulligan’s greatest performance); and “Zola,” Janicza Bravo’s head-spinning tale of two sex workers on an odyssey into the abyss.
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