PARK CITY, Utah — Park City got a hot blast of star power when Jennifer Lopez arrived last Sunday night to launch the Bill Condon’s blazingly emotional adaptation of the Tony-winning stage musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Lopez plays dual roles as a movie actor and an arachnoid goddess and she sauntered into the Sundance premiere channeling the power of both. Jeans and snow boots? Acceptable attire for mere mortals. Lopez wore a cobweb-and-lace see-through gown and heels. Her weather-defying glamour was so dazzling that everyone in my shuttle the next morning was talking about it — while also being boggled that Lopez’s little-known co-star, the monomonikered Tonatiuh, somehow stole his share of the spotlight.
Sundance was created to launch talents like Tonatiuh, a young actor from Los Angeles, who’s fantastic as a prison inmate who papers his cell with posters of Lopez’s fantasy icon. I’d seen his face once before in the background of the Netflix action movie, “Carry-On.” Now, I’ll watch a movie just because he’s in it. This festival is where stars are born, even if it’s gotten harder for an indie film to get funded without at least one recognizable name.
That’s always been a little true. If a certain video-store clerk hadn’t gotten his producer’s acting teacher’s wife to pass a script to Harvey Keitel, “Reservoir Dogs” might not have secured the cash, cast or clout to premiere at Sundance in 1992. How different would today’s Hollywood look if no one had ever seen that dizzying opening scene in which a breakfast table of crooks debates Madonna? How many potential Quentin Tarantinos never met their Keitel?
Tonatiuh, left, and Diego Luna in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
(Sundance Institute)
Fandom is a word more associated with glossy superhero blockbusters, but it was one of the through lines of this year’s festival. Film after film tugged at the fragile balance between object and admirer, the vital symbiosis between artist and audience, the vulnerability of knowing that any towering career — even Lopez’s — could topple over without anyone there to applaud. In “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Tonatiuh functions as both Lopez’s disciple and her defender. When his cynical cellmate (Diego Luna) suggests that Lopez’s character suffers from childhood trauma, Tonatiuh groans, “Ugh, let her be.”
I adored “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” That it left Sundance without distribution is a shock. At least director James Griffiths’ “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” a major crowd pleaser, will be in theaters by the end of the next month. It’s about a socially awkward lottery winner named Charles (Tim Key), a chatterbox with the patter of a Borscht Belt comic, who offers his favorite folk duo nearly $1 million to play a reunion show. (Devotees of the British game show “Taskmaster” will recognize Key from season one.) There’s a catch: The gig is on a remote beach for an audience of one. Worse, the bandmates, Herb (Tom Basden) and Nell (Carey Mulligan), are estranged exes. Herb sold out and got famous; Nell quit the business to sell artisanal jam. Neither is able to ignore a briefcase of money dangled by their No. 1 fan.
Herb spends most of the movie scowling, as he suspects that Charles wants the duo to reunite on stage and in bed. Eventually, Herb snaps: “You’re like a cut-price Geppetto,” he snarls. Yet, whenever Key’s lonely widower drops his desperation to amuse, there’s years of pain on his face. Key, Basden and Griffiths have been trying to expand their original BAFTA-nominated short, “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island,” for 18 years. The feature needed a star of Mulligan’s scale to get made. I’m glad it did.
Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden in the movie “The Ballad of Wallis Island.”
(Alistair Heap / Sundance Institute)
That Geppetto insult was dangling over my head when I sat down for “Lurker,” yet another fraught comedy about artists and fans. An underground musician (Archie Madekwe) risks his own rise to fame when a manipulative Instagram stalker (Théodore Pellerin) hitches his own future to the singer’s ascent. Tense, uncomfortable and choke-on-your-own-anxiety funny, this first feature by Alex Russell, a writer on “Beef” and “The Bear,” was one of most skillful delights of the festival, even if the movie itself seems on the fence about whether it believes in talent or opportunism. At its most on-the-nose, “Lurker” repeatedly plays the same song: the tinkling 1960’s R&B ballad “I’m Your Puppet.” But every time you hear it, someone else is yanking the strings.
“Opus” heightens the stakes by pitting a pop megastar named Moretti (John Malkovich) against a magazine journalist, Ariel (Ayo Edibiri). A debut horror film by the former GQ writer Mark Anthony Green, it had a sprinkling of wit and insight plus a surprising amount of Malkovich sex appeal. Still, it didn’t seize the moment to say much of anything. Does Moretti start knocking off Ariel’s colleagues because they’re too obsequious or not slavish enough? The movie opened strong but came to feel like a tribute band that exists only because they came up with the perfect punny name. (Not you, burger-themed metal band Mac Sabbath — you’re perfect.)
There’s more death and saxophones in Gala del Sol’s “Rains Over Babel,” a mythological fantasia set in a Colombia nightclub that doubles as a portal to heaven (and hell). One track of the plot follows the bar’s owner’s son (Jose Mojica) and a luckless gambler (Celina Biurrun) on a dangerous mission to rescue the town’s most popular jazz-band leader (Jacobo Velez) from a maze of bondage mask-clad minotaurs. Meanwhile, back on the dance floor, a diva named La Flaca (Saray Rebolledo) has the power to control death itself. One puke-smeared drug overdose refuses to accept that this is his last party.
It’s a lot of movie, even without the sassy talking lizard or the drag performer (William Hurtado) who disobeys his pastor father by yanking on a light-up afro wig and strutting onstage to slay. The film, a sequined hat on a hat on a hat, can feel a bit overburdened by literary allusions. (There’s a character named Dante.) Still, from costumes to make-up to ambition, the razzle-dazzle is impressive.
In Argentinean filmmaker Laura Casabé’s “The Virgin of Quarry Lake,” a name-dropper incites violence just being adjacent to celebrity. This glancingly supernatural teen nightmare gets grisly when a social climber named Silvia (Fernanda Echevarría) barges into a small clique and claims to have all sorts of famous friends. Silvia’s braggadocio wins her the attention of a heartthrob named Diego (Agustín Sosa) — and the wrath of local beauty Natalia (Dolores Oliverio), who has always believed that Diego was hers. Imagine “Carrie” with a spoiled girl.
Set in 2001, the movie hangs out in the internet cafes that are just coming into popular use. Yet, there’s already a sense that this new millennium is collapsing. The electricity won’t stay on, the water is permanently off, the bloodstain in front of Natalia’s house gets bigger by the day. If you don’t like gore, I’d close your eyes for the bludgeoning that takes place during the first five minutes. The film ends in a rush, simply dropping the mic and running off. Before it does, however, “Quarry Lake” is confident and gripping.
The most mortal tale of hero worship was Sophie Hyde’s semi-autobiographical “Jimpa,” an endearing family drama about an iconic gay-rights activist, Jim (John Lithgow), and his non-binary grandchild Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), who he affectionately calls his “grandthing.” Jimlives in Amsterdam; Frances was raised in Australia with their mom, Hannah (Olivia Colman), who was left behind when her dad set out to be his truest self.
The film starts with both Frances and Hannah rhapsodizing about Jim from a distance, saying all the things you’re supposed to say about marginalized people who have lived their lives courageously. They leave out that Jim is also selfish, close-minded and flaky: a conversational tyrant who controls the volume of every chat. Frances simply doesn’t know him that well. Mason-Hyde, the director’s own child, is a natural performer, while Colman’s Hannah has decades of experience suppressing her resentments . Playing a filmmaker based on Hyde herself, she claims it’s possible to make a movie that celebrates her iconic father’s life without any conflict.
To Hyde’s credit, her script zags away from sentimentality as much as it zigs. Things drag a little in “Jimpa’s” last stretch, but you come away believing that an uplifting sermon is no way to honor your idol. That kind of fanboy speech shuts down difficult questions. Good movies ask them.
