Our film critic picks 6 movies to make time for at this year’s Sundance Film Festival

Three years have passed since some of us last set foot in Park City, Utah, where the Sundance Film Festival has been on COVID-mandated hiatus — at least as an in-person event — since January 2020. Not that the festival has exactly hibernated in the meantime: In 2021 and 2022, digital screenings and panel discussions helped sustain this annual event and its movie-hungry audiences. One of those pandemic-impacted editions even produced the first Sundance-premiered title (“CODA”) to win the Oscar for best picture.

Even so, what a bummer. Anyone who’s ever trudged through the snow from screening to screening — or slipped on black ice mid-transit — knows that there is no experiential substitute, virtual or otherwise, for a festival as physically immersive and meteorologically unforgiving as this one. And so it’s a thrill to return to Sundance this year, masks and vitamin C tablets at the ready. Will it be a good, bad or average festival? Time will tell. The overall quality of the movies at Sundance, as at any festival, can vary from year to year, but any movie projected on a big screen stands a better chance of being a more indelible, more affecting and more lasting experience.

The six movies I’m recommending below are among just a small number of features I was able to see ahead. I’m looking forward to seeing (and thinking and writing about) much more in the days to come, but these already persist in my memory — and, if you seek them out in Park City or beyond, I hope they will also persist in yours.

The multigenerational tale “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.”

(Jaclyn Martinez / Sundance Institute)