Aurelia Butler

This documentary about the enduring legacy of Nushu, an ancient, secret language developed by women in southern China, raises more questions than it successfully answers.Throughout history, women have survived the stifling strictures of patriarchy by using their own codes of communication — be it intergenerational secrets, whisper networks or gestures legible only to other women. Several centuries ago, in Jiangyong County in southern China, women went a step further, inventing an entire language that they used to write songs, poetry and furtive missives to one another.This fascinating language, Nushu, is the subject of the documentary “Hidden Letters,” though if you’re expecting an illuminating deep dive into its history, you’ll be disappointed. The director, Violet Du Feng, uses Nushu mostly as a cursory framing device for a broad portrait of gender relations in modern China, structured around the stories of two Nushu practitioners: a divorced museum guide, Xin Hu, and a soon-to-be-married musician, Simu Wu.The brief epigraph that opens the film, introducing Nushu, doesn’t mention when and in which region the language emerged, or how exactly it was developed. As the film goes on, haphazard scenes raise more questions without providing answers. Glimpses of business meetings about the need to commercialize Nushu lack any context on who stands to benefit from such a plan. We hear a tutor at a regressive “princess camp” for girls praise Nushu as an embodiment of the camp’s values, but it’s not clear how this applies to a script that was developed for sororal solidarity in the face of repression.“Hidden Letters” compels when it dwells in the everyday lives of its two leads, capturing the stray misogyny leveled at them by their partners, fathers, bosses, customers and even strangers. Like a totem from their ancestors, Nushu evidently helps these women reckon with their own lives and ambitions. But the film’s attempts to connect the past and the present feel too glib, lacking the force of historical detail.Hidden LettersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

Based on a sex scandal that sent waves throughout Chile in the early 2000s, the film looks at the meaning of victimhood and the impotence of black-and-white systems of justice.In the opening minutes of “Blanquita,” an adolescent boy, the victim of a child sex ring prone to violent breakdowns, is deemed psychologically unfit to testify against his abusers, terminating the case.Enter Blanca (Laura Lopéz), an 18-year-old single mother with a major chip on her shoulder. Living in a foster home for victims of sexual violence, Blanca is regularly surrounded by damaged, disadvantaged souls; her own life has been far from easy.Encouraged by Manuel (an excellent Alejandro Goic), the aggrieved priest who runs the foster home, Blanca claims to have been a victim of sex trafficking and charges a senior politician of imprisonment and rape — a single strand in a larger conspiracy that traces back to the Pinochet dictatorship. As the case heats up, Blanca and Manuel are ordered to back down — sometimes aggressively, as mysterious cronies terrorize the duo with intimidation tactics. Facts emerge that poke holes in her story.Based on a criminal case that sent waves throughout Chile in the early 2000s, “Blanquita” looks at the meaning of victimhood and the impotence of black-and-white systems of justice.Unfolding like a David Fincheresque procedural and doused in gloomy grays and blues, the film, by the writer and director Fernando Guzzoni, may seem provocative to some in the context of #MeToo and its popular mantra to “believe women.”That’s because Blanca, an unflappable figure who likes to party and slings profanities with machine-gun-like speed, doesn’t square with the stereotypical understanding of a victim. Her methods of righting wrongs aren’t traditional either.In one scene, a female politician offering Blanca support discusses the case with Manuel, noting that he clearly loves his foster children. He snaps, “Here, love means housing, infrastructure, psychologists, teachers” — not the conceptual kind she’s referring to. Blanca, like Manuel, has had enough with the empty platitudes and promises of the most powerful; interested in results, not moral righteousness, she dares to play them at their own game.BlanquitaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

This quirky classic has been made all the stranger by the decision to turn it into an ill-conceived metaphor about fascism.“Shoot the puppet!”By the time a Fascist hard-liner barks this death threat in “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a stop-motion animated version of the children’s classic, you might be wondering if its impish little marionette is going to escape in one piece. At that point, Pinocchio has been threatened by scoundrels, run over by a car, lost body parts to fire and targeted by none other than Benito Mussolini. “These puppets, I do not like,” Il Duce says in a cartoonish accent right before ordering a henchman to take out Pinocchio. It’s a scary world, after all.Written by Carlo Lorenzini under the pen name Carlo Collodi, “The Adventures of Pinocchio” was published in serial form beginning in 1881 and turned into a children’s book two years later. Surreal and violent, it opens with an enchanted piece of wood that ends up in the hands of a poor woodcutter, Geppetto. He intends to make a marionette so that he can “earn a piece of bread and a glass of wine.” Instead, he creates Pinocchio, a disobedient puppet who yearns to be a boy, runs away and is jailed, almost hanged and, after being transformed into a donkey, nearly skinned. He also kills a talking cricket with a hammer.The movies seem to be going through a curious mini-Pinocchio revival: a live-action version of the story from the Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone (with Roberto Benigni as Geppetto) opened in 2020; and Robert Zemeckis’s reimagining of the tale, which combines live action and animation (with Tom Hanks playing Geppetto), arrived in September. Certainly it’s easy to see why del Toro, a contemporary fabulist given to baroque and lovingly rendered nightmarish visions, was attracted to Collodi’s novel. It’s an odd and quirky fantasy — and far grimmer and more unsettling than Disney’s sublimely animated 1940 film suggests.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.As weird as the story is, it’s been made all the stranger by the decision to turn it into a metaphor about fascism, a conceit that is as politically incoherent as it is unfortunately timed. (Del Toro directed it with Mark Gustafson and shares script credit with Patrick McHale.) The movie was, of course, finished before this year’s Italian general election, which brought to power a party whose roots trace back to the ruins of Italian Fascism. Even so, the real world casts a creepy shadow over the movie, which never explains the horrors of that period and instead largely uses Fascism’s murderous ideology as ornamentation.The movie opens in the midst of World War I shortly before a plane — it’s unclear from which country — drops a bomb on Geppetto’s young (human) son, Carlo (voiced by Gregory Mann, who also plays Pinocchio). Fast forward to the 1930s, and Geppetto is still in mourning when he carves Pinocchio, who magically comes to life. Before long, the puppet is up to his familiar mischief, making his acquaintance with a loquacious, charm-free cricket (Ewan McGregor) and meeting the locals, some of whom — including a priest and a rampaging Mussolini toady — raise their arms in Fascist salute. They’re all puppets, get it?The movie’s visuals, including its character design, were inspired by the lightly phantasmal, jauntily sinister illustrations that the artist Gris Grimly created for a 2003 edition of the Collodi book. Instead of the soft, rounded limbs and inviting, humanoid face of Disney’s Pinocchio, the character here is unequivocally wooden, with arms and legs that evoke pickup sticks and a pointy nose and spherical head that look like a carrot stuck in a pumpkin. The meticulous animation has stop-motion’s characteristic haptic quality, so much so you can almost feel the character’s rough and smooth surfaces, the burl of his form as well as the grain.In its ominous tone, its dangerous close calls and multiple deaths, this interpretation of “Pinocchio” cleaves closer to Collodi’s original tale than Disney’s does, although like that earlier film, it tends to tip the scales toward sentimentality, particularly in its conception of Geppetto. (It also adds some tuneless songs, a mistake.) Pinocchio is still an agent of chaos who, by not behaving like a good child ostensibly should, brings grief and even danger to himself and to Geppetto. Yet, in the end, nothing makes Pinocchio more wholly, recognizably human than his disobedience and repeated mistakes, something this movie grasps.Pinocchio is caught between the inhuman and the human for most of his episodic adventures, which is crucial to his singular mix of charm and menace. That helps explain the durable appeal of Collodi’s story, and it also makes del Toro and company’s decision to set the tale in Fascist Italy all the more baffling and disappointing. It’s evident that the filmmakers wanted to create a different, tougher and putatively more serious Pinocchio than the Disney version that has been lodged in the popular imagination for decades. But the movie’s decontextualized and disturbingly ill-considered use of Fascism is reductive and finally grotesque.Guillermo del Toro’s PinocchioRated PG for death, child peril and fascism. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Brendan Fraser plays an obese writing instructor reckoning with grief and regret in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film.Charlie is a college writing instructor who never leaves his apartment. He conducts his classes online, disabling his laptop camera so the students can’t see him. The movie camera, guided by Darren Aronofsky and his go-to cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, also stays indoors most of the time. Occasionally you get an exterior view of the drab low-rise building where Charlie lives, or a breath of fresh air on the landing outside his front door. But these respites only emphasize a pervasive sense of confinement.Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the script), “The Whale” is an exercise in claustrophobia. Rather than open up a stage-bound text, as a less confident film director might, Aronofsky intensifies the stasis, the calamitous sense of stuckness that defines Charlie’s existence. Charlie is trapped — in his rooms, in a life that has run off the rails, and above all in his own body. He was always a big guy, he says, but after the suicide of his lover, his eating “just got out of control.” Now his blood pressure is spiking, his heart is failing, and the simple physical exertions of standing up and sitting down require enormous effort and mechanical assistance.Charlie’s size is the movie’s governing symbol and principal special effect. Encased in prosthetic flesh, Brendan Fraser, who plays Charlie, gives a performance that is sometimes disarmingly graceful. He uses his voice and his big, sad eyes to convey a delicacy at odds with the character’s corporeal grossness. But nearly everything about Charlie — the sound of his breathing, the way he eats, moves and perspires — underlines his abjection, to an extent that starts to feel cruel and voyeuristic.“The Whale” unfolds over the course of a week, during which Charlie receives a series of visits: from his friend and informal caretaker, Liz (Hong Chau); from Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young missionary who wants to save his soul; from his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and embittered ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). There is also a pizza delivery guy (Sathya Sridharan), and a bird that occasionally shows up outside Charlie’s window. I’m not an ornithologist, but my guidebook identifies it as a Common Western Metaphor.Speaking of which, Charlie is not the only whale in “The Whale.” His most prized possession is a student paper on “Moby-Dick,” the authorship of which is revealed at the movie’s end. It’s a fine piece of naïve literary criticism — maybe the best writing in the movie — about how Ishmael’s troubles compelled the author to think about “my own life.”Perhaps Charlie’s troubles are meant to have the same effect. He becomes the nodal point in a web of trauma and regret, variously the agent, victim and witness of someone else’s unhappiness. He left Mary when he fell in love with a male student, Alan, who was Liz’s brother and had been raised in the church that Thomas represents. Mary, a heavy drinker, has kept Charlie away from Ellie, who has grown into a seething adolescent.All this drama bursts out in freshets of stagy verbiage and blubbering. The script overwhelms narrative logic while demanding extra credit for emotional honesty. But the working out of the various issues involves a lot of blame-shifting and ethical evasion. Everyone and no one is responsible; actions do and don’t have consequences. Real-world topics like sexuality, addiction and religious intolerance float around untethered to any credible sense of social reality. The moral that bubbles up through the shouting (and the strenuous nerve-pumping of Robert Simonsen’s score) is that people are incapable of not caring about one another.Maybe? Herman Melville and Walt Whitman provide some literary ballast for this idea, but as an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, “The Whale” is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.Aronofsky has a tendency to misjudge his own strengths as a filmmaker. He is a brilliant manipulator of moods and a formidable director of actors, specializing in characters fighting their way through anguish and delusion toward something like transcendence. Mickey Rourke did that in “The Wrestler,” Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” Russell Crowe in “Noah” and Jennifer Lawrence in “Mother!” Fraser makes a bid to join their company — Chau is also excellent — but “The Whale,” like some of Aronofsky’s other projects, is swamped by its grand and vague ambitions. It’s overwrought and also strangely insubstantial.The WhaleRated R for abjection. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

To our chief critics, news that “Jeanne Dielman” topped the magazine poll was a welcome jolt. If only there had been more room for the weird and messy.Last week, the British film magazine Sight and Sound released the results of its decennial poll of what it calls “the greatest films of all time.” In 1952, the first year the magazine conducted its survey, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic “Bicycle Thieves” was voted No. 1. Ten years later, it was supplanted by Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” which held that position until 2012, when it was knocked from its berth by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” This year, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 tour de force, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” supplanted “Vertigo,” shocking the world (OK, some movie people). The Times’s chief film critics discussed the poll and what it means.A.O. SCOTT Before the poll results were published, I was prepared to let loose with a rant about the nullity of list-making, the barbarism of conducting criticism by vote and the utter emptiness of the idea that one movie could be the best of all time.Don’t get me wrong: I still believe all those things. (And also, less high-mindedly, I’ve always been a little hurt that Sight and Sound never asked for my 10-best list.) But the ascension of “Jeanne Dielman” to the top spot was a welcome jolt to the critical system.MANOHLA DARGIS I never expected that Akerman’s brilliant, formally austere, intellectually uncompromising, three-hour-and-21-minute slow burn about an alienated Belgian housewife who turns tricks — which Akerman directed when she was 25 — would have more support than the usual old-school favorites. I mean, wow!Still, I wonder what Akerman, who died in 2015, would have made of this. It’s worth noting that she didn’t contribute to the previous poll. The day that this latest one hit, Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound’s managing editor, tweeted that when the magazine asked Akerman to contribute to a different survey in 2014, she replied, “I don’t really like the idea, it is just like at school.” Akerman said she’d think about it but didn’t understand this desire to classify everything, adding, “It is tiring and not really necessary to do these kinds of things.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.It almost feels insulting to include Akerman in this exercise, and yet human beings are invested in creating and maintaining hierarchies, so canon formation feels inevitable.SCOTT We do love to rank and sort! This year, Sight and Sound expanded its reach, soliciting ballots from more than 1,600 critics, almost twice as many as in 2012. (The directors’ poll is a separate undertaking, in which Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” captured the top spot.) As with some of the recent Oscar victories, you can see evidence of generational and other demographic shifts. There were two films directed by women on the 2012 list, and only one by a Black director. This time around there were nine women — including two films each from Akerman and Agnés Varda — as well as seven by African and African American filmmakers, including Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, Barry Jenkins and Djibril Diop Mambéty.Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” topped the directors’ poll conducted by Sight and Sound.Warner Bros., via Associated PressThere has been some predictable grumbling about how this inclusiveness must be a sign that political concerns have overtaken aesthetic judgment, a claim that indicates either bad faith or proud ignorance about the social bearings of art. The bigger shock to me is that it took so long for the greatness — and the influence — of movies like “Jeanne Dielman,” Varda’s “Cléo From 5 to 7,” Barbara Loden’s “Wanda,” Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” and Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” to be recognized in this forum.To me, and to many of the voters, I suspect, those movies clearly belong in the company of more established classics like “Citizen Kane,” “Vertigo” and Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story.” But the presence of newly consecrated masterworks also changes our understanding of the old ones, refreshing them with new meaning. You see new patterns and affiliations when the poignant household observations of “Tokyo Story” are in conversation with the rigorous attention to domestic alienation in “Jeanne Dielman.”DARGIS I think that’s exactly right. Akerman and Ozu and Renoir and Burnett are all giants. That said, I think the overall list is too narrowly shaped by respectable, consensus favorites from two familiar traditions: Hollywood and the art film. That pretty much defines my selections, too (I’ll share them below), and I wish I’d made room for weird, messy, disreputable movies, for a genre masterwork like George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” a movie that is forever lodged in my being, and for more avant-garde filmmakers.Much of this is about the creation of taste and how films are categorized and elevated, packaged and sold, and how and when they cycle in and out of favor. “Citizen Kane” dominated for so long not simply because it’s a masterwork, but also because Welles was a film martyr who legendarily fought Hollywood, and he was a ubiquitous cultural presence as film studies were becoming institutionalized. Importantly, “Kane” was repeatedly shown on broadcast television, and it was a repertory-house staple. Availability also may help explain why “Vertigo” — which was restored in 1996 to wide acclaim — rose to the top in 2012.I assume that availability at least partly clarifies why there is just one silent movie on the critics’ Top 10: Dziga Vertov’s 1929 “Man With a Movie Camera.” Scandalously, there are only nine silent movies total on the entire list of 100 films, none made before the 1920s. If this list looks different than it did 10, 20, 30 years ago, it’s less because critics and directors are now hewing to some phantom politically correct agenda; it’s because of factors like the decline in rep houses, the rise of film festivals, shifts in home entertainment, changes in the industry and in film schools. The mainstreaming of feminist film theory helped “Jeanne Dielman,” but surely so did the fact that it’s now streaming, including via the Criterion Collection.I also assume that D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (which tied for 93rd place in 2012) fell off the list not because the poll’s contributors are in P.C. lock step or worried about rebuke. Rather, the kind of spurious formalism that long dominated film discourse — and which insisted that the racism in Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” was less important than his artistry — is no longer tenable to many of us. There are, after all, many other filmmakers to celebrate instead. It’s notable that for this poll, only the directors showed love for Roman Polanski, choosing “Chinatown” as the 72nd greatest — it hasn’t changed in 10 years, but everything else has.Anne Wiazemsky in “Au Hasard Balthazar,” directed by Robert Bresson. Cinema VenturesSCOTT Back in 1952, when the first Sight and Sound poll was published — heavy on silent films, by the way, since the other kind had only been around for 25 years or so — the academic discipline of film studies did not exist. Like literature before it, film has in the decades since been partly annexed by classroom study. I suspect that many critics under 40 first encountered a lot of these movies that way, including “Jeanne Dielman,” which is a staple of the syllabus in courses on feminist film, European art cinema and the tradition of the avant-garde.One thing that hasn’t changed, at least among critics, is the tenacity of the auteur idea: the assumption that film is above all a director’s art. The canon of auteurs has expanded beyond the certified Old Masters of classical Hollywood, Japanese and European cinema. Some of those guys have at least for now been pushed into exile — we miss you, Howard Hawks — to make room for new consensus figures like Akerman, Varda, Wong Kar-wai and David Lynch. But the auteur principle remains durable, perhaps partly as a protest against the hegemony of I.P.-driven corporate “cinema.”The directors’ list is in some ways more populist, with more room for genre. The critics are still a bit wary of horror, science fiction, comedy and animation, which is represented for the first time with two films by the great Hayao Miyazaki. It does seem strange, though, to contemplate a survey of all of film history that leaves out Walt Disney and Chuck Jones.DARGIS I wish that Jones had made the cut, though Warners, his old studio, continues to keep him alive in some fashion, just as Disney makes sure that Walt maintains a grip on our hearts, minds and wallets. The industry takes care of those it can exploit, another reason I contributed to the poll: I want people to discover other movies. So, while I share Chris Marker’s 1992 reservation about the poll partly because favorites change (though mind you, he did single out “Vertigo”), here are my current 10 beloveds in order: “Au Hasard Balthazar” (Robert Bresson), “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola), “Jeanne Dielman,” “Flowers of Shanghai” (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), “The Gleaners and I” (Varda), “Tokyo Story,” “Killer of Sheep,” “Little Stabs at Happiness” (Ken Jacobs), “There Will Be Blood” (Paul Thomas Anderson) and “Shoes” (Lois Weber).So, Tony, what would you have submitted?SCOTT I thought you’d never ask! Picking just 10 movies is a brutal discipline, and I’ll try to pretend that I’m voting before knowing how everybody else did. Here’s a list I might have submitted, in chronological order: “The Gold Rush” (Charlie Chaplin); “La Terra Trema” (Luchino Visconti); “What’s Opera, Doc?” (Chuck Jones); “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (Mario Monicelli); “La Dolce Vita” (Federico Fellini); “Cléo From 5 to 7” (Varda); “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” (William Greaves); “Do the Right Thing” (Spike Lee); “Paris Is Burning” (Jennie Livingston); “Happy as Lazzaro” (Alice Rohrwacher).Let’s check back in 2032 and see how it all holds up. More

Veterans like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs and first-timer filmmakers like Randall Park made the cut, as did films about Ukraine.Nothing has been easy for the Sundance Film Festival. It’s been thwarted by pandemic complications, management upheaval and a business that is undergoing an identity crisis. But the confab will finally return to the snowy mining town of Park City, Utah, in January for the first time in three years with a slate of films it hopes will announce to both Hollywood and the rest of the world that independent filmmaking is back.Culled from a record 4,061 feature submissions, Sundance 2023, set to begin Jan. 19, will be filled with veteran filmmakers and those just starting out, subjects big and small, and a host of urgent topics. Stalwarts like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs are returning to their roots with new films, while studios will unveil their fare.A24 is premiering “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” from the director Raven Jackson and producers Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski, among others. Searchlight is screening “Rye Lane” from Raine Allen-Miller. Amazon has “Cassandro,” the documentarian Roger Ross Williams’s first foray into fiction filmmaking, and Focus Features is showing A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One” in the U.S. dramatic competition.Brooke Shields (Disney), Judy Blume (Amazon), Michael J. Fox (Apple) Willie Nelson and Little Richard are all getting the documentary treatment, while subjects like the Ukrainian war and films both by and about Iranian women are being explored via multiple entries in multiple genres.“A lot of the filmmakers are looking at relationships: family, work, institutions — things we often look to for stability in unstable times,” said John Nein, Sundance’s senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives. “In the program, there is a reflection of an age of anxiety in terms of the relationships we have with traditional institutions. There are all these ways of exploring just how tenuous those relationships can be.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.Indeed, Daisy Ridley plays a woman obsessed with her mortality in one of several films opening the festival, “Sometimes I Think About Dying”; Jonathan Majors stars as an amateur bodybuilder struggling to find human connection in “Magazine Dreams”; and Susanna Fogel directs Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun in “Cat Person,” based on the popular New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian.With anxiety comes antiheroes, who abound in films this year, the programmers say. These include Randall Park’s directorial debut, “Shortcomings,” about a cynical 20-something (Justin H. Min of “After Yang”) who traverses the country with two buddies looking for the ideal connection, and Sachs’s “Passages,” which challenges audiences with the terrible decisions made by the lead character (played by Franz Rogowski). Holofcener, who often traffics in the world of anxiety, has reteamed with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for “You Hurt My Feelings,” the story of a novelist whose long marriage is upended when she overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) giving his honest reaction to her latest book. It also hails from A24.Among documentaries, the filmmaker Luke Lorentzen follows an aspiring hospital chaplain on a yearlong residency in “A Still Small Voice,” which the director of programming Kim Yutani called “one of the more fascinating journeys I saw this year.”It’s all happening at a time of transition for Sundance. The institute’s chief executive, Joana Vicente, only joined the group in September 2021, a few months before the festival was rocked for the second year in a row by Covid-19 and was forced to shift in January to a virtual format in light of the rise of the Omicron variant. Five months later, the festival director Tabitha Jackson announced her departure after just two years at the helm. She has since been replaced by the former New York Film Festival executive director Eugene Hernandez, who stepped into the role in November but will not oversee the event until 2024, the organization’s 40th anniversary.“It was less than ideal,” Vicente said. “But I actually look at these past two years as incredibly successful festivals where we launched incredible films, some of which went on to win the Academy Awards,” she said, referring to “CODA,” the 2022 best picture winner. “We reached audiences in ways that we had not reached before, people who could not afford to come to Sundance, who thought Sundance maybe was not for them: film lovers, film students were able to connect and to discover these films.”Sundance’s virtual platform allowed patrons from all around the country to access films that previously had been available only to those who trekked to the snowy mountain town of Park City. The 2022 festival received some 818,000 unique visitors to its online portal during its 10-day run. For 2023, of the 101 features screening at the festival, 75 percent will be made available to view remotely.“We’re definitely prioritizing the in-person experience,” Vicente added. “But we are also continuing to build on what digital affords us in terms of reach and accessibility.”Similar to 2022, when Sundance screened films on a pressing news topic — a documentary and a feature film on the pre-Roe underground abortion network the Jane Collective — this year, the programmers added three films made by Iranian women and two that chronicle the conflict in Ukraine, ripped-from-the-headlines subjects that are likely to prompt heady conversations.In the U.S. dramatic competition, “The Persian Version” tells the screenwriter-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz’s story about a large Iranian American family that gathers for the patriarch’s heart transplant, only to have a family secret uncovered. “Shayda,” produced by Cate Blanchett’s company Dirty Films, is Noora Niasari’s feature debut about an Iranian mother who finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her daughter when her estranged husband returns. And “Joonam,” competing in the U.S. documentary competition, tracks director Sierra Urich’s investigation into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.In the world documentary competition, Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” from “Frontline” and the Associated Press, chronicles a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged town and their struggle to document the atrocities. “Iron Butterflies,” from the director Roman Liubyi, investigates the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. Three men with ties to Russian security services were convicted of murder by a Dutch court, but they are unlikely to be arrested.“The excitement I have around this program is significant,” Yutani said. “I think the offerings take a viewer on a complete roller coaster. There are a lot of films that are going to really strike people in a personal way and touch them. I also think there are some real thrills. So I encourage people who are coming to the festival to take chances.” More