The best movies at Sundance 2015 weren’t ‘Sundance movies’

This year, Sundance's juries handed out trophies like they were hosting a middle-school soccer tournament.

Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in 'The End of the Tour.'

It wasn’t a surprise when Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s stylized tearjerker about a high school senior (Thomas Mann) whose life is changed when a classmate gets cancer, took the Sundance Film Festival’s two biggest awards over the weekend. Called “The Fault in Our Stars for Criterion Collection fetishists” by one critic, the movie both manipulates and flatters its audience, peppering its adolescent weepie with references to Werner Herzog’s filmography and the “composed films” of Michael Powell.

This year, Sundance’s juries handed out trophies like they were hosting a middle-school soccer tournament: After recognizing the creepy precolonial horror movie The Witch for directing, the tender but unsentimental coming-of-age story The Diary of a Teenage Girl for cinematography, the self-explanatory The Stanford Prison Experiment for its screenplay, and the stylish but hopelessly disorganized ’hood drama Dope for editing (an absurd place to recognize the film, which is desperately in need of recutting), the dramatic competition jury tacked on a prize for “collaborative vision” for the dystopian sci-fi of Advantageous. The world cinema dramatic and world cinema documentary juries each added a pair of optional awards, and the main documentary jury padded their list out with three special prizes: One for vérité filmmaking, one for social impact, and one for “breakout first feature.” Everyone’s a winner!

Even so, some of Sundance’s best movies seemed to fly under the radar, or at least got set aside in a festival that prizes the shock of the new above all else. That Guy Maddin or Michael Almereyda or James Ponsoldt or Aardman animation has made another great feature is not news, at least not in the way the emergence of a thrilling new voice can be. But the movies that stayed with me at Sundance this year aren’t those that grabbed me by the collar but the ones that stuck around in my head for days after the fact, growing deeper and richer as they continued to take hold.

James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, which is drawn from the book-length account of David Lipsky’s five-day road trip/interview with David Foster Wallace, seemed like such a car crash waiting to happen that its greatness took a while to sink in. As Wallace, Jason Segel has a kind of puppyish amiability that belies his genius, while Jesse Eisenberg’s Lipsky radiates intellectual intensity; only one of them has something to prove. Lipsky and Wallace engage in a barely concealed battle of wits, sometimes friendly and sometimes less so. We begin, naturally, on Lipsky’s side: We want him to coax, or if necessary, trick, Wallace into revealing himself; otherwise, why bother? But eventually, we start to resent being complicit in Lipsky’s project: There are things about Wallace we don’t need to know. Given that Lipsky’s book was only commissioned after Wallace’s suicide and that The End of the Tour would not exist were Wallace alive to object to it, the movie’s embrace of such issues is thorny, but it’s far preferable to dodging them.

Dodging is what Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, the jury’s choice for best documentary, does. Moselle almost literally stumbled into an amazing story, striking up a conversation on a New York street with a group of six brothers who’d spent the bulk of their lives locked inside an apartment on the Lower East Side. Their father, a Peruvian Hare Krishna, believed so strongly in the outside world as a corrupting influence that he would let the six boys and their elder sister out only a handful of times each year. Their only contact, so to speak, with society, came through watching movies, which the brothers began to recreate on their own, fashioning a Batsuit out of cereal boxes and yoga mats or Sweding their own version of the ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs.

Unfortunately, Moselle found the story, but she didn’t get it all. The Wolfpack is full of odd lacunae; the boys’ father is so absent from the movie’s first section it’s easy to think he might have died. It’s hard to tell if she’s attempting to protect her subjects or lacked the nerve to press them, but the result feels frustratingly unfinished.

No such qualms afflict Pervert Park, a harrowing look inside a Florida trailer park facility for recovering sex offenders. Frida and Lasse Barkefors, who were awarded a special jury prize for “impact,” don’t camouflage their subjects’ reasons for being where they are, which range from truly horrific to almost innocuous. The movie never ventures outside the facility, and the closest thing to an outside voice is a sympathetic therapist. Pervert Park lets its subjects condemn themselves, which they’re more than willing to do. Even at 75 minutes, it’s a grueling experience, but it’s also an unforgettable one.

Rick Alverson’s Entertainment, his follow-up to The Comedy, is a similarly rough ride, though with less purpose. Starring Gregg Turkington (aka anti-comic Neil Hamburger) as a self-loathing standup working his way through a series of desolate dives, it’s a prolonged exercise in stoic miserabilism, effectively daring you to hang with it all the way through. You could say the same about Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room, a dizzying patchwork of nested narratives loosely inspired by the synopses of vanished silent films. Framed by a sequence set on a doomed submarine, itself nestled within a quasi-instruction film on the virtues of baths starring the poet John Ashbery, the movie drills through one narrative to find another beneath, and another beneath that. It’s a giddy delight at first, embracing Maddin’s fondness for the wild abandon of pre-formulaic cinema, but as the movie surfaces and dives without giving you a chance to catch your breath, a kind of underlying anger makes itself felt as well. No wonder the film’s world premiere began with a not-quite-full theater and was punctuated by a steady stream of walkouts.

As far as I know, no one walked out of The Shaun the Sheep Movie, but there was plenty of space in the theater, a result of the weird Sundance calculus by which the world premiere of a feature by one of the world’s greatest animation studios is less of a priority than a movie about transgender prostitutes shot on an iPhone. (As it turns out, Tangerine is pretty great, too.) A loose spin-off from the Wallace and Gromit franchise, Shaun’s wordless stories might be aimed at preverbal tots, but the movie is more Jacques Tati than Teletubbies, an ovine Odyssey that takes in the sights and sounds of an abstracted metropolis: Call it Clay Time. Like The Forbidden Room, or Almereyda’s Experimenter, which uses ostentatious rear projection and a wayward elephant to craft a self-questioning biopic of Stanley Milgram, Shaun isn’t a typical “Sundance movie.” But as it turns out, neither were many of the best movies at Sundance.