Robert Redford helped found the Sundance Film Festival, and through the years, it has become the preeminent independent film festival in the United States. Through the years, many of the most successful films in this Utah festival end up getting wide releases, and some end up as Oscar contenders.
Of course, for every award-winning film that ends up getting Oscar attention, there are films that no one talks about anymore. That is the downfall of an indie film. This also means that when a movie does end up standing the test of time, it beat all odds to reach that level. Here are 10 Sundance movies that aged perfectly well.
10 MEMENTO (2001)
Christopher Nolan is one of the few filmmakers in Hollywood who can get just about anything he wants to make any movie he wants. While he is known to mainstream audiences for the Dark Knight Trilogy, most of his brilliance has been original films.
His second movie came in 2000 with the mind-twisting Memento. The film starred Guy Pearce as a man with short-term memory loss who was trying to solve the murder of his wife, and the scenes from the movie played out in reverse order. The groundbreaking film screened at Sundance in 2001.
9 HOOP DREAMS (1994)
Hoop Dreams is one of countless Sundance Film Festival movies to end up as part of the Criterion Collection. The film is a documentary directed by Steve James that details two African-American high school basketball players with dreams of becoming NBA stars.
Neither player made it to the NBA, but the film was more about the difficulty of inner-city kids to climb out of their poor neighborhoods to make something of themselves. The film won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival and is one of the most successful documentaries to come out of the festival.
8 FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994)
One of the most successful movies to ever come out of Sundance was the Mike Newell-directed Four Weddings and a Funeral, and he entered it to screen at the Sundance Film Festival. Shot for just $4.4 million, it ended up grossing almost $250 million thanks to the surging popularity of Hugh Grant.
It went on to pick up a Best Picture nomination at the 1995 Academy Awards, and Grant won the Golden Globes Award for Best Actor. The film follows Charles (Grant) and Carrie (Andie MacDowell) through four weddings and a funeral as they start to fall in love.
7 THE USUAL SUSPECTS (1995)
Bryan Singer had a fantastic career for many years, getting to make some very big budget high profile movies like X-Men and Superman Returns. However, he proved his worth on a smaller independent film he made and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995.
That film was The Usual Suspects, and it was an unusual heist movie told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. The mystery movie had a fantastic cast, including Kevin Spacey, Kevin Pollak, Benicio del Toro, and Gabriel Byrne, and ended up winning two Oscars.
6 RESERVOIR DOGS (1992)
Quinton Tarantino got a chance to work on the script for his debut film, thanks to the Sundance Institute in 1991. It was through this association that he was able to get many of his cast members, including Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel.
Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was shut out of all the awards, and left with no distributor (although Miramax picked it up shortly afterward). It is now considered one of the seminal and greatest independent films of an era that brought indies back to life.
5 GET OUT (2017)
The newest movie on this list, the staying power of Get Out is still to be determined, but for now, it remains seen as not only a fantastic horror movie but a cultural masterpiece in an era where the horrors it displays are all too real.
It also made Jordan Peele a star, as he proved to have a master's eye at directing horror and took the idea of racism and turned it on its head. The movie premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and ended up nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture.
4 BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)
The Coen Brothers have had more success than almost any other independently minded filmmakers in history. Their movies have a combined 48 Oscar nominations, winning an impressive seven. They even won a Best Picture Oscar for their film No Country for Old Men.
It all started in 1984 with a crime movie called Blood Simple. Compared to many of their later films, it seems a little simple, but that is the beauty of their films — they take simple people in simple towns and throw them into unimaginable situations. It won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
3 BRICK (2005)
Rian Johnson has made a Star Wars movie with The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson was nominated for an Oscar in 2020 for his brilliant mystery flick, Knives Out. However, when looking at the director's career, the best film he ever made was arguably a small Noir film called Brick.
Brick won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. The film starred Joseph Gordon Levitt as a high school student investigating the murder of his girlfriend, and everyone spoke in a Film Noir slang.
2 AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000)
In 2000, Christian Bale starred in the movie American Psycho, and it was almost like he was trying out for the role of Bruce Wayne, something he picked up a few years later. In this film, Bale starred as Patrick Bateman, a business executive who was also a serial killer.
The film debuted at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically less than four months later. The film was polarizing, thanks to its graphic scenes of violence, but it was a huge success and made Bale a major star.
1 MOON (2009)
Duncan Jones is the son of David Bowie, but he wanted to make his name without piggybacking off his dad. It worked, as he got a chance to make a massive big-budget movie in 2016 with the videogame adaptation Warcraft. The film that proved he was a director on the rise was his debut film, Moon.
Sam Rockwell stars in the movie as an astronaut on a three-year mission to the moon, where he served along with only an AI called GERTY. Rockwell is one of the only human actors to appear in the film, and Johnson used mostly miniatures rather than CGI. It premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where Sony picked it up for release.
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