Today sees the kick-off of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and despite the increasingly corporate nature of the festival, and sometimes questionable selections (how many mediocre star-driven dramedies do we need?), it’s still one of the most important dates in the cinephile calendar, one that discovers countless talents both in front of and behind camera and that so often sets the tone for the moviegoing year to come (and beyond: Best Picture nominees “Boyhood” and “Whiplash” both premiered at the festival in 2014).
The film’s top award for fiction features, the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, isn’t as prestigious as the Palme d’Or, but it’s still important and increasingly so in the last few years. But for every Oscar-nominee that’s gone from Park City to the big stage, there’s a Grand Jury Prize winner that left Utah and was almost never heard of again.
So to mark the start of the festival, we’ve delved back and watched every one of the films that’s taken the top award in the last 31 years (including a number of years where the award was shared), and ranked them from worst to best (and yes, it says “Best to Worst,” but the opposite just reads weird in a headline: it’s not the end of the world, y’all!). Take a look at our verdicts below and let us know your own favorites in the comments, plus stay tuned over the next couple of weeks for our own extensive Sundance coverage to find out who’ll be winning the award in 2015.
35. “Waiting On The Moon” (1987)
Admittedly, 1987 wasn’t the most jam-packed line-up in the history of the festival, but even so, with films like “Hoosiers” and “River’s Edge” as competition, it’s pretty odd that the jury went for the staggeringly dull “Waiting On The Moon” as their top pick that year. Detailing the relationship between Gertrude Stein (Linda Bassett) and Alice B. Toklas (Linda Hunt), it’s almost entirely free of drama or understanding of Stein and Toklas’ work, with director Jill Godlimow seemingly more interested in the picturesque scenery than anything else. Character actor great Bruce McGill livens things up as Ernest Hemingway briefly, but otherwise this feels like a snoozefest of a TV movie, which isn’t entirely surprising, as it was made for PBS’ “American Playhouse” series.
34. “The Trouble With Dick” (1987)
Almost entirely forgotten even by the standards of some of the early Grand Jury Prize winners, there’s probably a reason for “The Trouble With Dick” having fallen between the cracks of Sundance history beyond its lack of distribution (the company that bought the film went under before they could put it out). Following a struggling sci-fi writer who starts to lose his grip on reality after having affairs with both his landlady and her daughter, it’s got some ambition to it (interspersing low-budget science-fiction sequences with the main narrative), but comes across as a slightly amateurish sex farce most of the time. Unavailable for years, you can check the whole thing out on Vimeo, should you so desire…
33. “Precious: Based On The Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire” (2009)
Sod’s law that one of the most successful films to win the top prize at Sundance (it received six Oscar nominations, winning two, and with a haul of $45 million is the top-grossing Dramatic Grand Jury Prize winner) is also one of the worst. Lee Daniels’ adaptation of Sapphire’s (fictional) misery memoir has moments of power, thanks mostly to mighty performances from Gabourey Sidibe and the Oscar-winning Mo’nique, but Daniels’ crass, over-the-top tastelessness and throw-everything-at-the-wall over-stylization makes the whole a pretty painful experience .
32. “Smooth Talk” (1986)
Providing a breakthrough role for Laura Dern (who’d appear in “Mask” a few months later and “Blue Velvet” the following year), “Smooth Talk” unfortunately hasn’t aged well. Though it’s based on a Joyce Carol Oates short story, the film about a precocious teenage girl (Dern) keen to explore her sexuality who’s wooed by a dangerous stranger (Treat Williams) is reminiscent more of a Lifetime movie than something more challenging, veering too close to histrionics and melodrama in places. Director Joyce Chopra does at least pull back to something more restrained in the closing stages, but it’s still worth noting more for Dern’s excellent performance than for anything else.
31. “Public Access” (1993)
Technically adept for such a low-budget film but notable more for the promise it held than for satisfying in and of itself, “Public Access” is today remembered only as the debut of “The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men” director Bryan Singer. “The Visit” by way of Hitchcock, the film tells the story of an enigmatic drifter (Ron Marquette) who turns a small town upside down with a local cable show. It’s admirably ambitious but doesn’t have the narrative know-how to make anything of its premise. That said, Singer does show the handle on tension and atmosphere that would serve him well with follow-up “The Usual Suspects.”
