That doesn’t make it any less of a cancer-themed tearjerker, perhaps, but it’s also a movie about how we manage, to quote the great Lily Tomlin in Paul Weitz’s “Grandma,” to transmogrify our lives into art. Like “Diary,” Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s beautifully hand-crafted first feature doesn’t just pay lip service to its characters’ reckless creative impulses but actively embodies them in every frame, in the cleverness of its verbiage and the intricacy of its visual design. As for “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” I would never have guessed that a film that looked like a must-avoid on paper - Wes Anderson’s “The Fault in Our Stars” - would instead turn out to be the one that all three of us can really get behind.
I suspect many would argue that Marielle Heller’s tender and evocative “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” deserved more than just a cinematography award, just as others were probably unhappy to see Rick Famuyiwa’s much-buzzed-about “Dope” kissed off with an editing prize - though I gather, Scott, that you weren’t exactly one of them. I was particularly pleased to see the frighteningly gifted first-timer Robert Eggers take directing honors for his eerie colonial gothic “The Witch” - an achievement that reminds me of the time Sean Durkin won this prize for “Martha Marcy May Marlene” (2011), another sharp, suspenseful tale of rural isolation and madness that the jury duly cited for its icily brilliant direction while reserving its top prize for something a bit more crowdpleasing. But it says something, I think, that the jury bestowed several runner-up prizes on a number of excitedly received entries that might well have come out on top in a different year. I had a bit of a hunch that “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” might sweep both the grand jury prize and the audience award, in the now de rigueur winner-takes-all manner of “Whiplash,” “Fruitvale Station” and “Precious” before it (or rather, “Fruitvale” and “Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire,” as they were known at the time). dramatic competition that offered the jury plenty of opportunity to spread the wealth. JUSTIN CHANG: Another Sundance has come to a close, and I think it’s safe to say that this year’s edition was a particularly fine one - distinguished, first and foremost, by a U.S.
All three of them agree: grand prize and audience award winner “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” was one of this year’s finest achievements in Park City. Variety’s top film critics have selected their favorite movies of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, which screened over 123 features in its 17th edition.
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