Best of Sundance 2023: top films from this year’s festival

Directors: Nick Lieberman and Molly GordonCast: Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, Jimmy Tatro, Patti Harrison, Ayo Edibiri, Amy Sedaris, Caroline Aaron, Nathan Lee Graham, Owen Thiele, Alan KimThe feature debut of co-directors Nick Lieberman and Molly Gordon, the loose-limbed, quite funny Theater Camp is one of the more winning efforts from Sundance this year. When the inspirational founder (Amy Sedaris) of AdirondACTS, a summer theater camp in upstate New York, is sidelined, her clueless son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) takes over, upending the lives of longtime instructors Rebecca-Diane and Amos (Gordon and Ben Platt, two of the film’s four writers). With potential foreclosure looming, the future of the camp seemingly hinges on the debut of their annual original musical.Theater Camp isn’t as flat-out anarchic as Meatballs or as silly as Wet Hot American Summer, both obvious inspirations. Nor is it as rigidly framed as the work of Christopher Guest. (While there aren’t direct-address interviews, occasional interstitials frame the movie as a documentary.) No matter. Theater Camp has the type of loving skewering that can only come from smart, highly observant collaborators who know that one of life’s keys is to take work seriously without taking oneself seriously. It wrings smiles and laughs from immediately recognizable and relatable characters, riffing on everything from vocal warm-up exercises (“Wolf Blitzer has a blister on his upper lip”) to the notion of mentholated tear sticks being the equivalent of doping for actors. [Brent Simon]