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

Director: Roger Ross WilliamsCast: Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla De La Rosa, Joaquín Cosío, Raúl CastilloMexican Lucha libre, with its flashy costumes and performative visions of masculinity, has long been ripe for the kind of tender queer storytelling behind Roger Ross Williams’ fiction feature debut, . The film follows the eponymous luchador (played with wounded vulnerability and lithe physicality by Gael García Bernal), who daydreams about telenovelas and is wholly devoted to his mother, as he builds a career for himself as one of the most (in)famous “exoticos” to ever grace the Lucha libre stage.In showing how Cassandro—born Saul Armendariz—turned his own effeminacy and penchant for the dramatic into assets amid an industry that expected their fighters to be villains and losers, the film treads familiar “sports drama” tropes (though, at least here, montages are set to the likes of Celia Cruz and Juan Gabriel). But the incandescent performances (joining García Bernal are the ever-reliable Roberta Colindrez and Raúl Castillo, as well as a luminous Perla De La Rosa), fabulous costumes, and riveting Lucha libre sequences, make for a thrilling film about learning to turn one’s truth to one’s glittering advantage. [Manuel Betancourt]