One last Park City roundup

Even as we look forward to next year’s edition in Boulder, Colo., the Sundance Film Festival put us in a reflective mood. It’s been years of cozy snowbound screenings, infuriating shuttle-bus delays and, more often than you’d expect, cinematic discoveries. In going over this year’s crop of standouts, we took turns casting back to our favorite memories of a festival now in transition.

- AMY NICHOLSON

One corner of Sundance was just for the geeks: the Holiday Village Cinemas, a humble quadraplex that hosted press and industry screenings from breakfast till dark. No tickets, no celebrities, no fuss. Pure bliss.

When I first came to Park City, Utah, in 2010, I barely left the Holiday other than to sprint to the grocery store next door for beef jerky and sushi. (Judge me for eating raw fish in a landlocked state, but their nigiri was almost as good as H-Mart’s.) Then as now, I wanted to watch movies until my knees ached.

With a higher concentration of film critics per row than at any other theater, the Holiday was the best place to spot people I only knew by byline. Roger Ebert sat in front of me at “The Runaways.” He had already lost his lower jaw and wore his scarf tightly wound around his neck as though to prop up his smile. I was too shy to thank him for teaching me that a critic should meet a movie where it is — be that an art-house’s niche or a blockbuster’s four-quadrant appeal — and for writing “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” I'd trade my next 200 Sundance star sightings to have that moment back.

I wouldn’t recommend watching a comedy in a room full of critics. One of our weird quirks is we don’t always laugh as loudly as we would with a normal audience, lest we influence anyone else’s opinion about whether a movie is funny. Even so, the festival managed to launch “The Big Lebowski,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “Palm Springs,” “The Big Sick,” “House Party” and “Napoleon Dynamite.” One of my core Sundance memories is tumbling out of the Holiday with a half-dozen colleagues after the press screening of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s vampire mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows” still howling about its sandwich punchline. We couldn't wait to see it again with a rowdier crowd.