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...
