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Sundance and other Park City Festivals news, past and future. 
Twelve is about a coterie of superrich teens in Manhattan whose ambition is blunted by their vanity and overweening social climbing. They go around the city saying things like, “My dad told me if I don’t get into Harvard, I have to go to Dartmouth” and “Dad’s so pissed I totaled the Porsche.” Among this crew of largely non-likable little twerps are Molly (Emma Roberts), Chris (Rory Culkin), and White Mike (Chace Crawford); White Mike is the protagonist, a onc...
It's hard to deny that higher education gets a bad wrap sometimes. Lackluster student events, hollow campus causes, (occasionally) crappy college radio, even school food – they all go hand-in-hand with some people's perception of student films. Beyond the food part – because, c'mon, that sneeze guard hardly does the trick – no one here on the Festival staff would agree with the assumption that collegiate-made film is in any way inferior to professional filmmakers’ ...
Thirty-four films were awarded prizes in 29 categories, honoring both veteran and first-time filmmakers from the U.S. to Spain, Cambodia, and beyond.From a spare, gothic-realist thriller (Winter’s Bone, Grand Jury Prize Winner: Dramatic) to a stylized Australian crime thriller (Animal Kingdom, World Cinema Jury Prize: Drama), and from a visceral, soldier’s-eye-view of war (Restrepo, Grand Jury Prize: Documentary) to a gonzo non-fiction satire (The Red Chapel, World Cinema Jury Priz...
Director Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy intimately portrays a slice of John Lennon’s life, just before he leaps into that explosion known as The Beatles. We meet John (Aaron Johnson) as a rebellious yet sensitive teen, who bunks school authorities and bumps heads with his cultured and forcibly subdued aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott Thomas), with whom he lives. John reunites with his mother, Julia (Ann-Marie Duff) and heartbreakingly and thrillingly enters the world of music as he wre...
Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and filmmakers in the former Eastern Bloc are still orbiting the wreckage of collapsed Communism, searching for stories to extract from the rubble. Even dead regimes exert an irresistible gravitational pull. This year's Festival includes several films made in countries that once resided behind the Iron Curtain. Diverse as they are, they each portray worlds in the midst of chaotic change – Poland of the early 80's; a dream-l...
You hear something often enough, and it starts to seem true. And as the directors of Russian Lessons have known for at least as long as the Putin administration has been in power, when you're part of the government-allied Russian media, people believe what you say even if it is rather strange.
As becomes immediately clear in Russian Lessons, investigative filmmakers Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya, the husband-and-wife directors ofthe hard-charging documentary, are not part of the mainstream ...
To cap off Sundance Film Festival U.S.A., which saw eight filmmakers present eight Sundance Film Festival films at eight cities through the country on Thursday, the Festival mothership in Park City hosted the U.S. premiere of the political documentary The Shock Doctrine, followed by a special panel discussion. The film was also simultaneously made available via VOD, extending the Sundance Film Festival radius even further. Based on the best-selling book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine explor...
Regardless of the size and type of a film, music plays a crucial role in setting its tone. Whatever plays over the speakers alongside the image, actors, and script, is going to alter how the audience perceives the movie.
The trick is enhancing the goals of the film, accompanying what the other aspects of the film are doing, while leaving room for the movie itself. A comedy doesn’t just need a funny score – the music could work against what is happening with the characters and ...
Part intimate profile of two determined women, part revealing glimpse into life in Iran, and part pulse-pounding sports film, Kick In Iran follows 20-year-old Taekwondo sensation Sara Khoshjamal-Fekri and her trainer Maryam Azarmehr as they train and fight for Olympic gold. Documentarian Fatima Geza Abdollahyan shoots these two fascinating women in their homes, in gender-segregated gyms, at prayer and play, and finally to the Olympic games in Beijing. Even though Iranian women are still d...
Novelist Russell Banks has been publishing books for nearly 40 years, but in terms of film he’s still something of a newcomer. In 1997, when he was well into his 50s and long suspicious of the business of movies, two of cinema’s most renowned auteurs, Paul Schrader and Atom Egoyan, involved him in the process of adapting his novels Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, respectively. Both films were critically acclaimed, and Banks has remained active within the world of independent fil...
What happens when your pet rabbit turns into a giant, wall-destroying monster? Often the reason people like having pets, other than the fact that they’re cute, is the sense of power and responsibility that comes with taking care of an animal. But what about the control animals have over us? Many shorts in this year’s lineup show just how strong an animal’s influence can be on its owner – from a monkey who possesses magical powers to a puppy that can turn good frien...
186 films. Even if you attended all 10 days of the 2010 Festival, 186 movies (even if 73 of them are shorts) is a lot of movies, and that doesn’t include everything else the Festival and Park City offer: the panels, the trippy, immersive New Frontier on Main installations, the parties, and the snow begging you to frolic in it. There’s a way to not let the Festival’s wealth of culture overwhelm you, though: it’s entirely possible to make your own mini-festival from the Fe...
“Every film in this Festival has to have been a nightmare to get made, and this is no exception,” director Jake Scott said on Saturday after the premiere of his second feature, Welcome to the Rileys. “Though I think ours may have been a bit easier than everybody else’s now that I’ve talked to some people.” Son of Ridley, nephew of Tony, Jake Scott leveraged his familiar capital (dad and uncle serve as executive producers) to make a film of surprising an...
Everything happens somewhere, but in movies, some places don’t matter that much. There are plenty of movies whose characters could encounter the same situations in whatever part of the world they’re in, or whose circumstances have little to do with where they’re from. But there is another kind of movie that lets you feel as if you know a place even if you’ve never been there. The characters are from there, and they talk a certain way. Regionalism is nothing new in ...
Four Lions, the hotly anticipated debut film by British satirist Chris Morris, courts controversy and laughter in equal measure. But what’s most shocking about this madcap comedy about a group of hapless wannabe suicide bombers is how warm-hearted it is. Pitched somewhere between the Three Stooges and The Office, Four Lions follows four British-born jihadists as they bumble and scheme their way to a potentially violent, and inevitably foolish, end. Before the film’s Festival premier...
When Hollywood makes movies about the war in Iraq, location shooting often takes place in Jordan or the deserts of the American Southwest, which provide a safe, if not always convincing, substitute for the real thing. But when Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji embarked on his latest feature film Son of Babylon, he decided that only authentic locations would suffice. The movie, which is playing in the Festival's World Cinema Dramatic Competition lineup, was filmed over 65 days in s...
Director Derek Cianfrance juxtaposes the realistic highs and lows of romance in his moving film, Blue Valentine. The audience first meets Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) just as their marriage begins to unravel. Dean whisks them off to a themed hotel with hopes of reviving the relationship, and just before they arrive, the audience is transported back in time, to witness how the couple first fell in love. As the story seamlessly weaves in and out of past and present, th...
Three documentaries in this year’s Festival approach America’s overseas conflicts from very different angles, yet at heart they are all stories about the human costs of war. For all their differences, these three films – Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo, Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story and Laura Poitras’s The Oath – represent an evolution of the contemporary war documentary. Eight years after the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan...
As two films in the Festival diabolically illustrate, claustrophobia has more than one instigator. Both Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried and Adam Green’s Frozen prey on the primal fear of confinement, and each film follows through on the blunt threat of their titles. In Buried, a man (Ryan Reynolds) awakens to find himself buried alive, with only a cell phone and Zippo lighter to battle darkness, panic, and death. And in Frozen, three college kids find themselves stranded high on a sk...
If it’s true that the most prolific trash talkers in sports are the ones who consistently back it up with stellar play, former NBA superstar Reggie Miller might just be the best trash talker ever. With a relentlessly disconcerting gift for on-court chatter coupled with a deadly jump shot that plagued the New York Knicks and its fans (most notably Brooklyn’s own Spike Lee, with whom Miller shared a celebrated personal rivalry) for most of the 1990’s, Miller was an unsusp...
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