For ten days each January, in the snowy town of Park City, Utah, the year in independent cinema is set. The 2012 Sundance Film Festival was true to that promise and provided attendees with a slew of films that are sure to be not only among the year’s best, but in the hunt for awards come Oscar time next year.
Along with Peter Sciretta, I was once again deep in the trenches of Park City – battling bus schedules, lack of sleep, snow, slush and more – to see as many movies as possible to try and get an idea of what the rest of 2012 holds. And it’s looking good.
We all know that the next few months hold an unprecedented offering of big budget blockbusters but companies like Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC, Magnolia and more all bolstered their upcoming release schedules by purchasing some of the best films of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The official awards have been handed out, but what were our favorites?
After the jump read about the best films of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Read More »
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The Lord of the Rings saved the West Memphis Three. It sounds like a crazy statement but one of the many things a viewer takes from Amy Berg‘s breathtakingly detailed and effective documentary West of Memphis is that co-producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh spent a lot of time, and even more money, to assist in the legal defense, new investigations and expert testimony which eventually lead to the 2011 release of the West Memphis Three, three men accused of murdering three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. Jackson and Walsh got a lot of their money from The Lord of the Rings so, put two and two together, and the statement seems less crazy.
Jumping off where Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky took off with their Paradise Lost documentary trilogy, Berg’s film makes Purgatory, the latest of Berlinger and Sinofsky’s movies, feel elementary. It expands greatly on all of the revelations on that film, and provides new ones of its own that were filmed as recently as January 12, 2012. Whereas the first Paradise Lost was the definitive documentary on the beginning of this massive, controversial case, West of Memphis is the definitive documentary on its conclusion. Read More »
One Oscar winner, an Oscar nominee and the actor who made the EGOT famous simultaneously elevate the quirky family drama Predisposed. Melissa Leo plays a drug addicted mother whose son, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is forced on a madcap adventure on the most important day of his life. On his way to drop mom off at rehab, he’s taken hostage by a a crazy drug dealer (Tracy Morgan), takes oxycontin, is forced to parent his little sister and even takes part in a Revolutionary War reenactment.
Co-directed by first time feature director Phil Dorling and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner from their short of the same name, Predisposed is extremely ambitious and, at times, succeeds in fulfilling those promises thanks in large part to fantastic performances by the three leads. Read More »
The Sundance Film Festival prepared to come to a close for 2012 tonight as the festival held its some of its last screenings and mounted an awards ceremony to celebrate the best films of this year’s festival. The biggest jury prizes went to Beasts of the Southern Wild (reviewed here) and Eugene Jarecki‘s war on drugs documentary The House I Live In.
The Surrogate (reviewed here) took an Audience Award, as did the doc Searching for Sugar Man (reviewed here) and the film Valley of Saints. The full list of awards is below. Read More »
There’s a running joke amongst comedians that people get into stand-up just so they can be TV stars. It works for some but for others, it seems like stand-up might be a better route to get into film directing. It worked for Woody Allen, Louis CK and now it’s worked for Mike Birbiglia, a successful touring comedian who turned his one man autobiographical off-Broadway show Sleepwalk With Me into a feature film. The movie just had its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Birbiglia stars as Matt, a struggling stand-up comedian who has been with his girlfriend Abby (Lauren Ambrose) for eight years. When the couple begins to have problems, Matt uses that to finally find his voice, which in turn makes the relationship even more difficult. Then there’s the tiny matter of Matt dangerously sleepwalking every night, all of which actually happened in Birbiglia’s life.
Co-starring James Rebhorn, Carol Kane, Marc Maron and produced by Ira Glass (This American Life), Sleepwalk With Me is incredibly clever, well-directed and laugh out loud hilarious. The message isn’t all that new, but the journey there definitely is.
Watch a clip from the movie as well as a video blog featuring myself and Jordan Raup from The Film Stage after the jump. Read More »
Like the dreams of Inception, The Words is a story about a story within a story. On the top level, there is a plot featuring Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde. In the middle, there’s Jeremy Irons, Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana. And on the bottom, there’s Ben Barnes and Nora Arnezeder. With direction by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, the film’s structure is its second most interesting aspect. When The Words is at its best, those three tales are weaving together to speak about the decisions people make and how living with them can be the hardest thing imaginable.
The Words will be the closing night film of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on Friday and while it won’t win any awards, it’s an entertaining, literature-centric story that will keep you interested and guessing. Read More »
While Sundance is best known for movies that sell for millions and stir up controversial topics, most of the movies are simple, well-written, well-acted films that are solid, but often get lost in the mix. Lynn Shelton‘s follow-up to Humpday, called Your Sister’s Sister, is one of those movies. Another is GOATS, the debut feature of Christopher Neil.
Your Sister’s Sister features Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt as estranged sisters Iris and Hannah who end up at their family’s old cabin when Iris’ best friend Jack (Mark Duplass) heads there to get over the one-year anniversary of the death of his brother. The three characters then develop what I’d like to call a “love triangle” but is more like a “love right angle” that flirts on and off with adding that third line.
GOATS stars David Duchovny, Vera Farmiga and Ty Burrell as the parental figures of a young teenager named Eliis, played by Graham Phillips. Ellis lives a care-free, hippie lifestyle in Arizona with his mom (Farmiga) and her groundskeeper named Goat Man (Duchovny) but when he decides to go back east to the prep school run by his estranged father (Burrell), he finds himself torn between two very different set of parental ideals.
Read more about both movies after the jump. Read More »
Craig Zobel‘s Compliance made me want to walk out of the theater. Not as a reaction to the film’s quality, however. On the contrary, Compliance is actually quite accomplished. Actually, it’s so effective it made me want to walk out because the real life events portrayed were so enraging, so unbelievable, so easily avoidable and painted such a bad light on humanity that I could almost not stomach sitting in the theater.
In the film, a man posing as a police officer calls a local fast food restaurant and accuses an employee named Becky (Dreama Walker) of stealing from a customer. The man asks her manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) to at first detain, and later search her employee. From there things devolve to almost unbelievable and upsetting depths. I say “almost unbelievable” because the film is based on true events that happened at a Kentucky McDonald’s in 2004. (In the film, however, McDonald’s isn’t mentioned for obvious reasons.)
At the first public screening of Compliance, Zobel was screamed at by audience members and accused of misogyny. Other Q&A’s also featured awkward and uncomfortable questions/comments as people wrestled with the disturbing events in the film. Read more about the film and its purpose after the jump. Read More »
