Premios del Festival de cine de Sundance (IndieWire)

Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic:
Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik (film page).

Grand Jury Prize, Documentary:
Restrepo, directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington (film page).

World Cinema Jury Prize, Dramatic:
Animal Kingdom, written and directed by David Michôd (film page).

World Cinema Jury Prize, Documentary:
The Red Chapel (Det Røde Kapel), directed by Mads Brügger (film page).

Dramatic Audience Award:
happythankyoumoreplease, written and directed by Josh Radnor (film page).

Documentary Audience Award:
WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, directed by Davis Guggenheim (film page).

World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award:
Contracorriente (Undertow), written and directed by Javier Fuentes-Leõn (film page).

World Cinema Documentary Audience Award:
Wasteland, directed by Lucy Walker (film page).

The Best of NEXT:
Homewrecker, directed by Todd Barnes and Brad Barnes (film page).

Directing Award, Dramatic:
3 Backyards, directed and written by Eric Mendelsohn (film page)

Directing Award, Documentary:
Smash His Camera, directed by Leon Gast (film page)

World Cinema Directing Award, Dramatic:
Southern District directed and written by Juan Carlos Valdivia (film page).

World Cinema Directing Award, Documentary:
Space Tourists, directed by Christian Frei (film page).

Waldo Scott Screenwriting Award:
Winter’s Bone, written by Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini. (film page).

World Cinema Screenwriting Award:
Southern District, written and directed by Juan Carlos Valdivia (film page).

Documentary Editing Award:
Joan Rivers—A Piece Of Work, edited by Penelope Falk

World Cinema Documentary Editing Award:
A Film Unfinished, edited by Joëlle Alexis (film page).

Excellence in Cinematography Award, Dramatic:
Obselidia Cinematographer: Zak Mulligan (film page).

Excellence in Cinematography Award, Documentary:
The Oath Cinematographers: Kirsten Johnson and Laura Poitras (film page).

World Cinema Cinematography Award, Dramatic:
The Man Next Door (El Hombre de al Lado) Directors and cinematographers Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat (film page).

World Cinema Cinematography Award, Documentary:
His & Hers Cinematographers: Kate McCullough and Michael Lavelle (film page).

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic:
Sympathy for Delicious, directed by Mark Ruffalo (film page).

Special Jury Prize: Documentary:
GASLAND, directed by Josh Fox (film page).

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Documentary
Enemies of the People, directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath (film page).

Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking:
Drunk History: Douglass & Lincoln, directed by Jeremy Konner

Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking:
The Six Dollar Fifty Man, directed by Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland (New Zealand)

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic for Breakout Performance:
Tatiana Maslany, for her role as a starry-eyed teenager in “Grown Up Movie Star.”

Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking:
Born Sweet, directed by Cynthia Wade (USA, Cambodia)
Can We Talk?, directed by Jim Owen (United Kingdom)
Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No, directed by James Blagden (USA)
How I Met Your Father, directed by Álex Montoya (Spain)
Quadrangle, directed by Amy Grappell (USA)
Rob and Valentyna in Scotland, directed by Eric Lynne (USA, United Kingdom)
Young Love, directed by Ariel Kleiman (Australia)

Alfred P. Sloan PrizeL
Obselidia, directed by Diane Bell

Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards:
Amat Escalante, Heli (Mexico)
Andrey Zvyagintsev, Elena (Russia)
Daisuke Yamaoka, The Wonderful Lives at Asahigaoka (Japan)
Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild (USA)

Don’t Smirk, Sundance’s Roots Do Show (The New York Times)

By MANOHLA DARGIS

PARK CITY, Utah — The spin was hotter and the vibe somewhat warmer at the 26th annual Sundance Film Festival here, while the movies were much the same, with good and bad entries promising much and sometimes delivering. Each year the festival, which ends Sunday, takes over this ski town in northern Utah, flooding the snowy, icy streets with some 40,000 attendees. This year, though, it also has a new director in John Cooper, a low-key, long-time Sundancer who took over from another veteran, Geoffrey Gilmore.

For almost as long as it’s been in existence, the Sundance Film Festival has fended off criticism that it has gone Hollywood. It’s no surprise then that its public face, Robert Redford, who created the Sundance Institute in 1981, used Mr. Gilmore’s departure for the company that runs the Tribeca Film Festival to declare again Sundance’s independence. It’s going back to “our roots,” Mr. Redford said at a press conference.

A cynic might note that this return to independence was convenient given the economic crisis: in the last few years half the six major studios have shut down or absorbed their specialty divisions. It is, after all, easier to declare your independence from Hollywood when Hollywood has already walked out the door.

But let us not be (entirely) cynical. For all its problems, the festival remains one of the most important in the world and the foremost launching pad for American independents. The stars were still out in formation, as were the paparazzi, who gave chase to Sandra Bullock (or maybe it was Nicole Richie) one afternoon on the town’s main drag. Yet this year there was also more room for micro-budget filmmakers in a new section called Next.

The idea that Sundance needs to create a sidebar for movies made on the cheap might sound paradoxical if not ridiculous, as was noted by a filmmaker, Daniel Harris, writing on the blog for the rival Slamdance Film Festival (slamdance.com), which takes place at the same time in Park City. “To sidebar low-budget films for their lack of finance makes them look like Special Olympics kids competing in the big show,” Mr. Harris wrote, before going on to encourage filmmakers to boycott the Sundance sidebar in question. As a matter of fact, the Next section did not register as an afterthought: audiences and distributors gravitate to selections with famous names, but as the mostly full theaters show, attention and love — if not always the large deals and press — are lavished on no-name titles too.

Nothing attests to Sundance’s commitment to off-Hollywood more than its documentary selections, which year to year remain its most qualitatively consistent suit. That much was reconfirmed by “Last Train Home,” a beautifully shot, haunting and haunted large-scale portrait by Lixin Fan about an astonishing migration involving 130 million Chinese workers who each year travel by train, boat and foot to return home for New Year’s. Working in a classically unobtrusive documentary style, Mr. Fan, who was an associate producer on an earlier Sundance entry, “Up the Yangtze,” conveys the enormity of this exodus while bringing you close to a family whose fraught efforts to reunite — the parents work in a city, the children are in the country with a grandmother — are symptomatic of a deeper struggle affecting China.

Two other documentaries would make an apt if harrowing pairing: “The Tillman Story,” about the death of Pat Tillman, the National Football League star turned Army Ranger, and “Restrepo,” about an Army outpost in Afghanistan. Directed by Tim Hetherington and the journalist Sebastian Junger, who served as their own cameramen, “Restrepo” takes you deep into the trenches and almost as deep into the mind-set of a platoon that was stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley in 2008. The movie doesn’t push an obvious agenda. But because it establishes such an intimate view of the soldiers, it nonetheless provides plenty to consider, whether the filmmakers are trudging alongside the platoon as it tramps over eerily quiet dirt roads or frantically scrambles during a firefight where bullets and screams eventually give way to tears.

Directed by Amir Bar-Lev, “The Tillman Story” continues the push, initiated by Tillman’s family, to uncover the details surrounding his death from so-called friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004. Even a familiarity with the case — the military initially claimed that he died during a heroic charge against the Taliban, a spurious narrative embraced by reporters and President George W. Bush — does not blunt the power of the movie, which makes its arguments with talking-head interviews, news reports, home movies and redacted documents. The movie hits its political notes well, but its finest achievement is to humanize Tillman, an unassuming man who read Noam Chomsky and, aware that his death might be exploited, smuggled a document to his wife in which he clearly indicated he did not want a military funeral.

The pleasure of discovering other people is one of the great appeals of documentary, as was also touchingly evident in “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child,” from Tamra Davis. Using videos she shot of Basquiat (who died from a drug overdose in 1988) as her creative jumping-off point, Ms. Davis creates a vivid if somewhat rough-edged portrait of an artist who was also a friend. Her familiarity with Basquiat, his struggles as a black artist working in an overwhelmingly, at times hostile white world — there’s a nasty swipe here from the art critic Hilton Kramer that should make your stomach turn — and especially her sense of the downtown New York scene from which Basquiat emerged in the late 1970s give the movie a vibrant pulse.

Ms. Davis’s intimate knowledge of the art and music world of that legendary scene gives her documentary the authentic tang missing in a fiction movie about a different 1970s legend, the rock band the Runways. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, “The Runaways” traces the rough and ready days of this all-girl band, primarily through the relationship between its two star teenage attractions, Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart, very fine) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning, often just as good). While the movie opens on a suitably punk note with a close-up of a drop of menstrual blood hitting the ground, a hopeful sign of some bad-girl attitude, it soon settles into a middle-of-the-road groove turning down the volume when it should go to 11.

Another blast to the 1970s past comes from “Night Catches Us,” the strong feature debut of Tanya Hamilton. Set in Philadelphia in the summer of 1976, the movie centers on two uneasily reunited former members of the Black Panthers, Marcus (Anthony Mackie), a recently returned wanderer, and Patricia (Kerry Washington), who stayed to nurse her wounds. Unfolding in the aftermath of the black power movement but before the mainstreaming of identity politics, the movie wonderfully weds the political to the personal. Like some of the recurrently finest selections at Sundance, this one makes sensitive use of its locations, including the wooden house where Patricia lives and, in one stunning moment that encapsulates cinema’s ability to capture loveliness in a single image, sits on her front porch in a bright orange dress.

The theater wasn’t completely full for Ms. Hamilton’s first public screening, which was disappointing given that Mr. Mackie, who’s emerging as one of the finest actors working in American movies right now, and Ms. Washington, alone should have filled the house. (Mr. Mackie has been at the festival before, appearing in “Half Nelson.”) Sundance might be the premiere showcase for independent cinema, but it’s hard to encourage people to stray from the familiar.

Witness another sturdy directing debut, this one from the actor Mark Ruffalo, whose terribly titled and wanly received “Sympathy for Delicious” is a laugh-spiked drama about a disabled D.J., Dean (a terrific Christopher Thornton, who wrote the script), who wakes one day with the power to heal. Either a modern-day Jesus or a fraud, Dean embarks on a wholly original adventure that is by turns moving, funny and surreal.

Mr. Ruffalo, who plays a priest in “Sympathy for Delicious,” also shows up in “The Kids Are All Right,” from Lisa Cholodenko, the director of “High Art” and “Laurel Canyon,” who returned to Sundance with her best work yet. Pitched between drama and comedy, the movie centers on two lesbians, exquisitely played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, whose world is rocked, with equal amounts of dread and pleasure, when their children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) contact their biological father, a sperm donor turned restaurateur (Mr. Ruffalo, as excellent as the rest of the cast). With characters who are as honest as the movie’s Los Angeles locations, Ms. Cholodenko has created a generous, nearly note-perfect portrait of a modern family that is, as its title suggests, political and insistently independent.

Mumblecore Auteurs Get Ready for Their Close-Up (The New York Times)

By MELENA RYZIK

Let this be a lesson to budding filmmakers everywhere: if you make low-budget, scruffy comedies with a distinct point-of-view long enough, you will eventually attract … other people who like low-budget scruffy comedies with a distinct point-of-view. At least that’s what happened to the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark, the Austin, Tex.-based auteurs of the mumblecore genre (“The Puffy Chair” and “Baghead”). They hit Sundance with their first mainstream film, “Cyrus,” developed for and distributed by Fox Searchlight, this year. The feature, their first to crack 90 minutes (“only because our credits are like five minutes long,” Jay said) was largely improvised; it stars John C. Reilly and Marissa Tomei as a couple whose relationship is threatened by her adult son, Jonah Hill, in the title role. The Bagger liked it and so did many others at Sundance; it won unofficial best-of polls and even had some watchers talking Oscars – pretty heady stuff for a couple of dudes who made their Sundance entrée with what they called their “$3 movie” and cast their parents in the follow-up. The Bagger spoke with them in the plasticized courtyard of a hotel in Park City.

Q: How is Sundance different for you this year?

Mark: We don’t have to sell our movie this year and it’s a lot less stressful. So our only real concern coming in was, are our friends and our existing fans going to like what we did with a lot of money as much as they liked what we did with a little money.

Q: When you say a lot of money, how much are you talking about?

Mark: I don’t think we can say, but the least amount of money a studio can make a movie for. Everyone else in the studio world says cheap, really low budget, but for our it us it was hundreds of times the budget we’d worked with before, thousands of times the budget of what we worked with before.

Q: So how did that affect your filmmaking, aside from the names involved?

Mark: We were maybe even overly careful about maintaining our process, because it’s been me and Jay and four or five other crew members for our other movies. The actors have always outnumbered the crew members, and that puts just an inherent importance on them. We didn’t want to walk onto the set where 80 people are dabbing on them and pulling at their clothes and so we had to basically establish that we’re going to treat every scene as if it’s a nude scene. This is a closed set. Only Jay and I and the other camera operators and a boom op are allowed on set. Everybody else was outside. And then as soon as we start the scene, no make-up touch-ups, no prop touch-ups. Nothing. We’re going to shoot and let our actors finish out.

Q: What did your actors think about that?

Mark: In theory, at the front of the movie, it was YES, that sounds so fun, let’s explore, everybody loves it. Then they get on set and they realize, oh, even though the Duplass brothers’ movies look like we’re all just smoking pot and hanging around, it’s actually an emotionally excruciating process. When you’re improvising and throwing away the dialogue and the script it’s a constant state of exploration, which sometimes is all pistons firing, lighting is striking, it’s beautiful, and sometimes we’re swimming in the sea of infinite possibility and it feels like no one knows what we’re doing. And that state of confusion yields great results but it doesn’t feel good a lot. So it wasn’t all fun but it was very rewarding.

Q: How did this film fit into your other work?

Jay: When we were making this film, a week into it, we were like, man, I don’t even know what this is going to look like or feel like, because the set was so big. And you know, John C. Reilly had this, like, giant head – I was almost awestruck by holding the camera in front of him sometimes. The whole, the tactile experience of making this film felt so utterly different than what we did. Then we watched the dailies and were like, oh yeah, that’s our stuff.

Mark: It’s one of our movies with some famous people in it.

Q: Did you ever have a trailer on a movie before for yourselves?

Mark: No. Oh my God, no.

Jay: We didn’t have a place to sit. I mean it was literally like Mark and I would be sitting in an ally behind a dumpster figuring things out.

Mark: For “Baghead” we rented a house in the woods. We lived in the house. We shot in the house.

Jay: We got bedbugs in the house.

Q: How are you going to stop yourselves from becoming all Hollywood?

Mark: There’s two of us, you know, so we’re never really operating alone. If someone starts to douchinate, I think the other person is going to be pretty quick to call it, and our wives tend to be good with us as well. I gotta say, though, walking around Sundance the last couple days, getting the press we’ve gotten on Cyrus,” the compliments, I didn’t realize it was happening but yesterday, someone wanted to take a picture with me because I was on “The League” and his friend said, I saw your movie, and I was like, oh what’d you think? And he said, I thought it was O.K. And it shocked me so much, and I had my feelings hurt so much. And I was walking away, I was like, that’s because my head has swelled in the last 48 hours, like, immensely. So, checks and balances.

Jay: I’ll take a picture with anybody. And I’ll be naked too.

Los premiados de NHK/Sundance (Indiewire)

Sundance Institute and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have announced the winners of the 2010 Sundance / NHK International Filmmakers Awards.

The winning filmmakers and projects are: Amat Escalante, “Heli” from Mexico; Andrey Zvyagintsev, “Elena” from Russia; Daisuke Yamaoka, “The Wonderful Lives at Asahigaoka” (written with Yugo Eto) from Japan; and Benh Zeitlin, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (written with Lucy Alibar) from the United States.

The four winners were selected from 12 finalists by members of an International Jury which included: Violeta Bava, John Carney, Michael Lehmann, Rebecca Miller, Jose Rivera, Elena Soarez, Pablo Stoll and Wesley Strick; and a Japanese Jury that included Masato Harada, Shin-ichi Kobayashi and Bong-Ou Lee.

“This year’s winners unsettle, delight and move audiences with their innovative and inspiring work. We celebrate each of their distinct styles and the unique lens through which they view the world”, said Alesia Weston, Associate Director of Sundance’s Feature Film Program, International, in a statement.

Originally created to celebrate 100 years of Cinema, the annual award recognizes and supports four visionary filmmakers from Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan on their next films. Each winner receives approximately $100,000 ($10,000 as a cash award and a guarantee from NHK to purchase the Japanese television broadcast rights). In addition, Sundance Institute staff works closely with the winners throughout the year, providing creative and strategic support through the development, financing and production of their films. The awards are presented at the Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony on Saturday, January 30, 2010.

Past recipients of the Sundance / NHK Filmmakers award include: Alex Rivera, The Sleep Dealer (USA); Miranda July, Me and You and Everyone We Know (USA); Andrucha Waddington, The House of Sand (Brazil); Lucrecia Martel, La Cienaga (Argentina); Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, Whisky (Uruguay); Walter Salles, Central Station (Brazil); György Pálfi, Taxidermia (Hungary); Fernando Eimbcke with Lake Tahoe (Mexico). The 2009 recipients were: Diego Lerman, Ciencias Morales (Moral Sciences) (Argentina); David Riker, The Girl (USA); Kenji Qurata, Speed Girl (Japan); and Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Evolution (France).
The Winners of the 2010 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award are (with descriptions provided by the festival):

LATIN AMERICA:
Amat Escalante / Heli (Mexico) In a small Mexican town, where most citizens work for an automobile assembly plant or the local drug cartel, Heli is confronted with police corruption, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, love, guilt and revenge in the search for his father who has mysteriously disappeared.

Born in 1979, Amat Escalante is a self-taught filmmaker from Guanajuato, Mexico. At age 15, he began to devote himself completely to cinema. His first feature Sangre premiered in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival 2005, where it received the Fipresci Prize. His second feature film Los Bastardos also premiered in the Official Selection Un Certain Regard Cannes in 2008 and won numerous awards including Best Film at the Morelia, Sitges and Mar del Plata film festivals. It has been distributed worldwide, including Mexico, USA, France and Canada.

EUROPE:
Andrey Zvyagintsev / Elena (Russia) An elderly woman who has lived with her rich husband in a large, comfortable home tries to rescue her alcoholic son from poverty and give his family the opportunity for a better life that she alone could not provide.

Andrey Zvyagintsev graduated from The Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS) where he was trained as an actor, then worked on independent theatre projects and acted in TV series and films. In 2000 Andrei made his first short TV fiction films as a director. His first motion picture The Return was nominated for the Golden Globe after winning the Golden Lion and the Lion of the Future for the best director’s debut at the Venice Film Festival. His second feature film BANISHMENT premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival where Konstantin Lavronenko won the award for Best Leading Actor Award, the first ever for a Russian actor.

UNITED STATES:
Benh Zeitlin / Beasts of the Southern Wild (USA) (written with Lucy Alibar) In the Louisiana Delta, a ferocious ten-year-old girl refuses to evacuate her home without her dying father as the Southern Apocalypse descends upon them.

Raised by two folklorists in Queens, NY, Benh Zeitlin is a director, animator, and composer for the Court 13 coterie. Director of award-winning shorts Eggs, Origins of Electricity, I Get Wet and Glory at Sea, Filmmaker Magazine recently named him one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Zeitlin participated in the 2009 June Screenwriters and Directors Lab and is the recipient of a Sundance grant from the Annenberg Foundation. He currently resides in New Orleans where he is developing two feature films and transforming Glory at Sea’s ship, the U.S.S Jimmy Lee, into a rolling, pop-corn making, movie projector cum Mardi-Gras float in preparation for Carnival 2010.

JAPAN:
Daisuke Yamaoka / The Wonderful Lives at Asahigaoka (Japan) (written with Yugo Eto) A young woman’s suicide attempt leaves her in a coma but stirs up the lives of the people around her in the sleepy riverside town of Asahigaoka.

Daisuke Yamaoka worked for production companies before completing Lost Girl in 2007. Lost Girl was released in 2009 and exhibited in Shibuya’s Eurospace Theater and screened at the Dresden International Film Festival in Germany. Mika and Seijun screened at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Austin International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and won the Toru Murakami Award at the Yamagata International Movie Festival. His film Death: The Only Cure for Idiots from Kanagawa University was a runner-up in the Kanagawa Film Concours Grand Prize.

Sundance: "The Runaways", de Flora Sigismondi (críticas)

Screendaily

Dir/scr. Floria Sigismondi, USA, 2009, 102 minutes.

In The Runaways, music video director Floria Sigismondi’s debut feature, the early days of Joan Jett’s rock career are revisited without any cloying nostalgia. Sigismondi has made a rousing portrait of the eponymous 1970’s teenage band and taken a hard look at life on the road at a time when most girls with bands were groupies.

With two major young stars in the cast, The Runaways should connect with the young female audience internationally, perhaps leading to a revival in sales for the band’s three albums, all released pre-1977. Jett’s original fans could also be piqued by good reviews when the film opens domestically on March 19 through Apparition. Needless to say, Kristen Stewart’s glow from Twilight will help globally.

Basing her script on the memoir Neon Angel: the Cherie Currie Story by the band’s singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), Sigismondi brings us back to the days when aspiring rock girls were Bowie fans (with obligatory Bowie hair) and punk was an as-yet unformed barrage of angry testosterone.

The story builds around Jett (who executive produces) and Currie, with Jett as the serious girl who always knew she wanted to play music, and Currie as the 15-year-old blonde recruited in a bar for her looks and later taught how to sing.

Both actresses sing themselves and perform more than competently. Stewart, who conveys Jett’s no-nonsense determination, lacks the singer’s guttural raspiness, but her voice and attitude do the job. Fanning as Cherie, meanwhile, starts out as a shy girl who gets by on her looks. In an audition scene in the filthy abandoned trailer where the group rehearsed in 1975, she is depicted stumbling clumsily through what would become the incendiary tune, Cherry Bomb, moments after manager Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) and Jett write the song on the spot.

Fanning’s performance of the same song during scenes showing the group’s 1977 tour of Japan reveals the singer that Currie had become, and reminds us why the song terrified the parents of teenage girls.

Sigismondi uses performance scenes sparingly but effectively, balancing the romance of the road with a backstage reality check. Conflicts would eventually lead to Currie’s departure from the band in 1977.

Crucial to The Runaway’s sprint to stardom was manager/svengali Fowley, a profane rogue without a conscience who gave the girls their first break.

As Fowley, Shannon relishes in the gonzo rock entrepreneur role, erupting with zinger lines that any comedian would envy. Music “is not about women’s lib,” he lectures Cherie, “it’s about women’s libido.” Despite his agenda of greed and lust, which Shannon plays to the hilt, the eager girls signed with Fowley nonetheless.

Cinematographer Benoit Debie and production designer Eugenio Caballero capture the disco kitsch of those early days (alongside the blandness of the suburban “valley” that the girls fled), and chart the visual evolution toward hardened punk.

Stewart and Fanning give us the musical and sexual cockiness of teenage ambition, along with its constant vulnerabilities. Yet performances are not overplayed in an effort to make The Runaways another Sid and Nancy. The same deft modulation sustains scenes of Cherie’s volatile family life, in which Riley Keough (Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) plays her twin sister Marie, who stays home reluctantly to care for their drunken father. Tatum O’Neal is blithely vain as the girls’ inattentive mother.

A vivid period piece, The Runaways is anything but an extended music video. It is an auspicious turn for Sigismondi.

Production companies

River Road Entertainment

Linson Entertainment

US distribution

Apparition

International sales

Summit Entertainment

+1 310-309-8400

Producers

John Linson

Art Linson

Bill Pohlad

Cinematography

Benoit Debie

Production design

Eugenio Caballero

Editor

Richard Chew

Main cast

Kristen Stewart

Dakota Fanning

Michael Shannon

Stella Maeve

Scout Taylor-Compton

Alia Shawkat

Riley Keough

Johnny Lewis

-------------------------------------------------------------

The Hollywood Reporter

PARK CITY -- "The Runaways" bursts with energy, youth, excess, female empowerment, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. It's an instant hit worldwide with its cast of young stars, but is it any good? Surprisingly, yes. It just must be met on its own terms.

Although neither a biopic nor a concert film about the famous/infamous 1970s all-female band the Runaways, the film does prefer music and bad behavior to insight, character or substance. First-time director Floria Sigismondi, whose background is in photography and video, surfs along the surface of the '70s rock scene in Los Angeles and, weirdly, Tokyo, to scoop up photo ops, sound bites and glimpses of a hardcore lifestyle. The vigor and pace is electric, and the movie features three showy performances by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon.

Maybe the film falls into the category of Guilty Pleasures. The dark ugliness on display -- the amazing drug abuse and pre-AIDS hedonism -- looks probably too exciting. While the film makes it clear its personalities suffered tremendously for their addictions, it all looks so glam.

The Runaways had their run from 1975-79. The movie so collapses this half-decade run of rock stardom and self-destruction that it feels like the rise and fall of the Runaways happened over a long holiday weekend.

The focus is on three dynamic personalities: wild child Cherie Currie (Fanning), the lead singer; androgynous ringleader Joan Jett on electric guitar; and the band's Svengali, Kim Fowley (Shannon), a record impresario whose attire reads neither male nor female.

This focus makes sense creatively but also legally as the producers never secured life story rights for other band members. The film is loosely based on Currie's 1989 memoir, "Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story." That book, however, delves more into Currie's drug addiction, one-film movie career and downward spiral than it does the Runaways. Jett, by the way, is the film's executive producer.

As the movie tells it, the Runaways are an accidental band. Joan approaches Kim outside a rock club one night and mentions her idea of forming an all-girl band. A light bulb goes off in his ever-scheming head, so he introduces her to drummer Sandy West (Stelle Maeve). Trolling another bar later, looking for a lead singer, he spots the underage Cherie and is immediately taken with her post-Marilyn Monroe/Brigitte Bardot look.

After few weeks of rehearsal in a San Fernando Valley trailer -- Kim has to write the group's first single "Cherry Bomb" on the spot for Cherie's audition -- the group, already snorting and drinking all sorts of intoxicants, hits the road. Somewhere around Cleveland, a record deal is signed. The Runaways are a hit and, next thing you know, are getting high on sake and coke in Tokyo.

Only Cherie gets her San Fernando Valley background sketched in, though sketched is the word, with Dad a drunk, Mom (former child actress herself Tatum O'Neal) remarried and living in Indonesia and a loving though iffy relationship with a sister (Riley Keough). Mostly, the film plays out a battle of wills between Joan and Kim to control the band and especially its loose cannon, Cherie.

For she is the key, because Cherie is the angel-from-hell face of the band. Kim exploits her and her teen sexuality to the fullest, even setting up a lurid photo shoot of her for a Japanese magazine without telling the other band members.

Stewart in short-cropped dark hair and dark clothes is the movie's driving force as Joan Jett. The movie never appreciates Jett's musical passion and savvy, but it does capture her burning ambition.

Fanning gets to play the film's most flamboyant character with her fishnet stockings and skin-tight corsets, but the trap here is that, for all its truth, it's repetitive and cliched. Still, the young actress makes you feel the confusions beneath an overconfident facade.

Shannon seals the character-actor stardom he launched with his Oscar-nominated performance in "Revolutionary Road" as the flamboyant music promoter/producer/manager who challenges the girls to discover their "balls." There is never a quiet moment in a life focused on supplying immediate gratification to audiences -- and to himself.

The film steers pretty clear of the more salacious side to the Runaways' reality. It doesn't linger long on the two teens' sexuality, expressed with both sexes and with each other. Instead, Sigismondi rushes back onstage for another performance or plays Runaways music over the film's many montages.

The actor-musicians play and sing reasonably well, or at least fake it reasonably well. Sigismondi's collaborators, especially designer Eugenio Caballero and cinematographer Benoit Debie, make the film's many environments reflect the colors and excesses of the '70s.

In the end, "Runaways" celebrates their music more than anything, even as it tries to give an impression of lives forever on the road where no one -- other than Kim, who refuses to travel -- has a home. The film is not memorable in the sense one recalls it afterward only in flashes and impressions. No scene particularly stands out. And the performances hit emotional and physical highs very early and then stay there.

This might be smart. Probably no one would sit still for a deep-dish biopic about any of the band members. Their product, as Kim sagely puts it, isn't music but sex. So the movie, like the band, is selling flash and glitz and a story about how a group of girls stormed the boys club of rock a little more than a decade after the Beatles.

Sundance/Berlin: "Please Give", de Nicole Holofcener (críticas)

Screendaily

Dir: Nicole Holofcener. US. 2009. 91 mins.

The difficulty of finding lasting happiness informs every frame of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s comedy-drama Please Give. As she did previously with Lovely And Amazing and Friends With Money, Holofcener reveals a deft understanding of female relationships, and with the help of a very strong cast, she presents a series of complex characters that are among her very best.

A recognised filmmaker with a solid if modest commercial track record, Holofcener should expect her usual audience of sophisticated, female-driven crowds when Sony Pictures Classics releases Please Give on April 23. Aided by strong reviews, Please Give could be a sizeable hit in the indie realm.

Married New York couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) own a successful business which resells antique furniture belonging to the recently deceased. Death is on their minds at home as well as they secretly wait for their 90-year-old next-door-neighbour (Ann Morgan Guilbert) to die so they can purchase her apartment and add it to their own.

But their lives become more complicated when they befriend the neighbour’s two very different granddaughters: conceited and gorgeous Mary (Amanda Peet) and sweet and withdrawn Rebecca (Rebecca Hall).

As she demonstrated in her previous films, Holofcener is less concerned with plotting than she is in investigating the behaviour of her characters. This approach – coupled with her uncomplicated, dialogue-heavy mise-en-scene – can lead to charges that her films are slight or inconsequential. But when she assembles as many relatable and interesting personalities as she does in Please Give, it feels churlish to complain about her perceived shortcomings as a filmmaker.

Beyond Holofcener’s gift for naturalistic, funny dialogue, she is also able to both satirise and empathise with the failings of her characters, and in Please Give she’s particularly good at commenting on the nagging unhappiness of Kate and Alex. Interestingly, the spouses never fully articulate the discontent they feel about their marriage, but their quiet desperation crops up in other ways: through Kate’s frantic need to help the less-fortunate, and Alex’s flirtations with Mary. To her credit, Holofcener never explains their actions, instead letting the audience extrapolate from the behaviour presented.

All her characters are satisfyingly complex and even Mary, Please Give’s most insensitive soul, has moments of real tenderness. Without resorting to quirkiness, Holofcener’s characters manage the nifty trick of being both thoroughly original and immediately recognisable.

Working with three generations of actresses, Holofcener gets across-the-board great performances. As Abby, Kate and Alex’s angst-filled daughter, Sarah Steele plays a believable teenager who’s filled with uncertainty and petulance. Guilbert cuts through the typical grumpy-old-lady clichés to make the 90-year-old neighbour exasperating but also very funny. And Keener, Peet and Hall all shine as women plagued with self-doubt who respond to those insecurities in strikingly different ways.

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Production company

A Likely Story

Domestic distribution

Sony Pictures Classics

International Sales

Sony Pictures

+ 1 212 833 8833

Producer

Anthony Bregman

Screenplay

Nicole Holofcener

Cinematography

Yaron Orbach

Production designer

Mark White

Editor

Robert Frazen

Music

Marcelo Zarvos

Main cast:

Catherine Keener

Amanda Peet

Oliver Platt

Rebecca Hall

Sarah Steele

Ann Morgan Guilbert

Thomas Ian Nicholas

--------------------------------------------------------

By Kirk Honeycutt/The Hollywood Reporter

PARK CITY -- In "Please Give," Sundance regular Nicole Holofcener has made perhaps the ultimate New York movie. It makes perfect sense to New Yorkers -- if a completely unscientific canvassing of attendees at the Sundance Film Festival means anything -- but is a little puzzling for non-Manhattanites. The movie certainly deals in universal situations - conflicts in values, a marital betrayal, teenage uncertainty and the guilt of the privileged class. Yet the film centers on a completely New York phenomenon regarding real estate in crowded Manhattan.

A well-to-do family purchases an adjoining apartment from an elderly woman with the proviso she can live out her life in the apartment, which they will only enlarge and remodel when she passes. It's rather ghoulish yet common for New Yorkers. From this situation, Holofcener extracts all sorts of moral tales and wry commentary on middle-class sensibilities.

How the rest of America reacts to this intriguing but dramatically muted story is hard to tell. Art houses may welcome this Sony Pictures Classics release, going out April 23.
The title itself is curiously void of meaning. The end credit crawl perhaps reveals an original title, "Feelin' Guilty," which makes more sense. It is Catherine Keener's character that mostly carries this banner as she seemingly feels guilt for every dollar the family makes - and they make a lot.

She and her husband, Oliver Platt, run an upscale vintage furniture/home accessories store. They mostly acquire their merchandise from estates, which is to say the children of dead people, but this is now causing considerable angst to Keener. She compensates by handing money to every homeless person she passes on the street and would love to volunteer to do good deeds only she can't handle the reality of the disabled or elderly.
The rest of the family is not so obsessed, Well, they have their obsessions, just different ones: her daughter (Sarah Steele) battles with acne while her husband has entered a kind of middle-age malaise.

Meanwhile, the two granddaughters of the elderly woman (Ann Marie Guilbert) over whom the family is conducting a polite death-watch hold ambivalent feelings about the family next door. The nice one (Rebecca Hall) visits her grandmother daily and is pleasant to the couple while the bitchy one (Amanda Peet) is, well, bitchy - to them and even more to her grandmother.

Everyone here is stressed about something but none of their travails seems terribly significant or revelatory about the human condition. Peet and Steele take physical appearances much too seriously. Peet, a spa worker specializing in facials, is a devotee of the tanning salon while Steele obsesses over every zit.

Peet is still reeling from her last romantic disaster, to the point of all but stalking the girlfriend of her ex, while Steele won't be satisfied unless her parents buy her a pair of $200-plus jeans.

Then the father and husband out of nowhere launches an affair with the spa bitch. Say what? This has got to be one of the least convincing adulteries in movie history. There's little in it for either party.

Think of "Please Give" as a finely tuned short story with every glance and gesture full of suggestive meaning. Drama is not high on the agenda here. There is a bit of comedy and, briefly, sexual mischief even though it doesn't look like much fun.

Keener, who frequently stars in Holofcener's film, is clearly writer-director's alter ego, so despite the multi-character format the focus tends to fall on her. But one wishes Holofcener had invested more in the other characters and their stories. They are a bit sketchy, seen more in how they relate to and play off of the Keener character than having a full life of their own.

The self-enclosed world of these New Yorkers is very well observed as designer Mark White has made the apartments, streets and businesses all seem to belong to the same small village.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Sony Pictures Classics)
Production companies: A Likely Story production
Cast: Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Sarah Steele, Ann Marie Guilbert, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Lois Smith
Director/screenwriter: Nicole Holofcener
Producer: Anthony Bregman
Executive producers: Caroline Jaczko
Director of photography: Yaron Orbach
Production designer: Mark White
Music: Marcelo Zarvos
Costume designer: Ane Crabtree
Editor: Robert Frazen
Rated R, 90 minutes

Sundance/Berlín: "HOWL", de Rob Epstein y Jeffrey Friedman (críticas)

By Todd McCarthy/Variety

A Werc Werk Works production in association with Telling Pictures and Rabbit Bandini Prods. (International sales: The Match Factory, Cologne, Germany.) Produced by Elizabeth Redleaf, Christine Kunewa Walker, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman. Executive producers, Gus Van Sant, Jawal Nga. Co-producers, Brian Benson, Andrew Peterson, Mark Steele. Directed, written by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman.

Allen Ginsberg - James Franco
Ralph McIntosh - David Strathairn
Jake Ehrlich - Jon Hamm
Judge Clayton Horn - Bob Balaban
Professor David Kirk - Jeff Daniels
Gail Potter - Mary-Louise Parker
Mark Schorer - Treat Williams
Luther Nichols - Alessandro Nivola
Jack Kerouac - Todd Rotondi
Neal Cassady - Jon Prescott
Peter Orlovsky - Aaron Tveit

Intelligent and highly respectful of its central character and his titular landmark poem, "HOWL" is an admirable if fundamentally academic exploration of the origins, impact, meaning and legacy of Allen Ginsberg's signal work. It is also an intriguing hybrid of documentary, narrative and animated filmmaking, one that needed to burst through the constraints of its conceptual origins as a docu to express everything on its mind. Adventurous but tidily formalized picture will attract a certain following among intellectual and gay audiences, but by nature it's a rarefied project for a relatively narrow target audience.

That said, how many remotely commercial films have ever had the nerve to build themselves around core sequences consisting of long swaths of poetry being read to eager listeners, whose rapturous reactions are recorded in enthusiastic detail? So it is here, as vet documakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman anchor this searching work with the 29-year-old Ginsberg (James Franco) getting up in front of a beatnik crowd at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955 to read "HOWL" for the first time. Even if the shock that Ginsberg's bluntly sexual and provocative words carried then can't possibly be felt the same way 55 years later, anyone who revels in the pure pleasure of the spoken word will receive rare gratification here.

To examine the impulses that caused the words to be written, the filmmakers expand their work fourfold: first, with excerpts from a far-ranging verite-style "interview" with Ginsberg (with text drawn from assorted actual interviews the writer gave over the years); second, with elaborate animated sequences by former Ginsberg illustrator Eric Drooker that attempt, with varying success, to translate words into moving pictures; third, with a dramatic re-creation of the 1957 trial in which the prosecution attempted to outlaw the book by having it adjudged obscene and without redeeming artistic merit; and fourth, with renditions of key moments from the youthful Ginsberg's life, notably his interactions, carnal and otherwise, with such Beat Generation superstars as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ginsberg's longtime mate, Peter Orlovsky.

In the interview, Ginsberg admits, among many other things, to his fear of his teacher-poet father's reaction to his work; his mother's madness; his sexual infatuations; his psychiatry-inspired breakthrough to live a fully honest, unconstrained life; and his view that "HOWL" was not, as some perceived, a promotion of the merits of homosexuality but at its heart an argument for "frankness about any subject." It's in these thoughtful, off-the-cuff interludes that Franco can come closest to fully inhabiting Ginsberg, which he does with great credibility; despite doubts going in about how plausible the handsome actor would be as the poet much more familiar from his later life as looking plump, balding and unkempt, it's a good fit in the end, physically and vocally.

The trial, cleanly and brightly rendered, is played without histrionics and with particular attention to how uncomfortable and clueless the prosecutor (David Strathairn) is with the substance of the text he's sometimes forced to recite in court. A parade of name thesps (Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, Alessandro Nivola) comes on to portray expert witnesses, while Jon Hamm, without having to much change his period look from "Mad Men," plays the defense attorney who ably steers the case being heard by a conservative, fair-minded judge (Bob Balaban).

Snippets from Ginsberg's intimate moments with his literary cohorts, as well as from his attempt to live a "straight" life, are little more than that, silent and fleeting black-and-white memories of loves yearned for, lusts consummated or not and acceptance found. There was certainly much more in Ginsberg's past that informed "HOWL" but is not shown here, particularly the more sordid aspects; this honorific treatment stands as the diametric opposite of the sensationalistic sort of biopic Ken Russell would have made had he been drawn to the subject.

But therein lies the rub. Russell's films, good and bad, had blood coursing through their veins, whereas this one, while clearly motivated to celebrate the life force embodied by Ginsberg and his work, is itself wood-dry. It's a paradox born of the film's fundamentally informational and historical perspective, one viewers will just have to live with.

Resourcefully made on a modest budget, the picture boasts top craft contributions from lenser Edward Lachman, production designer Therese DePrez and composer Carter Burwell, whose melodic, jazzy backgrounding mixes well with a number of period tunes.

Camera (Technicolor/B&W), Edward Lachman; editor, Jake Pushinsky; music, Carter Burwell; music supervisor, Hal Willner; production designer, Therese DePrez; art director, Russell Barnes; set decorator, Robert Covelman; costume designers, Kurt and Bart; sound (Dolby Digital), Jan McLaughlin; supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer, Lora Hirschberg; sound designer, Tom Myers; animation designer, Eric Drooker; animation producer, John Hays; visual effects, Mark Christiansen; line producer, Lynn Appelle; associate producers, Peter Hale, Bob Rosenthal, Ken Bailey, James Q. Chan, Kelly Gilpatrick; assistant director, Tom Fatone; casting, Benie Telsey. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (competing, opener), Jan. 21, 2010. Running time: 84 MIN.

------------------------------------------------------------------

By Kirk Honeycutt/The Hollywood Reporter

PARK CITY -- You don't turn a poem into a movie and certainly not such a revolutionary, in-your-face, youthful and passionate work as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." But then again, maybe you can, just not in the manner that longtime documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman presumed. In fact, they finally, in desperation, turned to the narrative format as they could find no other way to penetrate the 1956 literary work.

The movie mounts a four-pronged attack: animation, a simulated interview with Ginsberg (played imaginatively by James Franco), brief dramatizations of Ginsberg's life and a landmark obscenity trial that surrounds the birth of his game-changing poem all come together to capture how "Howl" landed in the middle of the Eisenhower era like a literary H-bomb.

"Howl" proved the perfect film to kick off Sundance 2010, a festival that means to rededicate itself to "cinematic rebellion" and indie experimentation. "Howl" fairly howls its proud defiance of commercial filmmaking norms. It's a heady flight into not just a particular poem but into the act of creativity itself, into how an artist breaks down barriers between himself and his art.

This exhilaration one feels watching this absorbing genre-bender doesn't mean the whole thing hangs together. It doesn't. The fragmented approach means some pieces don't fit, and you find yourself wishing for more of this and less of that.

Franco's Ginsberg is seen, in black and white, reading his poem in a Beat Generation coffee house to a young crowd growing more enthusiastic with each foray into homoerotic love, artistic hedonism and nihilistic drug-taking. A year or two later, the now established poet gives an interview -- this, like the rest of the film, is in color -- in which he explains his methods and reveals himself to be a disciplined, savvy artist fully aware of his craft.

Another section focuses on an obscenity trial over "Howl" in San Francisco, where the defendant is not Ginsberg but rather the poem's equally famous publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers). Here David Straithairn as a morally indignant prosecutor duels with Jon Hamm's defense attorney before an often-puzzled trial judge played by Bob Balaban.

Finally, there's the poem itself, imagined as you listen to its pulsating, on-rushing rhythms in surreal animation that feels like a contradiction -- a captivating nightmare with dark images that nevertheless appeal and attract.

Every piece of film involving Franco is terrific, but the problem is that there isn't nearly enough. The film barely sketches its hero and his emotional life. Some of this is even rendered in documentary-like revelations, about his mother and about his obsession with such Beat characters as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, rather than in fully scripted scenes.

The film never takes the leap into treating Ginsberg as a flesh-and-blood character but rather shoves him up on a stage or in front of a tape recorder as a cultural icon. Franco certainly delivers the performance, but the filmmakers haven't given it shape.

The animation, done in Thailand, is outstanding. If anything, you'd like to rerun just those sections, as "Howl" rages on the soundtrack, over and over again. They have a hallucinogenic feel that fits the poem like a glove.

The obscenity trial, frankly, could get lifted out, and the film would only improve. The courtroom footage is stiff and unconvincing. You get little sense of any of the personalities involved or what's at stake for them. Here especially the filmmakers' limited experience in feature filmmaking shows.

But what's cinematic experimentation without a few failures in the lab? Maybe that's why "Howl" is so appealing: The filmmakers don't get everything right but their passion for Ginsberg's genius and their excitement over trying to deconstruction a literary master work is contagious. A more perfect film might have been just a teensy-weensy dull.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival
Production companies: A Werc Werk Works production in association with Telling Pictures and Rabbit Bandini Prods.
Sales: Cinetic Media, the Match Factory
No rating, 80 minutes

Sundance/Berlin: "The Kids Are All Right", de Lisa Cholodenko (críticas)

By ROB NELSON/Variety

A Gilbert Films presentation of an Antidote Films, Plum Pictures production. Produced by Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Celine Rattray, Jordan Horowitz, Daniela Taplin Lundberg. Executive producers, Steven Saxton, Ron Stein, Christy Cashman, Anne O'Shea, Riva Marker, Andrew Sawyer, Neil Katz, J. Todd Harris. Co-producers, Charles E. Bush, Jr., Joel Newton, Todd Labarowski. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko. Screenplay, Cholodenko, Stuart Blumberg.

Jules - Julianne Moore
Nic - Annette Bening
Paul - Mark Ruffalo
Joni - Mia Wasikowska
Laser - Josh Hutcherson
Jai - Kunal Sharma
Clay - Eddie Hassell
Sasha - Zosia Mamet
Tanya - Yaya Dacosta
Luis - Joaquin Garrido

Sparked by wonderfully lived-in performances from Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, "The Kids Are All Right" is alright, if not up to the level of writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's earlier pair of new bohemian dramas, "High Art" and "Laurel Canyon." Once again, the focus is on the neuroses of well-off hipsters living alternatively in conservative times, as a Los Angeles lesbian couple (Moore and Annette Bening) are rattled by the unexpected introduction of their hippie sperm donor (Ruffalo) to their teenage kids. Commercial prospects look solid for an ingratiating, sitcom-style entertainment whose genuinely stirring moments come rather late in the game.

Cholodenko's uncharacteristic degree of comedy (in combination with her unusually high budget) can be understood and to a fair extent applauded as a principled bid to sell alt-family values to the mainstream. The kids of a married lesbian couple are alright, indeed, even or especially if that couple is wacky in familiar ways. Alas, this is the sort of movie in which illicit lovers agree that they'll never, ever hook up again, followed by a shot of them lounging post-coitus in bed. Cholodenko's previous work has been about how it's complicated to keep relationships from turning messy; this film simply has too much of "It's Complicated."

What the director's formulaic third feature does retain in full is her palpable and infectious love for characters and actors alike. By far the least likable of the bunch, uptight doctor Nic (Bening) nevertheless appears engagingly severe from the point when she learns that 18-year-old Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and 15-year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson) -- yes, Laser -- have secretly sought out and met their biological father, Paul (Ruffalo). Moore's well-sketched Jules is at once whip-smart and loopy, an underachiever whose landscaping biz remains stuck in low gear until Paul, an organic crop farmer and restaurateur who starts coming to family dinners, offers her work on his scruffy backyard.

This development naturally abrades the wine-guzzling Nic, as college dropout Paul, acting warm and sounding seductive via Ruffalo's lilting purr, appeals irresistibly to the kids in paternal terms, and to Jules in sneakily sexual ones. Nic's eventual realization that Jules and Paul have been tending more than his bushes is indelibly captured in a moment whose slo-mo closeup on scowling Nic, pumped up with sludgy background noise, makes it play like a fight scene in "Raging Bull."

It's more or less at this point that the movie, like the characters, begins to drop its glib defenses and score on an emotional level. The alternately comfy and edgy rapport between Moore and Bening hits peak levels in a scene where the two begin to pull apart. By far, the screenplay by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg is most incisive in the film's final reels, as the effects of a culture clash waged on multiple fronts -- male and female, gay and straight, educated and experienced -- literally come home to roost.

As before, Cholodenko generously shares her keen ear for pop, the soundtrack ranging from classic rock to Wendy & Lisa, along with a too-cute scene wherein Nic and Paul, in a rare moment of bonding, warble their way through a rendition of Joni Mitchell's "All I Want." Working with stellar production designer Julie Berghoff, the director also displays a vividly geographic feel for L.A.'s funkier, leftist enclaves. All across the frame, tech credits for this upscale indie production are of studio-film sheen.

Camera (Technicolor), Igor Jadue-Lillo; editor, Jeffrey M. Werner; music, Craig Wedren, Nathan Larson; production designer, Julie Berghoff; art director, James Pearse Connelly; set decorator, David Cook; costume designer, Mary Claire Hannan; sound (Dolby Digital), Jose Antonio Garcia; supervising sound editor, Joe Lemola; re-recording mixers, Elmo Weber, Frank Gaeta, Patrick Giuraudi; visual effects, Scale; stunt coordinator, Mark Norby; assistant director, Jesse Nye; casting, Laura Rosenthal, Liz Dean. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 25, 2010. Running time: 104 MIN.

---------------------------------------------------------

By Justin Lowe/The Hollywood Reporter

PARK CITY -- As Lisa Cholodenko's latest Southern California-set feature plays out, the title may seem particularly apt. An otherwise conventional romantic comedy centering on the mid-life parenting issues of a long-time lesbian couple, this love letter to gay-marriage supporters is respectably entertaining filmmaking, it's just not exceptional.

The cultural zeitgeist is just right for "Kids" to receive a warm reception from art house crowds and with a top-notch cast and Cholodenko's solid reputation, reasonable returns should be expected.

Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) have been together nearly 20 years and have two kids by artificial insemination. Laser (Josh Hutcherson) is a typical teenager, focused on sports and girls, although more experienced with the former. Sensitive, thoughtful Joni (Mia Wasikowska) has just turned 18 during her last summer home before heading off to university. Shortly after his sister's birthday, Laser asks Joni to follow up on a previous plan to make contact with their biological father.

Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the anonymous donor, is a laid-back entrepreneur and organic gardening enthusiast with a locavore restaurant but few other commitments in his life who is totally cool with meeting his offspring after a call from the sperm bank. Their first encounter, kept secret from the "moms," is understandably awkward, but soon the kids are regularly hanging out with Paul, until Laser inadvertently reveals their subterfuge to his parents.

Jules takes the news fairly well, but ever-uptight Nic reacts unfavorably, worried about Paul's potential influence on her kids. An informal introductory lunch ends with Paul inviting Jules, who is launching a fledgling landscape design business, to remodel his overgrown back yard.

Rather improbably, an attraction develops between Jules and Paul, and before long they are copulating like newlyweds, despite their shared guilt. Meanwhile, Paul has bonded remarkably well with Laser and Joni, offering them some respite from their moms' smothering parenting. Nic's chance discovery that her spouse is cheating with their sperm donor sends the family into a tailspin, with Paul left to wonder just where he fits in.

While snappy, realistic dialogue is one of the strengths of Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg's nonchalantly breezy script, the writers often strive a bit too obviously for perceived authenticity (the phrase "I'm just sayin'" seems to be repeated with the frequency of an advertising disclaimer). Despite some key character-motivation omissions, Moore, Bening and Ruffalo all deliver endearingly quirky comic performances, with Wasikowska also particularly effective as the confused and resentful Joni.

Cholodenko's polished directing and Igor Jadue-Lillo's cinematography burnish the boho LA settings with an almost tactile sheen, while production design by Julie Berghoff ornaments key scenes with revealing details.

"The Kids Are All Right" ultimately requires that audiences sympathize with the already familiar foibles of well-off, white Socal residents whose problems might seem fairly mundane to others struggling with crime, poverty and illiteracy. But whatever works -- "I'm just sayin"....

Venue: Sundance Film Festival
Production: Gilbert Films, Plum Pictures, Antidote Films
Cast: Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Screenwriters: Lisa Cholodenko, Stuart Blumberg
Producers: Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Celine Rattray, Jordan Horowitz, Daniela Taplin Lundberg
Executive Producers: Steven Saxton, Ron Stein, Christy Cashman, Anne O'Shea, Riva Marker, Andrew Sawyer, Neil Katz, J. Todd Harris
Director of photography: Igor Jadue-Lillo
Production designer: Julie Berghoff
Music: Craig Wedren, Nathan Larson
Costumes: Mary Claire Hannan
Editor: Jeffrey M. Werner
Sales: Cinetic Media
No Rating, 104 minutes

Sundance/Berlín: "The Killer Inside Me", de Michael Winterbottom (Screendaily review)

Dir. Michael Winterbottom, USA, 2009, 110 min.

Michael Winterbottom’s staggeringly violent adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me reaches a new extreme in the cinematic depiction of a psychopathic murderer. It is hard to watch – and for some will be impossible - regardless of any psychological logic behind its many killings.

Distributors everywhere will be shy of this film, despite Winterbottom’s established reputation. Anyone releasing it will be dogged by its violence, especially towards women. Theatrical response should be similar to Antichrist, another film whose violence is at the extreme of what is watchable.

The killer is (and is in) Sheriff’s Deputy Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), the son of respectable parents in Central City, Texas. Ford is imperturbable, except for when provoked, as we see in an encounter with a local prostitute, Joyce (Jessica Alba), who gets a beating after she strikes him, and then becomes Ford’s lover. He eventually kills her and the local mayor’s spoiled son, which he blames on Joyce.

Affleck plays Lou Ford as a boy scout who graduated to the police force with an eerily high voice and a rigidity that seems inscrutable. His motivation in killing seeps through over the course of the film, but far more time is devoted to the murders of two women than there is to why Ford kills them.

More violent than Chigurh, the killer in No Country for Old Men, Ford is also far more cerebral than American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. In his ability to talk about almost anything, he is reminiscent of real killers like the well-groomed Ted Bundy.

Thompson’s novel is mostly dialogue and interior monologue, so an adaptation has flexibility in its depiction of Ford’s town. Production design by Rob Simons and Mark Tildesley recreates a sedate western city meticulously, down the details of Ford’s clothing, about which the killer is fastidious. Cinematography by Marcel Zyskind takes us back to the 1950’s with the precision that Ford applies to his own life.

Ford’s exterior, as played with serene control by Affleck, is a defence and an offence. It hides the horrific drives inside him, which the film never probes satisfactorily, and it challenges anyone to penetrate through the mask of decorum. Winterbottom seems to be assuming that, as a work of fiction, The Killer Inside Me plays by its own rules, and that a character’s actions are better witnessed than explained.

Just as troubling are Joyce and Ford’s girlfriend, Amy (Kate Hudson), who remain drawn to him despite beatings and signs of depravity. Ford’s acceptance by these women could be why audiences will attack the film on grounds of misogyny. Winterbottom seems to suggest that their willingness to endure violence, like Ford’s aggression, are things that can happen to people.

The Killer Inside Me is well within American film noir territory, in that it identifies the criminal without understanding the crime.

Secondary roles are solid, with Ned Beatty as the town’s corrupt mayor whom Ford blackmails, and Bill Pullman as the wildly inane lawyer who escorts Ford out of an insane asylum, enabling him to kill one last time. Simon Baker plays the district attorney who sees through Ford’s defenses and hates what he sees.

Audiences up to their ears in cinematic serial killers may enter this film, thinking blithely that they already know them all. Like it or not, Winterbottom will prove them wrong.

Production companies

Stone Canyon

Muse

Revolution

Wild Bunch

Curiously Bright Entertainment

Indion Entertainment Group

International Sales

Wild Bunch

+ 33 6 20 36 77 72

Producers

Chris Hanley

Bradford L. Schlei

Andrew Eaton

Screenplay

John Curran, based on the novel by Jim Thompson

Cinematography

Marcel Zyskind

Editor

Mags Arnold

Production design

Rob Simons

Mark Tildesley

Main Cast

Casey Affleck

Jessica Alba

Kate Hudson

Ned Beatty

Elias Koteas

Tom Bower

Simon Baker

Bill Pullman

Brent Briscoe

Matthew Maher

Sundance: "Cyrus", de Jay and Mark Duplass (Screendaily review)

Dirs/scr: Jay and Mark Duplass. US. 2010. 92 mins.

A very unusual romantic triangle powers the narrative engine for Cyrus, the Duplass brothers’ peculiar and memorable third film. Executive produced by Tony and Ridley Scott and featuring a higher-profile cast than their previous comedies, Cyrus pours the idiosyncratic spirit of the Jay and Mark Duplass’ previous micro-budget indies into the world of broad studio comedies, resulting in plentiful laughs and some truly poignant moments.

Opening domestically later this year through Fox Searchlight, Cyrus should attract crowds thanks to stars John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill alongside a highly-marketable concept (grown son plots to break up his mother’s new relationship). The film’s mixture of comedy, drama and occasionally demented behaviour may prevent it from becomiing a runaway smash, however.

Lonely loser John (Reilly) falls for Molly (Marisa Tomei), but their budding love affair has one significant obstacle: Molly’s 21-year-old son Cyrus (Hill) who lives with his mother and has an unhealthy attachment to her. At first John thinks the two men can be friends, but soon it becomes clear that Cyrus will stop at nothing to turn his mother against John.

In their 2006 debut The Puffy Chair, the Duplass brothers revealed a knack for dramatising twentysomething relationships with humour and raw honesty. Their second film, Baghead, was more audacious (though less successful), bringing together character comedy and slasher-style horror. It might initially seem as if Cyrus represents a return to pure comedy, but this seemingly broad farce soon turns darker and more intriguing.

Much of that weirdness comes from Hill’s creepy, funny performance as Cyrus, who sneakily schemes to drive John away so that he can have Molly all for himself. In previous films, such as Knocked Up and Superbad, Hill has been cast as an obnoxious, volatile man-child, but with Cyrus he morphs into a weaselly, passive-aggressive manipulator who exploits his close bond with his mother to sabotage her potential happiness – while acting completely innocent. This satiric, demonic twist on the “mama’s boy” archetypes is some of Hill’s best film acting to date.

Although John is introduced as an ineffectual, unconfident dweeb, Reilly manages to convey his character’s sweetness and depth so that Molly’s interest in him never seems unbelievable.

Likewise, Tomei does great work in the film’s trickiest role. Molly clearly loves Cyrus, but it’s also obvious that she has coddled him to such a degree that the boundaries between mother and son are disturbingly blurry. Nonetheless, Tomei never makes Molly appear twisted or abnormal in her interactions with Cyrus, which gives their scenes an odd poignancy to go along with their inherent comedy.

On one level, Cyrus’s obsession with his mother recalls the overgrown-adolescent humour of Will Ferrell films (some of which have co-starred Reilly), but the Duplass brothers use the silliness to get at a deeper truth about how immature men often want their lover to behave like a mother for them. Underneath all the laughs is an important lesson about our universal need for unconditional love and the lengths we’ll go to in order to keep it.

Production company

Scott Free

Domestic distribution

Fox Searchlight Pictures

International distribution

Twentieth Century Fox International

Producer

Michael Costigan

Cinematography

Jas Shelton

Production designer

Annie Spitz

Editor

Jay Deuby

Music

Michael Andrews

Main cast:

John C. Reilly

Jonah Hill

Marisa Tomei

Catherine Keener

Matt Walsh

Sundance unveils complete lineup (Variety)

New films directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michael Winterbottom, Nicole Holofcener and Joel Schumacher, and starring such thesps as Ben Affleck, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds and Adrien Brody, mark the lineups of the Premieres, Midnight and other noncompetitive sections of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, which unspools Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Utah.

Although a handful of the Premieres titles, which generally sport bigger budgets and showier casts than the competition films, already have distributors, most do not, so prospective buyers will pay particularly close attention to the entries in this arena.

By contrast, purists with a craving for personal cinema on low and no budgets will gravitate toward the eight features in the new Next category, as well as to the perennial New Frontier sidebar for non-narrative and avant-garde fare.

The new Spotlight section, an evolved version of Spectrum, features one world preem and eight films previously seen at other festivals that fest topper John Cooper and director of programming Trevor Groth hope will benefit from their exposure here.

Park City at Midnight, which has long been home to the outrageous and extreme from all over the world, will serve up eight pictures, seven in their world premieres; Brody stars in two of them.

Points of interest among the Premieres are Hoffman's directorial debut, "Jack Goes Boating," an oddball love story starring Hoffman in an adaptation of Bob Glaudini's play; TV producer John Wells' feature directorial bow, "The Company Men," toplining Affleck, Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones as three men dealing with corporate downsizing; Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's new picture, "The Extra Man," a quirky comedy-drama; Winterbottom's ultra-violent adaptation of Jim Thompson's cult novel "The Killer Inside Me" and his Naomi Klein docu "Shock Doctrine"; musicvid helmer Floria Sigismondi's feature debut, "The Runaways," about the '70s all-girl band led by Joan Jett, starring Stewart and Dakota Fanning; Holofcener's Gotham-set ensembler "Please Give"; and Schumacher's "Twelve," an adaptation of the late Nick McDonell's cult novel about the reckless ways of rich Upper East Side teens.

Premieres section presently consists of 13 titles, although Cooper advised that two or three more films could be added before fest begins.

The 2010 Sundance lineup includes:

PREMIERES
All films are from the United States unless otherwise noted

• "Abel" (Mexico), the directorial debut of actor Diego Luna, written by Luna and Agusto Mendoza, about a peculiar young boy who, as he blurs reality and fantasy, takes over the responsibilities of a family man in his father's absence. With Jose Maria Yazpik. World premiere.
• "Cane Toads: The Conquest" - Director-writer Mark Lewis' 3D feature-length follow-up to his classic 1988 short, "Cane Toads: An Unnatural History," a documentary horror film about the environmental devastation left in the wake of the giant toads' unstoppable march across Australia. World premiere.
• "The Company Men," the first feature directed and written by "ER" producer John Wells, a corporate downsizing drama starring Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper and Rosemarie DeWitt. World premiere.
• "The Extra Man" - Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini and written by the directors with Jonathan Ames, a comedy-drama about a down-and-out playwright and escort to wealthy Upper East Side widows who takes a young aspiring writer under his wing. Toplines Katie Holmes, John C. Reilly, Paul Dano, Kevin Kline and Alicia Goranson.
• "Get Low" - Directed by Aaron Schneider and written by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, the offbeat story of a mysterious '30s hermit who schemes to stage his own funeral while still alive. Stars Robert Duvall and Bill Murray. Previously shown in Toronto, the Sony Classics release will serve as the Salt Lake City gala film.
• "Jack Goes Boating" - Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and written by Bob Glaudini from his own play about a limo driver whose blind date trggers an offbeat love story that involves two working-class New York City couples. With Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Tom McCarthy. The world premiere of the Overture release.
• "The Killer Inside Me" - Directed by Michael Winterbottom and written by John Curran, a new version of crime novelist Jim Thompson's yarn about a small-town Texas deputy sheriff who turns into a murderer. Stars Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Simon Baker and Elias Koteas. World premiere.
• "Nowhere Boy" (U.K.) - Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood and written by Julia Baird and Matt Greenhaigh, the biographical story of the family secrets and musical influences that shaped the teenage John Lennon in late '50s Liverpool. Features Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Thomas Sangster, Anne-Marie Duff, David Morrissey. Previously seen at the London Film Festival, the Weinstein Co. release is making its international premiere.
• "Please Give" - Directed and written by Nicole Holofcener, a character study about a New York City husband and wife who come into conflict with the granddaughters of the old woman who lives next door. Toplines Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Keener and Sarah Steele. The world premiere of the Sony Classics relese.
• "The Runaways" - Directed and written by Floria Sigismondi, about the launch of the eponymous '70s all-girl band by tough teen Joan Jett and an eccentric producer. Stars Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Scout Taylor-Compton, Michael Shannon, Alia Shawkat and Tatum O'Neal. The world premiere of the Apparition release.
• "Shock Doctrine" - Directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, a documentary based on the book by journo Naomi Klein exposing how shock is used to implement economic policy in vulnerable environments. The North American premiere of a film shown in different form in Berlin and already broadcast on British television.
• "Twelve" - Directed by Joel Schumacher, written by Jordan Melamed and based on the popular novel by Nick McDonell, who died just after having written the book at 17, a tome spinning on excesses involving sex, drugs and murder among the young Upper East Side elite. With Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, 50 Cent and Zoe Kravitz. This closing-night attraction will be seen in its world premiere.
• "Untitled Duplass Brothers Project" - Directed and written by Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass, in which a recently divorced guy meets a new lady, and then her son. With John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, Catherine Keener. World premiere.

NEXT
All are world premieres

• "Armless" - Directed by Habib Azar and written by Kyle Jarrow, an offbeat comedy about a woman coming to terms with her husband's strange secret. With Daniel London, Janel Moloney, Keith Powell, Laurie Kennedy and Matt Walton.
• "Bass Ackwards" - Directed and written by Linas Phillips, in which a man coming off a disastrous affair with a married woman has a lyrical, strange and comedic cross-country journey in a modified VW bus. Features Phillips, Davie-Blue, Jim Fletcher and Paul Lazar.
• "Bilal's Stand" - Directed and written by Sultan Sharrief, which centers on the title character, a Muslim high school senior in Detroit who juggles his dysfunctional family, their taxi-stand and an ice carving contest while secretly attempting to win a college scholarship. With Julian Gant.
• "The Freebie" - Directed and written by Katie Aselton, the tale of a man and wife who decide to give each other one night with another partner. Toplines Dax Shepard and Aselton, who co-starred in "Puffy Chair."
• "Homewrecker" - Directed by Todd Barnes and Brad Barnes and written by the Barneses and Sophie Goodhart, about the last romantic in New York City, who is an ex-con locksmith on work release. Features Ana Reeder, Anslem Richardson and Stephen Rannazzisi.
• "New Low" - Directed by Adam Bowers, a comedy in which a twentysomething man tries to figure out whether he belongs with the best woman he ever he's ever known or the worst. With Adam Bowers, Jayme Ratzer, Toby Turner and Valerie Jones.
• "One Too Many Mornings" - Directed by Michael Mohan and written by Anthony Deptula, Mohan and Stephen Hale, in which two damaged former high school friends reconnect by admitting how much they've messed up their lives. Features Deptula, Stephen Hale and Tina Kapousis.
• "The Taqwacores" - Directed by Eyad Zahra and written by Michael Muhammad Knight, about how the beliefs of a Pakistani-Muslim engineering student in Buffalo are severely challenged when he moves into a house filled with punk Muslims. With Noureen DeWulf, Dominic Rains, Rasika Mathur, Tony Yalda and Anne Marie Leighton.

SPOTLIGHT (NARRATIVE)

• "Bran Nue Dae" (Australia) - Directed by Rachel Perkins and written by Reg Cribb, Perkins and Jimmy Chi, about a young man's 1965 summer in the pearling port of Broome spent fishing, hanging out with his mates and consorting with his girl. Stars Rocky McKenzie, Jessica Mauboy, Geoffrey Rush and Ernie Dingo. U.S. premiere.
• "Daddy Longlegs" (formerly known as "Go Get Some Rosemary") - Directed and written by Benny Safie and Josh Safdie, about a thirtysomething torn between being a friend or father to his kids. Features Ronald Bronstein, Sage Ranaldo and Frey Ranaldo. North American premiere.
• "Enter the Void" (France) - Directed and written by Gaspar Noe, a hallucinatory plunge in which a murdered drug dealer watches over his sister from the spectral realm. Toplines Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Emily Alyn Lind and Jesse Kuhn. U.S. premiere.
• "I Am Love" (Italy) - Directed and written by Luca Guadagnino, an obsessive love story set in upper-class Milan. Stars Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Pippo Delbono, Alba Rohrwacher and Marisa Berenson. U.S. premiere.
• "Louis C.K.: Hilarious" - Directed by Louis C.K., a concert film starring the eponymous comedian. World premiere.
• "Lourdes" (Austria-France-Germany) - Directed and written by Jessica Hausner, in which a wheelchair-bound woman travels to Lourdes in an attempt to escape her isolation. Stars Sylvie Testud, Lea Seydoux, Bruno Todeschini, Gilette Barbier, Gerhard Liebmann and Irma Wagner. U.S. premiere.
• "Mother and Child" - Directed and written by Rodrigo Garcia, an ensembler about the intersecting lives of women involved in adoption. Toplines Naomi Watts, Annette Bening, Kerry Washington, Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson. U.S. premiere.
• "A Prophet" (France) - Directed by Jacques Audiard and written by Thomas Bidegain, Audiard, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit, about the education and rise of a young criminal in a French prison. Features Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi and Reda Kateb.
• "Women Without Men" (Germany-Austria-France) - Directed and written by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, an examination of Iranian society in 1953, when the CIA-backed coup overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammed Mossadegh and installed the shah in power.

SPOTLIGHT (DOCUMENTARIES)
All films are from the United States unless otherwise noted, and are receiving their world premieres

• "8: The Mormon Proposition" - Directed by Reed Cowan, which looks into the role played by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in promoting and passing California's Proposition 8 against gay marriage.
• "Catfish" - Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, concerning the unforeseeable consequences of Facebook contact between a young New York City photographer and an 8-year-old painting prodigy from rural Michigan.
• "Climate Refugees" - Directed by Michael Nash, about how changing conditions are provoking mass global migration and border conflicts.
• "Countdown to Zero" - Directed by Lucy Walker, about the dangers of nuclear weapons.
• "Life 2.0" - Directed by Jason Spingarn-Koff, which examines how lives are transformed by the virtual world called Second Life.
• "Teenage Paparazzo" - Directed by Adrian Grenier, in which a photo taken of the actor by a 13-year-old boy prompts an examination of the effects of celebrity on culture.
• "To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America" (Bangladesh-U.S.) - Directed by Gayle Ferraro, about how Yunus winning the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize prompts the opening of Grameen America in Queens, N.Y., replicating the banking model program he started in Bangladesh.
• "Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks" - Directed by Dan Klores, about how Knicks killer Miller became Public Enemy No. 1 in New York.

PARK CITY AT MIDNIGHT
All films are from the United States and world premieres unless otherwise noted

• "Buried" - Directed by Rodrigo Cortes and written by Chris Sparling, in which Ryan Reynolds plays a U.S. contractor in Iraq who is buried alive inside a coffin with only a lighter and cellphone to help him escape.
• "Frozen" - Directed and written by Adam Green, about three skiers stranded on a chairlift faced with extreme choices to avoid freezing to death. With Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers.
• "High School" - Directed by John Stalberg Jr. and written by Erik Linthorst, Stalberg and Stephen Susco, in which a random drug test coincides with a high school valedictorian's first hit of pot. Features Sean Marquette, Matt Bush, Adrien Brody, Michael Chiklis, Colin Hanks, Mykelti Williamson, Andrew Wilson, Yeardly Smith, Michael Vartan, Curtis Armstrong, Erica Phillips and Adhir Kaylan.
• "The Perfect Host" - Directed by Nick Tomnay and written by Tomnay and Krishna Jones, about a criminal on the run who cons his way into the wrong party with an unusual host. Stars David Hyde Pierce, Clayne Crawford, Helen Reddy and Nathaniel Parker.
• "7 Days" (Canada) - Directed by Daniel Grou and written by Patrick Senecal, centering on a doctor who takes revenge by kidnapping, torturing and killing the man who murdered his young daughter. Toplines Remy Girard, Claude Legault, Fanny Mallette, Martin Dubreuil and Rose-Marie Coallier.
• "Splice" (France-U.S.) - Directed by Vincenzo Natali and written by Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, which follows two brilliant scientists as they secretly mix human and animal DNA in an experiment. Features Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac and David Hewlett. North American premiere.
• "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil" (Canada) - Directed by Eli Craig and written by Craig and Morgan Jurgenson, a horror spoof in which two West Virginian hillbillies encounter trouble on a vacation at their dilapidated mountain cabin. With Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden and Jesse Moss.
• "The Violent Kind" - Directed and written by the Butcher Brothers, which sees things go south for some rowdy young bikers at a secluded farmhouse when they are tormented by a mysterious force. Features Taylor Cole, Christina Prousalis, Tiffany Shepis, David Fine and Joseph McKelheer.

NEW FRONTIER
All films are from the United States unless otherwise noted

• "Double Take" (Germany-Netherlands) - Directed by Johan Grimonprez, which reimagines Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor who unwittingly becomes caught up in a double take on the Cold War. Features Mark Perry and Ron Burrage. North American premiere.
• "Memories of Overdevelopment," directed and written by Miguel Coyula, an adaptation of a novel by Edmundo Desnoes that blends live-action, animation and newsreel footage to evokesthe personal memory of a misanthropic Cuban intellectual. With Ron Blair. World premiere.
• "Oddsac" - Directed by Daniel Perez, a visual record for the band Animal Collective. World premiere.
• "Pepperminta" (Austria-Switzerland) - Directed by Pipilotti Rist and written by Rist and Chris Niemeyer, a modern fantasy in which an anarchist of the imagination sets out to fight for a more humane world. World premiere.
• "Utopia in Four Movements" - Directed by Sam Green, a "live documentary" in which the director will provide voiceover for a portrait of the current battered state of the utopian impulse.
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