Sundance »

Utah isn't just for lovers--It's also for the Sundance Film Festival. Every year the fest rolls around I am jealous of those who get to attend the premiere of some of the most talked about independent films. This is the largest indie film festival in the U.S. and this year's lineup for the Park City at Midnight category looks like good stuff. The festival runs January 21 - 31 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. Many popular horror films got their start at the festival, including Saw. I wonder if Weinberg was there... After the jump you can get up close and personal with the lineup for Sundance's Midnight movie series. Keep your eyes here for more info on the films as we get it. I also gave you my picks. Tell me yours?

So far I'm pretty psyched for Splice, directed by the stylish Vincenzo Natali (Cube), starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as two scientists who splice human and animal DNA to create a beautiful but deadly creature. The film was getting buried for a while because of budget issues, so it's nice to see this one finally come around. Some initial reviews of the film were positive and I look forward to hearing what others have to say.

Also on my watch list is The Violent Kind by The Butcher Brothers (The Hamiltons) starring Taylor Cole, Christina Prousalis, Tiffany Shepis (Night of the Demons remake), David Fine and Joseph McKelheer. A secluded farmhouse, bikers, boobies, blood, ghostly Rockabillies and possession? Sold! Bloody-Disgusting has some more images for you to peek at and the official Facebook page launched yesterday.

Read the rest over at Horror Squad

Sundance is a celebration of independent filmmaking, but half the fun is seeing the premieres of larger films that might not come out for months, or years in some cases. In fact, the non-industry people who attend Sundance every year might not be able to tell you what documentary won the Grand Jury prize last year (it was Ondi Timoner's We Live In Public), but they're always able to tell you when they saw "that new George Clooney movie."

With that in mind, Sundance has announced the premieres that are screening out of competition. You can see a full list, complete with synopsis and cast listing for each film, just beyond the break. There's a few standouts so far, and I'd have to say my most eagerly anticipated is The Company Men, where Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper and others have to survive corporate downsizing. There are a few films that sound potentially painful, including Buried, where Ryan Reynolds plays a contractor in Iraq who finds himself buried alive with only a lighter and a cell phone.

However, our real money is on Splice, a Park City at Midnight premiere, which are usually quirky comedies or horror movies. "Clive and Elsa are young, brilliant, and ambitious. The new animal species they engineered has made them rebel superstars of the scientific world. In secret, they introduce human DNA into the experiment." Excellent! Plus it's directed by Vincenzo Natali, who also helmed the terrific Cube, and stars Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley.

Check out the full list just beyond the break, where you'll see that Catherine Keener and John C. Reilly are appearing in two movies apiece at Sundance, thereby making them eligible for the Parker Posey award.

It might be that Christmas is the time of year when we're inundated with tinsel and Christmas tunes, but it's also the time when Sundance starts announcing their killer line-ups for 2010. This year's festival will run from January 21 to 31in Park City, Utah, and as always, Cinematical will be there to kick off the new festival year and cover all the great films that premiere.

The first announcement covers Sundance's US and World Competition Lineups, with more to follow later. This year boasts a slew of buzz-worthy fare, a lot of which we've been dying to see. The U.S. Dramatic Competition will screen Hesher, Spencer Susser's tale of a trickster that descends upon a struggling family, which just so happens to star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman, Howl, the eagerly anticipated look at the obscenity trial that followed the poet's famous work (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman directing James Franco, David Strathairn), and actor Mark Ruffalo's directorial debut Sympathy for Delicious, starring Orlando Bloom as a recently paralyzed DJ who becomes a faith healer.

The Documentary selections include Alex Gibney's CASINO JACK & The United States of Money, plus additional fare ranging from Amir Bar-Lev's I'm Pat _____ Tillman to Tamra Davis' look at art with Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Topping that off with world cinema, we've got foreign docs from names like Jose Padilha, and narrative films like Peepli Live by Anusha Rizvi.

See the full list after the jump and stay tuned for more slates, ones that -- we're hoping -- will include the latest from Michael Winterbottom and Mark Romanek.

If you can't make it to Park City, Utah, in January for the Sundance Film Festival, don't worry -- Sundance will come to you! Sort of! If you live in one of eight specific cities! Still, it's a good start, and a pretty nifty idea.

They're calling it Sundance Film Festival U.S.A., and it will work like this. On Jan. 28, while the festival is taking place in Utah, eight filmmakers from the fest will travel to theaters around the country to show their movies to local audiences, followed by the customary Q&A. For the local audiences, it will be a decent approximation of what a real Sundance screening is like, minus the insane crowds and absence of parking. Several of the chosen cities are even in snowy climes, so you won't have to miss out on that aspect of Sundance attendance. If you're lucky, for the full effect, maybe you'll even run into a journalist complaining about the weather.

The selected theaters are: Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, Mass.; BAM, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Music Box Theatre, Chicago; Downtown Independent, Los Angeles; Sundance Cinemas, Madison, Wisc.; Belcourt Theatre, Nashville; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, San Francisco. Tickets will be sold through the individual theaters. Each location will get a different film, and we won't know what those films are until after the festival announces its programming in December.

Dispatching filmmakers to appear with their movies live and in person is a cool innovation, and a good way to spread the Sundance vibe beyond the confines of Park City. But it makes me wonder if the next logical step is to simply beam the films via satellite to theaters around the country, the way they do with concerts and special events. As big as Sundance is getting, and as small as Park City is staying, I'm glad to see the festival expanding its reach any way it can.

You may have heard about Bobcat Goldthwait's current film, World's Greatest Dad, possibly from all the raving various people at Cinematical have done about it. It's an outrageously dark comedy -- but that should be no surprise if you've seen any of Bobcat's previous films, including Sleeping Dogs Lie, which I've chosen as AOL/SlashControl's free flick of the day.

Sleeping Dogs Lie premiered under its original title, Stay, at Sundance in 2006, where its perverse subject matter was taboo even by Sundance standards. It's about a young woman who has fallen in love with a guy she hopes to marry, but she's not sure whether she can ever tell him about a certain embarrassing moment in her sexual history. It involves a dog, that's all I'm sayin'. Finally she takes the plunge and tells her boyfriend, and that's when the squirm-inducing comedy really takes off.

Not surprisingly, Goldthwait had a hard time finding a distributor for the movie. The best it ever got was a two-week run on six screens, grossing $15,745 in the U.S., but another $622,000 internationally. (Apparently this sort of thing plays better in foreign countries. Make of that what you will.) It's obviously not for everyone, but if you like bawdy, clever, shocking comedy, it's worth watching. It will almost certainly make you feel better about whatever shameful secrets you have in your own past.

Watch Sleeping Dogs Lie at SlashControl.

Critics and celebs alike have raved about the Sundance darling Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, Lee Daniels' hard-hitting account of a teenage girl's struggle with abuse growing up in Harlem. (Even comedienne Mo'Nique has commanded some serious awards season buzz for her performance as Precious' domineering, abusive mother.) But no endorsement can or will be quite as moving, or as disturbing, as the one Precious got from filmmaker Tyler Perry, for whom the film dredged up cathartic memories of his own childhood abuses.

Writing on his official website, Perry – who's created his own film niche with often comic tales of dysfunctional African American families – revealed that his own childhood growing up in New Orleans was filled with abuses to rival those in Precious, based on the experiences of teenage girls author Sapphire taught in New York.

By James Rocchi (repint from 2009 Sundance Film Festival)

The September Issue , directed by RJ Cutler (The War Room), offers the tantalizing promise of immediate inside pleasures with its synopsis alone, as it follows Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and her editorial team in the assembly and shaping of 2007's edition of the title issue of Vogue magazine -- the largest issue of the year, the holy writ and testament for the upcoming year in fashion, the big brassy bloated bane of every postal carrier's existence. Immediately, we're promised glamour, high-stakes editorial crisis, the confluence of commerce and style, the manic business of modern magazine publishing.

The good news is not only that The September Issue offers much more than those immediate inside pleasures -- although it does, commenting on celebrity culture, digital image-altering technology, power and privilege in the distraction-industrial complex and much more -- but that it delivers those immediate inside pleasures superbly along with the nitty-gritty, so we get to witness a mix of high fashion and near-fascism with Ms. Wintour as the iron fist inside the stylish hand-stitched calfskin glove -- velvet is so last year, darling.

By Erik Davis (reprint from 2009 Sundance Film Festival) The film opens this weekend in Austin, Texas, and should it "expand" in October (like we've heard it will), then we'll probably reprint the review again! We liked the flick just that much.

It's Encyclopedia Brown meets Napoleon Dynamite with a pinch of Ace Ventura ... and it's hilarious.

The Derrick Comedy troupe arrived at Sundance with a snot full of sketch videos and a massive internet fanbase. Sure, these were a group of kids from NYU who struck a cord with the YouTube audience and never looked back -- but a series of short online comedy bits and random late night improv are one thing; opening a feature film at the Sundance Film Festival is a completely different ballgame. Thankfully, with Mystery Team, these boys hit one way out of the ballpark, producing not only the funniest comedy I've seen at the fest so far, but one that definitely has the potential to stand toe-to-toe with the finer comedies of 2008 and the most hyped of 2009.

Inspired by Encyclopedia Brown, the Mystery Team are comprised of three kid detectives who run around with big magnifying glasses and several cheap, cliched disguises solving neighborhood whodunits, like who stuck their fingers in Mrs. What's-Her-Name's freshly-baked pie. Only problem is they're 18-year-old high school virgins who should've grown out of this detective phase back when they were seven. The entire community laughs at them, except for Jordy, the half-brain-dead doofus (aka the Mystery Team's "inside informant") who works at the 24-hour hole in the wall. However, when a tiny neighborhood girl asks the Mystery Team to find out who killed her parents, the guys that spend their days solving lame schoolyard pranks are forced to take their game up one giant, life-threatening notch.

By Scott Weinberg (reprint from Sundance Film Festival 2009)

The latest film from Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel is a simple, straightforward, and very sincere story that covers some rather fascinating issues: The cyclical nature of violence, the difficulties inherent in forgiveness, and the importance of being able to defeat tragedy and go on to live a happy life. If it sounds like a dark and slightly depressing story to hear, well that's the good news. For all its stark honesty and confrontational emotions, the messages found in Five Minutes of Heaven are refreshingly humane and hopeful.

We open in mid-'70s Belfast, and a very young Alistair Little is about to commit a heinous act. Fueled by streetwise fury and a need to prove himself, Alistair assassinates another young man, leaving his little brother as the horrified witness to the act. Poor Joe Griffen has just began a cycle of tragedy that would defeat most people: Dead brother, accusing mother, heartbroken father ... one act of horrible violence leads to a ripple effect that virtually destroys Joe's life.

By Scott Weinberg (reprint from Sundance Film Festival 2009)

You hear it in lots of (usually sad) movies, and I'd say it's probably one of the truest things ever spoken: "There's nothing more tragic than having to bury your own child." But, just for the sake of argument, let's pretend -- for just a second -- that (in one specific case) it wouldn't be the end of the world. As a matter of fact, let's further pretend that the death of a child could somehow lead to several wonderful and life-changing results.

Sick, I know, but that's one of the ideas that runs through the twisted-yet-amusing dark comedy World's Greatest Dad. Written and directed by the consistently unpredictable Bob Goldthwait (he also gave us the similarly strange Shakes the Clown and Stay), and anchored by an unexpectedly strong Robin Williams performance, World's Greatest Dad is indeed about a high school poetry teacher who finds his life blossoming after his son accidentally commits suicide.