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Each year as the calendar reaches the icy center of January the cinema world’s attention turns to Park City, Utah, for the annual Sundance Film Festival. For over 30 years the festival has served as a launch pad for independent filmmakers, including such talents as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson, who all received their big break after showing films there. This year Cinephiled is pleased to send our own special talent, James Rocchi, to observe and report on the fest, and he plans to deliver close to 20 (!) reviews.
While it’s difficult to anticipate which film will be the breakout hit of Sundance (nobody was talking about Beasts of the Southern Wild before the fest in 2011, nor about Fruitvale Station last year), a few movies are generating buzz before the first reel rolls. Here are a few of the titles that are getting attention:
Kristen Stewart plays a Gitmo guard in Camp X-Ray; SNL alums Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig get serious in The Skeleton Twins; Life Itself, a documentary about the life of film critic Roger Ebert, is expected to pick up a distributor quickly; John Hawkes headlines a strong cast (including Glenn Close, Elle Fanning and Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey) in Low Down, which explores the troubled life of jazz pianist Joe Albany; indie darling Lynn Shelton directs Keira Knightley as a woman stuck in permanent adolescence in Laggies; Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd meet cute in David Wain’s They Came Together, which looks to be a parody of rom-coms.
That doesn’t even include films starring Ryan Reynolds as a guy who talks to his pets (Voices), Zach Braff’s Kickstarted Wish I Was Here, a Richard Linklater film 12 years in the making (Boyhood) and a movie in which Michael Fassbender plays an eccentric musician who wears a giant mask over his head (Frank). Oh, and there’s a sequel to The Raid.
And chances are the film that everyone is talking about at the end of the festival is not one of the ones mentioned above.
Stay tuned to Cinephiled for the early word on many of these films and more with our Sundance Festival Channel and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ for live coverage of the event.