After announcing its competition titles yesterday, today the Sundance Film Festival continued its gradual release of the 2013 line-up with most of its remaining films, leaving only the highest-profile Premieres for Monday. Among the instantly promising:
MUD: The latest film by Jeff Nichols, who gave us Take Shelter last time out. Mud has already played at Cannes to a fair amount of acclaim, and its cast includes Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon and Michael Shannon.
THE GATEKEEPERS: A wildly praised documentary in which the former heads of Israel’s secret service very openly discuss their methods and the effects on the country and themselves.
STORIES WE TELL: One of the hits of this year’s Toronto Film Festival, Sarah Polley’s very personal documentary is the story of her own family and its secrets.
ASS BACKWARDS: Segueing to the more out-there Midnight section of the festival, this is a comedy directed by Chris Nelson, and both written by and starring Casey Wilson (from TV’s Happy Endings) and June Diane Raphael, along with Vincent D’Onofrio and Alicia Silverstone.
VIRTUALLY HEROES: Think of it as the midnight movie version of Wreck-It Ralph, as characters in a military video game suffer an existential crisis.
S-VHS: Apparently the Festival was so thrilled with last year’s omnibus gorefest VHS that it just had to have the sequel. Like the first installment, each chapter of this one is written and directed by a separate team, and all the episodes consist of “found footage” horror.
FAT SHAKER: The New Frontier section of the Festival tends to feature the more cutting-edge “entertainments,” and to quote from the press release description of this one, “an obese father and his handsome, deaf son share extraordinary experiences in Tehran.”
INTERIOR, LEATHER BAR: From actor/director James Franco and co-director Travis Matthews, a re-imagining of the explicit footage that had to be cut from the controversial William Friedkin 1980 thriller Cruising (about a serial killer targeting gays) in order for the film to avoid an X rating.
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