It takes quite a while–almost its entire length, in fact–for the utter conventionality of AFTERNOON DELIGHT to become clear.  Jill Soloway’s feature directing debut, for which she unaccountably won a Sundance award, toys with being a much more interesting, transgressive film, before settling down to be as middle-of-the-road and inoffensive as is humanly possible.  […]

As an actor, James Franco often delivers performances that are packed in quotation marks, as though he’s an actor playing the role of an actor playing his role.  In I AM MICHAEL, however, he does serious, substantive work as Michael Glatze, a real-life one-time gay activist who became not just a fundamentalist Christian pastor, but a […]

> Sundance announced the second group of its 2012 titles today (Competition entries were announced yesterday; Premieres will be unveiled on Monday), mostly in what are traditionally the most untraditional categories of the Festival:  Park City At Midnight, Next, and New Frontier. Also announced were the Spotlight films, which is where Sundance puts films that […]

  RYE LANE (Searchlight/Disney – March 31):  Raine Allen Miller’s feature debut Rye Lane is a bubbly surprise, a quick-witted, fast-paced rom-com overflowing with charm.  The script by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia wastes no time launching its premise, as Yas (Vivian Oparah) hears Dom (David Jonsson) weeping in a unisex toilet stall at a […]

  SIDNEY HALL (no distrib):  Shawn Christensen’s literary drama (written with Jason Dolan) is initially engaging as a modern-day sort of J.D. Salinger story, told simultaneously across three time periods, with Sidney Hall (Logan Lerman throughout) presented as an arrogant but troubled teen, an acclaimed novelist, and a middle-aged man who’s run away from the […]

  When Joseph Gordon-Levitt decided to make his feature writing and directing debut with DON JON’S ADDICTION (starring in it as well), his attitude was clearly Go Big Or Go Home.  To a large extent, he’s pulled off his audacious comedy, although in keeping with its theme, this may be the kind of movie people […]

  THE WORLD TO COME (Bleecker Street – March 2):  Although the story is set in 1856, this is 2021, so it’s not hard to see where Mona Fastvold’s The World To Come is heading.  Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard’s script begins in the dead of winter, in the wilderness that was upstate New York […]

  The old truism that Park City empties out during the second half of the Sundance Film Festival, making it possible to see all the hot titles that premiered at the festival’s start, is far less true than it used to be.  It was impossible to get into the festival’s big buy, The Way, Way […]