It just wouldn’t be a film festival without something from Michael Winterbottom.  Winterbottom isn’t at the very top of the film director pantheon, but he’s respected enough that his projects have been in near-constant festival demand for most of his two decade-long career, and one way or another they tend to be included in […]

> 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 […]

  NANNY (no distrib):  Think Netflix’s Maid, but as a (sort of) horror movie.  Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant in New York who works as a nanny for the daughter of a well-off couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), in order to earn money she can send to her young […]

  YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (A24):  The title of Nicole Holofcener’s newest film is a fair guide to its stakes.  Her projects (Walking & Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Friends With Money, Enough Said) have always been modest in scale, but this one in particular feels more like a collection of anecdotes than even a short […]

  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 […]

  Kate Barker-Froyland’s directing debut SONG ONE is so wispy and insubstantial that the bytes making up its digital images seem barely capable of adhering to a screen.  Clearly influenced by John Carney’s mini-musical Once, it makes Carney’s film look like an Andrew Lloyd-Webber spectacle by comparison. Barker-Froyland also wrote the minimal script, which almost exhausts its resources […]

  EMILY THE CRIMINAL (no distrib):  John Patton Ford’s feature debut is a lean, gritty, accomplished thriller with a smashing star performance from Aubrey Plaza.  Plaza (who also produced) plays the titular Emily, an aspiring artist whose career got derailed due to a violent incident in college, giving her a record that’s preventing her from […]

  James Ponsoldt’s SMASHED (not to be confused with NBC’s Smash), which premiered in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is a new spin on a fairly old story.  The concept goes back (at least) to 1962’s Days of Wine and Roses:  a couple (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul), very much in love with both […]