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So Sundance woke up all sweaty and hungover a few days ago and apparently decided it was time to change its ways. The quirky Fox Searchlight acquisitions, the earnest Amerindie movies like "Sin Nombre" going nowhere slowly but self-righteously...something didn't feel right. Was this the...
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Ted Hope, the major indie producer behind "Happiness," "American Splendor," "Adventureland" and many others, is a worrier -- he wants new distribution models and new ideas for independent film, and he wants them now. This week he's got a provocative guest post on his...
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By Steven Zeitchik There are plenty more sales still trickling in at Sundance, the country we visited what feels like a million years ago. A James Gandolfini-toplined political satire that everyone's been buzzing about called "In the Loop"...
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By Steven Zeitchik Exhausted doesn't begin to describe how we're feeling after we returned Wednesday evening to Los Angeles from Park City -- only to remember we had to be up at 5 am (also known as the time most... Read More...
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By Steven Zeitchik The words "Sneak Preview 2" in a festival catalog don't usually set hearts racing (cue "and I didn't even like the original" quip).But when Sundance fave Steven Soderbergh is hosting a surprise screening...
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By Steven Zeitchik Try this on for a premise: Characters in a movie are making a documentary about their relationship. And they're real people, so you believe it's a documentary. But the documentary is scripted. And the director of the... Read...
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By Jay A. FernandezAnother Sundance audience (and now, apparently, Fox Searchlight) was won over Monday afternoon when the Eccles Theatre hosted the debut screening of writer-director Max Mayer’s "Adam." A quietly elegant Manhattan love story...
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By Steven Zeitchik The Sundance Film Festival had either a sharp sense of timing or a cruel sense of humor when it scheduled "Big Fan" -- a scripted movie from the writer of "The Wrestler" about a stunted-adolescent New York... Read...
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Was that really Ben Lyons -- film critic, um, extraordinaire -- DJing the premiere afterparty for a movie titled "Vicious Kind" at the venue Hollywood Life House in Sundance Saturday night?We'd been at the party for about an hour, listening...
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By Jay A. Fernandez “What would a Sundance film festival be without Paul Giamatti?” joked festival director Geoffrey Gilmore as he introduced Sophie Barthes’ debut, “Cold Souls.”This turned out to be a more literal comment than he intended, as not......
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By Steven Zeitchik If you thought working for Anna Wintour was tough, try making a movie about her.R.J. Cutler, whose "The September Issue" played Saturday at a small screening at the Temple Theater (outside the confines of the usual Sundance...
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By Steven Zeitchik One observes many odd scenes standing outside a Sundance screening, especially the popular ones. But we weren't quite prepared for this interaction outside a screening of "The Greatest" that had already closed its doors...
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By Jay A. FernandezSundance audiences were on their feet, pounding out applause when filmmaker Cherien Dabis walked on stage following the debut screening of her slice-of-life dramedy, “Amreeka.” And justifiably so. The crowd, the writer-director and...
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By Steven Zeitchik Sundance's most buzzed-about picture -- if not strictly its finest one -- played Friday night to the expected mix of expectant distributors. There were good things and not-such-good things to "Brooklyn's Finest," a...
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By Jay FernandezSundance got bloody early this year with its first Park City at Midnight screening -- "The Killing Room"—at, uh, 11:30 am on Friday morning. Despite the potential for screaming and gore, the Prospect Square Theatre was full of...