Sundance Film Festival

On the heels last week’s hotly anticipated program announcement for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival comes today’s new list of all the premieres, section updates, and special events festivalgoers can expect after their long pilgrimage to Utah this January. Sundance always hosts the first of the big premieres of each year, and carefully curates programs of films to screen at their Midnight and Spotlight sections.

Much like the Golden Globes is considered “the fun one” of all the Hollywood awards ceremonies, Sundance is “the fun one” of American film festivals. It’s where celebrities old and new can rub shoulders with directors, critics, production agents, cinematographers, and everyone in between at the largest independent film festival on U.S. soil. Today, the Sundance Institute announced the lineup for the 2017 festival, and there are a ton of possible future gems on the list.

If you tried to describe Manchester by the Sea to someone else it would sound an awful lot like many other indie dramas. Trouble white guy returns to his hometown to care for a relative. But that does not do justice to Kenneth Lonergan’s third feature, only his third in 16 years...

Six months ago, this looked like a very different weekend at the box office. While the strong start for The Girl on the Train isn’t surprising, the weak opening for The Birth of a Nation reflects how the film, once seen as a surefire Oscar-contender, has been affected by a series of real world controversies. There’s an alternate timeline out there where it’s a sizable hit. Instead, the adaptation of a popular mystery novel starring Emily Blunt gets its picture at the top of this article.

As soon as I left the theater, still shaken from Elizabeth Wood’s ‘White Girl,’ I Googled the title of the film see what else the filmmaker has done. My finger must have slipped on the Google Search recommendations, as the results for “white girl wasted” popped up. I looked down at the Urban Dictionary definition highlighted at the top, a description that only just begins to capture the perilous, infantile destruction frequently found among, and willingly created by, a demographic often found at New York City bars and clubs.

Sundance’s quieter-than-quiet crime drama Rectify announced long ago that Season 4 would represent the last for Daniel Holden (figuratively, anyway) and at last we know when the convicted killer will plead his last. Sundance has set an official October premiere for the final eight-episode run, promising answers along with its first trailer.

‘Certain Women,’ the latest from Kelly Reichardt based on the short stories of Maile Meloy, is made up of three loosely interwoven vignettes about women living in Montana. There’s a lawyer, a wife and a farmer whose lives are each interrupted by something unexpecte

It’s only been a week since ‘Swiss Army Man’ shocked Park City audiences at its Sundance world premiere, and the absurdist dramedy is already known as “the Daniel Radcliffe fart movie.” If you’ve seen the headlines and read the reviews (here’s ours), you already know the film prompted some walk-outs after Paul Dano‘s Hank rode the back of Radcliffe’s Manny, a farting corpse, like a jet-ski across an ocean. But, like those who left after the hilarious, blissfully weird opening scene, what you don’t know is that Swiss Army Man is actually a meditation on profound, human topics.

Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation has been the talk of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival over the past week, from its premiere on January 25 to its record-breaking sale to Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million. We may very well be looking at an early Oscar contender for next year's awards, as Parker's telling of Nat Turner's slave rebellion has left a huge impression on critics and audiences at the festival. The film won both the Grand Jury and Audience awards at Sundance, with Anthony Weiner doc Weiner picking up the Grand Jury documentary prize, and Swiss Army Man grabbing a Jury award for Best Directing.

As any fan of ‘Once’ can attest, writer, director John Carney is a master at capturing the complexities of love through music. In his latest musical, ‘Sing Street,’ Carney pulls from his own past as a misfit school boy in the 1980s who found solace in music.