The Five Most Talked About Movies at Sundance

Beasts of the Southern Wild

As an avid movie lover, I make it my business to keep abreast of the latest news at Sundance.  It’s necessary, informative and I’ll admit it, fun.  With such an eclectic assortment of movies playing this year, I was curious what qualified a film to play at Sundance.  So I looked into it.  As it turns out, any film over 50 minutes long is eligible to compete for Sundance Feature Film awards as long as it is the World Premiere of that film.  Films that have screened elsewhere may still be played at Sundance, but can’t compete.  Short films also compete in different categories.  So basically, the qualifications are: have a good movie.

The Sundance Institute mission statement (from their website) is to “seek to discover, support, and inspire independent film and theatre artists,” and whether they have chosen to screen films with a $20 million budget or a $1,000 budget, these are all films that were produced with the intent of telling a story, as opposed to making money.  The Festival atmosphere may still seem to favor films with large budgets and big stars (which will get purchased by major studios in order to make money), but the Institute continues to champion up-and-coming artists (see below), allowing the combination of those efforts to achieve ongoing media success and accomplish the goal they set 30 years ago: to discover, support, and inspire.

This year’s event brings a wide range of accomplished features, coming from established names and newcomers alike.  Here’s the most-discussed films of the Festival, according to a carefully and professionally calibrated system I invented to calculate buzz (Me+Google=Professional).

1. Arbitrage

With Richard Gere, Tim Roth and Susan Sarandon, this hedge-fund thriller (really, that’s a genre now?) has gotten a lot of attention for Gere’s performance.  It sold for just over $2 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter, so I anticipate it will be available for the rest of us to view before long.

2. Queen of Versailles

This film about a family who experiences massive financial ups and downs while riding out the economic recession was the opening film of the festival, which is a rare honor for a documentary.  There’s been no shortage of praise for this film, which was bought the following day.

3. Beasts of the Southern Wild

The debut film of a brand new director, and the product of collaboration with The Sundance Institute, this one certainly sounds like a wild & unique ride.  It has a post-apocalyptic atmosphere centered around one family in America’s South, with a young girl named “Hushpuppy” providing the protagonism (maybe that wasn’t a word, but it is now that I’ve put it on the internet).  This one also got a pretty price when it was picked up by Fox Searchlight.

4. Red Hook Summer

This could be surrounded by hoopla mostly because it’s a Spike Lee Joint.  It has not received an overwhelmingly positive response.  It focuses on a young African American man who is plopped into Brooklyn for the Summer to spend time with his Grandfather, a preacher destined to get him to accept Jesus Christ as his savior.  While attempting to tackle a lot of issues (economic decline, racism, corruption), the word is that this one falls short.

5. The Surrogate

This bizarrely inspirational story captured a lot of attention for taking on an interesting and unique story that wasn’t necessarily suited to be a movie, blending in a respectable cast (William H. Macy, Helen Hunt, John Hawkes) and producing a vibrant and compelling movie.  In short, it’s based on a true story about a man who is paralyzed at young age, manages to accomplish a great deal in his life despite the handicap, and has one very important peak left to summit: getting laid.

Have you seen any of the movies at the Festival this year?  What’s your favorite?