It took me a couple of days to figure out the peculiarities of the pretzel-shaped shuttle-bus routes at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival – and by the time I did, I was on a Delta cattle-car-in-the-sky back to New York.

At the end of a festival stay, the temptation is to make sweeping judgments and generalizations, but those are inevitably based on a tiny sampling of films. Even if you stayed the entire 10 days (a prospect that makes my eyes glaze over) and saw six films a day (ditto), you’d still see fewer than half the films that were on display. (More…)

Katie Aselton and Adrian Grenier have a couple of things in common. Both star on TV series (Aselton on FX’s raunchily funny “The League,” Grenier on HBO’s long-running “Entourage”) – and both directed films that are at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival: Aselton’s “The Freebie” and Grenier’s “Teen-age Paparazzo.” I had a chance to talk to both of them in Park City about their films. (More…)

Sunday was a miserable day, football-wise, if you were rooting for the Jets and the Vikings, as I was.

And, filmwise at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, it ended on a weak note, because the last film of the day I saw was the dramatic-competition entry, “Lovers of Hate.” It almost broke my record this year for not having walked out of any festival films this year (I had to leave “Nowhere Boy” to see another film). On the other hand, if I hadn’t watched “Obselidia” and “Bass Ackwards” on DVD, I would have walked out of them – and, as it was, I bailed on both of those films before the end.

I didn’t walk out of “Lovers of Hate” but people around me did and the urge for flight was strong. (More…)

Every once in a while, you assemble a day at a film festival in which the films seem to resonate with each other, thematically or because of casting choices or perhaps just the zeitgeist.

I happened to catch three films in a row on Saturday at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival that all dealt with issues of family, particularly the idea of creating a family from people to whom you aren’t necessarily related but to whom you feel a connection. (More…)

The best performance I saw all day Friday at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival?

That would have to be the Park City shuttle bus driver who, in the midst of a heavy snowstorm and heavier 4:30 p.m. traffic, went from a bus stop at the curb across two lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic to make a left turn at a stoplight less than a block away. Now THAT deserved a standing ovation. (More…)

They want to rebrand – or perhaps reboot – the Sundance Film Festival this year. Which is why, when you sit in one of the theaters waiting for a film to start, you get a shimmering display that looks like LED lights, which occasionally coalesce into words to reveal the festival’s message in what are meant to be Jenny Holzer-like epigrams:

“This is cinematic rebellion.”

“This is the renewed rebellion.”

“This is the rebirth of the battle for brave new ideas.”

What are they rebelling against? Well, as Marlon Brando said in “The Wild One,” “What have you got?” (More…)

In early 2003, at a moment when the death penalty was in the news because DNA tests were proving so many death-row inmates were actually innocent of the crimes for which they were scheduled to die, I reviewed a forgettable film called “The Life of David Gale,” which was about the death penalty.

I wrote something to the effect that the film couldn’t have been timelier if it had been about a president rushing us into an unjustified war – even as we were days away from the disaster that was Shock and Awe.

I was working for a Gannett newspaper at the time, which was already beginning to feel the first tremors of what would be the sinkhole that print journalism has become. When my review ran, I received a couple of phone calls from angry readers, who wanted to know why I was inserting my political views into a movie review. (More…)

As a critic, I often get the same two questions, virtually back to back:

Have you seen (fill in the blank)? How was it?

Inevitably, I wind up giving one of two answers, if not both:

It was too long.

I wish it had been funnier.

There are very few movies to which those two answers don’t apply. (More…)