Sundance 2010: The Best Of The Festival

Blue Valentine

Let's kick off with a heady chunk of personal drama. Skipping backwards and forwards in time, Derek Cianfrance's movie charts the way a marriage goes into meltdown.

It may all sound a bit familiar, but there's real emotional heft here, not least from the two lead performances of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.

The Weinstein Company picked this up for distribution even before the festival started so it should be prompting sobs and sighs in cinemas soon, as well as jostling for awards noms for Williams and Gosling.

Buried

Also snapped up for distribution was this Ryan Reynolds starring tale of a US truck driver kidnapped and buried in a coffin in Iraq.

Tense, imaginative and clever, Buried was one of the first hits of the Festival with critics at Sundance calling it “staggering” and “powerful”. Not bad for a movie about a man in a box.

Unsurprisingly, writer Chris Sparling's next unlikely sounding project, ATM, about three men whose lives take a disastrous turn during a trip to a cash machine, has already been given the green light.

The Company Men

Out of competition at Sundance it may have been, but TV writer John Wells' big screen directorial debut still impressed plenty of people.

A slick star heavy account of executive downsizing that still manages to be touchingly personal, expect The Company Men to be there or there abouts when awards noms are slung around next year, with leads Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper and, yes, even Ben Affleck all possible contenders.

The Runaways

Pre-Sundance, we were looking at Welcome To The Rileys as the film that would nudge Kristin Stewart out of the Twilight vampire ghetto, but post the festival Floria Sigismondi's rock-band biopic looks just as likely an escape route.

Fang-fodder Stewart leather-trousers-up to play Joan Jett opposite Dakota Fanning's Cherie Curie in this clocked up to 11 story of the titular all-girl 1970s rock band. She sings, she does drugs, she has sex with lay-dees and she pees on guitars. What more could you want?

The Killer Inside Me

The highly hyped adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel about a small town sheriff (Casey Affleck) who's secretly a psychotic killer swiftly bagged a distribution deal after being screened at Sundance... despite having some audience members blanching.

Its depictions of graphic violence against women (Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba both garnered backslaps for their performances here) caused a few gasps at the screenings, but most thought Michael Winterbottom's film oozed noir class.

Winter's Bone

Debra's Granik's raw-boned drama picked up both Sundance's Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature and the festival's screenwriting award.

The story of a young girl searching through the redneck backwoods of the Ozark mountains for her absentee father, it's far from easygoing but it's well worth a watch. If for nothing else than to stop prize-giver Parker Posey self-harming.

“If it doesn’t get attention and respect I’m going to stab myself," she gushed as she handed out its gong. "We gotta support movies like this."

Restrepo

Bagging the Grand Jury prize for Best Documentary was Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's account of a year spent with a front line US army platoon in Afghanistan.

The depth of access that Junger and Hetherington got sidesteps any concern that you've seen this all before as you watch these men live, fight and, yes, die.

Makes Ross Kemp In Afghanistan look like an episode of Sgt Bilko.

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The capitals-free title screams “quirky” and the plot's not exactly slathered in original, but there's still something inescapably charming about this low-fi rom com.

The tale of the lives and loves of six twenty-something New Yorkers (See? Said it wasn't original...) was treated with disdain by snooty critics. One slammed it for “skating cutely and competently around”. Punters, however, loved it.

Bagging the audience award for best drama, it was one of the few light and loveable movies to brighten up a very serious Sundance slate.

The Kids Are Alright

One of the other rays of sunshine was Lisa Cholodenko's warm-hearted family comedy.

Pairing Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as lesbian mothers whose teenage kids decide to track down their biological dad, it's a lovely flick that Focus Features are banking on appealing will have a wide appeal – they splashed out $4.5 million on the rights, one of Sundance's biggest deals this year.

It's also got a nice supporting turn from Mark Ruffalo as the bio dad, which should make up for the “Meh...” reaction that greeted his widely anticipated directorial debut here, Sympathy For Delicious.

Waiting For Superman

Snapped up by Paramount days before the festival started, this docu's glimpse of the US's stumbling education system and the fate of the kids it fails more than justified its pre-festival buzz.

Exhaustive and occasionally exhausting, Davis Guggenheim's film turns education statistics from numbers into people, giving faces to the children staggering through the US school system.

Guggenheim's CV already boasts An Inconvenient Truth. In many ways, this is an even bigger wake-up call. It more than deserved the Festival's Audience Award for best documentary.