Everybody’s talking about the bottle scene.
In a Sundance Film Festival where we’ve had a gymnastic sex scene (“The Bronze”) and a James Marsden-Jack Black coupling (“The D Train”), the raunchy scene that seems to be topping them all is in Leslye Headland’s “Sleeping With Other People.”
If the consequences weren’t so dire, the ham-fisted FBI “counterterrorism” operation chronicled in the documentary “(T)ERROR” would be comical. You could see the Coen Brothers taking a whack at this sort of material — an FBI informant and would-be cupcake chef with delusions of grandeur (he’s a big fan of “Homeland”) ensnares completely innocent Muslims in terrorism investigations. And lets a documentary crew follow him around for the whole thing.
You need to stay for the entire 90 minutes of French-Canadian director Francois Delisle’s “Chorus,” and not get up and leave midway through.
Although you will want to.
Jason Segel gets David Foster Wallace just right in James Ponsoldt’s “The End of the Tour.” He looks just like the big, shaggy, brilliant author of “Infinite Jest,” and he sounds just like him too, the mix of pithy insights, tangents of self-doubts, and moments of unshakable compassion towards the human condition all tumbling out.
He sounds like him. But he sounds like us, too.
They were a group of strangers meeting for the first time. A punker, a jarhead, a tomboy, a bad girl, a good girl. They had nothing in common, except each other. And that they were Korean.
Take a run in the woods, chased by a dark figure. Cower in terror from giant kaiju monsters terrorizing the city. Or sit on a rock with Reese Witherspoon.
All these experiences and more are at your disposal at the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontiers pavilion on Park City’s Main Street. When I first started checking out New Frontiers in 2010, much of the exhibits had to do with incorporating film projection into art installations.
There’s a double meaning inherent in the title of the documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” which opened the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night.
At face value, the question seems innocuous: “What things occurred?” But the undercurrent of the question, which was posed by Maya Angelou in a poem, is “What went so wrong?”
“The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” has its Madison premiere on Friday, Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. at UW-Cinematheque screening room, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. FREE! Not rated, 1:57, three stars out of four.
UW-Cinematheque will also show “The Wind Rises” on Saturday, Jan. 24 at 2 p.m. And the Union South Marquee Theatre, 1208 W. Dayton St., will show “The Tale of Princess Kaguya” on Saturday, Feb. 28 and Sunday, March 1.
Responsible for some of the most delightful and imaginative animated films in the last 50 years (“Spirited Away”, “Ponyo”) from his Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki has been called the “Japanese Walt Disney.”
I’ll bet he hates that.
Take away the drinking, the sadomasochism, the horrific visions, and the fact that one of Britain’s great modern painters is involved, and “Love is the Devil” might be just like any other love story. Boy meets boy, boy falls for boy, boy loses interest in boy, boy has nightmares about sitting perched on the end of the diving board screaming and covered in blood.
Okay, maybe not that last bit.
Pick of the week: “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy“ — My full review is here. An unlikely spy thriller masterpiece, Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John Le Carre’s novel about British intelligence rooting out a mole is both a twisty, engrossing mystery and a meditation on those who keep secrets.
Madison Movie 