The Sundance Film Festival starts today, and pretty soon everyone will be discussing the next big hit to blast out of Park City, Utah. In preparation, here’s a list of five buzzworthy films lined up for 2013, with notable stars and directors stirring up the anticipation. Of course, these are certainly not the only films to check out from this year’s Sundance, so scan the complete list here to read up on all of the feature films, documentaries, and shorts from talented filmmakers all over the world.
5. Kill Your Darlings
While attending Columbia University in 1944, four friends meet who vow to take on and break down rules and tradition, and ultimately end up shaping the attitude of a generation. Allen Ginsberg (played by Daniel Radcliffe), Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Lucien Carr combine to concoct a powerful formula that gave birth to the Beat movement. But their story takes an alternate direction when David Kammerer, an outsider thirtysomething who is in love with Carr, is found dead, and Kerouac, Burroughs, and Carr are arrested in conjunction with his murder. By twisting crime with a cultural revolution, director and co-writer John Krokidas captures a riveting spark of energy combined with literary history in Kill Your Darlings.
4. The Spectacular Now
Based on the novel by Tim Thorpe, The Spectacular Now takes the beaten tale of ‘popular-boy-falls-for-shy-outcast,’ and unwraps the clean-cut package in which such a story is often sold. Miles Teller stars as Sutter Keely, a seize-the-moment high school senior who parties hard and has no plans for the future. After he is dumped by his girlfriend, Sutter gets wasted and wakes up in the lawn of Aimee Finicky, a sci-fi loving, nice-girl nerd played by The Descendants’ Shailene Woodley. The two, of course, fall in love; Sutter’s live-in-the-now mentality is contrasted by Aimee’s big dreams for the future, but an inexplicable passion drives them together. Soul-baring, unabashed, and irregular, The Spectacular Now’s originality is framed by its plot’s familiarity, and the outcome is winning.
3. Don Jon’s Addiction
Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is such a ladies’ man, his friends call him “Don Jon,” after literature’s legendary libertine. A serial objectifier, Jon conquers a different woman every weekend, but even the finest can’t break his addiction. Jon experiences pure bliss and a sense of tranquility only when he is alone, in front of his computer, watching pornography. As he grows dissatisfied with his habits, Jon attempts to revamp his sex life, and instead finds life-altering lessons of love and happiness through his relationships with two vastly different women. Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore fortify the film, which is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut.
2. Lovelace
The story of Linda Lovelace, the star of the first mainstream-accepted pornography Deep Throat, comes alive in the form of Amanda Seyfried. Following Lovelace’s life from age 17 to 32, including her relationship with husband/manager Chuck Traynor, the film captures Lovelace’s initial enthusiastic embrace of her newfound sexuality and stardom, as well as the later-revealed story of her own shadowy, sinister history. The all-star cast lends itself to the film’s anticipation, with performances by Peter Sarsgaard, Hank Azaria, Sarah Jessica Parker, Adam Brody, and more, as well as the craftsmanship of expert documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who co-directed the film.
1. jOBS
jOBS traces Apple, Inc. back to its ‘home brewed’ birth in a garage, and follows Jobs’ launch of a world revolution. Ashton Kutcher’s much-talked about portrayal of Steve Jobs comes to fruition in this biopic, which is able to lay out Jobs’ tumultuous path to success in a swallowable manner. The film goes inside the story of the college-dropout-turned-billionaire who changed the future of technology permanently, and refigured the way we as a society function. Director Joshua Michael Stearn successfully captures Jobs’ rocky progression and essence in perhaps the most anticipated film of this year’s festival.
