The Most Intriguing Sundance Descriptions

Richard Lawson

The 3,000th (approx.) annual Sundance Film Festival begins today in Park City, Utah, with a raft of promising indie films filling theaters and screening rooms in the hopes of becoming the next Little Miss Sunshine or Beasts of the Southern Wild. To inform those of us avoiding the wintry scrum and staying home, Entertainment Weekly has created a handy primer highlighting thirteen of the most intriguing films. In case it's all maybe too much to read, we've gone and taken the most interesting or head-scratching sentence or phrase from each writeup and listed them below. Happy non-viewing!

  • "Sam Rockwell, playing an older worker at the waterpark where the boy takes a job for the summer" (The Way, Way Back)

  • "'I don’t know if they get to go and have sex with the guys, but there are versions of it,' [Keri] Russell says." (Austenland)

  • "… she’s very much an older soul, and the older man is very much a younger soul" (Breathe In)

  • "The title, of course, refers to the car Muhammad and Malvo traveled in, and set up as their covert sniper station." (Blue Caprice)

  • "… this is exactly what it’s like when teenagers fall in love for the first time" (The Spectacular Now)

  • "There seems to be a kind of body snatcher element to the story, in which the 'ageless organism' infects various people" (Upstream Color)

  • "There is a disconcerting finality to the title. We’ve had the 'sunrise' and the 'sunset,' and now we’re reaching the end of the day." (Before Midnight)

  • "James Franco co-stars as Hugh Hefner" (Lovelace)

  • "… the two combative main characters try to repair a remote road devastated by a wildfire" (Prince Avalanche)

  • "This is a guy who gets laid all the time and he’s still addicted to porn." Also: "Glenne Headly and Tony Danza play his troubled parents" (Don Jon's Addiction)

  • "… a woman who is struggling in life but finally decides to follow her father’s footsteps into the world of dramatic voice-overs" (In a World...)

  • "Kaya Scodelario plays a young woman who becomes bizarrely obsessed with a neighbor (Jessica Biel) who reminds her of her late mother" (Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes)

  • "And now that the boys are no longer, well, boys … each of the moms has developed a crush on the other one’s kid." (Two Mothers)