Sundance Tix Sales Suspended As Fest Site Crashes

EXCLUSIVE: Hercules Film Fund and Rhea Films have closed a deal to finance and produce a feature-length version of Power Signal — the sci-fi short from Oscar Boyson that had its world premiere in Sundance’s Midnight Shorts section last Friday.

The cost of living crisis has hit the U.K. hard, but you wouldn’t guess from the trio of films screening in the official selection at Sundance. Rye Lane, in Premieres, is a goofy love story set in south London; Girl, in World Dramatic, is a tender parent-child drama set in Glasgow; and Scrapper, also in World Dramatic, is a curious mixture of the two. It deals with issues such as social care, single parenting, truancy, and grief, but director Charlotte Regan handles these matters with a candy-colored levity that can quite often be charming, in a whimsical, Wes Anderson way, but sometimes just plain baffling (there’s a reason why you don’t see talking spiders in a Ken Loach movie).

Brendon (Algee Smith) isn’t a bad kid. An aspiring artist living in Los Angeles, in his last month of high school, the pressures of his daily life, however, are beginning to overwhelm him.

In Montana’s Big Sky Country, a black cloud hangs over the state’s expansive horizon. It looms above the indigenous residents of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations and nearby towns in Big Horn County most of all.

While it may seem niche to those outside of Texas, high school mariachi competitions are quite prolific in the Lonestar State. The teams give students a creative outlet, as well as an opportunity to pursue scholarships in college music.

That old time religion takes another hit in The Starling Girl, an effective if somewhat overdrawn account of an obedient 17-year-old girl in a fundamentalist society who is lured astray by a local former pastor. Everything about Laurel Parmet’s feature directorial debut has been fastidiously tended to in this well-carpentered drama that will appeal to young female audiences who will be both fascinated with and appalled by the rigid strictures and male-dominated activities that, according to the film, define the lives of the women in such fundamentalist communities.

“I prefer to speak through my movies,” Ryan Coogler told a well-heeled crowd tonight at the late night A Taste of Sundance dinner.

Premiering on the first day of the Sundance Film Festival, Kim’s Video is the perfect Sundance documentary, a playful and intelligent film that teases one thing and delivers quite another. Just as 2012’s Searching for Sugar Man set out to find a missing soul singer and uncovered a secret history of anti-apartheid rebellion in South Africa, this affectionate and funny film by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon and playing in the fest’s Next lineup starts as a nerd’s quest and transforms into, well, actually two things: one a glorious shaggy dog story that somehow links a New York dry cleaner, the Coen brothers’ late fees, South Korea’s CIA and the Mafia, the other an astute and actually rather moving rumination on the very real social importance of film history.

Little Richard left this mortal coil in 2020, but tonight the architect of rock’n’roll is coming to shake up the Sundance Film Festival.

“It’s a part of me,” says Ryan Coogler of the Sundance Film Festival a decade after Fruitvale Station debuted in Park City and took home both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Award. So much of it impacted me and made me the filmmaker that I am today, the Black Panther director adds. “Without question, and in ways I could have anticipated.”

At today’s opening day Sundance press, Director of Programming, Kim Yutani announced the addition of Doug Liman’s first documentary, Justice, about Brett Kavanaugh.

Over a year after Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot by Alec Baldwin on the indie Western’s New Mexico set, the Santa Fe District Attorney’s office will reveal tomorrow if they will be filing charges against the actor, crew members, or the production.

EXCLUSIVE: Roadside Attractions, Grindstone Entertainment, and Lionsgate have picked up North American distribution for Charlie Day’s feature directorial debut Fool’s Paradise.

Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry is heading to Utah, not for a game against the Jazz but an event in an entirely different arena: the Sundance Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: Multi-hyphenate filmmaker, producer and financier Tommy Oliver has signed with CAA for representation of Confluential Films, his award-winning, Black-owned and -founded film, television, and docu production company and financier. CAA will also represent Oliver personally, as a writer-director, outside of Confluential.

Chrisley Knows Best stars Todd and Julie Chrisley reported to prison on Tuesday, January 17, after being convicted of 12 counts of tax evasion, bank and wire fraud and conspiracy.

The Sundance Film Festival is back in Park City. Really.

Justified: City Primeval isn’t so much a spinoff. But if the series requires a label “it’s an extension of the universe” said actress Adelaide Clemens today at the show’s TCA session.

EXCLUSIVE: Alejandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn, the directors behind the Sundance-bound feature documentary Going Varsity in Mariachi, have signed with WME.