Sundance Film Festival: Cool reception for Hollywood fare

Robert Redford’s “10-day schmooze-a-thon” in Park City, Utah, is among the youngest of major film festivals, said Gina Piccalo in the Los Angeles Times. But Sundance, nearly a quarter-century old, is starting to seem tired. It usually serves as a launching pad for promising indie films, as well as an excuse for industry folk to sip Champagne while cutting deals with young filmmakers. But “signs of fatigue were everywhere” this year, as festive spirits were dampened by single-digit temperatures, the ongoing writers’ strike, and the unexpected death of Heath Ledger. Yet those factors “only underscored what was already a lackluster Sundance,” due to the lack of breakout films.

Sundance just needs to return to its roots, said Anne Thompson in Variety. It began in the mid-1980s and became a showcase of the best in independent cinema, quickly developing into a “must-attend event for the North American film industry.” Over the last few years, festival organizers have become more interested in “playing Hollywood power broker” than acting as “a curator of emerging talent.” Redford claims, “It’s all about the filmmakers.” But this year’s festival added yet more star-studded premieres to its lineup. Sean McGinly’s The Great Buck Howard, for instance, stars Tom Hanks and his son Colin. Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened has Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, and Sean Penn.

If Sundance offers world premieres to “such ‘independent’ films” as those, it might as well debut George Lucas films, said Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter. “This was the year hype failed,” as both Hanks’ and De Niro’s films disappointed. Newcomers held their own against Hollywood heavyweights. Director Courtney Hunt took home a Grand Jury Prize

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

for Frozen River, a drama about a single mother who smuggles immigrants across the Canadian border. Another Grand Jury Prize winner was Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina that starts with harrowing home video and turns into a compelling story about a community’s resilience. These films may not be breakout hits like Little Miss Sunshine, which debuted at Sundance in 2006. But they’re “solid, insightful, and entertaining” works that deserve more than a “collective shrug” from the industry. In other words, these are the sort of films that belong at Sundance.