The last film we caught at the festival was The Visitor, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, best known for his 2003 Sundance darling The Station Agent. Like the previous film, McCarthy's sophomore piece is a well-crafted work about how people from disparate backgrounds can come together and form an unconventional family. Walter Vale, an uptight widower and bored college econ professor, has totally shut down and withdrawn from everything in his life, but......

Among the best movies we've seen at this year's festival is Sugar crafted with care by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the filmmaking team responsible for Half Nelson. The title refers to the nickname of our protagonist Miguel, a young Dominican hoping to make it big in baseball. When we first meet the twenty-year-old pitching dynamo, he's about to leave his homeland for a minor league farm team in small-town Iowa. Of course, he barely......

Absurdistan is an allegorically rich comedy care of witty German director Veit Helmer and filmed in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. In the tiny titular land, a war of the sexes break out when the local aqueduct ceases to work, and the men are too lazy to fix it. The women declare a strike--no water, no sex--and two childhood sweethearts find themselves feuding instead of consummating their long-standing love. Looks like it's......

We just barely made it into Be Kind Rewind. Due to the previous night's snowstorm, director/brilliantly weird little man Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) didn't make it all. It's too bad, since his creative vision is what makes this film worth a viewing (in theaters soon). The cheesy storyline--after erasing the VHS inventory of a dying video store with magnets, Mos Def and Jack Black have to......

We had heard a lot of good buzz going into Sunshine Cleaning, starring the perpetually lovable and talented Amy Adams and the nearly as up-and-coming Emily Blunt as sisters who break into the lucrative niche growth industry of crime scene cleanup. Dealing with the literal blood, guts, and body fluids of the recently departed forces the ladies to examine some of the biohazards in their own lives. Wackiness and personal growth ensues. Unfortunately, the movie......