What’s Hot at Sundance?

If it’s a Friday in late January, the Sundance Film Festival must be in full swing. We’ll be publishing dispatches as they come in from our blogger on the ground, David Leitner, but it seems like a good time to survey the offerings this year. Reports from Park City indicate that, despite a generally subdued film distribution market, deals are taking place — bolstered partly by the expectation of increased revenue from video-on-demand offerings — just with dramatically reduced price tags compared to just a few years ago. As far as getting in to see those films goes, it might be a little more difficult this year. Usually, if you’re willing to wait long enough (several hours, sometimes) to be near the front of a rush line for last-minute tickets, you can snag a seat at even the hottest Sundance screenings. But this year, the shuttered Park City Racquet Club theater may be putting a squeeze on the other festival venues. “If you go to Park City, buy tickets,” festival director John Cooper told The Salt Lake Tribune. “This is going to be a year where more wait-list people will be turned away.”

I’m not in Park City, but judging from my Twitter feed — which, admittedly, veers toward film critics on the artsy and alternative end of the spectrum — the hottest tickets on the first day of the festival are to Kaboom, the tenth feature from erstwhile enfant terrible Gregg Araki, which debuts at a public screening tonight, and Margin Call, a financial thriller by debut writer-director J.C. Chandor that press-screened today in a packed multiplex theater. Red State, a horror film by Kevin Smith, the celebrity figurehead of a certain kind of indie film, screens on January 23 and 24 and also has a high must-see factor among attendees. A preview article in The New York Times rattled off a few more titles that are generating heat in its festival overview this morning: they include My Idiot Brother, directed by Jesse Peretz (a founding member of rock band The Lemonheads turned filmmaker!), dark comedy The Details, and romance Like Crazy.

One strategy when you’re shut out of the big-buzz feature films is to try and work your way into one of the packaged screenings of short films. IndieWire has a comprehensive round-up.

The festival opened last night with four premieres, but the most buzz was generated by Project Nim, a documentary about a research project involving a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky from James Marsh, who made the terrific Sundance film Man on Wire a few years back. At HitFix, reviewer Daniel Feinberg compares it to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. In its review, The Guardian sounds an ominous note for British documentarians when it refers to the film’s partial funding by the UK Film Council, which no longer exists due to government cutbacks.

Can’t make it to Sundance this year? You’re in luck. (Well, unless you’re like me and subscribe to Verizon FiOS, with its rather limited range of video-on-demand offerings, but never mind that.) This year sees the inauguration of a video-on-demand platform under the new Sundance Selects banner, which will offer five Sundance movies for a period of 30 days following their festival debuts. They include the aforementioned Kaboom; the new film from microbudget standard-bearer Joe Swanberg, Uncle Kent; a documentary on the National Film Registry, These Amazing Shadows; an Australian coming-of-age story set among aboriginal communities called Mad Bastards; and writer-actor-director Michael Tully’s Septien.

Of course, some of the films showing already have distribution deals. You’ll be able to see Project Nim through HBO Films (I’m assuming that means a theatrical release is in the cards), Morgan Spurlock’s product-placement documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold through Sony, and thriller Take Shelter through Sony Pictures Classics. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Risky Business blog names six films that it calls “likely to sell” this year — meaning you’ll eventually have a chance to see them at a theater near you. They include I Melt With You, a new “druggy and dark” film from director Mark Pellington, and The Devil’s Double, a based-on-true-events movie about Saddam Huseein’s son Uday from director Lee Tamahori. And Movieline throws a few more names into that hat, citing Ellen Barkin vehicle Another Happy Day, Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, Higher Ground (read StudioDaily’s coverage here), and the “paranoiac cult-rehabilitation drama” Martha Marcy May Marlene as equally likely to set off bidding wars.