Jack Black, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Nicole Kidman are among the high-profile names set to appear on screen at next year’s Sundance film festival, the annual celebration of indie film-making founded by Robert Redford.
One trend this year is the profusion of comedy actors taking on dramatic roles. In the US dramatic competition, Sarah Silverman is being talked up by curators for her portrayal of a suburban wife and mother struggling with psychological issues and a taste for recreational drugs in Adam Salky’s I Smile Back. Elsewhere, Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement plays a newly single father and graphic novelist caught up in a romantic crisis in James Strouse’s People, Places, Things.
One of the festival’s most high-profile films will be the post-apocalyptic science-fiction drama Z for Zachariah, based on Robert C O’Brien’s popular young-adult novel about a 16-year-old midwestern girl who survives a nuclear war. Margot Robbie, Ejiofor and Chris Pine will star in the big-screen version, which is directed by Compliance’s Craig Zobel.
Jason Schwartzman stars in The Overnight, Patrick Brice’s drama about a family making unlikely new friends after arriving to start a new life in Los Angeles. Mumblecore godfather Andrew Bujalski directs Guy Pearce and Cobie Smulders in comedy drama Results, about a pair of personal trainers with a new, rich client. Meanwhile, Jack Black will star opposite James Marsden as a thirtysomething man hoping to wipe away troublesome high-school memories by befriending the cool kid from his class in Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel’s comedy The D Train.
Organisers this week announced details of 118 feature films, with 103 world premieres, in the key US dramatic, world dramatic, US documentary, world documentary and NEXT sections. Many more will be announced in the coming weeks.
In the world dramatic competition, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, Kidman stars in Australian missing-child drama Strangerland, while Fassbender appears in 19th-century American frontier romance Slow West. The US documentary competition addresses a number of topical issues: Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus’s Hot Girls Wanted examines the flood of teenage girls signing up for the amateur porn industry, while 3½ Minutes profiles the case of 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis, an unarmed African American teenager shot dead at a Jacksonville gas station in November 2012 by a white software developer in a row over loud music.
In the genre-themed Park City at Midnight sidebar, Keanu Reeves stars in Eli Roth’s Knock Knock, described as a psychological horror about a married man who receives a fateful visit from two beautiful young women. Kevin Bacon plays a corrupt police officer hunting the teenagers who took his vehicle for a joyride in Cop Car, and Room 237 director Rodney Ascher returns to Sundance with The Nightmare, a documentary-horror about sleep paralysis.
Last year’s festival gave early recognition to a number of movies which are now challenging for awards-season recognition, including Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and Justin Simien’s Dear White People. Festival director John Cooper told the LA Times he was “optimistic there’s going to be quite a few breakouts” from the 2015 crop. “I just like the intensity of some of the films,” he said. “The comedies being more comedic, the romances being really sweet and beautiful, docs that really enrage you. I get the sense of independent film-makers trying to make sense of the world.”
The 2015 Sundance film festival takes place between 22 January and 1 February in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.
