While 2015 has been poised as the year of the mega-blockbuster – “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” “Ant-Man,” “The Fantastic Four” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” to name a few – the first film festival of the year, Sundance, has raised anticipation for some of the smaller, lower-profile movies looking to squeeze into the packed slate.
Founded with the help of actor/director Robert Redford in 1978, the Sundance Film Festival is held every January in Park City, Utah, and is considered both a film lover’s dream and filmmaker’s marketplace. The slate specifically highlights independent films, which, in many cases, come to Sundance to screen for the first time as well as to find a studio buyer. Sundance also has a high reputation for launching Oscar players: just in 2014, two of the festival’s breakout hits – “Boyhood” and “Whiplash” – landed best picture nominations at the Oscars, following in the footsteps of films like “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Winter’s Bone.” This year’s offerings, however, have catapulted several films into the limelight, and judging by the studios that bought them, may be headed into the midst of 2015’s awards season. They offered ambitious directors, well-known actors taking a different spin on their personas, and breakout performances.
The festival opened on January 22 with “The Bronze,” a relatively well-received comedy about an Olympic gymnast, who, by the wishes of her late coach, trains the new upstart who may steal her glory. Fans of “The Big Bang Theory” will recognize the star: Melissa Rauch, who plays Bernadette on the CBS sitcom, wrote and starred in the film. While some critics were taken aback by the film’s sense of humor, it still sounds like one that could be a commercial success if its buyer, Relativity Media, can get it into the mainstream.
Speaking of CBS sitcoms, one of the festival’s most pleasant surprises was “The End of the Tour,” a drama starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and directed by James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” which landed at Sundance 2013). In his first major role since “How I Met Your Mother” ended last spring, Segel has received widespread acclaim for his performance as the late author David Foster Wallace, whose five-day road trip with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky (Eisenberg) during the 1996 press tour for his novel “Infinite Jest” is the focus of the film. Adapted from Lipsky’s 2010 memoir “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” the buzz surrounding the film and Segel in particular led to the film being purchased by A24, a studio prime for its first foray into awards glory after its first two major pictures, “The Spectacular Now” and 2014’s “A Most Violent Year,” missed out on Oscar nods but not on critical praise. A24 also picked up the critically acclaimed small-budget horror film “The Witch” and the road-trip gambling dramedy “Mississippi Grind,” starring Ben Mendelsohn, Ryan Reynolds, and Sienna Miller.
However, perhaps the biggest breakout of Sundance 2015 was “Me & Earl & The Dying Girl,” which has received widespread acclaim and comparisons to the 2014 hit “The Fault in Our Stars.” Starring newcomer Thomas Mann as an awkward teenage filmmaker who befriends a classmate (Olivia Cooke, “Bates Motel”) dying of leukemia, the film has been hailed as being able to stand apart from “Fault,” as more of a comedy than a love story. The film followed in the footsteps of “Whiplash” at last year’s festival, winning both the audience award for a U.S. dramatic film and the grand jury prize, and was picked up by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Considering what Fox Searchlight has been able to do in recent awards seasons – it distributed the 2013 Best Picture winner “12 Years a Slave” and its two major films in the 2014 race, “Birdman” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” led the Oscar nominations – it’s entirely possible that “Me & Earl & The Dying Girl” could be a player later this year. Fox Searchlight also picked up the acclaimed period drama “Brooklyn” with Saoirse Ronan and Noah Baumbach’s comedy “Mistress America,” with Greta Gerwig.
There are plenty more major films from Sundance 2015 to list, ranging from psychodramas (“The Stanford Prison Experiment”) to documentaries (“The Wolfpack”), from horror (“The Witch”) to comedy (“The D-Train”). While many of these films are still far off from hitting mainstream release, their Sundance launches have made their names known and thrown into the ring as alternatives to 2015’s blockbusters.
