16 Films with Sundance Buzz: EW Critics' Take

Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, as a troubled sister and brother coping with a dark family legacy, are as powerful as Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo were as the woundedly bound siblings of You Can Count on Me. As the gay, depressed Milo, Hader is a revelation. He doesn't dial back the shade-throwing bitchery, but he builds it around a core of feeling. And Wiig, as she did in Bridesmaids, draws us into a conspiratorial relationship with her character's bad behavior. Directed and co-written by Craig Johnson, this is a tenderly sincere, beguiling, penetrating, and funny drama about the ways that ordinary messed-up people can wind up stumbling through their lives. There is, God forbid, a lip-syncing number (done to the 1987 Starship hit ''Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now''), but damned if it isn't thrilling: When Milo gets the reluctant Maggie to sync along with him, what you're witnessing is the two of them bringing each other back to life. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's full review of The Skeleton Twins

Imagine Fight Club if Brad Pitt's part was played by a talking dog and cat. That should give you a sense of just how dark and twisted Marjane Satrapi's The Voices is. Ryan Reynolds is unexpectedly funny as a disturbed young man whose dates tend to go fatally wrong and who seeks the counsel of his evil tabby and benevolent mutt. —Chris Nashawaty

Read Chris' full review of The Voices

Richard Linklater's entrancing, one-of-a-kind act of dramatic storytelling is a beautiful stunt of a movie. It was shot over 11 years, starting in 2002, and it takes two hours and 40 minutes to tell the story of a boy named Mason as he grows up in Texas. The hook is that Mason is played by a young actor named Ellar Coltrane, who we literally watch grow up, year after year, on camera. Pensive and boisterous, at once very entertaining and very Zen, Boyhood touches something deep and true, which is that we all grow up to be the people we are by letting every moment form us. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's full review of Boyhood

In Damien Chazelle's electrifying jazz fable, Miles Teller plays a brilliant, driven young drummer who attends the Schaffer Academy in Manhattan, where he comes under the tutelage of the school's legendary taskmaster, a scarily exacting bebop maestro. Playing this sadistic and inspiring drill sergeant of jazz beauty, J.K. Simmons does a bravura turn, but it's Teller's brash, sensitive, tormented, passionate performance that makes the movie work. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's full review of Whiplash

Lars von Trier unveiled the first half of his latest taboo provocation at a buzzy top-secret screening. Charlotte Gainsbourg stars as a sex addict who recounts her sexual awakening and history for a stranger (Stellan Skarsgård). The film has some poignant moments, but seems to think that it's naughtier and more transgressive than it actually is. —Chris Nashawaty

Read Chris' full review of Nymphomaniac, Vol. 1

You may think that there's little left to discover about Roger Ebert, but documentary master Steve James (Hoop Dreams) puts the celebrated critic's life together with extraordinary fascination and resonance. The hard-drinking Chicago newspaperman, the film fanatic who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and shoot-from-the-id screenwriter, the TV personality who turned his weekly battles with Gene Siskel into a take-no-prisoners conversation that changed the face of pop-culture reviewing, the dazzlingly insatiable writer, the cancer victim who lost his ability to speak yet responded by only heightening the eloquence of his voice and even welcoming death: In Life Itself, they all add up to a man on a spiritual quest, who has now become what Ebert himself would have called a great movie character. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's full review of Life Itself

In this Continental sequel to the hilarious and touching 2010 road movie The Trip, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing themselves, go on another restaurant tour, sitting down to mouth-watering meals during which they spend most of the time taking the piss out of each other, and also doing their wickedly dead-on impersonations of Al Pacino, Michael Caine, Robert De Niro, Woody Allen, Christian Bale, and others. Brydon, the shovel-faced Welsh comic, doesn't just do Al Pacino. He channels him, imbibes him, deconstructs him, crawls inside his shouting gravel head. And Coogan once again turns his ethereal aura of failure (his movie career has never fully caught fire, and God, how he wants it to) into a luscious joke. Most of The Trip to Italy was made up on the spot, and it wouldn't have hurt if the movie had more structural design. But it can still make you sputter with laughter. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's full review of The Trip to Italy

Not that there's been a ton of competition, but Jeff Baena's Life After Beth is the best zombie rom-com since Shaun of the Dead. Mostly the credit goes to Aubrey Plaza, who brings her loopy, deadpan genius to the role of a young woman who mysteriously comes back from the dead with urges to listen to smooth jazz and eat her boyfriend (Dane DeHaan). —Chris Nashawaty

Read Chris' full review of Life After Beth

The new romantic comedy from director Lynn Shelton (Your Sister's Sister) is shaggy and amusing but also kind of diagrammed. Keira Knightley, likable but a little too pert and poised for the role, plays an arrested development case who has been with the same emo geek for 10 years and doesn't have the strength to admit she wants to leave him. So she befriends a teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz, in bloom) and spends a week crashing at the home of her new teen buddy and the girl's gruff Teddy bear of a single father (Sam Rockwell) — who, of course, turns out to be the man she's been looking for. Shelton, for all her talent, has emerged as the poor woman's Nicole Holofcener. She's pulling so many levers to get you to like the people on screen that you wish she?d let those levers go and see who those people might be without them. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's take on Laggies at the bottom of his review of The Skeleton Twins

Kristen Stewart makes a bid for indie integrity by playing a guard at Guantanamo Bay who befriends one of the detainees. Has he been unjustly imprisoned? Maybe, but as the film sees it, the real injustice is that he's been locked up with no end in sight, and he's nice. It's hard to buy Stewart as a soldier, because all she does is rein in her moody mannerisms and give an almost minimalist performance. The movie conveys a journalistic sense of the day-to-day squalor of Guantanamo, but as drama, it's mostly a dud. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's full review of Camp X-Ray

The place: Ocean City, Maryland. The Time: 1985. Michael Tully's coming-of-age-comedy tells the story of an awkward teen (Marcello Conte) during what will become the most awesome summer of his life. Gunning for the same groove as Adventureland and The Way Way Back, Ping Pong Summer may be a bit slight, but it's also charming. And the '80s details (parachute pants, Mr. Mister, boomboxes the size of Samsonites) are spot-on. —Chris Nashawaty

Read Chris' full review of Ping Pong Summer

John Lithgow (genteel, wily, with hidden corners) and Alfred Molina (open, affable, vulnerable) are touching together as aging New Yorkers who've been a couple for 39 years. At the start of the movie, the two get married, which results in Molina's character (who teaches music at a parochial school) losing his job. The two then then have to sell their apartment and crash at the homes of their friends and relatives — a rather slapdash, contrived situation that speaks to the imprecision of Ira Sachs' work here as a director. Sachs is coming off Keep the Lights On, his superb 2011 drama of love and addiction, but this new one has been made in the kind of clunky, telegraphed indie style that Sachs seemed to have outgrown. That said, whenever Lithgow and Molina get a scene together, the film takes wing, because they convey such a bittersweet, lived-in sense of the history of their relationship. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's full take on Love Is Strange at the bottom of his review of The Trip to Italy

It's taken 10 years for Zach Braff to make his second feature (after Garden State, a movie I loved), and given that he funded it with a highly publicized Kickstarter campaign, Wish I Was Here became one of the event films of the festival. Some were enthralled by it, but I was mixed on this middle-aged odyssey about an out-of-work Los Angeles actor dad (Braff) who is faced, all at once, with losing his career, his ailing father (Mandy Patinkin), his children's posh private school (the horror!), and his center. There are funny, lively moments, but the film turns into a woozy spiritual journey that's a little too be-here-now-in-L.A. —Owen Gleiberman

David Wain gets the Wet Hot American Summer gang back together (plus some new faces) for this silly, Airplane!-esque spoof of formula rom coms like You've Got Mail. Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler play the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan parts, meeting cute while firing off ''Don't call me Shirley''-style puns and sight gags. —Chris Nashawaty

Read Chris' full review of They Came Together.

Michael Fassbender plays a saintly-kook man-child of an indie-rock lead singer who wears a big, round papier-maché head that he never takes off. He's literally a head case, like Booji Boy from Devo as redesigned by Julie Taymor to look like a freaked-out Astro-Boy with his eyes popped open in deadpan shock. The movie has been conceived as Napoleon Dynamite meets The Commitments, with this crazy-cute character at the center of it. Meanwhile, Frank's bandmates, who include Domhnall Gleeson (from About Time) as the nominal sweet-geek hero and Maggie Gyllenhaal as some sort of raging feminist bohemian, kvetch and cuddle and fight and try to make an album together, in scenes that mostly just dribble on. At the end, Fassbender, singing in a voice that sounds like Jim Morrison on Klonopin, performs a song called ''I Love You All,'' and it is haunting. But most of the time Frank is a cult-film mascot who never really becomes a character. —Owen Gleiberman

Read Owen's extended take on Frank at the bottom of his Camp X-Ray review

An unexpectedly effective bogeyman chiller from writer-director Jennifer Kent. Essie Davis plays a single mother who's haunted by the death of her husband and pushed to the limit by her rambunctious son (Noah Wiseman) who's terrified by a very creepy bedtime pop-up book about a black-clad monster called ''The Babadook.'' Boo! —Chris Nashawaty

Read Chris' full review of The Babadook