Sundance: 10 Films to Keep an Eye On

Josh Radnor, who's like Paul Rudd's puppyish cousin, wrote, directed, and stars in a sharply thoughtful comedy about a 35-year-old dude who returns for a weekend to his leafy, idyllic Midwestern college and becomes involved with a 19-year-old sophomore. The movie both celebrates and deftly satirizes the castle-in-the-air romance of undergraduate life, and Elizabeth Olsen, as the precocious Zibby, proves that she has star power to spare. She's brainy and elegantly sensual, like Vera Farmiga crossed with the young Faye Dunaway.—Owen Gleiberman

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is terrific as an elementary school teacher who parties in a bond of shared drunkenness with her equally wasted husband (Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul) — until one day she decides she wants to stop. What's new about this affecting, unsensationalized portrait of addiction, recovery, and consequences is the low-keyed energy of the storytelling. This is a drunk's tale by and for a generation with a high tolerance for humor in the midst of seriousness, and a low tolerance for soapiness and bulls---. It's also a project shaped by television and Internet sensibilities, with a cast of likable, TV-seasoned actors also including Parks and Recreation's Nick Offerman.—Lisa Schwarzbaum

Sentimental high-concept fluff done with style. It's set in the not-so-distant future, when a lonely, aging former cat burglar who is losing his memory — he?s played with gruff magic by Frank Langella — teams up with the domestic robot who?s been hired to look after him. The droid, voiced by Peter Sarsgaard to sound like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, is never made too cuddly, too adorably anthropomorphic; he really is a machine. But the tiny beauty of the movie is that Langella becomes his friend only because neither of them can quite connect.—Owen Gleiberman

The story alone — a true one — demands that attention must be paid: A 38-year-old poet, who because of childhood polio has spent his life in an iron lung, hires a sex surrogate to relieve him of his virginity. But who knew a movie made out of such, ah, singular material could be turned into such an uplifting but unsentimental, funny, and frankly sexual crowd-pleaser? Winter's Bone's always wonderful John Hawkes delivers a tour-de-force performance as the real poet in question, Mark O?Brien, who wrote his own account of the experience. And Helen Hunt—frequently and eloquently naked—is marvelously matter-of-fact in the title role.—Lisa Schwarzbaum

A Sundance favorite, though not to me. It's an anthropological fairy tale set in the Mississippi Delta, among a group of shack dwellers so poor and removed that it would be absurd to say they live on the wrong side of the tracks. (There would have to be tracks first.) Director Benh Zeitlin uses a cast of nonactors, yet he doesn't so much create scenes as hold his wavery camera in front of them and wait for something to happen, which it seldom does. At one point there?s a hurricane, and it?s impressive, but it's the movie that's a perfect storm of aestheticized film-festival correctness.—Owen Gleiberman

When a police officer phones the manager of a fast-food restaurant and accuses a teenaged employee of theft, the manager's instinct to cooperate with the authoritative voice at the other end of the line leads to a nightmare of degradation and terrible behavior by many good people, all out of a natural instinct to comply. This nerve-wracking, extremely troubling, documentary-style drama, inspired by real events, is built on strong performances and canny production design that stir up feelings of claustrophobia and introspection so that we, the good people in the audience must ask: When is it time to challenge authority? At what cost?—Lisa Schwarzbaum

In Nicholas Jarecki's tasty financial thriller, Richard Gere, as a silver fox of an investment titan who is trying to sell off his company (but is hiding a $400 million hole in its assets), has never been more likable or intensely alive as an actor. We?re torn between wanting to see him get what he deserves and wanting to see him get away with it. Drawing on elements of the Madoff scandal, the movie has a stomach-churning, high-finance-vertigo anxiety.—Owen Gleiberman

I went into this documentary about the West Memphis Three case fearing that it would turn out to be Paradise Lost 4: Beating a Dead Horse. But no. Financed by Peter Jackson and directed by Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil), it exonerates Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin by digging into the evidence in newly dogged detail, and by going after the likely suspect — Terry Hobbs, who maintains his innocence — with an intensity that casts a hypnotic dark spell.—Owen Gleiberman

Director James Marsh, a Sundance star with Man on a Wire and Project Nim, makes great use of his talent for narrative control in a gripping, slow-building, cat-and-mouse dramatic thriller, set in Northern Ireland in 1993. Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the story is a complicated one involving secrets, moles, human inconsistency, and high political stakes. The outstanding young British actress Andrea Riseborough—the sole reason to see Madonna's W.E.—is superb as a single mother and only daughter in a family of IRA activists; Clive Owen matches her, nuance for nuance, as an MI5 agent trying to turn the lady into a mole.—Lisa Schwarzbaum

The characters in this drama of round-robin sexual and emotional upheaval are hothouse specimens of a certain kind of Los Angeles privilege: A successful Hollywood sound designer (John Krasinski) is married to a beautiful psychotherapist (Rosemary DeWitt), whose patients include a hot Hollywood star (Justin Kirk). The problems they confront in their beautiful home are tiny in the big world. And the gamine young New York artist (Olivia Thirlby), whose arrival as a houseguest nearly destabilizes the family, is more of a symbol than a believable personality. But something intriguing in this dreamy, scattershot movie just may get under your skin. It did mine.—Lisa Schwarzbaum