Sundance: ‘Kids’ purchased, the ‘Killer Inside’ Casey Affleck plus ‘Winter’s Bone’

The Sundance Film Festival keeps rolling through to Sunday, but all of the world premieres have been seen. Many journos and industry types will be packing their bags and heading home while others will be mopping up and catching additional screenings of hot titles they missed the first time around.

Consider this post a similar attempt to pick up some of the loose ends. Even from the comfort of home, it’s difficult keeping on top of all the great stuff happening at a festival like Sundance so here are a few more films that have been talked up in the last few days.

First though is today’s news that Focus Features sealed the deal for festival favorite The Kids Are All Right which lept to my attention yesterday and quickly established itself as the film to see. There’s no official word yet on when Focus will release the film, but with Oscar buzz already swirling around Annette Benning and her co-stars, a fall debut is a strong possibility.

The Killer Inside Me. USA (2009) d:Michael Winterbottom
s:Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson
World Premiere

As a big fan of author Jim Thompson, I had high hopes for Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of The Killer Inside Me starring Casey Affleck as a charming, small town sheriff who also happens to have a taste for brutally violent sex and murder. The film’s shocking violence (a depiction of Affleck repeatedly and forcefully punching Jessica Alba in the face is supposed to be especially graphic and disturbing) is what most reviewers came away talking about, and indeed the post-screening Q&A was kicked off by a woman who demanded to know why Sundance would program such a film before storming out. You’ll recall a similar controversy with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist at Cannes. In the end, it turns out Antichrist got a bum’s rush from lazy, reactionary festival critics. Though not perfect, it was a much better film than it was initially given credit for. I can’t help but wonder if the same is true here, though most of the reviews I’ve read really do make it sound like an unpleasant, unnecessary experience.

John DeFore, THR:

The savage wit of Jim Thompson is just another casualty, albeit the only unintentional one, in “The Killer Inside Me,” an adaptation that looks good but can’t find the right tone in depicting its Andy Griffith-meets-”American Psycho” anti-hero. Shockingly violent murders left many in the Sundance crowd disgusted, suggesting that potential distributors might argue for trims before any theatrical release.

Thompson’s book is a page-turning series of episodes in which [the Sheriff] is almost is caught and must invent a lie or kill someone to escape. But director Michael Winterbottom doesn’t generate the pulp author’s rising pitch, in which the next shoe dropping never is the final one, and his attempts to convey the narrator’s pitch-black humor often rely on an off-target use of Western Swing tunes that make the action more jaunty and ironic than menacing.

Katey Rich, Cinemablend:

When The Killer Inside Me was written as a novel by Jim Thompson in 1952, it might have seemed shocking to spend time inside the mind of a guy who gets a sexual kick out of beating women with a belt before punching them in the face. But in 2010, in a film directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Casey Affleck, it’s yet another disturbing and painful descent into a sociopath’s mind– both shocking and overly familiar.

…great film noirs rely on great mysteries or intrigues at their center, but this one is just a muddle. And despite Affleck’s efforts in the central role, Lou is a completely unbearable figure, snide and rude in public and unspeakably, horribly violent at home. The film’s violence is what’s got everyone talking, and while it’s debatable whether the movie shares Lou’s own misogyny, the camera does take a certain delight in shocking us by showing repeated shots of Jessica Alba’s face being beaten to pulp. When men are killed in the film they’re shot cleanly or dispatched with offscreen, but the women suffer brutally– and you have to wonder if Lou is the only one enjoying it.

Some may love the Lynchian darkness at the heart of Killer Inside Me, but again, that’s something that’s been done to death. The movie doesn’t just feel like punishment, but cliched punishment, and feels as nasty as the character it follows.”

Winter’s Bone. USA (2009) d:Debra Granik
s:Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Sheryl Lee, Tate Taylor
US Dramatic Competition, World Premiere

Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) spins an Ozark tale of a teen girl (Jennifer Lawrence) searching for her meth addict of a father before her home is taken away.

John DeFore: THR:

Six years after winning an award here for “Down to the Bone,” director Debra Granik returns to Sundance with her follow-up, “Winter’s Bone,” a grim story of persistence set deep in the Ozarks. Slow to get going and uningratiating…its grit and the tenacity of its young heroine will resonate with some viewers.

Daniel Fienberg, HitFix:

Even if I spent the day trudging around in wet, slushy shoes and even if I didn’t have a single real meal, experiences like catching “Winter’s Bone” on Saturday (Jan. 23) evening are the reason you go to festivals like Sundance.

“Winter’s Bone” is the best film I’ve seen this Festival and also one of the best films I’ve seen in the past year, a drama I appreciated more as I became increasingly immersed in its unique world.

Appearing in every scene, Lawrence gives a breakout performance which is…as revelatory as Carey Mulligan’s Sundance arrival last year…Lawrence looks like a young Jennifer Jason Leigh and this performance reminded me of some of those early, totally committed Leigh performances.

Steven Zeitchik, LA Times 24 Frames:

There are plenty of movies at this year’s Sundance film festival that take audiences into new and unexpected places — the gangster underworld of Melbourne, Australia, in “Animal Kingdom,” drug-running Hasssidic Jews in “Holy Rollers” — but no Park City offering transports viewers to as distinctive and haunting a place as director Debra Granik’s “Winter’s Bone,” which some Sundance patrons have called the best movie in the festival so far.

The naturalistic thriller is saturated with small, telling details that coll

Filed under: Film Festivals
Tags: Casey Affleck, Dale Dickey, Debra Granik, Garret Dillahunt, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Alba, John Hawkes, Kate Hudson, Michael Winterbottom, Sheryl Lee, Sundance, Tate Taylor, The Killer Inside Me, Winter's Bone