We are just one day away from the Sundance Film Festival, and whether you are attending the festival or not, you should be getting pretty excited. The celebrated institution out of Park City, UT has premiered some of the most important movies of the past three decades, and most recently gave us two of this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees: Boyhood and Whiplash.
Will this year’s Sundance movies make the same kind of impression on critics and audiences alike? Time will tell, but the odds are in their favor. Sundance seems to have great taste in motion pictures, and it seems like just about anything playing in Park City this weekend could very well be the next big thing in cinema.
Check Out: The Top 50 Most Important Sundance Movies
What follows are the 18 films that should probably be on your radar going into Sundance 2015, including intriguing documentaries, impressive casts and time-tested filmmakers. Any one of them could be a breakout hit, but never forget that the point of film festivals is to discover something new. This time next year, every single one of these films might be hailed as new classics, or a completely unknown entry could have slipped in and left them all in the dust.
CraveOnline will be covering the entire Sundance Film Festival, eagerly searching for films that could make a difference. Keep checking back for daily reviews, interviews and videos.
18 Sundance Movies You Won’t Want to Miss:
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
Sundance 2015: 18 Movies You Won't Want to Miss
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The Amina Profile
Sophie Deraspe's new documentary chronicles the search for Amina, a Syrian-American blogger kidnapped during the Arab Uprising in 2011. On the case is Sandra, a Montreal woman who travels the globe to find out what happened to Amina, a star blogger whose blog "A Gay Woman in Damascus" represented the underrepresented voices in the Middle East.
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The End of the Tour
Director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) returns to Sundance with The End of the Tour, starring Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) as Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky and Jason Segel as Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace, who bonded over the course of a five day interview that was only published after Wallace's suicide.
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Experimenter
The "obedience experiments" performed in 1961 at Yale University are still the stuff of disturbing legend. Now, director Michael Almereyda (Hamlet) dramatizes the story of social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), who gave people permission to administer electric shocks to strangers, and watched as 65% of them tortured their fellow man, just because they could.
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The Forbidden Room
Iconic experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music World) is back with a Russian nesting doll of a movie, comprised of dozens of surreal stories connected by tangential threads and his signature, silent film-inspired style. The Fobidden Room, co-directed by Evan Johnson, stars Matthieu Almaric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Udo Kier (Suspiria) and Caroline Dhavernas ("Hannibal") and a host of other recognizable actors.
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Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Lawrence Wright's bombshell book is now a documentary. Going clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief follows the story of eight former Scientologists and examines the secretive practices of the relatively young religion. Director Alex Gibney has won multiple awards for his previous documentaries, which include Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
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Hot Girls Wanted
Directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus follow a young woman as she enters the world of amateur pornography in Hot Girls Wanted. The documentary explores the well-known yet rarely examined corner of the entertainment industry and raises questions about the Millennial obsession with notoriety.
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I Am Michael
James Franco stars as Michael Glatze, a gay rights advocate who renounced his homosexuality in 2007. Directed by music video director Justin Kelly, making his feature film debut, I Am Michael illustrates Glatze's early activism and the turn of events that led to his dramatic and controversial change of heart.
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Knock Knock
Keanu Reeves returns to horror in Knock Knock, the latest film from Hostel director Eli Roth. Reeves plays a family man left alone on Father's Day. When two sexy young women arrive on his doorstep, he invites them in, and with Roth at the helm, we expect things to get very disturbing from here.
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Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
The new documentary about the life of iconic Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain promises to reveal new information about the musician's life, and even previously unreleased music by Cobain himself. Director Brett Morgan knows his stuff: he previously co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture and the Oscar-nominated On the Ropes.
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Last Days in the Desert
Ewan MacGregor plays Jesus Christ - and also the Devil - in Last Days in the Desert, coming into conflict over the fate of a family during Christ's 40 day fasting in the desert. Last Days in the Desert is directed by Rodrigo Garcia (Albert Nobbs), and is it just us, or does it sound like it could be an awful lot like The Seventh Seal?
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Mississippi Grind
Respected character actor Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises) takes center stage in Mississippi Grind as a gambler who finds a lucky charm in the form of Ryan Reynolds. The road trip film hails from directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, whose first dramatic feature Half Nelson earned Ryan Gosling his first Oscar nomination.
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The Nightmare
Documentarian Rodney Ascher spent his last film analyzing every little detail of The Shining, perhaps the scariest movie ever made. In The Nightmare he takes a look at a different kind of terror: sleep paralysis, in which the afflicted are trapped in a state between consciousness and unconsciousness, unable to move and fully aware of their surroundings. The Nightmare has been described as a "documentary-horror film," and Ascher himself has experienced the conditions depicted in the movie.
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Mistress America
Director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) reunited with his Frances Ha star and co-writer Greta Gerwig for Mistress America. Their previous film was so acclaimed that we probably don't need to say any more. Mistress America co-stars Lola Kirke (Gone Girl) as a college freshman who forms a bond with her more adventurous, soon-to-be stepsister (Gerwig) in New York City.
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The Stanford Prison Experiment
Another Sundance entry about a controversial sociological experiment (see also: Experimenter), The Stanford Prison Experiment dramatizes the famed study in which the participants are chosen at random to be prisoners and guards in a controlled environment, and begin to embrace their new roles to an unsettled degree. The impressive cast includes Billy Crudup, Ezra Miller, Michael Angarano, Tye Sheridan, Johnny Simmons and Olivia Thirlby.
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Strangerland
Strangerland stars Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes as parents whose teenage children go missing in the Australian desert town of Nathgari, just before a dust storm consumes the landscape. They enlist the local townsfolk to aid their search, but time is running out. Nicole Kidman's performance has been described as "one of the strongest [of] her career."
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Ten Thousand Saints
Directing duo Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have returned to Sundance, and after the genius American Splendor, we expect great things. Ten Thousand Saints stars Asa Butterfield (Ender's Game) as a young boy sent to live with his estranged father, played by Ethan Hawke (Boyhood), in the tumultuous East Village. Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild) co-star.
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True Story
Disgraced New York Times reporter Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill) discovers that an accused murderer (James Franco) has been using his name as an alias, and begins to interview the man in an attempt to save his own reputation. True Story is the feature film debut from Rupert Goold, but with a cast like that - in a drama, no less - the film is bound to attract some serious attention.
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Zipper
Patrick Wilson plays a federal prosecutor who develops a compulsive addiction to call girls, threatening his promising career in politics. The latest film from director Mora Stephens (Conventioneers) has a stellar supporting cast that includes Lena Headey ("Game of Thrones"), Ray Winstone (Noah), John Cho (Star Trek), Dianna Agron ("Glee") and Richard Dreyfuss (Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
