Movie Box Review

Sundance is sometimes thrilling, but it can also be an ordeal.  Especially when the films are good, but not great.  And even more so if you arrive with limited tickets, and are left to the tender mercies of the Wait List lines (which, given Sundance's idiosyncratic approach to Wait Lists, requires standing on each one twice, 2-3 hours before a screening and then again half an hour in advance--it makes for a lot of lines).  So there are some notable omissions below:  major acquisitions like The Surrogate, Arbitrage, Safety Not Guaranteed and Black Rock were just impossible to see.  However, the 22 capsule reviews below give a fair idea of what the festival was like.

One other note:  the US distributors listed below are accurate as of the time of writing, but no doubt there will be more acquisitions over time:  it's hard to imagine that commercial comedies like Bachelorette or The First Time, and awards hopefuls like Smashed, won't eventually be released.

All that being said:  here, more or less in order of preference, was one man's Sundance 2012:

LIBERAL ARTS (IFC):  Josh Radnor, star of How I Met Your Mother, shows signs of potentially becoming a major filmmaker with this beautifully realized, intelligent and even graceful comedy-drama.  To say it's about the relationship between a 35-year old academic administrator (Radnor) and a 19-year old college student (the again-remarkable Elisabeth Olsen) is to minimize the scope of Radnor's ambitions and achievements--it's really a film about growing up, at any age.  Full Review Here.

FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL... (Focus):  Jamie Travis's comedy is smaller in scope and budget than Bridesmaids, but more subversive and just maybe flat-out funner.  Two women (Ari Graynor and Lauren Anne Miller, also co-writer of the hilarious script with Katie Anne Naylon) who can barely stand each other find themselves running a phone-sex business together, leading to hysterical laughs and, incredibly enough, some genuinely earned sentiment.  The last reel is irresistible.  Full Review Here.

COMPLIANCE (Magnolia): The most unsettling drama of the festival, a true-life story about the impulse to obey authority no matter what.  Director/Screenwriter Craig Zobel guides a letter-perfect cast (headed by Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy and Bill Camp) methodically down a path that leads to a horror that's more shocking for being so banal.  Full Review Here.

CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER (Sony Classics): Rashida Jones' and Will McCormack's script tells the awkward, funny and sad story of a relationship that refuses to admit it's over.  Under Lee Toland Krieger's direction, Jones and Andy Samberg (yes, Andy Samberg) give sensitive performances that are as effectively serious as they are comic.  Full Review Here.

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Fox Searchlight):  The Festival's Dramatic Jury Grand Prize Winner is a story about life in the poverty-stricken Louisiana bayou, rhapsodically visualized by director Benh Zeitlin, and with brilliant music and sound design to match.  It's gorgeous and completely unlike any other film at Sundance, but it's also for people who thought the trouble with The Tree Of Life was that it was too tightly plotted.  Full Review Here. 

SAVE THE DATE (No Distrib):   More serio-comic romance about break-ups and new romances, this one a little more on the indie nose.  Michael Mohan's film (written with playwright Egan Reich and graphic novelist Jeffrey Brown, whose drawings inspired the script) leaves itself open to charges of conscious hipsterism, but its hugely appealing cast, headed by Lizzy Caplan (in what deserves to be a breakout performance) and Alison Brie as sisters, helps keep things grounded.  Full Review Here. 

SMASHED (No Distrib):  Days of Wine and Roses for the 21st-century, with a spectacular Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the spouse who decides to get sober, and Aaron Paul as her husband who doesn't.  The script by James Ponsoldt (who also directed) and Susan Burke dares to be funny about all this (and with a cast that includes Nick Offerman, Megan Mullaly and Octavia Spencer, there isn't a laugh left on the table), but it also accommodates heartbreak, searing arguments and the ambivalence of the newly sober.  Full Review Here. 

THE FIRST TIME (No Distrib): Can a movie be too lovable for its own good?  Writer/Director Jonathan Kasdan is so fond of his teen leads (Britt Robertson and Dylan O'Brien) that he barely gives their romance any challenges to overcome--they're just endlessly charming, articulate and cute, and while that's diverting, it's also a little thin.  Full Review Here. 

ROOM 237 (No Distrib):  Either the prospect of a straight-faced 104-minute study of obsessive theories concerning Stanley Kubrick's The Shining thrills you, or it doesn't.  As a Kubrick devotee, count me among the (probably limited) group that couldn't wait.  In any case, given that the entire movie is composed of footage director Rodney Ascher considers "fair use," the film may never be seen in its current form outside festival venues.  Full review Here. 

BACHELORETTE (No Distrib):  Leslye Headland's movie writing/directing debut, based (although apparently rather loosely) on her own play, ends up being far more conventional and less edgy than it starts out to be, as its 3 "heroines" (Lizzy Caplan again, this time with Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher) are forced to learn Life Lessons and Become Better People in the final reels.  Until that point, though, there are plenty of dirty, socially unacceptable laughs to be found.  Full Review Here. 

SHADOW DANCER (ATO):  James Marsh's low-key, complicated thriller (adapted by Tom Brady from his own novel) works the LeCarre side of the spy street, with morally ambiguous characters and no end of betrayals.  Andrea Riseborough is the IRA member forced to turn informer by MI6's Clive Owen in a Belfast where no one on either side can be trusted.  The fact that everyone is hiding something means that we don't get to know any of the characters particularly well, but the film is very effectively put together.  Full Review Here. 

2 DAYS IN NEW YORK (Magnolia):  Julie Delpy's sequel to her own 2 Days In Paris is more sit-commy than its predecessor, but a lot of fun.  Her character's eccentric family (including Delpy's own father playing her dad) again occupies center stage, this time visiting her in NY rather than being visited.  The movie's most pleasant surprise is Chris Rock as Delpy's new boyfriend, more assured and relaxed than he's ever been on the big screen before.  Full Review Here. 

WISH YOU WERE HERE (Entertainment One):  Two Australian couples go on a vacation to Cambodia, but only 3 people come back.  Kieren Darcy-Smith's drama (co-written with Felicity Price, who also plays one of the leads) isn't really a thriller so much as a story about the damage caused by secrets hidden and revealed.  Price, along with Joel Edgerton and Teresa Palmer (in a much more intense role than any of her Hollywood eye-candy parts) are excellent.  Full Review Here. 

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (Participant/AFFRM): The basic story of Ava DuVernay's film could have been the stuff of a TV movie:  a young mother (Emayatzy Corinealdi) waits out her husband (Omari Hardwick)'s prison term; as she finds out more about him, she comes to question the limits of her own loyalty.  As written and directed by DuVernay, however, and performed by Corinealdi, Middle of Nowhere has a dignity and seriousness that sets it apart.  At times it can feel stolid, but it consistently recognizes the humanity of its characters.  Full Review Here. 

OSLO AUGUST 31 (No Distrib):   A loose Norwegian remake by Joachim Trier (co-written with Eskil Vogt) of Louis Malle's The Fire Within, about a drug addict in recovery (Anders Danielsen Lie) having his first day back in the real world so he can interview for a job.   Extremely well performed and filmed, but unrelievedly grim to the very end, with insights overwhelmed by an aestheticized embrace of self-destruction.  

HELLO I MUST BE GOING (No Distrib):  Todd Louiso's film, written by Sarah Koskoff, is unintentionally the less interesting version of Liberal Arts:  a narrowly-focused story about a depressed (divorced, out-of-work) 35-year old (Melanie Lynskey, very good) who begins a romance with a 19-year old (Christopher Abbott) that sparks her back to life.  Mild, populated by dysfunctional family tropes, and lacking in ambition.  Full Review Here. 

FILLY BROWN (No Distrib):  The familiar Sundance subgenre of a low-income young woman's struggle to improve her life.  Youssef Delara (who also wrote the script) and Michael D. Olmos directed this somewhat ham-handed story about an aspiring rapper (the terrific Gina Rodriguez) and her interactions with her jailed mother, dependable father, and some music industry pros who--spoiler alert!--aren't all that trustworthy.  Full Review Here. 

V/H/S (Magnolia): Gimmick (horror anthology) piled upon gimmick ("found footage"), with different indie-terror directors behind the camera for each of the 6 segments.  There's some inventiveness in the ways the footage is justified (Skype, eyeglasses with a spy camera built in), a dollop of memorable gore and a few cheap thrills, but before too long, a serious law of diminishing returns kicks in.  Full Review Here. 

RED LIGHTS (Millenium):   Rodrigo Cortes's supernatural thriller is classy and fun for a while, with Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy as scientists who debunk false mediums and Robert DeNiro as the one they can't figure out (and Elisabeth Olsen among those in support).  Unfortunately, the second half becomes increasingly dumb, and the ending is awful, both illogical and a cheap trick.  Full Review Here. 

LAY THE FAVORITE (Weinstein): Stephen Frears's comedy-drama about big-time gambling, from a script by D.V. DeVincentis, sounds on paper like it should have everything going for it, from well-regarded autobiographical source material and an experienced, skilled director to a cast that includes Rebecca Hall, Bruce Willis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Vince Vaughn and Laura Prepon.  And yet it's more proof that sure things rarely are:  clumsy, uninspired, rife with miscasting  and not even smart about its own subject matter.  Full Review Here. 

THE PACT (IFC):  Nicholas McCarthy's feature writing/directing debut is mostly a routine Boo! low-budget haunted house movie, but it has one neat twist about an hour in, and a few minutes of genuine suspense after that.  It's not quite enough to make the picture worthwhile--especially because after those promising minutes, the movie winds things up with a cheap-shock coda--but Caity Lotz as the kick-ass heroine has real charisma.  Full Review Here. 

GOATS (No Distrib):  Every festival seems to have at least one prominent loser, and this year it was Christopher Neil's directing debut, adapted by Mark Jude Poirier from his own novel.  Whatever appeal that novel may have had is lost on screen, buried in cliches about prep school and narcissistic New Age mothers, not to mention self-conscious eccentricity involving, well, goats.  Even a cast that includes David Duchovny, Justin Kirk and Ty Burrell can't help, and a mark of the movie's failure is that it's one of the rare times you'll ever see the phrase "a bad performance by Vera Farmiga" (as the mother) used with sad accuracy.   Full Review Here. 

And full versions of all SHOWBUZZDAILY'S Sundance reviews are Here.

Click on SHOWBUZZDAILY's reviews from this year's Sundance Film Festival, in alphabetical order:

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, which won the Sundance US Dramatic Directing award for Ava DuVernay last night, is in no rush.  The films moves with deliberation as it establishes its leading character and her difficult situation:  Ruby (Emayatzy E. Corinealdi) isn't a single mom, but she might as well be, with husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) doing a 8-year stretch in prison.  Ruby sacrificed her own dreams of being a doctor so that she could raise their son and make the weekly trek to visit Derek in jail; she struggles with her nursing career, her difficult relationships with her disappointed mother (Lorraine Toussaint) and sister (Edwina Findley), and her own loneliness.

The main body of the story takes place 4 years into Derek's sentence, when he has his first chance to be released on parole for good behavior.  Ruby's life becomes more complicated when, even as she's in the midst of raising the funds for her husband's appeal, she meets a charming bus driver (David Oyelowo), and then learns increasingly shocking facts about her husband's time in prison. 

The melodramatic bones of this story could have resulted in a Lifetime movie (although it's not exactly Lifetime's demo), but the restraint and precision of DuVernay's script bring it to a different level.  Middle of Nowhere is also aided immeasurably by Corinealdi's powerful performance as Ruby--she's a woman constantly aware that her every action has consequences for everyone in her life, and her attempts to crawl out from under that weight are quietly moving.  Hardwick and Oyelowo are also excellent as the men who orbit her life, although Toussaint, despite a bravura dinner table monologue, is hindered by DuVernay's decision to keep Ruby's family life somewhat vague.  Sharon Lawrence, as Derek's attorney, has a small but very nimbly written role that she plays to the hilt.

DuVernay makes smart use of what must have been limited production resources, and the cinematography by Bradford Young (who also shot Pariah) belies the film's low budget with handsome visuals that mercifully mostly eschew the urban-movie cliche of shaky hand-held camerawork. 

Middle of Nowhere sometimes bears the burden of its own cinematic dignity, and it can feel stolid, especially in the mid-section (a little re-editing before theatrical release might help).  But Corinealdi is never less than compelling, and Nowhere feels like it's taken Ruby--and the audience--on a genuine journey by the time it ends.  

It takes about an hour, but Nicholas McCarthy's THE PACT, which premiered in the Park City At Midnight section at Sundance, eventually turns out to have a neat twist up its sleeve, one that switches the movie from haunted house horror to an entirely different subgenre of thriller.  And after that, a solid reel or so of scares and suspense kicks in, and the picture moves into another gear.

The question will be whether that's enough, given that the hour preceding the twist has been an exceedingly routine low-budget chiller, and that the ending afterward is a cruddy, obvious cheap-shock coda. 

The Pact is McCarthy's first feature, expanded from a short that previously screened at Sundance.  It's set mostly in and around a house where a single mother (of the sadistic variety, not the noble, self-sacrificing kind) raised 2 daughters, both of whom left town as soon as they were old enough.  When the story begins, mom has recently died, and a prologue mysteriously dispatches the older sister, herself a (much better) single mother, while having an ill-fated Skype session with her young daughter.  (This year's Sundance lesson of both The Pact and V/H/S:  stay away from Skype.)  This brings biker sister Annie (Caity Lotz) somewhat reluctantly to town, less to attend her mother's funeral than to find out what happened to her older sister.  We're immediately plunged into the world of inexplicable sounds, disquieting nightmares, unseen forces that fling our heroine against the walls, and shadowy was-that-really-there? figures.

All of this comes right out of the haunted house movie textbook, and McCarthy isn't a skilled enough filmmaker to hide the lack of production values.  Instead we get the usual silences leading to sudden musical and sonic zings, many lightbulbs that flare and then burst, and ghostly visitations.  Even lay-up set-pieces like the visit of an eccentric psychic (who Annie, in an unlikely development, knew in high school), offer minimal fun.  With the exception of Lotz (she played the niece of Don Draper's California "wife" on Mad Men), who has plenty of charisma as the Ripley-like Annie, the acting is for the most part wooden and subpar.

And then The Pact zigs when you expect it to zag, and McCarthy suddenly gets his directing feet under him for a few minutes.  It builds a lot of goodwill... which he then squanders with his dumb, predictable epilogue.  This leaves The Pact as a severely mixed bag, one that has its jolting moments, but doesn't deliver consistently or professionally enough to justify its festival berth.

FILLY BROWN, directed by Youssef Delara (who also wrote the script) and Michael D. Olmos, falls into a recognizable Sundance genre:  sagas of poor young women (usually ethnic) struggling to escape their poverty and make a better life.  Celebrated examples in festival history include Girlfight and Real Women Have Curves; Filly Brown, while it has its definite strengths, doesn't quite measure up to those.

Although she uses the name Filly Brown when she's rapping, the movie's LA heroine is actually named Majo Tonorio (Gina Rodriguez).  She has a hard-working contractor dad (Lou Diamond Phillips) and a bratty younger sister (Chrissie Fit), and she works in her uncle's tattoo parlor, but the key event of her young life is that her mother Maria (Jenni Rivera) is in jail on drug charges and has been since Majo was a child.  Her father has kept his daughters distant from their mother, but one day Maria sends Majo a poem with the idea Majo can use the text as lyrics for one of her songs.  When Majo goes to visit, Maria tells her that there have been developments in her case, and with a little money in the right places, her conviction could be overturned.  Majo, desperate for the chance to have her mother come home, does what she needs to in order to raise the cash--in particular, she signs with the loud-mouth manager Big Cee (Noel Gugliemi) who can push her toward a hit.

As the synopsis suggests, unpredictability is not what makes Filly Brown work.  The people in the movie who appear trustworthy when we meet them generally are--Majo's father, her uncle, her mother's attorney (Edward James Olmos), the loyal DJ who only wants her to create her best work--and the seemingly sleazy turn out to be exactly that.  Delara's dialogue, too, is often ham-handed and obvious, with few gradations between light and dark, and visually, the direction is rarely more than rudimentary.

And yet the picture has real force and emotional payoff.  Some of that is simply because of the old saw that cliches become that way for a reason, but much of it is due to the acting.  Rodriguez, in particular, is a powerhouse both as an actress and rapper, and she carries much of the movie on her back.  Phillips, too, has his best role in years and runs with it.  The final scene, in which Majo performs a capella and her father is among those who watch, has fire and pain to spare.

Filly Brown is more likely to be a calling card for its makers, particularly Rodriguez, than a broad success on its own.  Despite its flaws, the movie delivers some of the raw talent that Sundance is all about.  

V/H/S, which screened as part of Sundance's Park City At Midnight series, is a gimmick piled upon a gimmick.

First is the horror anthology itself, familiar from the Twilight Zone movie and Rod Serling's Night Gallery TV show, among many others.  In this case, half a dozen unrelated short films, each from a different director, are presented as an omnibus film.  The additional gimmick is that all the stories are variations of the "found footage" horror subgenre that kicked off with The Blair Witch Project and became a franchise with Paranormal Activity.  The connective tissue (so to speak) of the movie is a loose story (directed by Adam Wingard) about a group of thieves hired to steal a mysterious VHS tape from a house; to no one's surprise except theirs, as various members of the gang settle down to watch the videos, they're slaughtered one by one. 

There was a fair amount of imagination put to finding different excuses for the "found footage" to exist.  In one story, directed by David Bruckner, the camera is embedded in a pair of spy eyeglasses worn by one of a trio of frat-boy idiots who are on the hunt for sex--and we all know how well that ends in movies like this.  Another mini-movie (direcred by Joe Swanberg and Simon Barrett), is entirely in the form of Skype chats.  Another, set in the 1990s, and directed by Ti West (House of the Dead), the closest thing to a "name" director in the group, is composed of "home movies" from a second honeymoon that goes wrong.  There is, of course, a slasher-in-the-woods story, directed by Glenn McQuaid.  And in what is probably the most elaborate of the chapters, directed by the collective known as Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Chad Villella, Justin Martinez, Tyler Gillett), another group of morons is unwise enough to spend Halloween night at a "haunted house" party that lives up to its name. 

There are certainly some shocks and enjoyably gruesome violence to be had along the way (the picture will probably have to go out unrated or be edited to avoid an NC-17 in its current form), but the project inevitably suffers from a serious case of diminishing returns.  Because of the stylistic homogeneity imposed on the anthology, chapter after chapter features the same mannerisms:  shaky hand-held (or head-held, in the case of the eyeglass camera) visuals, sudden cuts to blue when the "VHS" picture goes out, staticky interference as supernatural events are captured on tape.  The most controlled chapters are West's and Swanberg/Barrett's, but theirs also have the dumbest stories with the worst endings; the rest are mostly just exercises in watching people wander around for 10 minutes or so and then get hacked apart.  

There are no characters to speak of in any of this, little of what one would call "acting," and certainly no memorable dialogue.  By definition the production values are low-rent.  So V/H/S just exists as a vehicle for gore and creatures jumping out of the shaky, hand-held dark, and 116 minutes of that is far more than anyone who isn't an obsessive could need.

Plot and character revelations are a critical part of James Marsh's subtle, complex spy drama SHADOW DANCER, adapted by Tom Bradby from his own novel, so I'll be circumspect in describing its plot beyond the initial set-up.  (Then again, I saw it at an 8:30AM screening at Sundance, so I'm not altogether sure I could reconstruct the details in any case.)

The obvious point of comparison for Shadow Dancer is the work of John LeCarre, especially because we currently have a very fine film version of the master's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on hand.  The comparison, though, is somewhat misleading.  LeCarre's template (sometimes in recent years to the point of predictability) is to place innocents into the clutches of cynical professional spies and then detail the way they're disillusioned and very often destroyed.  In Bradby and Marsh's vision, there aren't really any innocents to begin with.

We meet our protagonist Colette McVeigh as a Belfast child in a brief, unsettling prologue, in which she is unintentionally but thoughtlessly responsible for the death of her little brother in an IRA/British Army crossfire.  10 years later, as an adult (played by Andrea Riseborough, from Brighton Rock and Madonna's W.E.), Colette has responded to this tragedy by becoming a full-fledged member of the IRA, planting a bomb in a London tube station.  Things go awry, and she's arrested by MI6 in the person of Mac (Clive Owen), who informs her that she'll be in jail for decades, far distant from her young son, unless she becomes an informer for the British.

Colette feels she has no choice but to agree, and the heart of Shadow Dancer concerns the many subterfuges and betrayals that follow, on both sides of the conflict.  The Northern Island portrayed in the film is a place where no one is to be trusted, and no affiliation holds for long.  Marsh, who is having a fascinating career in film--he's also one of the world's great documentarians, with the Oscar-winning Man On Wire and Project Nim (shamefully excluded from this year's Oscar race) to his credit--has created, in a way that recalls his chapter of the Red Riding Trilogy, a dark and convincing portrait of a place in a perpetual state of dread.

The movie is extremely grim, and at times there's a certain monotonousness to its inescapable sense of doom.  Also, while Bradby's script is admirably intelligent and clear (even at 8:30AM), the fact that all the characters have to hold their cards close to the vest, since any one of them may be preparing to betray any other, means we have a limited opportunity to really know them.  Riseborough has little dialogue, and while she gives a terrific performance, conveying Colette's fear, anger and desperation, her character is in many ways opaque.  (When she has an emotional outburst with Mac late in the story, it seems to come from another movie.)  Mac is as close as the movie comes to having a heroic figure, and Owen brings the role his own charisma, but he too is presented through blinkers much of the time, and that's even more the case for the excellent supporting cast, which includes Aiden Gillen, Gillian Anderson, Brid Brennan and Domhnall Gleeson. Technical credits are uniformly first-rate:  greyish cinematography by Rob Hardy, convincing production design by Jon Hensen, and a pace that's compelling and also comprehensible under editor Jinx Godfrey.

Shadow Dancer is, in the end, so in love with its shadows that it provides little in the way of dancing, and that will likely hold it back from mainstream success.  Nevertheless, it's a beautifully executed piece of work.

In 2007, Julie Delpy wrote, directed and co-starred in 2 Days In Paris, a romantic comedy-drama featuring Adam Goldberg and herself as a couple who lived in NY and visited the title city for a tumultuous visit with her character Marie's family.  Paris was only a moderate art-house success in the US ($4.4M), but it did well overseas, and hence, somewhat surprisingly, we have a sequel with a continental switch:  2 DAYS IN NEW YORK, which premiered at Sundance.

A real-time 4 years has passed, and Marie has had a son with Goldberg's character but broken up with him (Goldberg doesn't appear in this film). She now lives with Mingus (Chris Rock) a public- and satellite-radio host, along with her son and Mingus's daughter.  This time, it's her relatives who are visiting New York, including her jolly if unwashed father Jeannot (played by Albert Delpy, the star's real-life dad), ultra-competitive sister Rose (Alexia Laudeau), and idiot ex-boyfriend Manu (Alexandre Nahon), who is now seeing Rose.  (Marie's mother was played by Delpy's real-life mother in Paris, and in the interim, both the actress and the character have passed away.)  They're in town for the opening of Marie's art gallery show, for which the centerpiece is Marie's sale of a piece of conceptual art:  her soul.

2 Days In Paris had a bit of a dark edge:  the disruption caused by Marie's family and her exes scraped at the tensions between Delpy and Goldberg's characters, and it became increasingly clear that they were unlikely to stay together.  New York is more of a sit-com and a fairy tale (it's framed with Marie's narration of a children's puppet show), and it has less substance, but it's often quite amusing.  The 2 Delpys, Laudeau and Nahun are a polished comedy troupe (Landau and Nahun also collaborated on the script), and they get big laughs from culture clash between American and French notions of sexuality, drug use and race--and in Manu, they have the kind of character who's liable to say just about anything at any time and be amiably, unintentionally offensive.  Kate Burton and Dylan Baker turn up as neighbors who become embroiled in Marie's comic deceptions, and there's also a hilarious in-joke piece of casting for the person who purchases Marie's soul.

The surprise of 2 Days In New York, though, may be Chris Rock.  Rock, one of the great stand-up comics of his generation, has had a frustrating movie career, playing sidekicks (often in terrible Adam Sandler vehicles) and bland leading roles, even when he's also been the writer and/or director.  He's never been as relaxed or assured on screen as he is in New York, providing not just a believable movie mate for Delpy, but seemingly content to be the straight man with superb comic timing to the crazy French people.  As Marie becomes increasingly frayed by her family, it's Mingus who holds the movie together, and watching Rock adeptly supply grounding to the silliness around him is a pleasure.

2 Days In New York is in no way a major piece of work, not even as compared to Paris, where the emotional stakes were higher.  Some of Delpy's devices, like Mingus's extended monologues to a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama, are awkward, and as a director, she can't quite pull off the whimsy of her last reel. Still, it's an enjoyable 90 minutes with quite a few pleasant cross-cultural laughs, and while there are very few franchises in indie film, a third installment of the series in a few years' time could be fine.

THE FIRST TIME may be too lovable for its own good.  Jonathan Kasdan's teen romance, which premiered in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, couldn't be more straightforward:  in its opening minutes, it introduces the adorable Dave (Dylan O'Brien) and Aubrey (Britt Robertson), two hyper-articulate sweethearts who meet outside a suburban LA party neither of them particularly wants to attend, and who chat at length as though they're in a magical moment with the rest of the world in suspended animation around them.  The movie then follows them over the course of the next few days as they gradually acknowledge what we realized instantly, that they're utterly made for each other.

The model, of course, is the John Hughes canon, Hughes having become the J.D. Salinger of 21st Century coming-of-age sagas.  In this case, it's a dash of Some Kind of Wonderful with a pinch of The Breakfast Club's loquaciousness, along with some other post-Hughesians, notably the Kevin Williamson of Dawson's Creek days and the Robert Iscove/R.Lee Fleming She's All That, as well as (although he might not consider himself a Hughesian) Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset duo. 

Dave and Aubrey really are charming, and listening to them rattle off smart, stuttering dialogue is all kinds of fun.  In his eagerness to bring them together, though, Kasdan fails to come up with much of a conflict to keep them apart.  Hughes himself was strongly aware of the way class figures into high school, and that's a critical undercurrent that often threatens the relationships in his films.  In The First Time, even the competing romantic interests for our hero and heroine are straw people, clearly vapid and unworthy, and the only obstacle Kasdan can think of to put in the couple's way is some unpromising sex (not really spoiler alert territory, given the title of the movie).  The result is a story that feels thin to the point of invisibility, and a romance that can sometimes feel like an exercise.

The First Time creates plenty of rooting interest, but little opportunity to root.  It's extremely pleasant to watch, anchored by Robertson and O'Brien (both CW veterans), and with good supporting work from Craig Roberts (from Submarine, a much more textured teen romance [that nobody went to see]), Victoria Justice, and token adults Josh Malina and Christine Taylor.  There's also lovely photography by Rhet Bear, and special note is due for collages supposedly created by Aubrey, which manage to be impressive but also believably teen-like.  The movie's very weightlessness, however, ultimately weighs it down--having no real surprises or tension, it feels anecdotal and unmemorable.

Virtually every screening at Sundance is followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, and while these sessions can be informative and charming (although 3 questions that need never be asked again are How long did you shoot?  What was the budget? and How much was improvised?), they can also be quite sad.  Watching them, you realize that even bad independent movies require an enormous amount of effort, usually with little compensation, over many years, and that no one sets out to invest that kind of sacrifice into a movie that's not worth watching.

GOATS is a very bad movie, but not because anyone who made it was lazy or horribly untalented.  It's just a misconceived, uninvolving story that falls into all too many indie-movie traps.  Based on a novel by Mark Jude Poirier (who also wrote the script) and directed by first-timer Christopher Neil, it's a compendium of the genre's cliches, from sensitive teen Ellis (Graham Phillips, best known as Juliana Margulies' son on The Good Wife) going away to his first year at school, to the wackily eccentric New-Agey mother (Vera Farmiga) and pot-growing surrogate father (David Duchovny) he leaves behind, to his difficult relationships with both mom and estranged biological dad (Ty Burrell). 

If you're going to embrace this kind of hackneyed material, you'd better bring something new to the party, but Goats just loads on self-conscious idiosyncracy.  Duchovny's character, apart from being a pot grower, is called Goat Man because he raises and is constantly accompanied by goats, which he takes on spiritual survivalist journeys.  Farmiga is the kind of only-in-the-movies trust fund mother who teems with extravagant narcissism (she seems to be auditioning to play Auntie Mame), and as her boyfriend, Justin Kirk does a snide variation of his role on Weeds.

None of this works.  Naturally the point is for Ellis to Grow Up and learn Life Lessons from his time at school (the movie's title, apart from referring to Duchovny's compansions, presumably is meant to suggest Gates, the name of the prep school) and his evolving relationships with his parents and Goat Man, but since none of the characters are believable or interesting, it all feels forced.  (There's also a jarringly ugly tone to the semi-friendship that forms between Ellis and a girl who works at the school that the movie never acknowledges.)

Even though Neil has been an acting coach (he's also a member of the Coppola family) and has gathered a fine cast, he lets each of the actors go in their own direction, so there's no sense of an ensemble or unifying tone.  Goats marks one of the very rare times you'll ever see Vera Farmiga give a bad performance, and the only ones who really fare well are Duchovny, whose detached, ironic humor at least makes Goat Man interesting, and Burrell, who gives an admirably controlled performance as Ellis's dad. 

Goats is technically quite accomplished, convincingly set in several areas of the country despite limited budget and locations, and handsomely shot by Wyatt Troll.  It moves along and has a few mild laughs.  the film was made with what seems to be true affection for its material, but that affection was misplaced.  It's an overfamiliar, unenlightening and ultimately tiresome piece of work that, sadly, took years out of people's lives. That's the less pleasant side of Sundance.

James Ponsoldt's SMASHED (not to be confused with NBC's Smash), which premiered in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is a new spin on a fairly old story.  The concept goes back (at least) to 1962's Days of Wine and Roses:  a couple (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul), very much in love with both booze and each other, finds that they don't make as much sense together once one of them--in this case, Winstead's Kate--gets sober.

What makes Smashed feel fresh is the script by Ponsoldt and Susan Burke, which introduces some humor and ambiguity into what is usually a drearily pedantic genre. Kate does awful things when she's drunk, far worse than what Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick did in Wine and Roses (and some of them are in front of the 1st grade class she teaches), but she's sometimes quite funny when she does them.  And even when she's getting sober, she retains a sardonic edge, both about AA (which is never explicitly named) and sobriety in general.  This isn't the kind of movie where we have to follow the protagonist tearfully make amends for prior actions--in fact, the one time we see Kate admit to some past lies, the result is disastrous.  It helps that the supporting cast includes people like Nick Offerman (as a fellow teacher in recovery), Megan Mullaly (as the principal) and Octavia Spencer (as Kate's sponsor).  All are sharply-drawn characters with some depth.

The lead in a movie like this is reliably an opportunity for tour de force acting, and Winstead, who hasn't been much more than pretty in movies like Scott Pilgrim and The Thing, really delivers.  Completely deglamorized, she has to carry virtually every scene, in tones that range from physical humor to profound sadness to scorching drama, and she pulls off every step of the journey.  She and Paul have great compatibility as an on-screen couple, and their relationship believably evolves from nights of drunken camaraderie to a marathon argument that leaves them, and the audience, shaken.  The script and Winstead's performance enrich Kate by allowing us to see her in quite a few contexts:  as a daughter (her mother played by Mary Kay Place) and a friend as well as a wife and a woman getting sober. 

Smashed can't completely avoid the rote feel of its basic story.  While Kate is beautifully realized, Paul's Charlie is perhaps inevitably a thinner character--he's just the guy who'd prefer to stay drunk, and the fact that we've seen Paul play stoned at length on the brilliant Breaking Bad doesn't leave much room for surprise in his performance. 

The getting-sober genre is mostly been taken over by television in recent years, and although Smashed makes good use of its limited budget, it's unlikely to find a wide audience.  Winstead's performance, however, and the complexity with which her character has been realized, make the film worth seeking out.

Sundance has a thriving Park City At Midnight program that features plenty of high-octane horror movies, but the most unnerving and disturbing film of this year's festival may have been Craig Zobel's COMPLIANCE, a low-key drama based (apparently rather closely) on a true story without any hacked-off limbs or hint of the supernatural.

In a suburban fast-food store on a Friday afternoon, a call comes in to the manager Sandra (Ann Dowd).  The caller identifies himself as a local cop, and explains that there's been a report that young Becky (Dreama Walker), who works the counter, has pilfered some money from a customer's handbag.  The officer tells Sandra to pull Becky aside and search her belongings for the money.  Then, step by step, as he explains that Becky is actually part of a larger criminal conspiracy, his instructions to Sandra become steadily more demanding and assaultive on Becky.  By the end of the night, all legal and humane boundaries have been crossed, and things have taken place in the back of that restaurant that can never be undone.

Zobel's superbly worked-out script explores what ordinary people will do if instructed by (in this case literally) a voice of authority, every shred of reason and morality dominated by the primal urge to obey.  It isn't just Sandra who caves in to the voice on the phone, or Sandra's fiance Evan (Bill Camp)--ultimately responsible for the most heinous acts--even Becky herself, who knows that she isn't guilty of anything, assents to what she's told to do.  Watching each person gradually surrender his or her individual will, it's increasingly difficult to distance oneself from them.

The acting is remarkable.  With the exception of the man on the other end of the line (performed by Pat Healy), there are no flat-out villains here.  It's not that the people fail to question what they're being told to do, or that they don't realize these things are wrong, but a mixture of expediency and fundamental weakness keeps them from acting on their own morality.  Dowd, Walker and Camp take us through their hesitations and initial resistance to a terrible place where their actions, however disgraceful, feel comprehensible.

On its all small terms, Compliance is beautifully made, with letter-perfect production design, riveting pace and handsome photography.  It's not a picture for the faint of heart (walk-outs and furious Q&As marked some of its festival screenings), but at a Sundance largely notable for humor and mainstream entertainment value, Compliance is a genuinely challenging piece of work.

I write this as a fairly obsessive fan of Stanley Kubrick, back since I desperately wanted to see A Clockwork Orange in its original X-rated release but was too young to get in. So the very idea of ROOM 237, a feature-length film by Rodney Ascher constructed of the theories and interpretations that have been formed around The Shining is, to be honest, catnip for me.

Let me prove my Kubrick-geek (Kub-Geek?) bona fides at the outset. I was moderately outraged that the movie entertained the concept that viewing The Shining backwards and forwards simultaneously, the images superimposed on each other (a la The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon), would impart hidden insights. The reason? I was one of the people who saw The Shining on its limited opening weekend (at the Criterion Theater in NY) and thus saw the original ending, which Kubrick had removed from each individual print a few days later. It was an epilogue set in the hospital where Wendy and Danny were recovering (before the final shot of the 1921 photo with Jack) and its excision was no loss, but the point is that its removal changed the running time of the film, altering any possible superimposition. Room 237 (do I really need to say that the title refers to the room where Jack encounters the nude woman who becomes a rotting corpse?) should at least have mentioned that, damn it.

Many movies have given rise to bizarre, elaborate, tortured interpretations over the years (a technical term for this is "French film criticism"), but Kubrick's provide more fodder than most. There are a few reasons for this. One, of course, is the director's famed perfectionism, his own obsessive attention to detail. It's easy to assume some critical meaning must lie in every frame, when Kubrick insisted that each one be absolutely perfect. Combine that with Kubrick's fondness for narrative vagueness, and the fact that his films really do comtemplate giant philosophical themes, and the result is a formula for fixation.

The theories featured in Room 237 run the gamut from one reasonably finding The Shining to be, on some level, a tale about the conquest of the American Indians--the film's own dialogue and production design call attention to this theme--to the fairly crazy idea that it's Kubrick's way of confessing that he personally faked the footage of Apollo 11's landing on the moon, pre-Capricorn One. My personal favorite, however unlikely, was that a quick shot of a red Volkswagon pinned under an 18-wheeler (when Hallorann is making his way back to the Overlook) is Kubrick's coded message to Stephen King that this was Kubrick's Shining and not King's. Which would serve King right for his rejection of the movie over the past 30 years (until it was cut short by the terms of a deal with Warners--but that's another theory).

Ascher's decision to make Room 237 a compilation of illustrated theories (we never even see the theorizers) sometimes makes it feel more like a Powerpoint presentation than a movie. (I did, however, appreciate little touches like its studio logo designed to look like the Warners one circa 1980.) Its reflection of a certain kind of movie love, though, make it uniquely fascinating--albeit undoubtedly more so for those who are already members of the church of Kubrick.

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Although Sundance still has several days to go, and surprises could spring up at any time (yesterday The Surrogate, a drama with John Hawkes as a man in an iron lung who decides to lose his virginity to a sex therapist played by Helen Hunt, came out of nowhere to win a huge $6M deal from Fox Searchlight), the festival does tend to be frontloaded with films expected to have commercial appeal, and last night's premiere of Leslye Headland's BACHELORETTE was probably the last of the truly highly-anticipated arrivals.

Bachelorette sets itself up as the last word in female-comedy edginess, and the surprise is how conventional and downright cuddly it turns out to be. Based by Headland on her own Off-Broadway play (reportedly a far tougher piece of work), the story concerns icy Regan (Kirsten Dunst), slutty Gena (Lizzy Caplan) and, well, intelligence-challenged Katie (Isla Fisher). They've been friends since childhood, and all of them are devoted to bad behavior (drugs, alcohol, random men), and looking down on everyone around them. In all the world, though, there's no one they disdain more than the 4th member of their longtime group, Becky (Rebel Wilson), who doesn't have their svelte physiques and who they call, behind her back (mostly), Pig-Face. Imagine their collective disgust and shock when it turns out that not only is Becky the first of them to get engaged, but she's marrying the goodlooking 6th richest bachelor in NY.

Corralled as bridesmaids, the trio approach the bachelorette party like a combat zone, their bitterness and self-destructiveness unrestrained. After the party, they manage to screw up a key element of the next day's wedding, and the movie is mostly about their comic attempts to clean up the mess they've made. Up to this point, Bachelorette is pretty much hilarious, subversive fun, but then more familiar notes start to come into play in the story's second half, as each woman Learns Something About Herself and Becomes A Better Person. Also, the members of the groom's party--best man Trevor (James Marsden), and ushers Clyde (Adam Scott) and Joe (Kyle Bornheimer)--start to behave increasingly like Hollywood leading men.

In a Sundance crammed with rom-coms, Bachelorette falls somewhere in the middle. It's not as insightful or as successfully serious as Celeste and Jesse Forever, not as gutbustingly funny (or, ultimately, as daring) as For A Good Time, Call... and not as quirky as Save the Date. It is, however, a mix of all of those, and Headland constructs her composite with an ease that belies her first-time filmmaker status. She also has the benefit of yet another great cast, with 3 spectacularly talented leading women (Caplan, following up on her terrific work in Save the Date, is particularly strong) and a sterling group in support.

It's worth noting that since Bridesmaids only opened last May, it's a coincidence and not a commercial calculation that 8 months later, Sundance is afire with funny, independent, foul-mouthed women protagonists. (Although the existence of Bridesmaids will no doubt help their way to general distribution.) It's now a full-fledged comedy subgenre, and as such, some of its members will be better than others, and some will be bigger hits. Bachelorette isn't the most distinctive of the group, but with its slick style, promotable cast and happy ending, it could end up as one of the most successful.

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Or if the title were a Jeopardy answer, the question would be: what should writer/director Rodrigo Cortes have paid attention to, before he typed "The End" on his script

Red Lights wouldn't have been a festival movie even if it had been good. It's no more than high-grade hokum (and not that high), and one has to assume that it's at Sundance because Cortes made a splash here with his debut Buried, the one that kept Ryan Reynolds alone underground for its whole length and (Spoiler Alert) killed him at the end.

Lights has a fine enough premise for the genre: Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) are scientists employed by the kind of institute of paranormal activity that usually shows up as the setting for TV series. They debunk fake hauntings, bogus mediums and faith-healers, and do so quite entertainingly for the first half of the movie. Their nemesis is Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro), a blind psychic whom Margaret has never been able to disprove.

So far, so fun. Halfway through, though, the movie takes its first bad turn, with a switch to loud-noise! shocks and a more serious tone as Tom's pursuit of Silver turns personal. But that's nothing compared to the last reel, which starts with a ridiculous action sequence and ends with the kind of cheap-trick twist that makes the whole movie up to that point nonsense.

With his director hat, Cortes handles all this smoothly enough, with lots of exploding light bulbs and menacing hallways. But after Buried and this, his next producers may seriously want to pay for a rewrite before financing his next project on the basis of his writing. The actors are fine, but in no way stretch themselves (the same goes for Elisabeth Olsen, who turns up in a thankless ingenue role as Tom's love interest).

Red Lights holds the interest, but not in a good way--you keep watching to see how much dumber the next turn of the plot will be (and usually underestimate it). Its title is a signal to choose another movie to see.

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Josh Radnor's writing/directing debut happythankyoumoreplease, which played Sundance a couple of years ago, was a promising, entertaining NY-set romantic comedy-drama that hailed from the Woody Allen division of indie film. His second film LIBERAL ARTS, which premiered last night at the festival, still sips from the fount of Woody (in this case, particularly from Manhattan), but it's an enormous step forward for Radnor as a piece of writing and directing, and one of the most well-rounded and satisfying films of the festival so far.

Radnor plays Jesse, a 35-year old alumnus of an Ohio university (much of the film was shot at Radnor's own alma mater, Kenyon College), who's now a college administrator in NY. Jesse isn't unsuccessful, but his life is running in place. He grabs the opportunity to leave town for a few days to help celebrate the retirement of his mentor and favorite--maybe 2d favorite--professor (Richard Jenkins). While there, he makes the acquaintance of smart, gorgeous sophomore Zibby (Elisabeth Olsen), and a more troubled student named Dean (John Magaro).

Liberal Arts is about the ways these relationships change Jesse's life, but the movie's strength is that it's also about the way he changes their lives. Radnor's script views the process of growing up, and growing older, from the perceptions of a group ranging from teens to 60s, and is fair to all of them. The Jesse/Zibby bond isn't what you'd expect, and the story's complications come to seem remarkably like wisdom.

The cast is worthy of a Woody Allen ensemble. Radnor orchestrates Jesse's mix of confusion, arrogance, compassion and immaturity beautifully. Olsen is, in the end, playing a fantasy of a co-ed, however sensitively imagined, but if there was any doubt about her abilities or star power after martha marcy may marlene, it should vanish now. Richard Jenkins is sultan of American character actors, and Allison Janney, as perhaps Jesse's all-time favorite professor, has a brief but extremely pungent role. Magaro is moving as Dean, and there's also (spoiler alert?) an amazingly funny and appealing unbilled turn by Zac Efron. Radnor's only mistake was in casting a well-known performer in what seems to be a bit part at the start, pretty much telegraphing exactly what the story's third act is going to be. (It's like when a former Oscar nominee used to turn up playing a waiter early in an episode of Law & Order and you immediately knew who the killer was.)

Radnor is sometimes too precious for his own good, as in a lengthy montage concerning the joys of classical music, but mostly he has a very steady hand on the directing wheel. Liberal Arts is consistently funny and just as consistently perceptive, and it flows with skill, earning more than a passing grade.

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There's a principled discussion to be had about whether the Sundance Film Festival should be featuring movies that are essentially low-budget Hollywood entertainments made outside the studio system. But that discussion fades into irrelevance when the result is as hilarious and accomplished as FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL..., which premiered tonight.

Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Jamie Travis, and with a terrifically bawdy and smart script by Lauren Anne Miller and Katie Anne Naylon, Good Time at first seems to be another comedy about mismatched roommates, a la 2 Broke Girls and the upcoming Apt 23. Lauren (played by co-writer Miller) and Katie (Ari Graynor) didn't know each other well at college, but their brief encounter was enough to make each of them hate the other. However, they share gay pal Jesse (Justin Long), and several years later, when all are living in Manhattan and both women are faced with apartmentlessness (Lauren's longtime boyfriend wants some time apart and Katie's beautiful place is losing its rent control), he's the one who brings them together. Lauren is smug and repressed; Katie is a foul-mouthed slob. Surely these 2 almost-broke girls will find reluctant friendship?

Well, yes, but not in the way you'd think. Before long, Lauren discovers that Katie is earning her share of the rent by working as a phone-sex operator. Initially outraged, Lauren starts to calculate the profits in that business if done right--and the 2 are embarked on a partnership. Of course it's a silly, contrived premise, but to their great credit, Miller and Naylon, while playing the idea for many dirty laughs, also use the gimmick to genuinely develop the characters, with much more texture than you'd expect. Good Time turns out to be a genuine, emotionally satisfying love story, albeit a platonic (sort of) one.

As an actress, Miller's screen credits so far have been for bits in her real-life guy Seth Rogen's movies (he returns the favor with a hysterical turn as one of the phone-sex customers here), but in her first leading role, she's a star. And Ari Graynor, who's been marking time in limited roles since her breakout in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, simply hits it out of the park as Katie, who's much more complicated than she at first seems to be. It's a measure of how well-crafted the picture is that even though Justin Long is playing a variation of his role in Zach and Miri Make a Porno, here his (seeming) improv is kept under rein, and he's hilarious without ever seeming self-indulgent. The very busy Mark Webber (also a star of Save the Date and with another self-directed picture in the festival as well) is likable as a customer who comes to play a larger role in the women's lives.

Good Time can't hide its limited budget, and here perhaps is where Travis's inexperience shows; the low-budget look could limit the picture a bit at the box-office. But when your debut has such control of the important facets like performance, tone, pace and balance, not to mention the ability to get huge laughs from an audience, the technical side can follow. (It's not like Bridesmaids looked like a Terence Malick picture.) The movie's title provides an all-too-easy summary of its success, and the good times will almost certainly spread to a wider audience, since it's impossible to believe the picture won't be acquired for theatrical distribution. It's worth waiting for.

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Michael Mohan's SAVE THE DATE, which premiered this afternoon at Sundance, doesn't earn its points from an original premise.

It concerns 2 divergent sisters, Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) and Beth (Alison Brie), but mostly Sarah. While Beth, the control-freak, is relentlessly planning her upcoming wedding to musician Andrew (Martin Starr), the commitment-phobic Sarah is about to have a messy break-up with her long-term boyfriend (and Andrew's band-mate) Kevin (Geoffrey Arend). Sarah, an artist who doesn't take her talent seriously and works in a bookstore, almost instantly launches into a new romance with Jonathan (Mark Webber), and those relationships are the root of the story.

What Save the Date does have in spades is casting. Caplan has never had the opportunity to carry a movie before, and she's both charming and believably at loose ends. She and Brie also make convincing sisters, even if the differences between the siblings is somewhat rote (and Brie's character is a near cousin to her Annie on Community). Starr is so good as Beth's fiancee that one wishes there were more of him, and Arend and Webber are both able to convey shading to Sarah's swains.

Mohan also brings some great atmosphere to the film, particularly in the middle-level success of Andrew and Kevin's band, and the apartment interiors that play parts in the action.

When seeing a multitude of films in a compressed time at a festival like Sundance, it's hard to avoid instant comparisons. Looked at against Celeste & Jesse Forever, the festival's other contemporary LA romantic comedy-drama, Save the Date has less character insight and sharp dialogue, but also less plot contrivance. Both films, though, share very fine casts and the ability to move audiences and make them laugh. Save the Date probably isn't worth clearing the calendar for, but it is worth watching.

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The fundamental problem with LAY THE FAVORITE, Stephen Frears' new film that premiered last night at Sundance, is that it's made by people who seem to have little if any interest in gambling. And since this is a movie about the thrill and especially the business of gambling, that means they don't have any interest in their own movie.

Based by screenwriter D.V. DeVincentis on Beth Raymer's autobiographical book, the movie introduces Beth (Rebecca Hall) as a Florida "private dancer" who moves to Las Vegas to become a cocktail waitress. Instead, she stumbles into becoming a runner for gambler Dink (Bruce Willis). Beth has always had what the script portrays as an almost idiot savant knowledge for numbers, and she rises in the ranks until she's a manager herself.

The world of modern sports and racing bookmaking operations, both in casinos and online, is a fascinating one and a huge, profitable business--it's no coincidence that an affiliate of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald is now a major player in Las Vegas casinos. Lay the Favorite, though, barely suggests how that business works. It doesn't even trust the audience to understand the difference between betting a team to win and getting points (ironically, considering the title), and has to contrive an ending so that it's not enough that an underdog covers the spread, it has to win the game in order for there to be a happy ending. Because of that lazy disdain for its own content, and its insistence on painting Beth as an airhead throughout, the story has no center.

Even on its own terms, the film's casting is problematic. Beth is radically different from any role Rebecca Hall has played before--Beth is essentially conceived as a Marilyn Monroe part--and while Hall is always appealing to watch, and her performance is consistent and thought-out, the effort is always evident. (Students of Stephen Frears' work may ponder the similarities between Beth in the film and the title character Tamara Drewe in his last picture; at the very least, Frears is a man who loves his short-shorts.) Similarly, Bruce Willis is playing a lovable Damon Runyon type gambler with a heart of gold, and that's not his strong suit as an actor. (Vince Vaughn, in a much smaller role, has far more fun as another bookie.) Joshua Jackson is wasted as Beth's straight-arrow boyfriend who figures into the action as the movie's story becomes increasingly silly and fictionalized, and Catherine Zeta-Jones does what she can to be amusing as Dink's shrewish wife.

Lay the Favorite is a mildly pleasant time-waster, but mostly it's a waste. Frears, who's done very fine, incisive work in the past in films like The Queen, seems to have his eyes half open as he directs, and the result is that a subject matter that might have provided grist for a great social commentator like Scorsese or Soderbergh instead becomes what feels like the pilot for a USA cable series.

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The festival has its first crowd-pleaser in CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER, a light but heartfelt romantic comedy-drama in the Woody Allen vein. Written by Rashida Jones (who also stars as Celeste) and Will Mc McCormack (on hand as well as a supportive weed dealer), it takes a different slant on the usual rom-com by starting the story near the end: Celeste and Jesse (Andy Samberg, making as far as I know his dramatic acting debut), best friends since college, have been married for 6 years and are now in the middle of their divorce.

Notwithstanding their marital status, the two are still tightly bound: they hang out together (and sometimes more), and Jesse still lives in the studio behind Celeste's house. They think they're being civilized, and more capable than everyone else around them, but really they're just holding themselves and each other back from moving on. The problems that broke them up--Celeste is judgmental, Jesse is irresponsible--are an inch below the surface of their relationship, held down by their sheer will.

Director Lee Tolan Krieger, working in a markedly different (and more commercial) key than his indier The Violent Kind, handles the complicated emotions smoothly, and even though the script's tone varies from physical comedy to serious drama, the picture stays on course. He also has a great cast to work with: Jones finally has a role that shows what she's capable of handling on screen, Samberg is remarkably controlled and believable for someone who's previously been a sketch comic, and the supporting performers include Ari Graynor, Elijah Wood, Chris Messina and Emma Roberts.

The picture, which seems guaranteed of finding distribution, could use some tinkering. About halfway through, the balance of the story shifts from Celeste and Jesse to predominantly Celeste, and she has to learn the same life lesson half a dozen times before the movie ends--even though, in real life, we often do need to have things pounded into our thick skulls repeatedly before we really get it, in a movie it can feel repetitive. Also, perhaps out of an imperative to keep the running time below 90 minutes, it feels as though some emotional continuity has been left on the cutting room floor (Roberts, whose characgter has an engaging arc, is reduced to being a plot vehicle).

In a genre that seems confined, more and more, to the formulaic, Celeste and Jesse is both engaging and perceptive, with solid laughs and characters more than skin-deep. It's a picture that should find a receptive audience.

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