Red Lights, the new film from Buried director Rodrigo Cortés, weds an earnest, simplified exploration of the nature of faith with a goofy, gussied-up B-movie plot about a pair of academics who travel around debunking extrasensory phenomenon. As marriages go, it's a troubled one, but it certainly makes for some interesting fights across the dinner table.
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Why do we believe, or need to believe, in the possibilities that lie beyond the laws of physics and known science — the unlikely, irrational hope that suggest something more exists in the universe, be it spiritual or simply supernatural? Actor Cillian Murphy explores these Big Questions in Rodrigo Cortes' Red Lights as Tom Buckley, a paranormal debunker who goes head-to-head with a powerful pop psychic (Robert De Niro) whose self-proclaimed powers to bend spoons and read minds may be mere parlour tricks compared to what he's really capable of.
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Park City did indeed turn out to be a robust marketplace this year, with buyers snapping up over two dozen features and docs out of Sundance 2012. Ranging from genre pleasers to indie charmers to potential future Oscar picks and beyond – and veering from critical fest duds to overwhelming crowd favorites – the class of Sundance ’12 is an intriguingly mixed-but-mostly-promising bag of films that will be dotting the cinematic landscape in the year or so to come. Here’s an updated comprehensive look at what sold and which films you should be looking forward to.
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Our Sundance bidding-war preview may have foreseen only part of the fervor around the John Hawkes/Helen Hunt drama The Surrogate, but how's this for compensation: As predicted, the Richard Gere/Susan Sarandon Wall Street thriller Arbitrage went to Roadside Attractions (with its partners at Lionsgate) for just over $2 million. Bam! That's not it for deals, either: Get the updated roster of Sundance pics -– and see which offerings earned raves, and which didn’t -- after the jump.
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No matter how many gifting suites, D-list "celebrities" and/or head-splitting parties the malevolent forces of modern commerce may stuff into the wintry idyll of Park City over the next week, we'll always have the movies. And as usual, "we" also means studios and distributors with money to burn and release slates to fill. Let the Sundance bidding wars begin!
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