No one, as far as I know, has come to the Berlinale in search of Gillian Anderson, the strawberry-blonde vixen who set millions of hearts aflutter -- and not just male ones -- with her role in the supernaturally beloved ’90s show The X-Files. But Anderson has surprised those of us who love her by showing up -- in small roles, but still -- in two films here, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer and Ursula Meier’s Sister. In Shadow Dancer, a thriller set in early-‘90s Belfast, she’s a British secret-service officer who squares off against a colleague (played by Clive Owen). In Sister, she’s the well-heeled patron of a tony Swiss ski resort -- and a mom -- who befriends a young thief and rapscallion who barely knows what it means to be a child.
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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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Park City was eerily peaceful early this morning with nobody around and last night’s dusting of snow on the ground. Soon enough – by this afternoon, or this evening, or certainly tonight – that will all change as filmmakers, press and industry folks roll in and the dreaded promoters (“leveragers,” Sundance founder Robert Redford called them in his inaugural address today) pimp out this snowy mountain town like a toddler in a tiara. Appropriately, Redford pointed to the current hardships for filmmakers, and the world at large. “Times are hard and grim,” he acknowledged, later offering optimism. “Independent film is healthy. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
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