As the 2012 Sundance Film Festival drew to a close with a flurry of sales, Movieline posed THE question to a panel of critics and bloggers: What was the best film of this year’s festival? While many of Sundance’s high profile offerings came and went with a whimper, a few notable titles rose to the top of Movieline’s poll; fest darling and Grand Jury Prize winner Beasts of the Southern Wild earned wild praise among our pundits, for example, but so too did some of this year’s more controversial entries. Hit the jump to see which top films the critics picked.
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Critic faves Beasts of the Southern Wild and The House I Live In took top Grand Jury Prize honors tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, where the John Hawkes Oscar hopeful The Surrogate and Kirby Dick's The Invisible War nabbed this year's audience awards. Also earning Sundance 2012 kudos were the music doc Searching for Sugar Man, Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk With Me, and the Aubrey Plaza starrer Safety Not Guaranteed.
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Ben Lewin’s The Surrogate emerged as the undisputed hit of Sundance 2012, landing the biggest sale thus far (a $6 million sale to Fox Searchlight) with the unlikeliest of subjects: A paralyzed man’s quest to lose his virginity, based on the life and writings of Bay Area poet Mark O’Brien. Thanks to Lewin’s sensitive and honest script and an impressive turn by indie favorite John Hawkes -- who shines with wit and grace in a physically demanding performance as O’Brien, who has no use of his limbs due to polio but begins to explore his sexuality with the help of a hands-on sex therapist (Helen Hunt) – The Surrogate earned consecutive standing ovations and got critics buzzing with the possibilities for next year’s Academy Awards.
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As sort of presumed, the John Hawkes/Helen Hunt-starring, man-in-an-iron-lung-virginity-losing, awards-ready indie drama The Surrogate made an impressive market showing Monday following its Sundance premiere, selling for $6 million -- more than twice the figure noted in last week's festival bidding-war preview -- to Fox Searchlight. Not bad! The studio also has all but closed a deal on director Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild; drop back by for more coverage of each from Sundance and, for The Surrogate in particular, from next year's awards season. Ahem. [Deadline]
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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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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