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Upstream Color

Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth's Upstream Color -- a lyric reverie on loss, love, and various invasions of the body -- was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let's say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady consideration of coupledom and the cosmos, Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, the third (but one hopes not the last) in Linklater's series of scintillating gabfests co-scripted with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

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Zachary Pincus-Roth

Ushio Shinohara's painting, created by boxing with the canvas

See also:
*More Sundance 2013 coverage
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

Bare-chested, in shorts and goggles, an 81-year-old Japanese man stood in front of us. It looked like we were about to watch him go swimming. But it was zero degrees outside, and we were in an art gallery during the Sundance Film Festival last Saturday. It turns out films aren't the only things to see in Park City: we were about to watch a round of paint-boxing.

Ushio Shinohara, the shirtless octogenarian, one of the subjects of Sundance documentary Cutie and the Boxer, created the art of paint-boxing in 1960. "At that time, he didn't have anything, so it was just a piece of paper on a wall," the interpreter at the gallery translates from Shinohara's Japanese.

In an interview later, Shinohara elaborates in what he calls his "not very good" English, "Boxing gloves very expensive in 1960, I can't buy. Canvas, I can't buy." His secret? "Garbage." Shinohara recounts how he and his peers were inspired by their contemporary, Robert Rauschenberg, a master of found-object work. "He's a king of junk for Japanese young artists. Every young artist get free [supplies]."

Back in the intro, he remarks through the translator, "Since boxing is not very popular in New York right now [boxing gloves are] down from $55 to $20." The audience of festivalgoers laughs at his current good fortune, though perhaps some of that is nervous laughter. The crowd is huddled together on steps inside the gallery, many trying to get as close as possible and others hanging back just a bit, iPhones held up like periscopes, as they protect themselves from the splattering paint we've been warned about (though we're assured it washes out of clothes). Shinohara attaches sponges to his bargain boxing gloves, dips them in tubs of paint, then punches recklessly at the canvas, sending paint-droplets, black and hot pink, flying in our direction.

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David Kruta

Stacie Passon's Concussion is a happy surprise.

Sometimes, one film in a festival lineup can help to reveal another in sharper relief. To wit, one of the loveliest entries in Sundance 2013's U.S. Dramatic Competition, James Ponsoldt's deeply felt coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now, looked even better after the premiere of The Way Way Back, a deeply insincere coming-of-age comedy from writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash--a movie that has so far generated the festival's biggest sale (to Fox Searchlight, for close to $10 million).

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Rachel Morrison

Michael B. Jordan (The Wire), who's fully up to the challenge, in Fruitvale.

You could hear a pin drop during the first Sundance screening of writer-director Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale, an enormously powerful and moving debut feature based on the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Oakland transit police in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2009. Coogler opens the film--one of the standouts of this year's U.S. Dramatic Competition--with pixilated camera-phone video of the real incident, then flashes back 24 hours to take us through the last day of Grant's abbreviated life. The result is a richly observed portrait of working-class African-American life and of one man's flawed but sincere efforts to make things better for himself and his young family. Taken together with another Dramatic Competition highlight, Andrew Donsunmu's previously discussed Mother of George, Fruitvale also offers further evidence of the American indie black cinema renaissance that has emerged at Sundance over the last few years

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In May in the Summer, Dahlia (Arrested Development's hilarious Alia Shawkat) is a lesbian tentatively trying to step out of the closet.

In his brief remarks before the first public screening of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford praised the Sundance Institute's ongoing filmmaker development labs as "our core," noting that the festival itself was conceived "to create an audience for the filmmakers in our lab program."

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Yung Jake

Although half of Los Angeles will decamp this weekend to the snowy hillsides of Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, not everyone is going for the movies. Starry-eyed attendees relish access to the suits, the skiing and the swag, but what about the art?

Shari Frilot has curated Sundance's experimental New Frontier films and exhibitions for the past seven years, and this year, rather than pushing anyone to see James Franco's film Interior. Leather Bar, (hint: it involves sexually explicit gay BDSM), Frilot is encouraging us to notice Yung Jake, whose work blurs the lines between memes, hip hop and video art.

"He's young, green and pretty hot," Frilot said. After all, not many visual artists would mention a dislike of rapper-turned-actor Ludacris and race-conscious silhouette artist Kara Walker in the same breath. I want to know more, to talk to Yung Jake himself, but he's back in New York for the holidays. He doesn't want to talk on the phone, and he doesn't want to Skype; he says it's too impersonal. He wants to talk over text.

Well, okay.

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Mother of George

For the next 10 days, all Hollywood eyes--and those of many a filmgoer--will turn toward the frigid wilds of Park City, Utah, reportedly experiencing its chilliest winter in a decade. Their collective hope: to discover at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (January 17 through 26) the next Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Sessions, Chasing Ice, or Searching for Sugar Man, to name four of last year's Sundance premieres now in the running for this year's Academy Awards. Those breakouts, alongside such acclaimed 2012 alumni as Keep the Lights On, Middle of Nowhere, and The Queen of Versailles, offer ample proof that, as it enters its 29th year (and despite formidable competition from Austin's upstart South by Southwest), the festival remains reliable one-stop shopping for those films that will stand at the center of the indie-film conversation over the next 12 months.

It has been four years since this critic last set foot in Park City, and in that time, the festival has undergone a number of significant changes. After a two-decade reign, Sundance festival director Geoffrey Gilmore ceded the throne in 2009 to his longtime lieutenant, John Cooper--a shift that also saw longtime festival programmer Trevor Groth move up into Cooper's former role as director of programming. The following year brought the introduction of a new competitive section, NEXT, focused expressly on the sort of incipient, no-budget filmmaking that some observers saw the festival abandoning toward the end of the Gilmore era in favor of starrier fare tailor-made for the picture pages in Us Weekly.

Another new category, Documentary Premieres, was established in 2011 to siphon off higher-profile docs by established filmmakers from the festival's main U.S. documentary competition. And the heretofore U.S.-centric festival has increasingly challenged its seasonal rivals Rotterdam and Berlin for international premieres, launching the likes of An Education, Bronson, and the Irish musical Once, with new work by Australia's Jane Campion (Top of the Lake) and France's Anne Fontaine (Two Mothers) on tap for 2013.

In recent years, more Sundance films than ever before have entered the coveted world of U.S. distribution, even as that world has itself undergone a series of fairly dramatic, Darwinian adaptations. Long gone are the days when studio-owned "indie" divisions like Focus, Fox Searchlight, and Miramax routinely made Sundance headlines with profligate seven-figure acquisition deals for movies that almost inevitably failed to recoup.

Nowadays, the few such companies that remain are more interested in long-term talent development, as Searchlight signaled when it signed a first-look deal with the New York-based Borderline Films collective responsible for Afterschool and Martha Marcy May Marlene. (In a similar move, Searchlight picked up two films at Sundance 2012 from the prodigiously talented actress-writer Brit Marling--the low-fi sci-fi drama Another Earth and the cult-leader thriller Sound of My Voice--and returns to the festival this year with Marling's latest, The East.) Meanwhile, for more and more Sundance movies, "distribution" might mean playing on an Apple TV near you rather than in a brick-and-mortar cinema, as upstart micro-distributors navigate the swiftly changing currents of video-on-demand platforms.

As more than 100 new feature-length films unspool (or, rather, digitally splay) across Park City screens, I'll be reporting back with regular dispatches in print and online. In the meantime, here's an early look at some standouts sure to be generating buzz on Main Street:

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