2014 Sundance Film Festival: dispatches from Park City – The Verge

Oculus Rift at Sundance: games are just the beginning

2014-01-29T09:00:04-05:00

Sundance describes the New Frontier portion of its annual film festival as a "creative space" for "multimedia performances, transmedia experiences," and other interactive art forms. This year that translated into a room of pure sensory overload: orange-red walls with matching plush couches, video projections, and in one corner, five stations gilded in chrome. That's where a constant stream of visitors would sit down, plug in, and get transported into another world.

Oculus had come to Sundance.

Since its Kickstarter debut, much of the public focus on the Oculus Rift VR headset has been on its potential as a gaming device. The uses there are …

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Cinema and snow: Sundance 2014 in photos

2014-01-27T17:29:58-05:00

Take a sleepy mountain resort, bring in nearly 200 feature films and shorts, add a crush of filmmakers, industry peers, movie fans, and partiers - and you get the Sundance Film Festival.

Every year Sundance takes over Park City, Utah for a dive into the latest in independent and mainstream films, and the movies shown often end up setting the agenda for the year to come. It's the kind of scene where you can listen to Nick Cave talk about his movie in one moment, and then learn about the life of a local shop owner the next - and there's no telling which will be the more interesting conversation. Back from our trip, we take a look at the thing …

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What to watch: our favorite movies of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival

2014-01-27T13:07:21-05:00

Sundance Film Festival Marquee

By Bryan Bishop and Casey Newton

Strip away the spectacle and the snow, and Sundance is all about one thing: movies. For its 30th anniversary year, the film festival debuted an incredibly diverse selection of titles, ranging from the funny to the violent to the just outright odd. Below we've collected some of the films we liked the most so you know exactly what to look out for in the year ahead.

THE VERGE FAVORITES

Boyhood

Richard Linklater's film covers the evolution of a family by catching up with them at annual intervals over the course of 12 years. It could have come off as a gimmick, but fantastic performances and brazenly honest w …

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Google’s creepy BigDog robot goes to the movies in the Sundance sci-fi drama ‘Young Ones’

2014-01-24T12:53:11-05:00

Young Ones promotional still

Science-fiction films have often been the domain of grand designs and sweeping cityscapes, but over the past decade we've seen a more grounded approach to the genre. Movies like Her, District 9, and Looper put the focus on gritty, lived-in worlds filled with technologies that are clear descendants of the tools we use today. Here at Sundance, a new sci-fi drama from writer-director Jake Paltrow is joining that movement.

Young Ones tells the story of a family struggling to survive in a future where water shortages have turned entire sections of the country into barren desert. It's a world where every day is a struggle and flashy new technolog …

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‘The Raid 2’ review: bigger and bloodier

2014-01-23T12:14:57-05:00

The following review was written during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Let's just get this out of the way: I wasn't a huge fan of The Raid: Redemption. Gareth Evans' Indonesian action flick was a video game riff on John Carpenter's classic Assault on Precinct 13, and while its intense devotion to martial arts wizardry was certainly impressive, I found myself wanting more when it came to story and drama. So when it was announced that The Raid 2 would be debuting at Sundance - with a running time of nearly two and a half hours, no less - I was curious to see if Evans could bring something more to the table the second time around.

I had not …

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‘The Internet’s Own Boy’ fights for reform after Aaron Swartz’s death

2014-01-23T11:04:48-05:00

January 11th marked the first anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death. As an inventor, a coder, and an activist, Swartz had an outsized impact on the world before he died at the age of 26. In his short life, he helped to shape the modern internet by developing RSS, Creative Commons licenses, and Reddit. But he also spent the last two years of his life fighting a legal case that stemmed from his copying millions of documents from a digital library. Depressed and facing 35 years in prison, Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment.

A compelling new feature documentary

Swartz's story was widely chronicled in real time, including here on The …

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Reliving ‘Boyhood’: how Richard Linklater spent 12 years shooting one movie

2014-01-22T13:09:38-05:00

Boyhood promotional still (IFC FILMS)

"I don't know what to say about the film, except 4,207 days ago we started shooting this film and we're really happy to be here." It was Sunday night, and director Richard Linklater was addressing a sold-out Sundance audience for the debut of his latest project, Boyhood. Festival audiences are used to seeing premieres of highly anticipated new films, but the energy in the Eccles Theatre was at a higher pitch than usual - and the director of Dazed and Confused and A Scanner Darkly was ready to unveil the most ambitious project he'd ever taken on.

The same cast playing the same roles

Boyhood tells the story of a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane …

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‘Life Itself’: a stirring tribute to Roger Ebert from the director of ‘Hoop Dreams’

2014-01-22T11:59:06-05:00

roger ebert

The movies, Roger Ebert said, "are like a machine that generates empathy… It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us." Life Itself, an engrossing new documentary based on Ebert's memoir of the same name, inspires more than its share of empathy as it chronicles its subject's final days. But the film by Hoop Dreams director Steve James also generates a sense of wonder. How did a chubby know-it-all from Urbana, Illinois, come through decades of alcoholism and loneliness to redefine film criticism and become one of the country's greatest popular writers?

It's a journey worth taking, even if you know the broad o …

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Blurred lines: how an app ruined the Sundance waiting game

2014-01-20T15:30:02-05:00

Sundance ewaitlist

Waiting, as the contemporary philosopher Tom Petty has observed, is the hardest part. And yet it was once the defining characteristic of a trip to Sundance Film Festival, where anything worth doing required arriving well in advance. That isn't true of the celebrities and the filmmakers, who wait for nothing. Nor is it always true of the press and employees of the film industry, who attend free screenings of their own.

But for most of the 40,000 people who descend on Park City each year, getting tickets used to be an agonizing challenge, one that required vast stretches of time standing around. It was part of the unique charm of the festival …

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Zach Braff’s crowdfunded ‘Wish I Was Here’ reportedly bought for $2.75 million

2014-01-19T22:57:04-05:00

zachbraff

According to Variety, the distribution rights to Wish I Was Here - the second film written and directed by actor Zach Braff after 2004's Garden State - have been purchased by Focus Features in a deal worth $2.75 million. Deadline reports the comedy drama will reach 500 screens on its theatrical release in the US.

The movie, co-written by Braff's brother Adam, was partially funded by Kickstarter. Braff took to the crowdfunding site in April last year with a goal of raising $2 million. That money, he said, would help him retain creative control of the picture, but his project received criticism from people who felt celebrities with Braff's we …

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