Director Derek Cianfrance juxtaposes the realistic highs and lows of romance in his moving film, Blue Valentine. The audience first meets Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) just as their marriage begins to unravel. Dean whisks them off to a themed hotel with hopes of reviving the relationship, and just before they arrive, the audience is transported back in time, to witness how the couple first fell in love.

“Everything has a tragedy. You think your tragedy is the only tragedy? Everyone has one.”
These opening lines of Amy Grappell’s short documentary Quadrangle are spoken by her mother.

A son of Nobel Prize–winning magical realist Gabriel García Márquez, Rodrigo García is an artist in his own right. His credits as writer and director include Things you can tell just by looking at her, which won the Best Film Prize in Un Certain Regard at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival; Nine Lives, which won the 2005 Locarno Film Festival, was nominated for several Independent Spirit Awards; and Ten Tiny Love Stories and Fathers and Sons. His pilot credits include Carnivale, Big Love, Six Degrees, and In Treatment, on which he has also served as executive producer.

If it’s true that the most prolific trash talkers in sports are the ones who consistently back it up with stellar play, former NBA superstar Reggie Miller might just be the best trash talker ever. With a relentlessly disconcerting gift for on-court chatter coupled with a deadly jump shot that plagued the New York Knicks and its fans (most notably Brooklyn’s own Spike Lee, with whom Miller shared a celebrated personal rivalry) for most of the 1990s, Miller was an unsuspecting but deadly thorn in the side of a franchise destined for but never achieving championship greatness. Award-winning director Dan Klores (Crazy Love; Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story) expertly catches the sights, and most notably the sounds, of this rivalry in Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs.

Park City, UT—The 2010 Sundance Film Festival this evening announced the jury prizes in shorts filmmaking and gave honorable mentions based on outstanding achievement and merit. The awards were presented at a ceremony held in Park City, Utah. These award recipients will also be honored at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony hosted by David Hyde Pierce on Saturday, January 30.

Three documentaries in this year’s Festival approach America’s overseas conflicts from very different angles, yet at heart they are all stories about the human costs of war. For all their differences, these three films—Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo, Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story and Laura Poitras’s The Oath—represent an evolution of the contemporary war documentary. Eight years after the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan and nearly seven years after the invasion of Iraq, none of these films concern themselves with questions over the wisdom or justifications for these missions, and instead focus on the complex realities of what’s happened since.

“Do you really think I’m flat-chested?””You look really good, and that’s all that’s important. You don’t want to overdo it.”The last lines of Metropolitan, Whit Stillman’s seminal tale of Upper East Side class and love returned to the Egyptian Theatre in Park City yesterday after 20 years.

The Runaways is a love letter to the era and place it portrays—the rock scene in L.A. during the mid to late ’70s—but it’s also a glitzy ode to the sneering little punks who made up The Runaways.

It can be easy to assume that the world’s refugees are the unfortunate and senseless collateral damage of political, military, and racial repression. But what of the countless millions of souls who fall victim to the devastating effects of climate change and are forced to move from their homelands to other parts of the world where they may not be so welcome? Veteran filmmaker Michael Nash circled the globe to put a very real and poignant face on the migratory effects of environmental change in Climate Refugees, which premiered Saturday night at the Festival. After the screening, Nash took part in a Q&A along with producer Justin Hogan, and environmental migration expert Koko Warner.

“We see nothing,” says Yael Hersonski, the director of the powerful documentary A Film Unfinished, which will have its world premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. “Every day we are bombarded by images of atrocity, but we cannot really see them. We simply look, and say, ‘Oh dear.

Juan Escobar was born into a life of privilege. His charmed childhood was shattered in 1993, when his father, the notoriously brutal Colombian drug lord, Pablo Escobar, was gunned down in Medellín. Juan Escobar changed his name to Sebastián Marroquín and moved with his mother and sister to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to escape the stigma of his father’s name and reputation, and has struggled to come to terms with his family’s circumstances ever since.

Bad news. A film set in the 1980s is a now considered a period film. Director Anthony Burns and writer Brandon Freeman came to that conclusion fairly easily when setting Skateland in early ’80s East Texas.

Anna Deavere Smith casts a wide net. An award-winning playwright, chameleonic actress, published author, and university professor, Smith’s range belies not only brilliance, but an inexhaustible curiosity. Her art is born of a conviction that there’s always more to know, always assumptions to upend, always more to life and people than we’re willing to acknowledge.