As two films in the Festival diabolically illustrate, claustrophobia has more than one instigator. Both Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried and Adam Green’s Frozen prey on the primal fear of confinement, and each film follows through on the blunt threat of their titles. In Buried, a man (Ryan Reynolds) awakens to find himself buried alive, with only a cell phone and Zippo lighter to battle darkness, panic, and death.

“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.

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.

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.

“To be very honest, I’ve had a growing love affair with cinema,” says New York-based Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat, who brings her first feature film project, Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan),to the Festival this year. “Part of it is the form and the power of storytelling and narrative,” she says, “but it’s also the relationship cinema has to its audiences. It’s very, very powerful.

No one could believe me when I said I had never seen Harold and Maude. I honestly don’t know either how it slipped by me. It’s the perfect film for me: about how life is so amazing and at times so horrible that you have to seize every minute.

A feature film from Greenland is a true rarity even in the global film festival circuit. So the arrival this year of Nuummioq in the Festival’s World Dramatic Cinema Competition qualifies as an event in itself.
Nuummioq, directed by Torben Bech and Otto Rosing, is a moody character study that follows Malik, a young, introverted construction worker who embarks on a journey that is both physical and spiritual after he is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.

Jay and Mark Duplass radiated giddy exuberance from the stage of the Eccles Theatre before the Saturday evening premiere of their film, Cyrus. The filmmaking brothers got their start in the ultra-low-budget, uber-indie “mumblecore” genre, and seemed genuinely thrilled to arrive at Sundance 2010 as a couple of Festival darlings.Cyrus stars John C.

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.

Director and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener reveals the subtleties of relationships in Please Give—a story of love, guilt, and humanity. When Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), a Manhattan married couple with an estate-sale furniture store buy their neighbor’s apartment, they need to wait for the occupant, Andra (Ann Guilbert), to actually die before they can tear down the walls to expand their home. An impromptu birthday dinner for Andra and her grown granddaughters (Amanda Peet and Rebecca Hall) plants the seeds for complicated relationships between the two families, in which all are faced with issues of their own morality and Kate and Alex confront their “liberal guilt,” which they’ve been at pains to navigate.