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As often as cinema can operate as a vehicle for empathy, it can just as easily provoke the contrary. Co-directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker never intended for their film to pander to audience’s entrenched beliefs, and that was on display front-and-center at a hot-blooded screening of the film at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where its most nefarious subject joined via Skype during a rowdy Q&A session.

The last time Craig Zobel premiered a film at the Sundance Film Festival, he wasn’t sure he’d make it out of the theater. After debuting his film Compliance in 2012, the film’s post-screening Q&A session was reduced to a shouting match as a combative audience member lobbed criticisms at the director’s intentions with the film. Earlier this year during Zobel’s second time around in Park City, the drama stayed on the screen.

Is a film really a film if it’s actually more of a kinetic collage that weaves through canyons and countrysides, picking up Beck or Cat Power or the Kansas City Marching Cobras along the way? We like to think so, and Doug Aitken, the ever-inventive multimedia artist, often makes it so. Aitken’s newest project, Station to Station, can seem inscrutable at first. The Aitken-prescribed tagline, “62 one-minute films.

While introducing The Diary of a Teenage Girl at the Sundance Film Festival, senior programmer David Courier prepared the audience to meet two striking new talents. He noted that he was honored to have Marielle Heller, an alum of the Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs, return with her debut feature, and predicted actress Bel Powley’s future is “so bright that we’re going to be seeing her work here for years to come.”
This wasn’t typical pre-screening hyperbole.

Judging from conversations and Twitter activity in the moments before the world premiere screening of The End of the Tour at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, there was as much trepidation as there was excitement about the prospect of the life of the late, great author David Foster Wallace being dramatized on film. Yet even though the film, and actor Jason Segel in particular, made great pains to evoke Wallace’s singular way of talking, thinking, and being, it turned out that The End of the Tour is far from a biopic—it documents just a few days at the end of the author’s press tour for Infinite Jest—and rather uses writer David Lipsky’s best-selling account of his time reporting an ultimately unpublished profile of Wallace for Rolling Stone as a jumping off point for a rumination on fame, American manhood, and loneliness, among many other things. It’s also, despite a bigger budget and stars like Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, and Joan Cusack, very much a deeply felt James Ponsoldt (Smashed, The Spectacular Now) film.

If you’ve been to the movies this summer, you’ve probably had a lot of fun watching dinosaurs behave badly, deadly robots travel through time or the earthquake-induced, computer-generated destruction of California.  These films and other blockbusters have a place in our culture, but don’t miss checking out what is in many ways a banner season for risk-taking and refreshing independent movies.
Some of my favorite new independent films are in theaters now or opening soon.

Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez may not be the second coming of Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the groundbreaking psychologist at the helm of the Stanford Prison Experiment, but that doesn’t preclude his new film from channeling the same chilling tenor as those controversial events.
One could speculate that every film screening is an “experiment” of sorts, as a number of audience members intimated during The Stanford Prison Experiment’s Q&A session at the film’s Sundance premiere, but Alvarez is loath to concede that his film manipulates with the same scheming tendencies as the experiment itself.

A perilous journey into the world of drug cartels, a simulated prison experiment that reduces Ezra Miller to a weeping boy, and a Christmas Eve spent with transgender prostitutes in Los Angeles. Yeah, July has something for everyone.
Those three Sundance favorites—Cartel Land, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and Tangerine, respectively—headline a slate that further catapults us into summer moviegoing season.

Passionate, mercurial, prodigiously talented. They’re adjectives that could personify any number of entertainers, but maybe none more than the utterly compelling, endlessly perplexing Nina Simone. In January at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, director Liz Garbus—an Oscar-nominated and first-class artist in her own right—premiered her sweeping portrait of the complicated singer and pianist whose classically trained skills were paired with an undeniable fervor for activism.

A stranger-than-fiction documentary, The Wolfpack reveals the almost unbelievable story of the Angulo family. They’re seven children—six brothers and one sister, all with waist-length black hair—who are being raised on welfare in a crowded, untidy apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The surprise here is that they weren’t allowed to leave for 17 years due to their Hare Krishna father’s fear of the outside world.

Check out these Sundance-supported films coming to theaters, DVD, and Blu-Ray this month, including this year’s Grand Jury Prize winner Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Rodney Ascher’s jarring fright film The Nightmare, and a refreshing and decidedly westcoast update to coming-of-age films in Dope.
 
In Theaters

Friday, June 5 The Nightmare, directed by Rodney Ascher

Friday, June 12 The Wolfpack, directed by Crystal Moselle

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Wednesday, June 17 The Tribe, Myroslav Slaboshpytsky
Friday, June 19 Eden, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

Dope, directed by Rick Famuyiwa 

Infinitely Polar Bear, directed by Maya Forbes

The Overnight, directed by Patrick Brice

Friday, June 26 Fresh Dressed, directed by Sacha Jenkins

 
DVD and Blu-Ray
 
Tuesday, June 2 Camp X-Ray, directed by Peter Sattler
Tuesday, June 9 Rich Hill, directed by Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo
Tuesday, June 16 Wild Tales, directed by Damian Szifron
 
#ArtistServices
 
Monday, June 1 La Ciudad, directed by David Riker
Tuesday, June 2 The New Black, directed by Yoruba Richen
Wednesday, June 10 FUEL, directed by Joshua Tickell
Monday, June 15 Rain in a Dry Land, directed by Anne Makepeace
Thursday, June 25 Across the Creek, directed by Jonny Cournoyer
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Andrew Bujalski returned to Sundance last January with Results, a perceptive comedy set in the world of fitness trainers that examines the relationship between money and happiness. The movie premiered at the Eccles in the U.S.