Sundance Film Festival names Midnight, Spotlight, Frontier picks

By John Horn

Nov. 29, 2012 12 AM PT

A sequel to a horror anthology movie, an experimental film from James Franco and new works starring Sarah Polley, Rob Corddry and Matthew McConaughey are among the newest additions to next year’s Sundance Film Festival, organizers announced Thursday.

The festival’s selections for its Spotlight (dedicated to movies that have played at other festivals), Park City at Midnight (reserved for thrillers and raunchy comedies) and New Frontier (focused on experimental projects) sections include 20 movies and seven art installations.

The works join the 32 dramatic and documentary competition films that were announced Wednesday; the festival’s narrative and nonfiction premieres, the most high-profile movies at Sundance, will be revealed on Monday. The festival, considered the nation’s top launching pad for movies made outside the studio system, runs Jan. 17-27 in Park City, Utah.

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In the festival’s Midnight program, the new films include “S-VHS,” a sequel to last year’s Sundance title “V/H/S,” and “Hell Baby,” a horror comedy work from “Reno 911!’s” Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon that stars Corddry.

The other genre selections are “Ass Backwards,” starring and co-written by Casey Wilson from television’s “Happy Endings”; “In Fear,” which features up-and-coming actress (and daughter of filmmaker Jane Campion) Alice Englert; the sex and submission documentary “kink”; “The Rambler,” a mystery about a prisoner played by Dermot Mulroney; “Virtual Heroes,” in which two video game players become involved in a parallel competition; and the cannibalism tale “We Are What We Are.”

In the festival’s New Frontier category, Franco will present “Interior. Leather Bar,” which the actor made with filmmaker Travis Mathews. The film imagines how the actors in 1980’s controversial movie “Cruising” wrestled with gay sadomasochistic sex scenes. Joining it in the grouping are “Charlie Victor Romeo,” an adaptation of the stage play about plane crashes; the Iranian movie “Fat Shaker”; Mexico’s “Halley”; and Canada’s “The Meteor.”

The festival’s Spotlight selections, some of which are playing in the United States for the first time, are Polley’s quasi-documentary “Stories We Tell”; Israel’s “Fill the Void”; India’s “Gangs of Wasseypur”; the documentary “The Gatekeepers”; McConaughey in “Mud”; Chile’s “No” with Gael Garcia Bernal; and Britain’s “Sightseers.”

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