SundanceIt may be freezing in Park City, Utah, but things couldn't be hotter at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Dozens of movies at the fest are generating lots of heat. Here we give you six standouts that will have you—and award season forecasters—talking in the months to come.
1. The Way, Way Back: Holy, snowflakes—Fox Searchlight reportedly paid about $10 million earlier today for this Steve Carell comedy. The film is about a 14-year-old (The Killing's Liam James) about who forms a friendship with the manager of a water park (Sam Rockwell) and some of his staffers. Codirected by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (the duo behind the Oscar-winning script of George Clooney's The Descendants), the cast also includes Maya Rudolph, Toni Collette and Allison Janney.
2. Don Jon's Addiction: Joseph Gordon-Levitt pulls a Ben Affleck by writing, directing and starring in the movie as a young man obsessed with online porn. Scarlett Johansson plays the woman who may change his self-loving ways.
"Try to see Don Jon's Addiction when you're here," a Sundance staffer said before the festival even began. "But it could be hard to get tickets because it's been sold out forever."
And once it showed, it didn't take long for the flick to sell. Relativity won the bidding with a reported $4 million.
"I'm here at Sundance, and the good news is the movie that I wrote and directed, Don Jon's Addiction, just closed a deal, a really great big deal for it to come out all over the country and all over the world," Gordon-Levitt said in a video posted on his website, hitRecord. "I couldn't be happier, and it's what I always wanted for this movie. I always intended it to be for a big, popular mass audience, and that's what's going to happen, it looks like."
3. Kill Your Darlings: If Daniel Radcliffe having sex with a man on screen wasn't enough to get everyone chatting about this pic, the film is getting rave reviews. The young man formerly known as Harry Potter stars as the late gay poet Allen Ginsberg during his college days in director John Krokidas' drama about the beginnings of the Beat Generation.
"Kill Your Darlings succeeds more than most in capturing the first flickers of the literary movement without hipster self-consciousness," reviewer David Rooney wrote in the Hollywood Reporter.
4. Fruitvale: Two of the nicest people in Hollywood, Oscar winner Octavia Spencer and Parenthood's Michael B. Jordan, star in this true story about the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a young Bay Area man who was shot and killed by a police officer on New Year's Day 2009, trigging hundreds of protestors rioting in Oakland demanding justice.
The Weinstein Company reportedly scooped up the real life drama for $2 million. And talk about indie cred—the first-time director 26-year-old Ryan Coogler also works at a juvenile-detention center in San Francisco.
5. Before Midnight: As of this morning, the supersecret third installment of the Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) love story didn't have a buyer. But we imagine that will change rather quickly.
The Sunday night premiere proved how devoted the fans of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are. Dozens of people were lined up at least five hours before the screening in hope of snagging a much-coveted ticket.
6. Austenland: Like Don Jon's Addiction, this flick is said to have sold for about $4 million to Sony Picture Classics. While Don Jon is addicted to porn, Austenland is about a young woman (Keri Russell) addicted to Jane Austen. So much so, she goes looking for love at an English Regency-era camp.
And it's got the Twilight stamp of approval—Stephenie Meyer is a producer!