On the other side of the country, the film industry is preparing for the upcoming Sundance Film Festival. As always, there are a few huge movie stars featuring in some of these smaller films, but it appears that the upcoming festival is likely to have more familiar faces than most. Who’s showing up on the red carpet this January? Jim Carrey, Richard Gere, William Hurt, Robin Williams, Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman and Kevin Spacey, just to name a few.
Those stars figure prominently in the 16 premieres added to the Sundance lineup, and many of those movies will come to the January festival in Park City, Utah, looking for a distribution deal.
Carrey stars in “I Love You Philip Morris,” a fact-based story of an inmate’s love affair not with a cigarette maker but another man. Buyers have identified the film as one of the festival’s most important acquisition screenings.
The distributors also have singled out “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a police drama from director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) that stars Gere, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes and Don Cheadle. “Endgame,” a British political thriller likely to draw crowds of acquisition executives, stars Hurt and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson star in “The Messenger,” a look at soldiers obligated to convey the grim news of combat deaths to family members. And Ashton Kutcher anchors the cast of “Spread,” a profile of a Los Angeles gigolo wooing older women. Both movies are looking for a distributor.
” Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart stars in “Adventureland,” Billy Bob Thornton and Basinger are among the ensemble in “The Informers,” Spacey stars in both “Moon” and “Shrink” (opposite Williams), and Thurman appears opposite Minnie Driver in “Motherhood.”
The festival opens Jan. 15 with “Mary and Max,” director Adam Elliot’s clay-animated movie about the pen-pal relationship between two troubled people, an 8-year-old Australian girl (voiced by Toni Collette) and a morbidly obese New Yorker (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The festival closes Jan. 23 with “Earth Days,” a documentary from director Robert Stone tracing the environmental movement’s history.
