Sunshine Cleaning a Delightful Mess

Film festival spawns potential hits

(NEWSER) - This year’s indie love-fest Sundance spawned several movies that have a shot at real commercial success, with a roster of films showcasing “more old-fashioned storytelling,” writes Andrew O’Hehir in Salon. Jury prizes went to Push and We Live in Public, but here’s a sampling of the films O’Hehir deems unmissable:

• An Education: “Marvelously well-constructed period entertainment with a feminist bite.”

Top-notch performances make prize-winning play work as a movie

(NEWSER) - Doubt erases any qualms over whether the claustrophobic, Pulitzer Prize-winning play would work on the big screen, say critics. A "frighteningly good" Meryl Streep stars as the hardline principal of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, Lou Lumenick writes in the New York Post. A game of cat-and-mouse begins when Streep's nun suspects a priest, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, of molesting the school's first African-American student. More»

Actor makes a bodyslam of a comeback with portrait of a has-been

(NEWSER) - Mickey Rourke takes the title role of The Wrestler and pins it to the mat in a stunning comeback, say critics. The tragicomic portrait of a washed-up star still hitting the circuit decades past his prime "is not just a comeback performance but something much rarer: a rounded, raddled portrait of a good man," longtime Rourke fan Anthony Lane writes in the New Yorker. More»

Critics say indie romantic comedy needs an IQ test

(NEWSER) - Critics like the big-name actors in family serio-comedy Smart People —especially Dennis Quaid, who stars as a cranky professor with much to learn about people—but think they might have been smarter to choose a different script. Screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier "is aiming for Scrabulous dialogue but his movie is barely of Boggle quality," Carrie Rickey writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer. More»

1960s icon plays a grandma-turned-sex-worker

(NEWSER) - Irina Palm, about a frumpy grandmother who resorts to prostitution so she can pay for her desperately ill grandson's operation, is winning over critics, both because of its unsentimental portrayal of the sex trade and because of the performance given by its star, singer/songwriter/actress and '60s icon Marianne Faithfull. More»