Enjoying and Producing Music

Former SNL standouts Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader show their known comedy chops as well as impressive dramatic range portraying a brother and sister with major life issues as The Skeleton Twins. Hader’s pragmatic and nuanced gay character here is at the other end of the spectrum from the hilariously one-dimensional Stefon. The story explores the simultaneously supportive and combative relationships that only siblings can have, and does so with enough laughs to avoid being a debbie downer. B

A happy couple with possibly the cutest 2-year old in cinematic history have their lives disrupted by an open-ended visit from a well-meaning but irresponsible party girl (a convincing Anna Kendrick), whose antics threaten their Happy Christmas. But the new chemistry injects some creative energy into everyone’s lives, and we get to witness some pleasant moments and some good lines from Lena Dunham as one of the friends.

In the Q/A after the screening, after the tell-us-about-the-baby question, director Joe Swanberg said the film was shot from his 12-page outline with dialog improvised by the actors. (That process of course results in realistic but not always well-crafted dialog.) He also pointed out that supportive, happily married couples are underrepresented in film, and he wanted to offset that. B-

All who attend Sundance know that the films can sometimes be wild and over the top. But for the 40 or so viewers who walked out early during the screening of slasher-comedy The Voices, the psychopathic and bloody antics of Ryan Reynolds’ deeply disturbed factory worker were too much to handle. And that meant walking out without even waiting to see if Reynolds would eventually remove his shirt. Perhaps a few hundred more coped with the comedic carnage by covering their eyes. In any case, this is an unforgettable, genre-mutilating, occasionally hilarious film with a killer performance by a gore-geous Reynolds, who finds enough twisted charm to make this unconventional villain non-hateable. And what is the absolute last element one would expect in this cheerfully chilling chop-spree? Yes, talking pets, and they have some of the best lines.

In the Q/A after the screening, director Marjane Satrapi presented herself as articulate, smart and funny, and revealed that considerable thought was put into the portrayal of this unique character. B.

Three computer savvy MIT students are engaged in an on-line feud with a mysterious internet presence, and their attempt to find the source takes them into the desert, and into some horror-movie atmosphere in what looks like an abandoned house. Then the bits hit the fan in ambitious WiFi/sci-fi iThriller The Signal. There are twists, and the tone shifts later when the students try to figure out what happened to them, and what sort of extraordinary discovery they have made. Overall, the interesting buildup does not quite hold together toward the end. C+

Stuart Murdoch, the lead singer and songwriter for alternative-pop band Belle and Sebastian, has made his film debut with musical God Help the Girl. Set in a beautifully shot Glasgow, the film is an obvious homage to the filmmaker’s home city and its vibrant music scene. The central character is a troubled high-school student who befriends a nerdy musician, and finds a path to a better life in the joy of creating music. We suspend our disbelief for movies, and we just need to suspend it a notch further for the somewhat sketchy plots of musicals that have fun and accessible songs, like this one. B+

The conflict between fact-based science and wishful-thinking-based faith or magic is not often explored responsibly in film, but Mike Cahill, the director of Sundance 2012’s prize-winning “Another Earth”, is taking on that topic with attempted mind-bender I Origins. The plot develops with two researchers, including Sundance fave Brit Marling, doing interesting and authentic science in the field of iris recognition biometrics. But the discipline gets quite a bit looser at the end, as it would have to in order to allow the dramatic payoff. Like Cahill’s previous film, this is another interesting exercise in light science-fiction. B