(With Sundance wrapped and an intimidating backlog of films to write about, I’ll be publishing a number of brief capsule reviews over the next few days. If a specific title piques your interest and you’d like to see a more substantial review, let me know in the comments.)

The MIssing Person is a present-day film noir starring Oscar nominee Michael Shannon as a private detective hired to find a man who worked in the Twin Towers. The third feature by writer/director Noah Buschel, Shannon stars as John Rosow, a hard-drinking private detective hired by an unseen lawyer to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to follow a mysterious man who’s heading West with a young Mexican child in tow. Along the way, Rosow phone-flirts with the lawyer’s tough-girl secretary (Amy Ryan), gets waylaid by a sexy decoy (Margaret Colin), and befriends a cabbie (John Ventimiglia) who, like him, grew up in New York but had to get away. It eventually emerges the detective and his prey are running from similar things.

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• Stu at Defamer takes a look at this year’s Oscar nominees that debuted at last year’s Sundance and predicts that An Education will receive Academy Awards recognition one year from now.
• One of this year’s Sundance films has already been nominated for an Oscar: the animated short This Way Up.
• And one of this year’s Oscar nominees almost wasn’t a Sundance selection: AJ Schnack samples from an IDA interview with Geoffrey Gilmore in which Man on Wire is said to have nearly been rejected.
• The Envelope points out three Oscar nominees who are at Sundace this week: Josh Brolin, Melissa Leo and Michael Shannon, the latter of whom stars in The Missing Person.
• Four directors/projects have been named winners of this year’s Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards.
• Anne Thompson’s summary of this year’s fest notices it was a “time of transition for both Sundance and the industry,” while also quoting manager Michael Sugar, who believes it was a return to the past: “This year’s fest started to recapture the intended spirit. It seemed back to being about the filmmakers.” Also at Variety, Todd McCarthy’s summary notes that An Education and Sin Nombre were the two emblematic films of the fest, and both fit in with the start of the Obama age.
• Manohla Dargis’ NY Times summary concentrates heavily on the presence of Sundance hero Steven Soderbergh, whose latest film she didn’t care for.

Being that it’s at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it’s a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise. Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema. That all of this talent is put to the service of an adaptation which fundamentally bastardizes the main project of Richard Yates’ novel and neuters its cruel vision of the inability of the individual to grapple with his/her own soul sickness without projecting toxicity outward, doesn’t diminish the actors’ achievements, but it does force us to question whether masterworks of the literary form should be adapted into prospective Oscar cash-ins to begin with, if it means necessarily stripping said masterworks of the daring that makes them masterful.

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“No pictures, no attacking — none of that,” warned the junket manager to the online press, who had been assembled for an hour in the tiny Waldorf Astoria ballroom, awaiting their audience with the director and four top-billed stars of Revolutionary Road. The admonition was necessary because two of those stars were of such grand stature, and more so in combination with each other — you may remember, they once pretended to fall in love in front of a green screen whilst standing atop a scale model of a famous boat — that of course the average bottom-feeding, basement-dwelling blogger could be forgiven for forgetting that they were in fact human beings asking questions of other human beings, and not bloodthirsty animals driven feral by the scent of fame.

Not long later, they appeared, as if out of nowhere (although it should be noted that from my seat, I didn’t have a clear view of the door). Kate Winslet, remarkably slim and tan. Leonardo DiCaprio, rocking the wispy facial hair of a posturing adolescent. Kathy Bates, looking just like Kathy Bates, but more so. San Mendes, being British. Michael Shannon, wearing the vague stare of a time clock puncher. The warning, it turned out, was unneeded. The talent cast such a glow on the assembled press that all thoughts of aggression were easily pushed aside. How wonderful life is, now that potential Oscar contenders are in the world!

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Shotgun Stories, the impressively accomplished feature debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols, has a few obvious affinities with the directorial work of its producer, David Gordon Green. Beyond the fact that both filmmakers have a demonstrated interest in the personal tragedies of working class families in the small-town South, much of the commonality lies in the aesthetic sense that Green has been fairly accused of adopting from Terrence Malick. But if Shotgun’s courting of visual pleasure via deliberate pacing and a certain transluscent golden glow fail to reinvent the wheel, at least credit Nichols with picking the seconds that suit the material. A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy.

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