Jameson Kowalczyk

Director John Else, who won the first ever Sundance documentary award in 1980 for his film The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb returns to Sundance, and to familiar subject matter, with Wonders Are Many, a documentary about the making of Doctor Atomic, an opera produced in San Francisco about Robert Oppenheimer in the weeks leading up to the detonation of his atomic bomb.

Sundance has never seen a film quite like director M dot Strange’s We Are the Strange, but then again, neither has any audience, anywhere (except perhaps in the future, where M dot Strange has traveled from to bring us this film). The first digitally animated feature to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, We Are the Strange is the product of a single filmmaker’s labor – dot Strange made the film by himself in his bedroom over the course of two and a half years, and is a rightfully self-described “one man evil animation studio.”

Here it is, my first coverage of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, a review of the opening night film, Chicago 10, a fast-paced, loud, and at times nerve-racking film that is part-documentary, part courtroom drama, part music video, written and directed by Brett Morgan (The Kid Stays in the Picture).

Edward Norton (The Illusionist, Fight Club, Death to Smoochy) stars as Walter Fane, an English bacteriologist who moves himself and his adulterous wife Kitty (Naomi Watts -- 21 Grams) to a remote region of 1920’s China racked by a Cholera outbreak in The Painted Veil, directed by John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Anymore). The script is adapted from the novel by W. Somerset Maugham by screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) and Norton, who have been collaborating for over six years to perfect the script and also get the project off the ground. The finished project is well worth their time – filmed on location in China in cooperation with the China film Bureau, The Painted Veil is part love story, part adventure film, and epic both visually and dramatically.

Now playing in theaters is writer/director Karen Moncrieff’s (Blue Car) second feature-length film effort, The Dead Girl. Part-psychological thriller, part psychological drama, The Dead...