Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated American Indie Films of 2018: #40. Madeleine Olnek’s Wild Nights with Emily

Published on January 17, 2018

Wild Nights with Emily

There has been a lot of tinkering around on Madeleine Olnek‘s third outing as a filmmaker. We’ve been thinking this might be ready for three Sundance editions in a row, and it looked promising when Wild Nights With Emily won the top prize at the sixth edition of US in Progress in Paris (Champs-Elysées Film Festival edition) but with line-ups unveiled for Park City, Rotterdam and Berlin – we have nada. The filmmaker gave us 2011’s Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same and 2014’s The Foxy Merkins (read review) and we’re itching for a fest unveiling.

With players Molly Shannon, Susan Ziegler, Amy Seimetz, Brett Gelman, Sasha Frolova and Dana Melanie, based on Olnek’s stageplay of the same name, the comedy-period piece about famed poet Dickinson has been described as kind of an “experimental” piece with Shannon taking the title role as an adult Emily and Dana Melanie playing Young Emily.

Release Date/Prediction: We think this might land in Locarno.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).