EDGE Provincetown

Here are a dozen films from the 28th Sundance Film Festival crop, leading with a queer pick to click; a romantic comedy, Liberal Arts, I screened as part of the Festival’s outreach to indie cinema; and several films that have garnered distribution, or that have good pedigrees based on their creators’ resumes.

Keep the Lights On Memphis-raised filmmaker Ira Sachs has continued to confound anyone who expects a certain kind of film from an openly gay filmmaker. Sachs, in a Sundance blurb, explains his approach to this quasi-autobiographical, erotically charged drama.

"It’s about the highs and lows in the relationship between these two men [Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth]. You can be in a relationship that you should have left but you don’t have the perspective to know why. I was in a relationship for 10 years in New York City, and on the day it was over I knew it was a story that was different from other things I’ve seen.

"It’s very sexual, there’s nudity, also there’s an emotional nakedness. It was pretty obvious once we saw Thure and Zach that they had something that would surprise most people: something dangerous and unknown and unexpected. You need to have an extreme intimacy with the material, but also a certain distance - it’s not a confessional because it has the perspective of an artist. I’m not nervous about showing it, I’m interested in the conversations it will generate."

First Birthday Hopefully Frameline will find this queer Sundance short appealing. A gay Korean American is plagued by family issues.

ExcisionThe prospect of a John Waters cameo whets our appetite for a strange teen’s unorthodox path to ridding herself of her nettlesome virginity.

Beasts of the Southern Wild This highly original drama won the Festival’s unofficial buzz competition, garnering the Grand Jury Prize for US Drama for director Benk Zeitlin, while scoring a distribution deal from Fox Searchlight. Set in a Southern Louisiana still devastated by Katrina, the story is told through the eyes of a six-year-old African American.

Liberal Arts "Nobody feels like an adult - it’s the world’s dirty little secret." It helps that the "author’s message" in this uneven but at times terrifically appealing romantic comedy bursts forth from an aging, newly retired college professor, played with a cockeyed mix of glee and resignation by the maestro of mid-life fuck-ups, actor Richard Jenkins. It doesn’t hurt that filmmaker Josh Radnor’s aging 30something pretty boy, Jesse, returning to his college to get his life back on track, gets to have a profanity-laced night in the sack with an austerely bitter classics professor (a deliciously foul-mouthed Allison Janney).

Like his debut happythankyoumoreplease, Radnor’s newest has its highs and its longueurs: the core quickie romance with quirky coed Elizabeth Olsen feels a little facile (offset by a hilarious math lesson produced by their 16-year age gap), but Jesse’s ability to ditch his narcissistic neediness long enough to mentor a suicidal prodigy (John Magaro) pays off in some guilty-pleasure one-liners. "Don’t you love that you can call yourself a poet here and nobody will punch you in the face?"

The Surrogate John Hawkes, Helen Hunt and William H. Macy notched a Grand Jury Prize for Ensemble acting for dramatizing a paralyzed poet’s wish to lose his virginity with a surrogate; plus the Audience Award for US drama for director Ben Lewin.

For Ellen Paul Dano draws on his moves as lead singer for the indie band Mook to fuel his portrait of a self-aggrandizing musician out to wrestle custody of his young daughter from his ex-wife. Writer/director So Yong Kim cites a wisp of memory about a solitary childhood visit by a mysterious stranger she later learned was her Dad. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis says Dano’s "twitching and preening like a bottom-drawer Robert Plant [gives] the film solidity and a jolt of energy."

Red Hook Summer Director Spike Lee insists this is not a sequel to his explosive 1991 summer-rage drama Do the Right Thing, but the buzz has Lee back to his old prickly rabble-rousing cinema as an African-American kid trades his childhood comfort zone in Hotlanta for an equally warm but decidedly weirder slice of Brooklyn.

Simon Killer Mysterious Skin’s "battered boy" Brady Corbet reveals more of his thespian dark side in a recent college grad’s descent into a Parisian bourgeois sewer.

ArbitrageNicholas Jarecki takes on the global financial crisis in a drama that has Richard Gere as an aging hedge-fund manager whose slippery business practices are about to unravel big time.

The House I Live In Meanwhile, brother Eugene Jarecki argues that America’s "War on Drugs" has squandered enormous resources, produced over 45 million arrests, and put a huge contingent of African American men behind bars, only to discover that street drugs are more available and of a purer quality than ever before. Winner of the Grand Jury Award for Best US Doc.

The Invisible War Director Kirby Dick received the Audience Award for Best US Doc for a film that investigates the epidemic of sexual assault in the American military against soldiers of all genders.

PredisposedJesse Eisenberg and Melissa Leo star in a mother/son meltdown. Jesse plays a talented pianist facing a crucial audition, while needing a timeout from Mom.