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"FacebookPinterest\n\nSo far, at this year's jam-packed Sundance Film Festival, there's no blow-out hit, no blockbuster champion. Everyone's still waiting for that shockingly big deal, that breakout performance to blow them away (No Elizabeth Olsen or Carey Mulligan yet), that film that's got Oscar written all over it. On the morning of the third day, most of the major commercial hopes\u2014headlined by stars like Andy Samberg, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro\u2014have failed to knock out audiences, buyers, or critics. But the festival is still a wild, snowy ride, packed with everything from the sublime to the bizarre. Below, some early impressions of the most talked about films.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThe Words: Starring Bradley Cooper as a famous author who plagiarized  for fame and Jeremy Irons as the author he stole from, this ambitious drama leaps from post-war France to yuppie, modern-day New York and back, but never quite delivers on its sprawling premise. (Maybe the screenwriter should have plagiarized something better?) As it time-skips too quickly through flashbacks, the film feels like it's deliberately jumping through hoops.\n\nRed Lights: Directed by Rodrigo Cort\u00E9s\u2014the guy who put Ryan Reynolds six feet underground in his ridiculous contained, man-alone horror film Buried\u2014turns his eye to the paranormal. Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy are well-matched as deadpan paranormal investigators and Robert De Niro is almost spookily well-cast as a formerly famous performer whose (psychic) abilities are now in doubt. If Red Lights were a magic trick, the audience would be rapt during the set-up and patter, then walk out as the deck of cards flopped to the floor in the final act.\n\nLay the Favorite: Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dangerous Liaisons) surprised many by bringing his gambling flick here without distribution, and that may have been a bad bet: Rebecca Hall has a flashy, leggy, Daisy-Duked role as a Tennessee girl who hits Vegas and ends up working for a betting agency run by a surprisingly sweet Bruce Willis. She's as bubbly and hyper-charged as a Red Bull and vodka, but the  film is overcooked and overlong, and bungles gambling logic in the final sequence. Even with watch-me-now supporting turns by Vince Vaughn (back in Vegas, baby!) and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the odds aren't favorable.\n\nWish You Were Here: This Aussie tourists-in-trouble thriller falls  into that Sundance middle-ground of just-good-enough: Joel Edgerton and, Felicity Price (the real-life wife of director Kieran Darcy-Smith) play a feuding, lying married couple with bristling grit, even as the film overheats: Unfortunately, that can't overcome the basic fact that the plot is painfully predictable in the Bad Things That Happen in Southeast Asia mold.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nLike other star-laden films at the fest (Celeste and Jesse Forever, say), none of these films are terrible, but not one has generated the wild raves (and angry rants) that have met Benh Zeitlin's wildly original debut, Beasts of the Southern Wild. It's gone from rave to backlash to backlash-to-the-backlash in just a few short days. The thumbnail plot can't help but sound grim: An African-American six year old lives without electricity or plumbing in a shack set on a flood-threatened, isolated island off the southern coast of Louisiana with her erratic father. But the feel is all fireworks, sometimes literally. The screen explodes with color in almost every shot: Swampland, dirty honky-tonk bars, and jury-rigged boats are all conceived with a reckless, junkshop aesthetic. The local characters, all non-professionals, are a kind of circus-like motley crew of missing teeth and hard-won accents. Oh, and giant dinosaur boars occasionally charge across the screen, animated by rising star Ray Tintori, as in some carnival mirror refraction of The Tree of Life.\n\nIn terms of aesthetic ambition and invention, Beasts of the Southern Wild is thrilling. And that six-year old? She's played by actually six years old Quvenzhan\u00E9 Wallis, a live-wire kid who destroyed the crowd in the post-film Q&amp;amp;A with her one-liners. (It's entirely possible this little kid will be the breakout star of the festival.) Plot- and script-wise, the film unfolds in what might kindly be referred as a kind of dream-logic, or messy metaphor\u2014quite a few segments, including a sequence at a floating strip club, just don't work as anything but images. Understandably, some critics are  ticked off by the upbeat romanticism of such on-the-brink poverty, and the film is more than a bit na\u00EFve. But as a debut, with such an unusual, overriding, maximalist aesthetic of joy, this is undeniably an exciting debut. If you come to Sundance hoping to discover new talent, you can't help but be happy to meet Benh Zeitlin.\n\nIn the documentary field, Searching for Sugar Man scored the festival's first sizeable deal, when Sony Pictures Classics picked it up. Malik Bendjelloul's story about the mysterious legend of Rodriguez, a '70s rock icon who disappeared into the ether. But if you're looking for a latter-day gonzo Herzog, check out The Ambassador, a  crazy-risky stunt documentary by Denmarks' very mad Mads Brugger. In Brugger's last doc, Red Chapel, he risked imprisonment and took a theatrical troupe led by a handicapped actor to North Korea, posing as the company's director. In his new film, he risks death by purchasing an ambassadorship through the black market, becoming Nigeria's ambassador to the Central African Republic, and then concocts a blood-diamond-laundering scheme. With breathtaking gall and bleak comedy, he schemes to start a match-manufacturing business where the matches will be made by pygmies, films senior government officials taking bribes, and expertly reveals the everyday insanity of central African politics, all while dressed in absurdly dapper suits. There's unlikely to be a ballsier film this year."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/sundance-film-festival-review-recap-best-movies-words-red-lights>