Ashton Kutcher’s turn as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut are leading a slew of star-studded premieres at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Utah, Arizona.
Jobs is a biographical look at the career rise of Steve Jobs from wayward hippie to charismatic inventor and entrepreneur
Kutcher stars in Jobs, a biographi-cal look at the career rise of Steve Jobs from wayward hippie to charismatic inventor and entrepreneur, which Sundance said will officially close the indie film festival from January 17 to 27.
The premiere line-up also features Gordon-Levitt directing, writing and starring in Don Jon’s Addiction, about a self-centred porn addict attempting to reform his ways, opposite Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore and Tony Danza.
Behind-the-scenes tales of pornography will also be explored in British director Michael Winter-bottom’s The Look of Love, starring Steve Coogan and based on British adult magazine publisher and entrepreneur Paul Raymond.
Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfried and James Franco, tells the story of porn star Linda Lovelace, famed for the film Deep Throat. Sundance, the top US film festival for the independent cinema sector held in Park City, Utah, unveiled the premieres section – which typically features more established directors – after it announced its list of competition films last week.
Adding to the premieres list is Before Midnight, director Richard Linklater’s third film collaborating with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy after Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in which the audience encounters their characters nine years later in Greece.
New Zealand director Jane Campion will screen her new six-hour epic, Top of the Lake, a haunting mystery about a pregnant 12-year-old girl who disappears, with Holly Hunter.
Other big-name actors in the line-up include Steve Carell and Toni Collette in The Way, Way Back, Naomi Watts and Robin Wright in Two Mothers, Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen in Very Good Girls, and Shia LaBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood in The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman.
Australian actresses Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Jacki Weaver star in the psycho-logical thriller Stoker, which marks South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut.
Among documentaries premierng at Sundance in January is Oscar-winning documentary film-maker Alex Gibney’s insight on WikiLeaks, the power of the internet and the beginning of an information war in We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks.
Author and documentarian Sebastian Junger chronicles the life of late photojournalist Tim Hetherington in Which Way is the Front Line From Here? after Hetherington’s death in Libya in 2011. The photojournalist had collaborated with Junger on the 2010 Oscar-nominated film Restrepo about the war in Afghanistan.
The World According to Dick Cheney promises to examine the former vice president while Anita profiles how Anita Hill’s allegations in 1991 of sexual harassment against then-US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas brought sexual politics into the national consciousness for the next two decades.
Linsanity offers a portrait of basketball player Jeremy Lin and Running From Crazy follows actress Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, and her insights into her family’s mental illness and suicide.
Pandora’s Promise looks at a growing number of environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists changing their minds after decades of opposition to support nuclear power.
Continuing the rise of music documentaries in the last several years, Foo Fighters’ musician Dave Grohl looks at the history of Sound City studios in California, where Grohl’s former band Nirvana recorded their classic 1991 album Nevermind.
Veteran Los Angeles rock band The Eagles will also showcase their past in The History of the Eagles Part 1.