Hollywood meets the world in Sundance line-up

UTAH-PARK CITY

Hollywood A-listers Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde and Russell Crowe will rub shoulders with some of cinema's best and brightest new talent at the Sundance film festival next month, organizers said on Dec. 10.

The first edition of the festival since the death in September of founder Robert Redford will see a firmament of stars descend on Park City, Utah for one of the most important gatherings in the global movie calendar.

A rich vein of comedy runs through this year's program, said Sundance director of programming Kim Yutani.

"There are films that are looking at things in a kind of more quirky and unique way, like 'The History of Concrete' by John Wilson, which is going to have its own enthusiastic audience," she said.

Meanwhile, "Mad Men" stars Hamm and John Slattery reunite in "Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass," where a Midwestern bride-to-be rampages through Hollywood in an effort to even the score after her fiance uses the couple's "free celebrity pass" on his famous crush.

In "The Gallerist," starring Oscar winners Natalie Portman and Da'Vine Joy Randolph, along with Jenna Ortega and Sterling K. Brown, a desperate curator tries to sell a dead body at Art Basel Miami.

Sundance received more than 16,000 submissions, whittling them down to 90 feature-length films, with 40 percent of them from first-time feature directors.

All but a handful of the titles that will be screened in the festival's snow-capped Rocky Mountain base will be world premieres, selected from 164 countries and territories around the globe.

The strong international line-up includes films from traditional cinematic powerhouses like Britain, in the form of the debut feature "Extra Geography" from director Molly Manners, and queer genre film "Leviticus" from Australia.

But it also includes offerings from places the audience might be less familiar with, like "Hanging by a Wire," a nail-biting race to save schoolboys dangling from a stranded cable car in the Himalayan foothills.

"Hold On to Me" from Cyprus tells the story of an 11-year-old tracking down her estranged father, while documentary "Kikuyu Land" from Kenya examines how powerful outside forces use local corruption to dispossess a people.

Sundance, which runs from Jan. 22 to Febr. 1, is being held in Utah for the final time before a move to Boulder, Colorado in 2027.