30. “Personal Velocity” (2002)
The second feature from writer-director Rebecca Miller (who went on to make “The Ballad Of Jack and Rose” and “The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee”), “Personal Velocity” is admirable for giving showcases to three ever-underrated actresses, in Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, and Fairuza Balk, but not for much else. A triptych narrative focusing on Sedgwick’s housewife who escapes an abusive marriage to hook up with a teenager, Fairuza Balk’s pregnant runaway, and Parker Posey’s book editor flirting with infidelity, it’s mostly overwritten and pat in its psychology (though the middle segment, Posey’s, is the best), and shot in ugly post-Dogme digital.
29. “Heat And Sunlight” (1988)
Something of an overlooked figure in the history of American independent cinema, director Rob Nilsson (who’d won the Camera d’Or at Cannes for “Northern Lights” in 1979) both helmed and starred in this improvised feature about a war photographer wallowing in the memories of a failed relationship, and his memories of the conflict in Biafra in the 1970s. Nilsson’s something of a disciple of Cassavetes, and it shows here, but for all the admirably dark and deep character study the film shows, it’s indulgent and unruly in a way that the “Shadows” director rarely was. Not uninteresting, but not hugely satisfying either.
28. “True Love” (1989)
If “True Love” is remembered at all, it’s as the film that beat “Sex, Lies, & Videotape” (which went on to win the Palme D’Or, and become perhaps the most important film in Sundance’s history) to the Grand Jury Prize. It’s still a puzzling decision, but that doesn’t mean that “True Love” is a bad movie. Nancy Savoca’s film, a Cassavetes-influenced rom-com, is a perfectly decent look at the impending marriage of Annabella Sciorra and Ron Eldard (both very good), that doesn’t go into new territory even remotely, but handles the ground it covers pretty well, even if the film dissipates from the memory almost as soon as the credits roll.
27. “Padre Nuestro” (aka “Sangre de mi Sangre”) (2007)
A prime example of a film in which so much is right — the performances, the gritty backdrop of New York City’s underclass, the surprisingly emotive interpersonal relationships — but it’s all built on such shaky foundations that it feels like a doomed enterprise. The contrived, credulity-snapping script, which involves an opportunist illegal immigrant exploiting a naive illegal immigrant and switching identities with him by means of a purloined letter, proved that writer/director Christopher Zalla’s talents lie much more in the directing than the writing realm, and it’s hardly surprising that so compromised a film, for all its individual merits, is one of the less well-remembered of the recent Sundance winners.
26. “The Brothers McMullen” (1995)
Its reputation has been sullied somewhat by the diminishing returns of its writer-director’s subsequent, similar-but-not-as-good films, but Edward Burns’ debut, “The Brothers McMullen,” is, in and of itself, a decent, if decidedly modest film. Centering on the love lives of a trio of Irish Catholic brothers who end up living together back in the family home after the death of their father, it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but stands out thanks to a seriousness of purpose when it comes to sexual and romantic morality, making the film a little less bro-tastic than it might otherwise threaten to be.
