Critic's Notebook: Sundance

6:00 AM PST 1/31/2012 by Todd McCarthy

Raunch and righteousness were on tap, and despite fewer highs (with one major exception in Beasts of the Southern Wild), the fest had a welcome emphasis on film over celebrity scenery.

At the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, there was Beasts of the Southern Wild, and then there was everything else. A number of past Sundances are thought of that way -- the years of Ruby in Paradise, sex, lies, and videotape, Reservoir Dogs and perhaps a couple of others come to mind -- but it's difficult to think of a festival at which, from an artistic point of view, one film stood so completely apart from the others.