Felicity Jones

CHICAGO – The young love affair, that first one that breaks through the heart, mind and biological objectives, is the memory that never really goes away. Sometimes it works out for a lifetime, sometimes it ends. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play out this oft-remembered experience in “Like Crazy.”

CHICAGO – From the moment filmmaker Drake Doremus and actress Felicity Jones won big at the Sundance Film Festival, their film “Like Crazy” has been garnering a good deal of award season buzz. Jones’ star-making portrayal of Anna, a British college student attempting to sustain a long-distance relationship with her American boyfriend, Jacob (Anton Yelchin), has become the focus of media hype that threatens to drown out the film itself.

CHICAGO – Risk-taking visionaries are always exciting to watch in action, even when their gambles don’t quite pay off. Yet while the recent projects tackled by Julie Taymor have sported great promise on paper, their externalized metaphors often work against the material she’s aiming to enhance. In her Beatles musical “Across the Universe,” soldiers were seen carrying the Statue of Liberty into Vietnam while singing, “She’s so heavy.”

CHICAGO – An overarching feeling of optimism seemed to permeate throughout the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Studios purchased the distribution rights to roughly 30 movies, nearly double the number of films that sold last year. Several of the festival’s most buzzed-about discoveries could easily find a sizable audience outside of the festival circuit, either in theaters or on VOD.