As the debate over “Zero Dark Thirty” and torture rages on, director Kathryn Bigelow staunchly defended the Oscar-nominated film Tuesday on “The Colbert Report.”

Describing the movie as a “first rough cut” of history, Bigelow expressed her own unequivocal objection to torture, which she characterized as “reprehensible.” But she said she would have been “whitewashing” history if she had chosen not to include scenes of enhanced interrogation.

Colbert noted the difficult position Bigelow was in with regard to her critics: Although she’s being attacked by many on the left who see “Zero Dark Thirty” as an explicit endorsement of torture, they also “would have been screaming bloody murder” if she left it out.

OSCARS 2013: Complete nominee list | Reactions | Trivia | Ballot | Snubs & surprises

“It was also part of the history and we wanted to tell the story respectfully and honestly,”...

PARK CITY, Utah -- We all know the feeling, that creeping tingle that something is not quite right, whether it’s someone standing too close to your car or bad directions that seem to be leading you closer and closer to trouble. Often, though, there is nothing the matter, and it is just our suspicions and paranoia getting the best of us. For “In Fear,” screening at the Sundance Film Festival, British writer-director Jeremy Lovering kept his actors in the dark just as they would be in life, not showing them a script and getting reactions of genuine shock, surprise and fright.

Playing as part of the festival's Midnight section, the film explores just how long it takes to realize that something is, indeed, wrong -- and what to do once things take a turn for the worse. As the story begins, a young couple, who have only known each other a few weeks, are on their way to meet friends at a music festival. Tom (Iain De Caestecker) tries to surprise Lucy (Alice Englert) with a...

PARK CITY, UTAH -- James Franco is never shy about pushing a few buttons with his filmmaking, and at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, he has his thumb exactly where you’d expect.

Franco is involved with two films, the meta-documentary “Interior. Leather. Bar,” a story about William Friedkin’s explicit 1980 film “Cruisin’ that he directed, and “Kink,” a nonfiction look at a San Francisco bondage site of the same name that Franco produced.

In an interview with Franco and “Kink” director Christina Voros, the pair explained they wanted to make "Kink" to show a side of the porn process few might expect.

FULL COVERAGE: Sundance Film Festival 2013

“On screen what was happening within the video was very intense … but off-screen behind the camera it was completely different,” Franco said in the interview, which you can view below. “I watch porn but even I had preconceptions about what a porn studio...

PARK CITY, Utah — Ryan Coogler was at home in Oakland on New Year's Day 2009 when it happened: Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was killed by a transit policeman at the BART station in the city's Fruitvale neighborhood. Cellphone videos of the incident soon went viral, sparking protests and demonstrations.

"I saw the videos almost at once," the 26-year-old filmmaker said. "He was dressed like me and my friends dress, he looked like us. It was kind of like it happened to me, or someone I know."

At the time, Coogler was a graduate student at USC's film school and had come to view movies as "my outlet for my fears, for the things that make me angry or frustrated, for messages I want to get out. I was terrified, shocked, angry. I felt this was the film I was born to make."

PHOTOS: Dramas in competition at Sundance | Full coverage

And so, with the producing help of Forest Whitaker, Coogler wrote and directed "Fruitvale," his first feature-length film, and landed it in the...

PARK CITY, Utah — A group of star-driven dramas and comedies, plus a half-dozen documentaries, have caught the fancy of buyers at the Sundance Film Festival, with distributors ponying up nearly $25 million in the last few days for movies they hope will return their investment in spades.

Fox Searchlight paid close to $10 million for a Steve Carell movie, and Sony shelled out almost $4 million on a Jane Austen-themed comedy. Relativity Media spent $4 million for a Joseph Gordon-Levitt porn comedy and the Weinstein Co. put up about $2 million for a well-received drama, "Fruitvale."

The distributors are seeking the lightning that struck several Sundance movies last year, including "Arbitrage," which has tallied a combined $20 million at the box office and video on demand, and "Beasts of the Southern Wild," which has garnered $11 million in theaters and picked up best picture and best director Oscar nominations.

VIDEO: Your guide to Sundance 2013

But often, Sundance movies leave their...

PARK CITY, Utah -- In what could be one of the richest deals in Sundance Film Festival history, Fox Searchlight has bought distribution rights to “The Way Way Back,” two people close to the film said early Tuesday.

The studio did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

The movie, directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who shared screenplay credit on “The Descendants,” stars Liam James as Duncan, a 14-year-old boy spending a miserable summer in a Massachusetts beach town. His mother, played by Toni Colette, has started dating a car salesman played by Steve Carell.

VIDEO: A video guide to Sundance 2013

Duncan strikes up a friendship with a man (Sam Rockwell) who runs a dilapidated water park.

The film premiered Monday afternoon to an enthusiastic response.

Fox Searchlight was the studio behind “The Descendants” and also distributed “Little Miss Sunshine,” to which “The Way Way Back” has been compared.

Unconfirmed reports...

PARK CITY, Utah — The Sundance Film Festival is rightly famous for launching the careers of eminent filmmakers — directors Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderbergh and Bryan Singer, to name just a few, all were discovered here. Yet the festival also can help establish heretofore unknown actors; a lineup of discoveries from past gatherings includes Brad Pitt ("Johnny Suede"), Carey Mulligan ("An Education") and Ryan Gosling ("The Believer").

The Times caught up with four of this year's most buzzworthy young stars: Michael B. Jordan, 25; Skylan Brooks, 13; Dane DeHaan, 26; and Kaya Scodelario, 20.

Michael B. Jordan

Jordan wasn't named after the famous Chicago Bulls basketball player. As his father's first son, Jordan inherited his dad's name just as a young NBA player was blossoming as a star in the league. But the New Jersey native is finally making a name for himself at Sundance this year, as his movie "Fruitvale" has been a slam-dunk with critics and audiences.

P...

PARK CITY, Utah — “It’s been awhile,” director David Gordon Green said as we shook hands on Sunday. Indeed it had.

It was, in fact, 10 years almost to the day since I’d interviewed Green at the Sundance Film Festival, and the trajectory of his career had been little short of unprecedented.

In 2003, Green was in Park City with “All the Real Girls,” one of a series of small, contemplative films that had some people thinking of him as the next Terrence Malick. Instead, he became celebrated as the director of the big-budget stoner action comedy “Pineapple Express.”

SUNDANCE: Full coverage

Back then, Green expected he would direct an independent version of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”; instead, he ended up with the Jonah Hill comedy “The Sitter,” the James Franco-starring “Your Highness” and a thriving business directing commercials.

But to spend time with Green is to realize...

PARK CITY, Utah — Since the ‘90s, bestselling humorist David Sedaris has given Hollywood the Heisman. Anyone endeavoring to adapt his wryly observed personal essays into feature films was greeted with an automatic no, a byproduct of Sedaris’ enduring apathy toward mounting movies.

All that changed, however, when director Kyle Patrick Alvarez, 29, slipped a copy of his 2009 indie phone sex drama “Easier With Practice” to the author at an Irvine book reading along with a note laying out his hopes to adapt Sedaris’ autobiographical essay “C.O.G.” (from the 1997 essay collection “Naked”) for the screen. The writer, who never met a quirk he didn’t like, eventually checked out the little-seen movie. And, impressed by Alvarez’s Gen Y enthusiasm and unvarnished sincerity, surprised everyone by granting him his blessing.

This dark-horse film version of “C.O.G.” made its world premiere Sunday night to an...

A threequel for a scripted independent film is an anomaly. A threequel for a movie whose original premiered 18 years before is almost unheard of.

Yet "Before Midnight," Richard Linklater’s return to the romantic and other life travails of Julie Delpy's Celine and Ethan Hawke's Jesse is exactly that. And judging by its debut screening Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival, the franchise has only gotten better with age.

"I guess we're all 18 years older," Linklater wryly said before the premiere of the movie, which is seeking U.S. distribution at the festival and is generating heavy interest among buyers. Then he unveiled his film, which offers a resolution to the question of what happened to Jesse and Celine after the ambiguous end of 2004’s “Before Sunset” (fans will recall that Jesse changed his flight from Paris to stay with her) and then follows the chatty pair as they explore new conundrums.

SUNDANCE: Full coverage

[Note: This is the rare movie where the...