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Reviews

2007 Sundance Shorts Program

Death, sex, and originality

By PETER KEOUGH | January 16, 2008

3.5 Stars

“SALT KISS”: A boorish lothario makes this one of many surprisingly potent entries in the Sundance
Shorts Program.

The features at the Sundance Film Festival have tended toward limp, pseudo-indie pabulum. Not so the shorts, which pack a potent mix of sex, death, and originality. Sexual tension vibrates in Caran Hartsfield’s “King,” in which a male prostitute negotiates with an older woman, and in Brazilian director Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa’s “Salt Kiss,” in which a boorish lothario entertains a friend and his fiancée. In Swedish filmmaker Jenifer Malmqvist’s “Peace Talk” the games played by two schoolgirls take an odd turn, whereas in Sophie Barthes’s “Happiness” an old woman working in a condom factory wonders whether she should open a box with the title label. Death hovers over Brian Cassidy & Melanie Shatzky’s “God Provides,” an impressionistic study of post-Katrina, and Don Hertzfeldt’s brilliant, animated “Everything Will Be OK.” The best, though, Ray Tintori’s “Death to the Tin Man,” combines sex and death with revolution and the Rapture in a hilarious, Guy Madden–like farce. 97 minutes | Coolidge Corner

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