Sundance announces first round of picks

LOS ANGELES—

Ashley Judd, Robert Downey Jr., Rosario Dawson, Paul Giamatti, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tom Waits are among the stars appearing in movies competing at January’s Sundance Film Festival.

Yesterday, festival organizers announced 64 films that will play at the Park City, Utah, festival that runs Jan. 19- 29, including A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, starring Downey, Dawson, Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest in a drama set on the tough 1980s streets of New York City’s Astoria.

That film is among 16 that will play in Sundance’s U. S. dramatic competition, whose highlights in recent festivals have included In the Bedroom, American Splendor and Napoleon Dynamite. The competition also features Come Early Morning, which marks actress Joey Lauren Adams’s directing debut with a drama about a self- destructive Southern woman that stars Judd, Tim Blake Nelson, Diane Ladd and Stacey Keach; SherryBaby, with Gyllenhaal in the story of a woman adjusting to life after prison; Giamatti, Michael Pitt and Michelle Williams in Hawk Is Dying, about an auto upholsterer spicing up his life by training a red- tailed hawk; and Wristcutters: A Love Story, with Waits, Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon and Jake Busey in an afterlife fantasy about people who have committed suicide. Among 16 films contending for the top U. S. documentary prize will be American Blackout, director Ian Inaba’s examination of voting troubles for blacks in recent U.S. presidential elections; The World According to Sesame Street, Linda Goldstein Knowlton and Linda Hawkins Costigan’s chronicle of the venerable children’s show.