Happy Independents’ Day!

The Hype: As a follow-up to the 1995 Before Sunrise, Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy), who once spent a memorable night falling in love in Vienna, meet each other again nine years later in Paris and spend a few hours catching up and rekindling feelings.

Heat Factor: The first movie–a talky romance which didn’t do very well at the box office–isn’t really what you’d call sequel material. But Sunrise did gather a cult following, so Hawke, Delpy and Linklater felt the need to get these two lovebirds together again. Let’s see if it has the same effect.

Heat Factor: The casting is outstanding–but if it’s not done right, this thriller could potentially be as dull as watching grass grow.

The Hype: Giants is a semi-serious, often rollicking, multigenerational documentary which looks at the origins of surfing, the colorful and subversive birth of surf culture, and the mythology and lure of the “big wave”–as told by filmmaker and surf enthusiast Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys) and a cache of famous surfers.

Heat Factor: Surfing movies rock! Need we say more?

The Hype: Alim (Mistry) is a Canadian Muslim who lives in London, thousands of miles from his family, for one very good reason–he wants to keep his relationship with his boyfriend (Holden-Reid) a secret from his conservative mother (Mathew). But when she shows up to find him a proper Muslim girlfriend and convince him to return to Canada for his cousin’s extravagant wedding, things get sticky. Oh, Alim also consults his fantasy friend, Cary Grant (MacLachlan), on a regular basis.

Heat Factor: Casting an actor to sub for Cary Grant as an imaginary friend is a bold choice, but we hear MacLachlan pulls it off nicely.

The Hype: From The Hours novelist Michael Cunningham comes a story which chronicles the lives of two very different best friends (Farrell, Roberts), who find themselves involved with an older women (Wright Penn). As a journey of trials, triumphs, loves and losses unfolds, the film examines how a perfect couple can sometimes be made of three people.

Heat Factor: Farrell finally heads back to his indie roots, away from all those commercial action flicks, stretches his legs a little–and even goes full frontal. OK, now you’ve got our attention. Home could prove to the world Farrell isn’t just a pretty face, in more ways than one.

The Hype: Biotech executive John Henry “Jack” Armstrong (Mackie) gets fired for informing on his corrupt bosses. Desperate to make a living, his former girlfriend (Washington), a high-powered businesswoman and now a lesbian, offers him cash to impregnate her. Word spreads and soon Jack is in the baby-making business at $10,000 a try. But, between the attempts by his former employers to frame him for security fraud and his dubious fathering activities, Jack finds his life, all at once, becoming very complicated.

Heat Factor: Spike Lee, Spike Lee, Spike Lee. We’ll go see anything he does but he’s finally doing another comedy, harking back to his first major directorial effort, the hilarious She’s Gotta Have It.

The Hype: Andrew Largeman (Braff) returns to his hometown for the funeral of his mother, a journey that reconnects him with some of his past friends. The trip also coincides with his decision to stop taking his powerful anti-depressants, so in a way, he begins to reconnect with himself–with a little help from a kooky girl named Sam (Portman).

Heat Factor: Braff, who plays the scruffy goofball J.D. on NBC’s excruciatingly funny sitcom Scrubs, wrote and directed this little slice of twentysomething life before he got the Scrubs gig. Suddenly, with his newfound clout, he’s making good on his film–to the point of creating bidding wars between distributors at the Sundance Film Festival (Fox Searchlight won). As Braff tells it to Entertainment Weekly “…The funny thing was that I would never in 1,000 years get offered this part if I hadn’t written it, so it just felt like a smart thing to do.”

The Hype: In their small New England college town, two best friends, Jack Linden (Ruffalo) and Hank Evans (Krause) are the best of friends, enjoying the camaraderie they share in their similar circumstances–dissatisfied lives. This bond, however, is put to the test when their love lives get entangled with each other’s wives.

Heat Factor: According to Entertainment Weekly, when Anymore premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, an audience member stood during the Q&A session and said, ”If someone from Mars came down and saw this film, they’d think that sex and love were mutually exclusive ideas.” Ruffalo, who compares the excruciatingly emotional film to the likes of Carnal Knowledge quipped, ”So the MPAA won’t be showing this to the Martians when they come.”

The Hype: British actor Stephen Fry (Gosford Park) makes his directorial debut with a tale, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel, about a group of 1930s thrill seekers who scandalized London.

Heat Factor: Sounds like another pretty period piece where British actors behave badly. Sure James Ivory and Ismail Merchant aren’t involved somehow?

The Hype: Based on a true story, this thriller–part Jaws, part The Blair Witch Project–is about an American couple on a dive vacation, who find themselves stranded in the middle of the ocean after their dive boat leaves them. What follows is the story of their ordeal: cold, alone and miles from land, the couple is adrift in shark-infested waters.

Heat Factor: With screenings happening as early as mid-spring, word’s gotten around town that this smart little flick is the new millennium’s answer to Jaws. And hell, shark movies scare the bejeezus out of us, so like it or not, count us in! (Even if we’re peeking between our fingers.)

The Hype: Bud Clay (Gallo) races motorcycles. After a race in New Hampshire, he has five days to get to his next race in California. During his road trip, he is haunted by memories of the last time he saw Daisy (Sevigny), his true love.

Heat Factor: The buzz about this movie may be a blessing–but it may be a curse, too. It all started last year at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film was so poorly received (a fellatio scene was particularly derided), audiences actually booed it before walking out. The eccentric Gallo himself engaged in a war of words with critic Roger Ebert in the papers, first publicly berating critics for hating it…and then later admitting he agreed with them. We hear Bunny has been re-edited–either way, we’re still intrigued.