Welcome back to This Week In Discs! Hope you have some time cleared on your schedule this week… As always, if you see something you like, click on the image to buy it. Bedevilled Hae-won leaves the big city on a forced vacation and heads to her childhood home on a remote island, but the years have not been kind to the place or her once best friend, Kim Bok-nam (Seo Yeong-hie). She’s little more than an abused workhorse for an ungrateful husband and community of seven, and understandable fears that her daughter may suffer the same fate lead her to beg Hae-won for help. The dangers of isolation, abuse and irresponsibility come home to roost in this darkly menacing and eventually bloody dramatic thriller from South Korea. Part social commentary, part violent and bloody as hell revenge thriller, this was one of my favorites from Fantastic Fest 2010. The extras are sparse, but I highly recommend the making-of doc after watching the movie if only to see Seo smiling along with the other actors in between takes. Also available on DVD. [Extras: Behind the scenes, trailer]

Popular festival offering Shut Up and Play the Hits quite accurately captured the agony and the ecstasy of LCD Soundsystem’s final show as a collective, and while filming a concert and putting it on the big screen for consumption might have lessened its inherent impact on viewers, the doc was quite warmly received. The film played at both Sundance and SXSW (at the former fest, our own Allison Loring called it “a moving rock-doc” “not only takes you inside Madison Square Garden for an up close seat at the band’s final show, [but] really shows the feelings that would accompany making the decision to end such a big part of your life and looking towards what will happen next”), and the buzz at both festivals was that the film has to be seen on the big screen with a big sound system to back it up. In short – it will rock your face off, and it’s damn hard to do that at home, even with the best equipment money can buy (and who can afford that?). Fortunately, Oscilloscope (the film’s distributor), agrees, and will release the film in theaters for a special one night only engagement on Wednesday, July 18th. You can check out a full list of theaters playing the film after the break, and you can always Demand It on its official page over at Oscilloscope.

Spend enough time on the festival circuit and certain films just keep coming back around – but fortunately, they’re usually good ones we’re happy to see again. As the first big film festival of the year, Sundance often features some of the best independent films that people like us Rejects will be jawing about for months to come. SXSW offers the chance for cinephiles to catch a bevy of films that other people have been carrying on about for weeks and weeks, thanks to both their regular programming and their ever-clever Festival Favorites section, which is packed with (you can probably guess) films that have played recently at other festivals that the SXSW crowd will eat right up. After the break, get reacquainted with ten films we saw, reviewed, and (in some cases) loved back in January in snowy Park City, Utah. All ten are playing at this month’s (let’s be real, this week’s) SXSW Film Festival in Austin, our very own hometown film fest. Luckily enough, some of our favorite Sundance films pop on this list, including one I enjoyed so much that I am going to see it again in Austin.

Brace yourself, SXSW attendees and fans, we’re about to hit you with a metric ton of new information. Leading off with the big stuff! SXSW has just added a number of new films to be screened, including a fistful of Sundance hits, including Safety Not Guaranteed, Sleepwalk With Me, Shut Up and Play the Hits, Searching for Sugar Man, and Chasing Ice. That news alone should excite you, but it comes bundled up with still more, including the complete conference line-up, along with the news that all screening and panel dates and times are finally live. Meaning? If you’re a psychotic planner like me, you can get cracking on crafting your schedule for maximum fun and consumption. I’m frankly afraid to look at the schedule just yet, because it will send me spiraling into a fit of planning that I might not emerge from for many hours. But you? You can start planning now. After the break, check out the full line-up for all conference panels, along with descriptions on all of today’s just-announced film titles.

As I touched on in my roundup of the must-see films set to screen during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, there are many titles to choose from, but in looking over the ten films I am most looking forward to seeing I realized my interest is centered around character driven narratives (both funny and dramatic) and documentaries with their roots in music (no surprise there.) Of course with a full week at the festival, I am aiming to take in as many movies as I can, but these were the ten that stayed at the top of my list as I revised (and revised) my schedule. From actors I have had my eye on to compelling stories that grabbed my attention, keep your browsers bookmarked to FSR as I review each of these films and discover whether I was right (or wrong) with my choices here.

Sundance is many things – cold temperatures, snow, memorizing the shuttle schedule, training your body to take two hour “naps” each night, Simon Baker stopping your delirious self from walking into on-coming traffic on Main Street (a true, and embarrassing, story), but most importantly – it’s about movies. The Sundance Film Festival is the first big film festival of the year and as such, it never fails to set the bar high with standout programming from premiere features to moving documentaries to midnight scare-a-thons. With an impressive (and at times overwhelming) slate of films to choose from, I narrowed down the films that seem to be getting the most buzz already and are popping up on people’s “must-see” lists. Of course there will probably be a film or two here that do not live up to expectations while there is also a good chance that I have left something out that will end up being a standout at this year’s festival, but it is that unpredictability that’s part of the fun. Stay tuned to FSR as Kate Erbland and I head to Park City this weekend to take in as many of these titles as we can and report back on whether they live up to the hype and what should stay on your must-see lists as these films (fingers crossed) get picked up for distribution over the next eleven days. A mix of features and documentaries, comedies and horror, this list features both actors and filmmakers returning to Sundance and