In a small town, dark secrets sure do have a way of getting out, don’t they? Such is the case in Secrets of Eden, premiering on the Lifetime network tomorrow night.

Based on the Chris Bohjalian best-seller, Eden stars Uncle Jesse—er, John Stamos, as Reverend Stephen Drew, a beloved Vermont minister whose world is rocked by the shocking murder-suicide of locals Alice and George Hayward (Sonya Salomaa and Graham Abbey). Though they seemed to be fastidiously observant parishioners and an upstanding couple, dark truths eventually emerge, including a clandestine affair between Stephen and Alice.

Anna Gunn of Breaking Bad plays Detective Catherine Benicasa, who hones in on the snazzily outfitted minister as the prime suspect. Meanwhile, the man of God must also grapple with a crisis of conscience and faith, as well as deal with Katie (Samantha Munro), the teenage daughter of the Haywards. Stephen also finds solace in Heather Laroche (Athena Karkanis), a woman who understands the pain Katie is enduring.

Blackie Parrish—er, Stamos acquits himself just fine in Eden, which strains credibility but never twists or turns in unexpected directions (Anne Meredith is credited with the adaptation). The actor’s natural charisma shines, and makes it clear why Alice would be attracted to him, and his scenes with both Munro and Karkanis have a reassuring gentility perfectly suited to the Lifetime audience.

But let’s be clear: this is not top-shelf material. Jake-in-Progress—er, Stamos—may have staked a career claim in television (the actor has entered his fourth decade in the medium, after all) but Gunn, such a vital presence and a seasoned performer, deserves richer material than her detective here. I’m glad to see the actress getting work, since with only one Breaking season to go, she’ll surely need it, but I hope the future brings better, more nuanced roles for the searing actress to portray.

Tawnia McKiernan (whose TV credits include the USA shows Burn Notice and Monk) directs with a steady hand. Eden may not reach high, but it certainly has its share of earthly pleasures

While most prognosticators are sharpening their knives in anticipation of this year’s upcoming Oscars, some of the darker, more indie prospects for next year’s awards have already emerged, courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.

Jurors in the documentary categories were Fenton Bailey, Heather Croall, Charles Ferguson, Tia Lessin and Kim Roberts. Eugene Jarecki’sThe House I Live In, about the war on drugs, took the grand jury prize, while Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts, aboutIsrael’s military legal system in the OccupiedPalestinian Territories, took the World Cinema Jury Prize. (Jurors included Nick Fraser, Clara Kim and Jean-Marie Teno).

The jury for films in the dramatic competition consisted of Justin Lin, Anthony Mackie, Cliff Martinez, Lynn Shelton and Amy Vincent. Beasts of the Southern Wild, written by Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar and directed by Zeitlin, won the Grand Jury Prize. The film features a cast of non-actors playing a group of poor people on the fringe in the Mississippi Delta.

The Surrogate, starring John Hawkes as a poet with an iron lung and Helen Hunt as the sex surrogate hired to deflower him, took home the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for ensemble acting. The movie, directed and written by Ben Lewin, is based on the true story of Mark O’Brien. Fox Searchlight Pictures has already acquired rights to the movie.

A Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Independent Film Producing went to Andrea Sperling and Jonathan Schwartz for two movies: Smashed and Nobody Walks. The former stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul as an alcoholic couple, based on the Koren Zalickas memoir of the same name. Real-life couple Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman co-star, as does current Hollywood golden girl Octavia Spencer. The latter stars Olivia Thirlby as a free spirit from New York who wreaks havoc on the life of the family she stays with when visiting Los Angeles. John Krasinski, RoseMarie DeWitt, India Ennenga and Justin Kirk co-star.

Of course, a Sundance win doesn’t automatically augur success. For every Little Miss Sunshine there is aBuried or a Grace is Gone. So there is hope for such other entrants as Liberal Arts (with Elizabeth Olsen and Josh Radnor), Robot and Frank (with Frank Langella) and Shadow Dancer (featuring Clive Owen andW.E. breakout Andrea Riseborough).

That’s the thing about Sundance. You never know whether a hit there will translate and be a hit for the rest of the world!

Kiefer Sutherland returns to FOX in another heavy show

“I’m 4,161 days old,” says Jake the young protagonist of the new FOX series Touch, which just screened the series pilot prior to a proper March 19 premiere. Jake (David Mazouz) is obsessed with numbers, and uses them to find ways to bring people together. A numismatist like this suggests that Jake is autistic, although the show doesn’t necessary classify him as such, and in many ways Touch (created by Heroes’ Tim Kring) could be Rain Man: The Early Years, except for one choice that would render the show infinitely less dynamic: Jake is mute.

Yes, while he narrates Touch to us, the audience, he is silent to the other characters onscreen, which leaves the burden of carrying the show to Kiefer Sutherland, returning to the network that birthed 24 and reinvigorated his flat lining career. Sutherland is Jake’s overburdened father, Martin, an erstwhile reporter whose wife perished on September 11 and who has been emotionally and professionally at sea ever since (we meet him as a baggage handler at JFK). The actor brings the same combination of determination and sensitivity with which he imbued Jack Bauer during the show’s height to Martin. Jake is a worrisome tyke, between keeping quiet, scaling radio towers and avoiding being physically touched at all costs, and

The pilot, directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine, Water for Elephants), is visually slick but pedantic. King hammers home Touch’s central conceit – we’re all connected! – ad inifinitum, and uses terminology like “destiny” and “the cosmic wheel of humanity” to deleterious effect. In the pilot, Kring relies on the great, if ill-used, Danny Glover to translate Jake’s inner thoughts aloud to Martin, letting him know that his young son recognizes a pattern to the universe, and Touch shows that near, far, pretty much wherever people are, people are unknowingly tied to one another and have a ripple effect on each other’s lives.

Kring’s fusion of science, philosophy and religion also call to mind that of Lost. But that show’s enormous ensemble allowed it be as much about the characters’ evolving relationships as it was about its labyrinthine plot. Touch is a more intimate story, and as a result feels more schematic. Here’s hoping it’s an equation that Kring is able to solve in time.

“There are only three great Shakespeare movies,” Harvey Weinstein said last night at the Paris Theater. “Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, and Coriolanus.” How convenient, then, that Weinstein was introducing the U.S. premiere of Coriolanus, the directorial debut of actor Ralph Fiennes.

Weinstein may have been his typically hyperbolic self, but he was not inaccurate. Fiennes’ adaptation of the lesser-known but enduring Shakespearean tragedy, adapted by John Logan, is excellently crafted. Set in the contemporary war-torn city of Rome (a generic one, not the Italian one), Fiennes is sensational as General Caius Martius, a soldier who rises to fame and political power after defeating the army of Volscian soldier Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler, believable here but not given as much of the Bard’s iambic pentameter to master as the rest of Fiennes’ terrific ensemble). When the people of Rome fail to cotton to their new hero, foe becomes friend, with Aufidius and Martius (now crowned “Coriolanus” after the Volscian city he has conquered) establishing a toxic connection of mutual understanding.

There’s much to be said here about war, politics, the media, betrayal, ambition and hubris. Fiennes has no trouble transferring the universal Coriolanus to a modern setting while keeping Shakespeare’s gorgeous language intact, with only the occasional peppering of a more modern patois. (A note to the squeamish: There will be blood.) Jessica Chastain, Brian Cox and James Nesbitt all have a terrific grip on the material. In a perfect world, Chastain, seemingly assured a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination next week for The Help, would face off against this movie’s titanic Vanessa Redgrave, in a career high as Coriolanus’ mother Volumnia. There hasn’t been a mother this terrifying since Angela Lansbury planted a kiss on Laurence Harvey 49 years ago in The Manchurian Candidate, but Redgrave’s performance is truly notable for its marked restraint.

James Earl Jones, Redgrave’s co-lead in the Broadway revival of Driving Miss Daisy last season, attended the premiere, while Liam Neeson, Redgrave’s son-in-law (not to mention Oskar Schindler to Fiennes’ Nazi Amon Goeth) attended the after-party at the Royalton Hotel, co-sponsored by Dewar’s, where among talk about Oscar predictions and Sundance entries, a humble Chastain could be heard effusing about the honor of working alongside Redgrave.

Chastain, who had attended Sunday’s Golden Globes in Los Angeles, was probably not the only party guest feeling a hint of jet lag: the Bruno Mars-ian Thomas Langmann, now a Globe-winner for producingThe Artist, could also be spotted. Other stars in attendance included The Big C’s John Benjamin Hickey and Laura Linney (herself an erstwhile co-star of Neeson’s), Paul Haggis, Gina Gershon, Patti Smith, Fisher Stevens, Bob Balaban, Judd Hirsch, and self-proclaimed BFFs Dan Abrams and David Zincenko, editor of Men’s Health.

One thing you can be sure everyone agreed upon: This movie is bloody good.

Let’s be honest: the past year saw a lot of versatile takes on interesting subjects in film form. There was plenty of talent on display in a number of movies that were good enough to justify spending the ever-rising price of tickets. But that’s all that the year in film was: good enough, rife with some very good movies, if no outright masterpiece was in sight. Below, in ascending order, are the most effective and affecting works I saw (sorry to movies like Take Shelter that I never made it to!) in 2011. And in looking at the least, see which themes kept repeating themselves in these works:

Weekend: Boy meets boy. Boy takes boy home. Then the boys realize they might really have something together. On paper, it doesn’t sound like the most novel of plots, but the beauty of Brit, Andrew Haigh’s honest film is how well it all works, and how real it all feels on celluloid. Kudos to stars Tom Cullen and Chris New for so believably portraying the excitement that goes on when you meet someone new – and all the uncertainty that lies therein as well.

Beginners: Director-writer Mike Mills’ romantic dramedy was a refreshing antidote to the by-the-numbers formula pap being pumped into theaters because it gave us real characters to care about. Whether it was Ewan McGregor finding love (starting with a wonderful meet-cute) with Mélanie Laurent or widower Christopher Plummer coming out and facing a terminal diagnosis, Beginners gave us people unafraid to look love and death in the eye. Now that’s a great visual effect.

Moneyball: I’m a baseball fan and am pretty good with numbers, and even I didn’t think I was gonna like Bennett Miller’s adaptation of the Michael Lewis book chronicling the Oakland A’s ascent to be just a middling team. And then I saw this passionate film, a tale about economics so economically told that it never had a chance to bore. And while Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane was solid, it was Jonah Hill as AGM Peter brand and Chris Pratt as first baseman Scott Hatteberg that really hit it out of the park. Talk about a fall classic.

Of Gods and Men: Xavier Beauvois’ gorgeous French film covers the seemingly obscure story of Algerian monastery Tibhirine, a peaceful enclave suddenly thrust into the devastation of civil war. It’s an examination of faith versus free will, as well as a look at what brotherhood truly means. And just like the most powerful of horror films, it’s a palpable examination of the power of fear. Except the horror this time came from some place all too real.

The Trip: British comics Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan play versions of themselves on a road trip. Ostensibly reviewing restaurants along northern England, Michael Winterbottom’s mockumentary (which originally aired on the BBC), is not only a look at competition among two adult males; it’s also an examination of what it means to devote oneself to a career in the arts. Bonus: the duo’s performance of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All.”

Melancholia: Even the best of Lars von Trier’s work – Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville– feel like what I call movies for medicinal purposes. “Watch this,” we’re told, “it’s good for you.” But this opus, featuring stellar work from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg as sisters forced to question the world they know as another one threatens to crash into it, burns with psychological insight. If Ingmar Bergman had come of age in the modern era, this might have been the result.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol: With a different major director behind each installment, the M:Iseries is as much of a chameleon as the IMF agents it features. This time, Pixar stalwart Brad Bird took the reins, and not since Casino Royale has there been an action reboot been so merited, with solid acting (Tom Cruise the movie star, we miss you), visually arresting stunts and a plot that’s neither too complicated nor condescending. The medium was made for great action films, from The Thief of Baghdad to Star Wars to The Fugitive, and M:I – GP ranks among the best of the bunch.

The Descendants: Seven years after the masterpiece that was Sideways, director Alexander Payne returned with another incisive look into the neutered adult male psyche. George Clooney offers the most lived-in performance of his career as Matt King, a privileged Hawaii native on the precipice of two big cliffs: selling the family estate and saying goodbye to his unfaithful comatose wife. Did I mention this movie was a comedy? As ever, Payne employs all resources – his actors, camera angles, long takes, editing, ambient sound, local music – to let us into the humor, embarrassment and pathos that exist in the world of the Kings. And also as ever, he reminds us just how often these roads must overlap.

A Separation: I mentioned Bergman before, and now I’ll do so again. Iranian Asghar Farhadi’s look at the dissolution of a marriage of course invited comparison to Scenes from a Marriage. Except this film, with political, legal, social and familial commentary, ultimately talks about much more than the intimate voids Farhadi examines so perceptively. There isn’t a single wasted frame or line of dialogue in this incredible work, which challenges its viewer in all the right ways. It acts locally, but forces us to think globally.

The Artist: Not necessarily a more perfect movie than any other ones on the list, but definitely the most blatantly joyful. Which is not to cay the central story in The Artist is a carefree one. French performer Jean Dujardin is the find of the year as a matinee idol who loses not just his fame but his pride and his livelihood as the silent film era ends and the Depression begins. Multi-talented filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius’s tale of redemption pays homage not just to the most innocent days of filmdom in The Artist but to such other classics as A Star is Born, All About Eve and Umberto D. And yet this movie is not just for cinephiles; it’s for anyone who’s ever loved, lost or found the power to soldier on. His film is called The Artist, but I call Hazanavicius the magician.

Runners-up: Attack the Block, Cedar Rapids, Certified Copy, A Dangerous Method, Hugo, Margin Call, The Mysteries of Lisbon, Take Shelter, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Win Win