With more than 100 titles in contention, one doesn't cover Sundance so much as one samples it. I mean, a whole other festival (Slamdance) was created just to accommodate what was rejected; I know that at least one film I've been anticipating, a documentary about horror-movie hosts called American Scary, was submitted for consideration and turned down by Sundance. I'm sure there's a method to the madness, but the longer I attend (six years running, although 2006 was the first time I went as accredited media), the more inscrutable that becomes. From what I can see, the shit-to-gold ratio isn't any better at Sundance than it is out there in the world of theatrically-distributed films.

The festival specializes in Hollywood and arthouse features, and the common problem with the former is that they're moronic, while the common problem with the latter is that they don't exhibit much in the way of filmmaking excitement. Looking back at this year's Sundance line-up, it occurs to me that the shorts are getting to be better than the features--or, at least, more reliable, because they're untethered to anything like commercial expectations. Short filmmakers have a minimal amount of risk, and you have to be a little bit crazy, not to mention passionate and hungry, to even think of making a short in the first place. These artists see themselves as only getting one chance and they take it. In many ways, the selections reviewed below constitute cinema at its finest and most immediate.-Alex Jackson

I don't mean this observation to sound particularly inflammatory, but The Bleeding Heart of It director Louise Bourque reminds me a little of Lara Flynn's Boyle's poet from Happiness. Finding that her writing reeks of suburbia, Boyle wishes that she'd been abused or raped so that she could actually produce something authentic. Bourque took super8 footage that her father shot before she was born and put it through a rigorous decaying process. On the soundtrack, she recounts a dream where she witnessed some kind of war. Bourque appears to have had a relatively happy childhood, yet she distrusts happiness--she seems to think it's intrinsically Unreal and therefore needs to be stripped of its unreality. The film is presented as a meditation on the nature of memory, but, you know, when you take child molestation out of the formula, you lose the pressing need to fixate on the nature of memory. The film "works" as an audio-visual experience: it's disorienting and mysterious, and it has that earthy quality of beauty-in-ugliness that you only really encounter in no-budget experimental films. Then again, Bourque uses her own voice and real footage of her family in order to give The Bleeding Heart of It the unearned weight of documentary. She doesn't want to sacrifice that edge through making a fiction film, but she doesn't want to enter the choppy ethical waters of using the dreams and family footage of an actual sex abuse victim for her art. It's fascinating to watch on the level of mere experience, but as art it's terribly suspect.

The gap between technical achievement and artistic validity has never been wider than it is in Losing Lusk. The film is a sterling example of what's wrong with '00s cinema: the popularity of film schools and the increased democratization of technology has produced a generation of savants able to join sound and image with the best of them, yet these new filmmakers haven't built up the emotional, intellectual, or spiritual maturity needed to produce great art. Losing Lusk is sort of breathtakingly awesome to watch--it's also sort of breathtakingly smug, ridiculous, and stupid. Essentially an epic movie trailer about a boy who grew up in Lusk, WY and who will leave once he becomes a man, it pretends to lament that the town of Lusk will soon disappear as its inhabitants look elsewhere for more excitement and better jobs. This is the kind of lofty position that only somebody who has never been stuck in a small Wyoming town can take. Director Vance Malone isn't really interested in exploring Lusk or supporting his thesis. Rather, he aestheticizes small-town Americana so that he has something to aestheticize. Losing Lusk is essentially a demo reel for a filmmaker who wishes to be the next Brett Ratner. Mission accomplished.

There's a classic story in THE ONION about bohemian artists protesting a Christ painting for not being obscene enough, and Be Quiet is of the same mindset. It's unique and challenging for not being unique or challenging: there are no characters breaking the fourth wall; there is no decaying of the film stock; and there is no high concept to it. The film isn't even self-contained like most shorts, instead positioning itself like an excerpt from a full-length film. (When it concluded, the people behind me mused that they had thought the feature was starting.) A film depicting a Palestinian father and son trying to go home after a funeral only to be harassed by Israeli soldiers, Be Quiet doesn't exactly emanate Greatness. The stakes are kept pretty low and you don't get a movie high off of it as much as you get a nice, smooth buzz. The message behind it is a genuinely pacifist one and it's rather subtly delivered: it's saying that there's a thin line between Israeli and Palestinian and that this constant fighting is making it impossible for us to live our lives. You can tell that this is an inside perspective and an optimistic one at that, so the lack of politicism is really only a problem when accessing its weak experiential impact.

A Kurdish immigrant father and son journey cross-country through Norway to find work, then become separated. Upon learning that his son has been placed in an orphanage, the father decides to leave knowing that the boy will now have a chance at a real life. This material is a little thin but for a while Bawke gets by on its accomplished visual look and solid performances. It's good, grey, and grungy, conveying a palpable sense of the hell these people go through. But the ending is the stuff of cheap melodrama, and Hisham Zaman aggressively puts the screws into you by having the kid turn on the waterworks in close-up as he realizes what his father has done. Zaman dedicates the film to the thousands of immigrants coming in, cementing the film's sublimation into mediocrity. These are false "Hollywood" emotions that he's peddling.

I'm going to be completely honest with you here: Dealbreaker never had much of a chance with me. Knowing the goofy high-concept plot and, more to the point, that this was Gwyneth Paltrow's directorial debut (she shares credit with minor actress Mary Wigmore), I was out to get it from the start. When the first title card came up saying "Glamour and Nokia present," I let out a loud guffaw that was picked up and carried across several members of the audience. (This has to be the most dubious pre-title placard since The Garbage Pail Kids Movie's "A Topps Chewing Gum Production.") After giving the film a chance, I found that my original prejudices were in fact well-founded, though it's a lot better than I was expecting. Dealbreaker is about a professional New York woman who always manages to find a minor flaw in every man she dates. Her high standards prevent her from ever being truly happy. This is hardly an original idea for a film--as a matter of fact, this was a running joke on "Seinfeld", which had to bend the conceit back onto itself so it didn't grow stale (e.g., Jerry dumping a girlfriend because she's too perfect). The entirely unjustified presence of a documentary crew (shooting their thesis project) and the "strawberry and margarine" aesthetic lucidly illustrates the "isolated in a bubble" quality we would expect from a Gwyneth Paltrow-helmed film. The piece does have one great gag, however, playing on the permeable social boundaries between couples. The boyfriend comes into the bathroom while our heroine is in the bathtub and drops his pants. She smiles, thinking he's going to join her, but instead he makes a beeline for the toilet and then, like nothing's nothing, proceeds to take a loud but not overexaggerated shit. Any film with a scene like that deserves at least two stars in my book.

In what is perhaps the most redundant plotline in all of indie cinema, a young man brings his fiancée home for Thanksgiving to meet his dysfunctional family. Smell the suburban angst. Fortunately for us, this is only the launching point for John Bryant's very funny Momma's Boy. "Momma's boy" is a taunt employed by our hero Jason's abusive older brother, Todd, before Todd tells him that he's adopted. If Jason wants proof, all he has to do is ask Dad to open that top drawer of his dresser, where the adoption papers are hidden. Dad is reluctant to do so, maybe because he doesn't want Jason to know that he's adopted but maybe because that's where he keeps his porno mags. Momma's Boy is dark and hard-edged. It has a heavy, ugly realism to it that ties the humor into something quite painful: our emotional vulnerability to family members. In what is perhaps the film's best gag, every man in the family save Jason sports Van Dykes--a subtle indicator that he doesn't belong in the clan. While Bryant takes a little too long to find his focus (the film begs for one more trip through the word processor), such concerns fade when you realize you're actually seeing the work of somebody with a new voice. Bring on the feature films, I say.

Common Practice was shot in anamorphic widescreen, a real rarity for the short format; I felt a tinge of excitement when everything paused during the program so the projectionist could mechanically pull back the left and right curtains. For anybody addicted to movies, Common Practice is a direct injection of the good stuff. The film finds an entire neighbourhood in a predominantly Latino section of Los Angeles gathered outside a young boy's window, stopping whatever they're doing to listen to him practice the violin. Yes, this is basically a PSA asking for increased funding for school music programs, as I think I saw in the end credits (but could not adequately corroborate through the film's website). Nevertheless, the PSA format is invaluable in introducing a sense of direction and a sense of conviction to the cinema. The political message is a relatively benign one, as all it's basically saying is that music is important to children and to their community. But it's a political message just the same, and Common Practice has a weightiness that many of the apolitical film-school brats cannot readily duplicate. The depiction of this L.A. neighborhood is gemeinschaft; there's a degree of magic realism to it, to be sure, but it's sweet and doesn't feel especially artificial. It's an idealistic piece, and with idealism come ethics and vision, two things conspicuously lacking in too much of early-21^st century cinema.

In the middle of a cold Brooklyn winter, several Georgian men wait outside looking to get hired for a few odd jobs. They spot a guy who stiffed them from a previous job and confront him about it. The guy has a heart attack and they're left with the body to dispose of and/or rob. The subject matter is very odd; I'm sure that the exploitation of Georgian immigrants by Brooklynites looking for cheap labor is indeed a pressing issue, but The Debt does little to contextualize any of this for us and comes off as a social activist film that's bending over backwards to ignore race. I found myself constantly reading these Georgians in Brooklyn as Mexicans in Los Angeles (to whom I think I could better relate), unable to accept them on their own terms. Director Levan Koguashvili seems to think his visual style is gritty and real, but actually it's aggressively cheap-looking. Some have praised the film for its documentary style, but why is the documentary style something to aspire to? While I still believe that pain is truth, ugliness--the subversion of any aesthetic pleasure--is just uncommitted thinking.

Remember those little home movies you made in junior high school with your friends where most of the fun was seeing yourself in costume? Redemptitude brings them immediately to mind. Co-directors David and Nathan Zellner embarrass both their audience and their peers through simple proxy. The film is badly written, directed, shot, edited, and acted, and, even worse, the Zellners are not serious about it. It's useless engaging in discussion about Redemptitude, as there's really nothing to say about it. The filmmakers never exposed any part of themselves in making it, preferring instead to hide behind this shield of "being goofy." Basically, they seemed to have thought it would be fun to kill a weekend making a short film. The film has something to do with a minister trying to save the soul of an angry man stuck in a wheelchair. Paintball fights, a forced baptism, and bad Australian accents rule the day. The very fact of Redemptitude's aggressive stupidity and irrelevance is likely to cause your blood pressure to rise a little.

The only movie that's ever made me cry is Awakenings. Yes, not only did I lose it at a Robin Williams movie, I lost it at a Robin Williams movie directed by Penny Marshall. Most of the picture isn't bad considering the pedigree, but there is specifically one scene that gets to me. Robert De Niro's treatment is wearing off and he's relapsing to his catatonic state. Before he 'goes' he has one last dance with girlfriend Penelope Ann Miller. As they sway, Miller wilfully ignores his convulsions; the idea that she considers it her duty simply to be there and not let on that this is affecting her is what gets to me. Le Rouge au sol begins more or less conventionally, depicting the night and morning-after for a furry French-Canadian alcoholic. It's a good looking little film, evoking the poetic grunginess of the barfly culture in a way that reminds favorably of Faith Akin's Head-On. But then we get to the brunt of the story, which is a car ride to the alcoholic's workplace by his mother. On the way there he casually mentions how hard he drinks and that he has unprotected sex and is destroying himself. And it's all his mother can do to nod along. We realize that his self-destruction is a way of tearing himself away from his mother, or maybe to express his anger towards her. She realizes this, too, which is why she can't show any real judgment towards him. She loves him and wouldn't be driving him if she didn't, but the circumstances require her to keep a stiff upper lip for the sake of her son. Le Rouge au sol is a little too hip to exploit these emotions the way Awakenings could, but it sticks to the ribs. You can't shake the melancholy or the buried frustrations beneath the mother-son relationship, and you find yourself searching for a sense of resolution that will probably never come.

A band of mariachi skeletons sings the alphabet, each letter illustrated by the death of a different person. Said deceased persons are overwhelmingly victims of American policy: one's a slave who died on the ship ride, one is a Japanese girl vaporized by an atomic bomb, one's an Indian made sick with smallpox-infected blankets, one's a lynched black, one's an executed Hispanic gang member, many are killed through our carpet bombing of Iraq, and so on. Los ABCs: ¡Que Vivan los Muertos! is iconoclastic in a fruitful way: you can feel the audience collectively wince during some of the harsher imagery, and nervous laughter breaks up the otherwise stunned silence; it has such kinetic energy and raw anger that we're sucker-punched. Exhilarating as it is depressing and confrontational, the film casually evokes the image of Slim Pickens cheerfully riding a nuclear bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: it tells us that, much like nuclear annihilation, ethnic cleansing is one trippy ride.

A poem by Canadian writer Al Purdy is read by the author and illustrated by some really bad animation. Purdy's poem and voiceover both have an effortless charm--he's a pleasure to listen to; director Bruce Alcock's animation, however, is amateurish and undisciplined and, what's more, adds very little to our perception of the work. Alcock doesn't seem to have anything to say about Purdy, he just wants to piggyback his accomplishment. It's a crock, never more so than during the end credits, when we see behind-the-scenes footage of the short's production. What does he want, a medal?

The Clara of the title is a very cheap-looking plastic doll animated to pick flowers, see her dead sister or friend in a funeral home, and stick her finger in some hot oil, perhaps out of penance. There's something genuinely eerie about the plastic doll's inexpressiveness, but director Van Sowerwine sabotages this by having her eyes water when she sees the dead girl and by having her finger turn red when she puts it in the oil. Sowerwine isn't interested in inhabiting the alienness of Clara's dollness--she wants to humanize her. The humanized doll acts to idealize real-life girls, a conceit that admittedly has some punch to it (great art should look and feel better--or, at least, bigger--than real life), but not enough to overcome its intrinsically tasteful banality.

One big "huh?" I think Fable has something to do with Native American pantheism: we take on the perspective of a hawk at one point and a man turns into a tree. My Sundance film guide describes it thusly: "A woman's and a man's passions are overshadowed by their predatory instincts." This indicates, I guess, that passions and predatory instincts are at odds with one another. Can't wrap my head around it. In any case, it's dreadfully difficult to pay attention during Fable. The animation is primitive, reminding of MTV's The Maxx series, only it's considerably more bland and inoffensive. The film moves hyper-smoothly, so much so that you completely tune out and let it wash over you. It's pretty good, really, if you just need seven minutes to clear your head before you watch a real movie.

Fumi is a little girl who always has terrible things happening to her foot. In the first shot, a black cat avoids crossing her path and anvils and passenger planes crash into the unlucky hoofer. After years of misery, she discovers that she can use her foot to distract danger and saves children from being run over by drunk drivers and orphanages from burning down. (When the fire sees her foot it immediately stops what it's doing to start burning her.) The unlucky foot is an aggressively dumb idea; director David Chai should have done some more brainstorming before going ahead with this one. The film's only joke is its meaninglessly random violence towards a character who obviously doesn't deserve it. The joke is rooted in an age-old animation tradition of subverting innocent children's entertainment, and while it's fitfully funny, Chai is ultimately coasting by employing it.

I imagine that Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers would laugh their asses off were they to see Jeff Fowler and Tim Miller's Gopher Broke, basically a 2.0 version of Chris Wedge's "Scrat" shorts; one-hundred years and countless advancements in filmmaking technology and we're still making nickelodeon shorts. Gopher Broke is as meaningless as it is expensive-looking, and it's not unfair to muse that the budget of this mild amusement probably could have fed an entire nation in sub-Saharan Africa. But on the terms of a mild amusement, Gopher Broke has a kind of perfection to it. The story of a gopher who digs a pothole to release vegetables from passing trucks only to have them stolen from other animals relies on the same kind of random sadism as the aforementioned Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot, but this is more sophisticated and less hard-edged. The gopher-hating transforms the film's scatological climax into a real big laugh--however lowbrow, it's borderline brilliant slapstick. And hey, CGI lightshows are looking better than ever these days.

Comforting proof that you don't have to know how to draw in order to be an animator, Hadacol Christmas tests the outer limits of just how grungy animation can get. The film has something to do with a clinically depressed Santa Claus and dead crows, though the story seems to be an excuse for fiddling with stick figures and assorted non-sequiturs. Hadacol Christmas is hardly a good film, and I'm not sure that I would want to see it expanded into a feature, but it has an earthy, phlegmy flavour that's genuinely refreshing in light of the subdued artfulness of something like Clara or Fable. I kind of grin when I think back to it.

The titular half man is actually a dissected human being gradually rotting away, much to the ambivalence of his own daughter. The film looks great, overexposed as it is with lots of whites, yellows, and browns and obsessed with machinery and decay and film as a vehicle for these obsessions. In fact, it begins to look as if director Firas Momani is seriously about imitating the aesthetic of David Lynch. He seems to accept ugliness on its own terms, refusing to beautify it as it's already pretty beautiful to begin with. Alas, it quickly becomes clear that Momani can't resist himself. Rather than giving us this material straight, he needs to squeeze in his own smartass commentary to show that he doesn't take it seriously. The half man's decay into a metaphor for the dehumanization of the wage grind and implicitly of the sterility of the suburban environment: easy targets that bring little more to the conversation.

Set in an alternate future where airships rule the skies while workers toil in an industrial wasteland down below, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (henceforth Jasper Morello) follows the adventures of an airship navigator searching for a cure for the plague that is killing his fiancée. The film embodies both the greatest triumphs of the animation format and its greatest weaknesses; Jasper Morello is animated with paper silhouettes, and while the lack of expressiveness from the figures is at first a trifle alienating, it neutralizes the inherent pop trashiness of the material. Jasper Morello looks like it took years and years to complete and you can smell every drop of blood, sweat, and tears poured into it. It's difficult to not respond to that type of loving care, and visually--hell, viscerally--speaking, Jasper Morello is a masterpiece. On the other hand, there is a sense in which all that loving care is exclusionary of the audience. You get the feeling that you've stumbled into an epic miniseries, and director Anthony Lucas doesn't want you to miss a single detail of his universe, much less a single plot point of his narrative. While Jasper Morello is easy to watch passively, there is little reward in caring about the mythology of it as much as Lucas apparently does. Still, you really should see this.

Stranger than Paradise by way of Wallace & Gromit, The Wraith of Cobble Hill is genuine and honest. Teenager Felix is entrusted with the keys to the corner convenience store when the kindly owner goes away for the holidays. He wants Felix to take care of his dog; Felix invites his friends over to the store and they steal some candy and malt liquor while the dog looks to Felix to feed him his kibble. Shooting the piece in stark black and white, director Adam Parrish King is fond of luxurious long takes and goes to great lengths to make the soundtrack sound authentic. It feels like a live action film with claymation figures. King goes the opposite path of Clara's Van Sowerwine in using animation to depict human beings--his creations make people more expressive, not less. Felix's gaping mouth and tiny protruding ears give him the visage of a child, while the dog's skinny legs render him extra pathetic. We feel terrible for the dog, but because Felix looks so utterly goofy, he never becomes an unsympathetic figure, either. The Wraith of Cobble Hill is kind of a minor film, but it's nice. It doesn't take any short cuts or engender any false emotions; it's the sort of thing you can support without any reservations.