Those half-frozen girls and I finally got seats, Sigismondi came teetering out on her eight-foot, fashion-vixen legs to say hello, and Stewart and the real-life Jett, both of them teeny-tiny, waved to the crowd and set a thousand iPhones and Flipcams whirring. Eventually it was time for the movie, and while I wouldn’t call it a letdown — Sigismondi shoots with style to burn, and the costumes, sets and hair are all meticulously, artfully correct — you don’t actually need me to tell you the story. Kids from busted homes start a rock band, meet a sleazy-genius manager, become too famous too fast, do a bunch of drugs and make some bad decisions, see the whole thing come crashing down. (Repeat as desired.)

Yes, of course there was one crucial difference between the Runaways and just about every other mid-’70s band, and that difference changed rock history, 20 years or so before the riot-grrrl meme. I think Sigismondi gets that aspect of the story just about right. Creating an all-girl band that actually rocked, and whose members would strut the stage like the Stones or Aerosmith, was the joint inspiration of Jett and producer-manager Kim Fowley (played with delicious, scenery-chewing abandon by Michael Shannon). They needed no grasp of feminist theory to understand that things were changing in mid-1970s America, and that an all-female band that actually rocked hard, and wasn’t a transparent cheesecake gimmick, could hit the big time virtually overnight.

While the original idea was Jett’s, it was Fowley who decided the band needed a hot blonde lead singer, and who picked a glam-rock teenager named Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) out of the crowd in a Hollywood nightclub. Interestingly, of the two front Runaways, it’s Fanning’s haunting performance as the ambivalent, damaged Currie that anchors the film. I don’t know if the real-life Jett’s involvement with the production complicated matters for the filmmakers, but Stewart’s Jett remains a hooded figure, a tomboy rock ‘n’ roll cipher. We learn nothing about her family life, and the question of her sexuality and her relationship with Currie is veiled with hints and allusions.

I’m not sure that’s exactly a criticism. We have no inherent right to the details of Jett’s personal life, and I certainly don’t think that probing psychological realism is the only way to tell a living person’s story. It’s more that Sigismondi has made a straightforward rock ‘n’ roll biopic that’s fluid and exciting to watch, but clearly aspires to something more. It aspires, in fact, to the mind-blowing power that “Cherry Bomb” wielded over a distinctive subset of adolescents 35 years ago. Sometimes mind-blowing power isn’t available, and a rollercoaster ride of stardom and depravity will just have to do.

Elusive British street artist Banksy is in Park City this week — as the trompe l’oeil murals appearing around town attest — but of course he did not reveal himself at the premiere of his first film “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” another hot ticket this weekend. It’s not exactly a movie about his own endlessly imaginative work — which has included hanging his own paintings in the Tate Gallery and bending a London phone booth in half — nor is it exactly about the ambiguous “street art” movement that has bridged the gap between graffiti tagging and the gallery world.

Well, it’s a little bit about those things, enough to offer newcomers a primer in both subjects. But Banksy’s inventive and genial film, narrated by Rhys Ifans in plummy, self-mocking documentary-narrator tones, is really about how he half-accidentally helped a strange little French guy in L.A., a vintage-clothing entrepreneur named Thierry Guetta, become Mr. Brainwash, an overnight sensation (and flashpoint of controversy) in the contemporary art world.

There’s a real danger here of falling into the traps set by a professional prankster like Banksy — some conspiracy theorists have suggested that Mr. Brainwash is entirely Banksy’s invention — but for the moment I’m taking “Exit Through the Gift Shop” mostly at face value. It’s a rueful, comic exploration of what happens when artists like Banksy and his friend Shepard Fairey, who’ve set themselves up as opponents of the pretentious, big-money art establishment, see their own weapons used against them.

Despite their rebel, street-artist status, Banksy and Fairey cling to relatively old-fashioned ideas about craft, training and vision, and the explosion of somebody like Mr. Brainwash — who has no artistic training or ability, little knowledge of art history and a miscellaneous aesthetic cobbled together from every prominent pop or street artist since Andy Warhol — calls all that into question. As Banksy’s London dealer muses late in the film, “Good for Thierry if he can pull it off. At the same time, the joke’s on … well, I’m not sure who the joke’s on. I’m not even sure there is a joke.”

Sticking with inscrutable British phenomena, something like Chris Morris’ “Four Lions” is utterly unimaginable in America. Morris studied the cases of homegrown British Muslim terrorists with real or imagined links to al-Qaida, and turned the results into a very dark slapstick farce about a group of lovable but incompetent morons devoted to the task of launching jihad in the industrial north of England. Yes, it’s “In the Loop” meets “Paradise Now,” and Morris dishes out the ruthless satire in all directions: The hardass white Muslim convert, the wholesome Pakistani immigrants, the devout mosque-goers, the inept police, the studiously liberal British politicians — they’re all criminal-grade idiots.

You’ll laugh uproariously at what seems like a nihilistic but good-humored film, until you realize that Morris isn’t actually kidding about any of it, and that where “Four Lions” is going isn’t funny at all. I don’t think this is the near-masterpiece some Sundance critics have proclaimed it, and it’s pretty hard to imagine an American audience of any size tolerating this film. But it’s a first-rate example of the self-lacerating, take-no-prisoners current in British comedy. (Watch a clip here.)

Among the films I haven’t seen yet, there’s been a tremendous reaction to the Internet-romance documentary “Catfish,” which apparently has quite a sting in its tail. (Here’s Christopher Kelly of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.) I’ve also heard furious back-and-forth debates about the confrontational drama “Hesher,” which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a long-haired anarchist grief therapist. (Here’s Dennis Lim’s thoughtful but negative review on his Sundance blog.)

“Winter’s Bone” Debra Granik’s blend of low-budget regional realism and crime thriller (adapted from the novel by Daniel Woodrell) is an absolute knockout, for me the narrative film of the festival so far. Young Jennifer Lawrence is sensational as Ree, fierce teenage scion of an Ozark family of bootleggers, outlaws and meth-cookers. When she finds out that her dad has put up her family house and 300 acres of virgin timber on bond, and then jumped bail, Ree has a week to track him down or be evicted, along with her younger sister and brother and her near-catatonic, pharmaceutical-addled mother. Problem is, the only people who might know where Pa is are the meanest and scariest members of her extended family, and what they know might not be stuff Ree wants to learn.

Granik captures the details of life in the ruined and beautiful backwoods villages of Missouri in thoroughly convincing, documentary-like detail, but there’s not much meandering or contemplation. This is a woman who knows how to direct a damn movie; “Winter’s Bone” builds to an ominous, almost breathless tension, every moment pregnant with violence and disaster. John Hawkes adds a powerful performance as her wiry, speed-freak Uncle Teardrop, who virtually oozes menace but is Ree’s closest capable relative and her only source of succor. Channeling both urban myths (“The Sopranos”) and rural ones (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”), Granik reveals herself as a lean and forceful tale-spinner, as courageous in her own way as the indomitable Ree.

“The Tillman Story” Just before Sundance, director Amir Bar-Lev changed the title of his documentary from “I’m Pat Fucking Tillman,” reportedly the last words that the NFL star-turned-Army Ranger said while being gunned down by his own comrades in Afghanistan. But this seemingly nondescript new title has a resonance that becomes clear when you watch Bar-Lev’s fascinating account, made with the consent and cooperation of Tillman’s family. You see, “The Tillman Story” isn’t just about the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire and the military brass lied about it, and essentially have never stopped lying. It’s also about the fact that from the moment of his death, and even before, the former Arizona State and Arizona Cardinals star became a mythic, über-patriotic hero, the centerpiece of a right-wing, pro-military propaganda fable. He was never allowed to be who he was, a surprising, curious, and even eccentric individual who didn’t fit the mold of either football player or gung-ho soldier.

Tillman returned from a tour of duty in Iraq convinced that the war there was both ill-advised and illegal; he reportedly had read essays about American foreign policy by Noam Chomsky and expressed an interest in meeting him. But as Bar-Lev’s film makes clear, it isn’t fair for the left to try to steal Tillman back and make him into its own hero figure. He joined the military in the first place, it appears, out of a genuine belief in patriotic self-sacrifice (although he never discussed the decision in public), and reading Chomsky was part of Tillman’s wide-ranging self-education, which also included Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Book of Mormon. (He was personally an atheist, but had an almost academic interest in religion.) In this funny, profane and profoundly sad film, Bar-Lev depicts Tillman and his similarly unconventional parents and brothers as belonging to a vanishing species: Americans who hew to no ideological standard, and who actually think for themselves.

“Cyrus” Do shlubby John C. Reilly and ultra-hot Marisa Tomei make a plausible couple? They kinda do, in this enjoyably off-kilter romantic comedy from filmmaking brothers Jay and Mark Duplass (“Baghead,” “The Puffy Chair”), who have ascended from zero-budget DIY movies to a mildly more expensive version. (“Cyrus” was actually produced by Ridley and Tony Scott!) Reilly plays a depressed loser whose ex-wife (the Sundance-ubiquitous Catherine Keener) is shoving him back out on the romance market. Tomei’s character is immediately drawn to his lack of pretense (her first words to him: “Nice penis!”), and perhaps to his intense neediness as well. After all, she’s got her overweight, 21-year-old, socially maladjusted son, the eponymous Cyrus (scene-stealing oddness from Jonah Hill), living with her, in a relationship that’s just this side of totally creepy. All the improvised dialogue, herky-jerk camerawork and social discomfort of previous Duplass films is here, along with name actors playing damaged but ultimately human characters. Fox Searchlight will release this later in the year.

“Splice” It’s the parenting movie of the year! Canadian genre director Vincenzo Natali takes a page from his countryman David Cronenberg’s old playbook in this slick, enjoyable, black-comic monster movie about Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), a hot-shit scientific couple infected with bottomless corporate dollars and boundless arrogance. They’ve already created a genetically engineered life form — a pustulent giant caterpillar whose body produces useful pharmaceutical agents — but of course the next stage will involve blending in some human DNA. Good idea, right? Polley and Brody tackle the film’s ludicrous situations with total deadpan commitment; Polley’s Mama Macbeth bonding scenes with the hairless rabbit-cum-alien baby-cum-winged scorpion they produce are almost touching. But don’t kids sometimes come between Mom and Dad, especially when they’re seductive, gender-switching, super-powerful new life forms? I’ve heard some critics complaining about Natali’s tongue-in-cheek blending of every possible monster-movie trope, but for me “Splice” went down smooth, with its sleek surfaces, terrific special effects and disturbing sexiness.

After emerging from Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give,” an edgy, somber, beautifully written Manhattan fable of guilt, shame, infidelity, death and real estate, I got to dig my cute little rented Hyundai out of a snowbank on a Park City back street, which was no doubt good exercise but felt like a scene from a very different kind of movie. At one point in “Please Give,” a memorably misanthropic, foulmouthed and borderline-slutty character named Mary (played with a marvelous lack of inhibition by Amanda Peet) tells her ailing grandmother, “Things don’t get better. They only get worse.” This is true enough when you’re talking about a 91-year-old woman’s circulatory system and vision, which is the ostensible subject of Mary’s diatribe. But is it true, I asked myself, with those gorgeous huge snowflakes dropping on top of me and the ski slopes of Park City apparently hanging illuminated in midair above me, is it really true as a general principle?

I’m not actually sure that’s what Holofcener thinks, in fact, although it seems to be a sentiment she sympathizes with, at least to a point. Mary belongs to a distinctively New York social network that’s on the verge of implosion, thanks to a set of factors that should be familiar to Holofcener’s viewers by now: capitalism, middle age, sex, good intentions. Mary’s plain-Jane sister Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is the principal caretaker to their grandmother, who has become the tenant of the couple next door, Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt). They are quite literally waiting for Granny to die so they can knock down the interior walls, double the size of their apartment and live in near-suburban luxury with their acne-ridden teenage daughter (Sarah Steele).

Kate, who is in some sense the story’s central character — certainly Keener gets the most screen time — is plagued by unmanageable, almost pathological guilt, not just about waiting for the old lady to buy the farm but about anything and everything. She gives $20 bills to homeless people, tries to volunteer with seniors and disabled kids (but ends up weeping in the ladies’ room instead) and feels tormented about the business she runs with Alex, which involves buying furniture from estate sales for relatively little and then reselling the better pieces at a ridiculous markup. Of course, it’s also possible her bad vibes emanate from a more intimate source, such as her poisoned relationship with her daughter, or the fact that Alex has been visiting Mary at the spa where she works for a little one-on-one physical therapy.

Holofcener is frequently understood as a director of “women’s films,” and to some extent she embraces that role: She opens “Please Give” with a hilarious and startling montage of naked breasts, in all imaginable shapes and sizes, being squished into a mammography machine. (Rebecca is a medical technician at an ob/gyn clinic.) But she’s light years away from Nancy Meyers, thank God. Holofcener has no interest in punishing or even judging Alex for his infidelity, for instance. Kate is losing her shit and no fun to be around; in the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld, stuff happens.

I see Holofcener as something closer to a younger, female-centric Woody Allen, meaning that she’s a social satirist whose essentially dark vision is cloaked (sometimes thinly) as comedy. “Please Give” is a bit more conventional in presentation, and perhaps a tad less ruthless, than her last black-comic foray into upper-middle financial and sexual anxiety, “Friends With Money.” But she remains a dramatist of unusual gifts, unmatched in American cinema at the moment, finely attuned to the mystery and terror that lie just below the surface of affluent modern existence.

French visionary director Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void” is also obsessed with mortality, and expresses the ephemeral beauty of family life with even more tenderness than “Please Give.” Beyond that, it might as well come from a different planet, one drenched in powerful hallucinogens, and along with them colors and shapes that don’t exist in Holofcener’s world. In fact, as its title suggests “Enter the Void” isn’t exactly set in this world. Its main character is a young American drug dealer in Tokyo named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown, whom we hear but rarely see), who is shot and killed by police in a nightclub men’s room early in the film. We watch most of the movie through his eyes, alive and dead, as he soars above Tokyo’s streets, clubs and brothels, viewing our earthly existence through an increasingly distorted lens, as if suspended irresolute between his former life and whatever somethingness or nothingness lies beyond.

There’s no way to summarize the paranoid, terrifying and surpassingly beautiful lysergic odyssey between life and death on which Noé takes us, except perhaps to explain that he has said his principal influences here are Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the “Tibetan Book of the Dead,” and by God, he has the verve and the special-effects budget to pull it off. In previous hotly-debated films like “Seul Contre Tous” and the reverse-chronology rape-revenge saga “Irreversible,” Noé has combined a dazzling visual imagination with what seemed like a juvenile desire to brutalize the audience with acts of traumatic violence. There are certainly some shocking and grotesque images in “Enter the Void” — if there were a rating more restrictive than NC-17, Noé would earn it — but they feel like essential parts of the mind-bending whole.

This movie isn’t for the faint-hearted on several levels — the version I saw here ran 156 minutes, although I understand IFC will be releasing a shorter Noé-approved cut, and there were more than a dozen walkouts during the press screening. But if you have the stomach and the endurance,  it represents a revolutionary break from ordinary movie storytelling. There are characters besides Oscar in “Enter the Void,” including the damaged sister (Paz de la Huerta) he promised he would never leave and various disreputable Tokyo friends, acquaintances and lovers, and all these people’s actions do add up to a narrative of a sort. But Noé has here completed a journey he began with “Irreversible,” a film in which you could first see his desire to dissolve the distinctions between past, present and future, between happening and not-happening, between the physical landscape and the mental one, between life and death.

So when Oscar is not flying through the walls, roofs and clouds of Tokyo, observing the consequences of his death, he is reliving his parents’ horrifying death many years earlier and his childhood separation from his sister, recycling the events that led to his own murder and creating scenes that could not have happened and others that never will. He briefly comes back to life, as a zombie who has lost the power of speech, before realizing that he can’t come back — his body has been cremated. (I can’t explain Noé’s dream logic any better than that.) This is a daring, thrilling, awful and wondrous film that pushes so hard at the medium’s boundaries it sometimes becomes exhausting. With this movie Noé jumps to the front rank of mindfuck acid-trip filmmakers, right next to David Lynch, and I wandered out afterwards into the snow feeling dazzled, dizzy, exhausted, grateful.

The title of Ginsberg’s “Howl” suggests a cry of rage and pain. The poem certainly expresses those emotions, and came to be widely understood as a symbolic protest against 1950s conformist America. But Ginsberg’s howl is at least as much a cry of animalistic joy, and even more than that an expression of pure Whitmanesque human feeling, meant to contain multitudes. Played by James Franco in an uncanny impersonation that lies at the heart of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s film “Howl” — which opened the Sundance Film Festival here on Thursday evening — Ginsberg explains this to an unseen interviewer. The poem’s central piece of subversion, he says, lies in its most famous (and infamous) line, which comes when his nameless collective protagonists “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.” An American audience, even one that has traveled with him this far, says Ginsberg, will expect the man who is anally penetrated to scream in pain. But that is not the truth of homosexual desire, or of the human body.

That line shocked many people in 1955, leading to the San Francisco obscenity trial Epstein and Friedman’s film depicts, but what’s much more surprising is that it retains at least some of its startling effect more than 50 years later. One of the points raised by the film “Howl” — perhaps only in passing, or by accident — is that for all the public discussion of homosexuality in recent years, we still haven’t caught up to Ginsberg’s rapturous, confrontational descriptions of the pleasures men find in each other’s bodies. (For that matter, we don’t talk about heterosexual lovemaking in such fulsome terms either, and perhaps we’d be better off if we did. Ours is a pornographic age, not an erotic one.)

Epstein and Friedman’s loving and often lovely tribute to Ginsberg’s poem made for nearly ideal opening-night programming here on the slushy slopes of the Wasatch Range. (Storms across the West and Southwest have left many Sundance-bound travelers stranded en route; through pure luck, I arrived on time.) It’s a film about an archetypal American nonconformist, made by a beloved pair of indie-film veterans whose collective résumé includes two Oscar-winning documentaries, “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt” and “The Times of Harvey Milk” (which Gus Van Sant essentially remade in fictional form as “Milk”). It’s an affectionate and artistically audacious movie, and I wish I could tell you it lived up to its source material. But I can’t.

As they told the Park City audience before the screening began, Epstein and Friedman at first intended to make a documentary about the creation, performance and prosecution of the poem that catapulted Ginsberg from being an unpublished and unknown New York-San Francisco drifter to an international celebrity. Somewhere along the way they became captivated by the idea of illustrating the poem with animated sequences (by Eric Drooker) and then by the idea of dramatizing, or halfway dramatizing, the circumstances around it. But there are virtually no lines of spoken dialogue in the film that aren’t supplied by the public record: Ginsberg’s interview, the obscenity-trial transcript, the text of the poem itself. I’m sure the filmmakers have a theoretical defense ready for this strategy, but it leaves us with a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl, no longer a documentary but not yet a narrative feature.

Franco is an actor of tremendous charisma, and he captures Ginsberg’s New Jersey Hebrew-school intonation and physical mannerisms so perfectly that I forgot, for long stretches of the movie, that I was watching a performance. But Epstein and Friedman leave him hanging out to dry, almost literally; the actors playing Kerouac, Cassady and Ginsberg’s longtime lover Peter Orlovsky never speak. As for the trial sequences, in which a number of Bay Area academics haggle amusingly over the meaning and value of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (one of them was Berkeley professor Mark Schorer, a colleague of my father’s), they don’t have much to do with Ginsberg himself. The man on trial was his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (another character who never talks); Ginsberg had moved back to New York and never entered the courtroom.

That leaves us with the great strength and great weakness of Epstein and Friedman’s film, the reading of “Howl” by Franco over Drooker’s animations, which strike me as both beautiful and excessively literal-minded. Drooker and his staff of Thai animators seem to channel “Waltz With Bashir” at some moments and Disney’s “Fantasia” at others, with a detour into the world of “Transformers” along the way. Through my haze of jet lag, altitude headache and lingering cold, I could see, at moments, what the filmmakers are driving at: a campy, gorgeous picture-book rendering of Ginsberg’s poem, in which entwined seraphic couples whirl through the sky, terrified suicides plunge to earth, pages of poetry burst into flame and Moloch is a huge “Night on Bald Mountain” cartoon demon presiding over a landscape of smokestack phalluses.

But I am afraid Epstein and Friedman cannot answer the question they raise: Does “Howl,” with all its intensely vivid and imagistic language, its conjurer’s madness, really need pictures? It’s done pretty well as a poem up till now, and more than once during Franco’s reading, I simply closed my eyes and listened. 

In fact, Cooper worked closely with Gilmore for most of the last two decades, serving in recent years as Sundance’s director of programming. He probably had at least as much to do with the final selection of movies for the festival as Gilmore did. So whether the most visible changes at Sundance this year really reflect Cooper’s desire to put his own stamp on Robert Redford’s annual ski-resort cinema showcase is a matter of debate. It’s more than likely that this year’s diverse, globalized and relatively serious Sundance roster reflects a bunch of other things, notably the shifting aesthetic and commercial landscape for independent film and the festival’s gradual drift away from Hollywood-lite, gift-loungey starfuckerness back toward its DIY indie roots.

Gilmore’s final year at Sundance was an exceedingly strange one, hitting near the very bottom of the current recession and overlapping with President Obama’s inauguration. Industry observers (e.g., me) widely assumed it would be an abysmal festival from the movie-biz point of view, but perhaps a more interesting one artistically. That was partly true. Such buzzed-over films as “Brooklyn’s Finest,” “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” “Spread,” “Cold Souls” and “The Informers” either came and went in theaters without anyone noticing or haven’t been released at all. But it was also a year that produced a reasonable quotient of modest successes — documentaries like “The Cove” and “The September Issue,” narrative features like “An Education” and “Sin Nombre” — and one old-school festival surprise.

That big surprise, of course, was Lee Daniels’ “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” (screened at last year’s festival simply as “Push”), which came out of nowhere to win both the audience and jury prizes and went on to gross a startling $45 million-plus at the box office. I haven’t crunched the numbers down to the final detail, but I’m virtually certain that makes “Precious” the most financially successful Sundance award winner in the festival’s history. While I don’t expect Tanya Hamilton’s Sundance 2010 feature “Night Catches Us” — set in Philadelphia’s African-American community, circa 1976 — to replicate the “Precious” phenomenon, I can guarantee it’ll get a lot of attention.

So on the one hand, Cooper’s first Sundance features a new section for films made for budgets below $500,000 — he has said most of them cost less than $200,000 — along with a near-total dearth of quasi-Hollywood premieres. Nobody expects any near-term resurgence of the late-night bidding wars of years gone by, when overhyped movies sold for inflated prices in the back rooms of Park City restaurants, on the way to box-office disaster. (“Grace Is Gone,” anyone? “Hamlet 2″? “Son of Rambow”? Didn’t think so.) On the other hand, Sundance 2010 opens on the heels of one of the best box-office years in recent history, a fact that remains true even if you discount the recent release of what will soon become the most popular film in history (that one with the tall blue people and Sigourney Weaver smoking those healthful 23rd-century cigarettes).

So it’s best of times, worst of times, etc. On balance this looks like a terrific Sundance lineup, light on dreary minimalism and middle-class indie navel gazing. Here are some of the storylines I see emerging as I wend my way to Park City. I’ll be back here Friday morning with a report on the opening-night film, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s “Howl,” which stars James Franco as the young Allen Ginsberg in beat-era San Francisco.

Cut-price films from low-budget land While Sundance has long thrived on movies made on microscopic budgets, Cooper has made that official this year by inaugurating the festival’s NEXT section, open only to movies with sub-$500,000 budgets. Prominent examples this year include Linas Phillips’ likable, lyrical road movie “Bass Ackwards,” Habib Azar’s demented marriage farce “Armless” (it’s actually about a guy who wants to get his arms chopped off), and Eyad Zahra’s “The Taqwacores,” adapted from Michael Muhammad Knight’s book about the Muslim punk scene. (I’ll bet you didn’t know there was one.)

They long to be close to you More and more indie filmmakers will bypass theatrical distribution, take their movies right out of Sundance, SXSW and similar festivals, and bring them straight to their small but loyal audience via video on demand, Internet stream/download or some combination thereof. Phillips’ “Bass Ackwards” (see above) will go out nationwide Feb. 1, just after Sundance wraps, by way of “major digital retailers” (I assume this means iTunes), cable VOD and “DVD on demand,” with a conventional DVD release to follow.

Meanwhile, the festival’s own Sundance Selects VOD label will release three Sundance films, simultaneous with their Park City openings, through various major cable-TV systems. Titles selected for the first round of releases are Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ “The Shock Doctrine,” a documentary based on Naomi Klein’s bestseller; “Daddy Longlegs,” a new feature from micro-indie talespinners Josh and Benny Safdie; and “7 Days,” a gritty, gruesome revenge-horror fable from French-Canadian director Daniel Grou.

The whole world is watching Although known around the world principally as a showcase for new American films, Sundance has tried to establish a global reach in recent years. While we’re not talking Venice or Cannes here, the imported offerings have gotten better, and more surprising. Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s ravishing family melodrama “I Am Love,” co-produced by its star, Tilda Swinton, while one of the un-Sundanciest films I can imagine, is also among the highlights of this year’s roster. The same goes for Jacques Audiard’s prison drama “A Prophet,” with its amazing performance from Tahar Rahim as a teenage Arab-French convict.

Other high-profile foreign flicks include French provocateur Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void,” reported to be a hallucinatory, violent journey through the mind of a dying drug dealer, and Chris Morris’ “Four Lions,” a ruthless farce about homegrown British Islamic terrorism. I am sworn to secrecy on the last film until its premiere, but let’s just say OMFG.

Can we still blame everything on Bush? While Sundance built its ’80s-’90s reputation as a foster parent to indie dramas of the Coen-Jarmusch-Soderbergh ilk, I would argue that in the 21st century it’s been at least as much a launching pad for social-political documentaries. This year, Oscar-winner and Sundance perennial Alex Gibney returns with “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” his film on the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady of the Oscar-nominated “Jesus Camp” are also back with “12th & Delaware,” which captures the street drama outside a Florida abortion clinic. Amir Bar-Lev (“My Kid Could Paint That“) examines the death of NFL star-turned-war-hero Pat Tillman in “The Tillman Story,” and a wide range of intriguing international documentaries stretch from Pakistan (“Bhutto”) to the Russia-Georgia conflict (“Russian Lessons”) and anthropology’s sins in the Amazonian jungle (Brazilian director José Padilha’s “Secrets of the Tribe”).

Star rookies and grizzled veterans Two of America’s best female indie filmmakers — who also happen to be among our best filmmakers, period — return to Sundance this year. Nicole Holofcener follows the underappreciated “Friends With Money” with her new “Please Give,” featuring Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt as a Manhattan couple at war with their neighbors. Is Holofcener — who’s already something like her generation’s Woody Allen — taking on the Woodman on his own turf? Then there’s Lisa Cholodenko, who seemed to go underground after “Laurel Canyon” in 2003 but resurfaces here with “The Kids Are All Right,” featuring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a snuggly L.A. lesbian couple whose kids finally meet their biological father (played by Mark Ruffalo, who’s the default setting for all such quasi-deadbeat roles).

Speaking of Ruffalo, he makes his directing debut this year with “Sympathy for Delicious,” which stars its writer, Christopher Thornton, as a paralyzed club DJ drawn into the world of faith healing. Fellow indie superstar Philip Seymour Hoffman also moves behind the camera, directing himself (as a New York limo driver) in the working-class drama “Jack Goes Boating.”

Other high-profile names in relatively low-wattage surroundings include James Gandolfini, Melissa Leo and Kristen Stewart as the damaged family in “Welcome to the Rileys”; Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as the tormented central couple in the long-gestating “Blue Valentine”; and — surely one of the festival’s hottest tickets — Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning playing Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, bandleaders of “The Runaways.”

Bill Murray and Robert Duvall head the cast of the winsome Southern fable, “Get Low,” a possible sleeper hit to be, and former “ER” show runner John Wells directs a sterling group of guy’s guys — Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones — in the recession drama “The Company Men.” But no actor embodies the diffuse and potentially beguiling spirit of Sundance 2010 better than Oscar laureate Adrien Brody, who appears to have thrown caution to the winds and decided he’ll do what he damn well feels like. Brody plays a legendary tattooed-’n'-dreadlocked local pothead in the stoner comedy “High School” — which I’m pegging here and now as a Sundance breakout — and a brilliant, misguided scientist in Vincenzo Natali’s genetic-engineering monster movie, “Splice.” I so cannot wait.

I’ll post Sundance updates to Film Salon as I can, and if you want even pithier news than that, you can follow my overcaffeinated, snowbound, half-conscious outbursts on Twitter.