As Sundance 2008 winds down, a consensus seems to be emerging that this year’s edition of the hallowed film festival was actually something of a bummer. The movies that came in with the most hype and the biggest names attached mostly ended up slinking out of town with no buzz and no deal. Festival director Geoff Gilmore poo-pooed the pre-fest conventional wisdom that the writers’ strike would lead to a buying frenzy, telling the Hollywood Reporter, “The notion that people would respond to one crisis by possibly creating another just seemed silly to me.”

The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr writes that “a free-floating cynicism had already been hardening into This Year's Attitude. To be impassioned about a movie was to be suspect, at least in the festival's early going.” Burr reserves most of his praise for the documentaries, notably Young@Heart, about these unlikely rock and rollers:



If you’ve been wondering when the first mumblecore horror movie would arrive, wonder no more! Indiewire has the scoop on Baghead, in which a group of friends sharing a mountain cabin are menaced by, yes, “a stranger with a rumpled brown paper bag over his head.” Actually, that does sound kind of scary.