A Postcard from Sundance 2007

The faces of Greg Kinnear, Steve Carrell and Abigail Breslin adorn one wall of the press lounge in Festival HQ. Al Gore stares down on us from the other side. Between them, they pretty much sum up what people come to Sundance for: a little ray of commercial sunshine, or the hard-hitting documentary truth.

Even before the festival got underway bloggers were writing off the prospects for another Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite or Garden State to emerge from this year's dramatic competition - not that they'd seen anything at that stage. More than most, this festival feeds on buzz. Many of the films are world premieres from unknown directors, and with more than 100 titles screening over 10 days everyone is straining for the first hint of a hit - or a miss that can be crossed off the must-see list. The shuttle buses that ferry audiences from makeshift screens in venues like the Racquet Club and the Library help word of mouth spread like wildfire.

Writing three days in, I couldn't claim to have discovered box office gold dust yet, but judging by past experience, some of the best films are easily overlooked in the rush - Old Joy, for instance, was probably the best dramatic film in last year's line up, but because it showed in a sidebar section many of us didn't see it at the time. (A very lyrical piece about two old friends who have gone their different ways, it finally opens in London this Friday.)

Festival programmer Geoffrey Gilmore is talking up 'a new phase' in American independent cinema, with moviemakers increasingly addressing what is going on in the world and trying to figure out where they fit in it. Certainly many of the movies I have seen so far have been pretty grim, and not always in a good way!

I've already seen three films about dementia, another three about bereavement, two about torture and abuse, a documentary about kidnapping in Brazil, and another about the notorious Manchester gangster Dominic Noonan, aka Lattloy Fattfoy. The idea of taking some time out to hit the ski slopes is beginning to seem not only appealing but necessary. After all, as the eco-doc Everything's Cool reminds us, these ski resorts probably won't be around much longer.

Best reason to stay in the warm: Snow Angels is a sombre but genuinely moving film by David Gordon Green, already a Sundance veteran after George Washington and All the Real Girls. Based on a novel, this is a less self-consciously poetic film from him, a portrait of several couples in a small town, few of them happy. The most fraught relationship involves divorced high school sweethearts Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. A born again Christian with a violent, alcoholic past, he wants her back, but she is in the midst of an affair with her best friend's husband. There is a young child involved too. This is an ambitious, anguished film reminiscent of Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter.

Talking of which, Canadian actress Sarah Polley is here with her first film as director. Away from Her is a touching film about an elderly married couple, with Julie Christie succumbing to Alzheimer's. Visually it's not very imaginative, but Christie still manages to be luminous even in these circumstances. I was more impressed with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages, in which Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are brother and sister coping with a dad with the same disease. Again, the acting is as exemplary as you would expect, and Jenkins manages to mine some welcome humour from the siblings' prevailing misery - it's as much about their failure to find suitable life partners as anything.

That is also the theme of Zoe Cassavetes' Broken English, which begins brightly (and features a very funny parody of a self-obsessed actor by Justin Theroux) but falls apart in the idiotic second half, when heroine Parker Posey embarks on a sub-Sofia Coppola journey of self-discovery in Paris. It also features the worst pun of the festival, a French taxi driver who improbably hopes Parker 'finds 'appiness'.

There isn't time now to give more than a passing nod to Rocket Science, a breezy, witty comedy about a tongue-tied high school debater from the director of Spellbound which should appeal to fans of Rushmore, and Weapons, accurately described by a colleague as Boyz n the Hood meets The Circle, though it was all downhill after a startling opening title sequence. Someone is rumoured to have died during a public screening of the Catherine Keener torture movie An American Crime, on Thursday, and having sat through it yesterday I can only sympathise. As for the vagina dentata movie, Teeth, don't get me started: Deep Throat Bites Back!

Still to come: several documentaries about Iraq, Hounddog, which is commonly referred to as 'the Dakota Fanning rape movie', and Black Snake Moan, in which Cristina Ricci plays a southern white trash nymphomaniac who is chained to radiator by Samuel L Jackson to 'cure' her. Oh, and my next date, Zoo, a documentary about a guy who died after copulating with a horse… More on those next week…

Tom Charity