One of the more controversial and polarizing films at this year's Sundance Film Festival (and last year's Toronto fest) was Towelhead, a dark and uncomfortable comedy about a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl living in Texas during the first Gulf War. It was directed by Alan Ball, who showed with American Beauty (which he wrote) and HBO's Six Feet Under (which he created) that he has a knack for finding humor in the sinister corners of suburbia.

The film is set for limited release on Sept. 12 (here's Cinematical's review from Toronto), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling on Warner Bros. to change the title before it comes out. A press release from the Greater Los Angeles Area office of CAIR said, "The word ('towelhead') is commonly used in a derogatory manner against people of the Muslim faith or Arab origin." Furthermore: "The use of such a derogatory term by a major film studio will serve to increase its acceptability in public discourse."

Really, CAIR? "Towelhead" is a slur? Then I wonder why the filmmakers would use it as a title -- unless -- you don't think -- nah -- could it be that the whole point of the movie is that this girl is trying to find her identity, and that "Towelhead" is one of the epithets she has to deal with while living in a redneck town during the Gulf War? Could it be that one of the movie's messages is that slurs like that are unacceptable? Could it be that only the most bigoted and idiotic of viewers could come out of it thinking, "I'm gonna start sayin' 'towelhead' more often!"?

As with so many successful screenwriters, John August's work might be more familiar to you than his name. He wrote Go, Charlie's Angels, and a trio of Tim Burton films -- Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride -- before making the mind-bending indie flick The Nines (pictured). He directed it, too (his first feature in that capacity), so he had even more personal attachment to it when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007.

A few days ago, August posted an entry on his blog in which he dissects his experience with The Nines and uses it to shine some light on the nerve-racking, dog-eat-dog world of independent filmmaking. Clearly this business is not for the faint of heart. He lists what he calls "the Graduating Class of 2007," 21 buzz-generating films from Sundance that year, including his own. All but one were bought by distributors ... and almost all of them totally tanked at the box office.

That's not very encouraging, especially considering these were the cream of the Sundance crop. Only five on his list made more than $1 million in theaters, and many didn't even crack $100,000. The Nines (which was pretty decent, by the way, definitely worth checking out) got a cursory theatrical release in a couple cities, where it made a paltry $63,165, then eventually found its way to DVD.

I told you a couple weeks ago how THINKFilm had picked up the gritty prison thriller The Escapist, and how the film, which stars Brian Cox, was the last thing I saw at Sundance this year. Well, I actually had a double helping of Cox that January night, because right before The Escapist I watched Red, another film boasting a terrific Cox performance -- and now it's headed for theaters, too.

Via The Hollywood Reporter we learn that Magnolia has picked up Red, with plans to release it late this summer. The film (which I reviewed here) is a thriller along the lines of Death Wish, only instead of avenging his wife's murder, the Cox character is going after the punks who killed his dog. (Do not mess with a man's dog!)

The very last film I saw at Sundance this year, at a lively 10 p.m. screening and seated next to the dapper James Rocchi, was The Escapist. It was a perfect ending for the festival, and a great "guy movie" to boot (Rocchi and I are nothing if not burly, rugged men): Brian Cox leads a bunch of Limey blokes, including Joseph Fiennes, on a daring escape from a British prison. Familiar premise, but well executed with a few twists. Rocchi's rave review is here.

The flick was well received during its world premiere at Sundance, and yet somehow it didn't get picked up by any distributors before the fest ended. Now, finally, THINKFilm has come to the rescue. Variety reports that the distributor has paid about $1 million for the film and plans to release it in October, starting small and expanding over the course of several weeks.

For the third year in a row, Sundance is partnering up with the Brooklyn Academy of Music to present the "Sundance Institute at BAM" series, where flicks from this year's film festival will play for New York audiences May 29-June 8. It's just like going to Sundance, only without the snow and ice. Oh, and Brooklyn is actually big enough to handle large crowds. So maybe it's nothing like going to Sundance, except for the movies.

The movies -- 22 features and 36 shorts -- include several must-see titles, some of which have not played anywhere yet except for Sundance. Hot-buzz documentary American Teen (pictured) is on the schedule (complete with a prom-themed BAM party!), as is the soldier drama American Son. Anvil! The Story of Anvil was one of the most popular films at this year's fest, and the heavy metal band featured in it will perform live at BAM. There's the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke, Stacy Peralta's L.A. gang doc Made in America, the South American cannibalism doc Stranded, and award-winning documentaries Trouble the Water and Man on Wire. If you've been paying attention to the indie/film-fest scene this year, you've probably heard of some of these, so it's pretty cool that the Sundance/BAM partnership will give wider audiences a chance to see them.

Tickets for the "Sundance Institute at BAM" series go on sale to BAM members on April 21, and the general public on April 26. Neither Sundance nor BAM has the complete info on its website yet, but here's the BAM page to keep your eye on.

If you ask my mom about Robert Redford, she'll cite his dreamy blue eyes and his charismatic performances in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. If you ask someone my age about him, though, I bet the Sundance Film Festival is the first thing that will come to mind. For a lot of us, the Sundance Institute has been so influential and important that it overshadows the earlier days, when Redford was "only" a movie star.

Variety reports that the industry convention ShoWest will honor Redford with the Visionary Award when it convenes next week in Las Vegas, a tribute to the Sundance Kid's extraordinary contributions to the world of independent film. Sundance is the largest, most influential film festival in the United States, and it has launched the careers of dozens of filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh. What's more, the Sundance Institute's workshops for screenwriting, documentary filmmaking, and other crafts have helped countless individuals hone their skills.

This will be the first time ShoWest has given out a "Visionary Award," and Redford seems like a mighty fine choice to me. Those dreamy blue eyes have seen a lot of great things happen in the movie world.

Thirteen months ago, at a midnight screening at the Sundance Film Festival, Scott Weinberg and I saw a new horror film called The Signal. We loved it. We were sitting next to some guys from Ain't It Cool News. They loved it, too. Scott wrote a review for Cinematical; I wrote one elsewhere (I wasn't on the Cinematical team yet); the AICN guys raved about it on their site. If I can presume to summarize all our feelings, they were: Wow. This is a really, really good horror flick.

Magnolia Pictures bought the distribution rights and finally released it last weekend. Weinberg reminded us about it the day before, having already shown us the trailer. We were glad it was finally seeing the light of day.

And then nobody watched it.

According to Box Office Mojo, The Signal played on 160 screens last weekend and grossed only $144,836, or $905 per screen. If you don't follow box office numbers, I'll just tell you: $905 is awful for an opening weekend. I Am Legend, playing on the same number of screens, grossed more than The Signal last weekend -- and it's been out for 2 1/2 months!

Consider Death Wish. In the original film, Charles Bronson sought revenge against the thugs who raped his daughter and killed his wife – heinous acts that the audience enthusiastically agrees ought to be punished, even if it requires vigilantism.

Now consider Red, also about a man seeking justice, only this time the murder victim is his beloved old dog, killed with a shotgun by juvenile delinquents. We agree that the act is monstrous, but what kind of punishment is appropriate? Even the most fervent dog-lovers don't generally believe in the death penalty for killers of canines.

That's the dilemma at the heart of Red, an emotionally gripping if slightly over-wrought drama based on a novel by Jack Ketchum. It's set in a small Western town that still has a general store and friendly neighbors, a place where just about everyone has a dog. (The only pet-free families, I note, are the bad guys.) Brian Cox plays Avery Ludlow, a widower whose boon companion is Red, his 14-year-old hound. The two are fishing on the lakeshore one afternoon when a trio of punks comes along to harass and rob him. The leader, Danny (Noel Fisher), ends the encounter by blasting Red with a shotgun.

After being suffocated by so many well-made but unoriginal independent films at Sundance, Baghead is like a blast of fresh air. It has warmth and innovation, and the mischievous good sense to subtly make fun of the type of film that it is.

And what type of film is it? It's essentially part of the "mumblecore" sub-movement, featuring hand-held cameras, semi-improvised dialogue, and directionless hipster characters in their twenties. It's the work of brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, whose Puffy Chair beguiled film festival audiences a few years ago and is well worth seeking out on DVD if you haven't seen it.

The Duplasses stay behind the camera this time but give us four of their kindred spirits as characters. Matt (Ross Partridge) and Catherine (Elise Muller) are long-time on-and-off romantic partners; Chad (Steve Zissis) and Michelle (Greta Gerwig) have been dating a few months, though Michelle thinks of Chad as more of a brother or pal. In fact, she has a thing for Matt.

The problem with making movies in the "grindhouse" style is that true grindhouse movies, almost by definition, were not seen by very many people. The target audience for a loving homage to the genre is therefore limited. Quentin Tarantino might adore the shlocky, violent capers of the 1970s, but how many of the rest of us have even seen them, much less love them enough to enjoy a re-creation of them?

Hell Ride, which Tarantino executive produced and Larry Bishop wrote and directed, is a salute to the ridiculous biker movies that Bishop frequently acted in back in the late '60s and early '70s. With titles like The Savage Seven and Chrome and Hot Leather, these were pure grindhouse cheese, and Hell Ride is either a parody of them or an adoring tribute. The line is always fine when it comes to a Tarantino project -- does he really like these movies, or does he only like them ironically? -- and here it's nearly invisible.

Bishop stars as Pistolero, the leader of a motorcycle gang called the Victors. Fellow members include Comanche (Eric Balfour) and The Gent (Michael Madsen); a comrade named St. Louie has just been murdered by a rival gang, the 666ers, led by Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones) and The Deuce (David Carradine). The Victors want revenge for this, but the often incomprehensible plot has them searching for a buried treasure, too, planted by a woman named Cherokee Kisum before she was killed back in 1976. Adding to the general mayhem is the reappearance of Eddie Zero (Dennis Hopper), a first-generation Victor who was presumed dead but has now returned to offer guidance to his successors.

When MTV Latin America honcho Ricardo de Montreuil made his first film, La Mujer de Mi Hermano, I thought (and wrote): Here is a man who ought to be making TV movies for Lifetime or Telemundo. His follow-up, the generic coming-of-age story Máncora, is more of the same -- selfish, gorgeous people having sex and lying to one another while undergoing a bland process of self-discovery.

Were it not for the sex and drugs, Máncora would be a completely forgettable movie. Never underestimate the power of sex and drugs to spice up an otherwise useless picture!

It's set in Peru (de Montreuil's native land), where Santiago (Jason Day) is a club-hopping, heavy-partying 22-year old who is having sex with an anonymous woman in a public restroom when he gets the call that his father has died. Wanting a break from Lima, he decides to take a road trip to the beach town of Máncora, where he can clear his head and do a lot of drugs and have some more sex with strangers -- you know, the usual grieving process. The first stage is denial, the second is anger, the third is cocaine.

In the future, our immigration problems will be solved by having Mexicans do their menial work with remote-controlled robots. We'll get our cheap labor, and the Mexicans will stay on their side of the border.

That's according to Sleep Dealer, which makes the suggestion satirically, of course. Set in the near future, the film is loaded with interesting sci-fi concepts but suffers in the execution of them. It falls back on too many clichés and spends too much time on an uninteresting subplot -- problems that could have been avoided if the film weren't so focused on presenting its nifty futuristic quirks.

Our hero is Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man in an arid Mexican village that was ruined several years ago when a water company dammed up the river. In this world, private companies control the water and charge ridiculous prices for it, protected and enabled by the U.S. government. Also in this world, the Internet has expanded to such a degree that you can have nodes implanted into your arms and neck and plug directly into the Information Superhighway. Once you're connected, you can upload your memories and broadcast or sell them a la YouTube.

Just Another Love Story is not just another love story. It is from Denmark, it has elements of film noir, and it has an outlandish batch of twists in its final 20 minutes. There is nothing "just another" about it.

We begin with images of our hero and narrator, Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen), lying on a sidewalk in the rain, apparently dying. He is a crime-scene photographer by trade, with a wife and two kids at home, the very picture of domestic tranquility. He is happy but somewhat unfulfilled – or at least he's allowed his middle-aged imagination to convince him that he is. In truth, his family loves him and his job is steady. Many men would be envious of his situation.

Jonas witnesses a car accident in which a desperate young woman named Julia (Rebecka Hemse) is critically injured, and something about her makes him want to check on her progress. At the hospital, through a series of events that would be downright zany if the film weren't so serious, Jonas comes to be mistaken for Julia's boyfriend Sebastian. Her worried parents and siblings have never met Sebastian, but they are comforted to know that he is being so supportive during this trying time.

Several other critics and I were chatting yesterday about how, so far, the festival has been only so-so. We all liked several things a lot, but we hadn't totally loved anything. Like optimistic youths, we were eager to fall in love. But when would the right film come along?

For me, it happened last night, when I saw American Teen. I'd heard good things about it, but the description in the festival guide didn't really interest me. Knowing it had been picked up by Paramount Vantage, and that so many people liked it, I thought I'd give it a try. But even as I took a seat in the Yarrow screening room just before 10 p.m. last night, I was considering changing my mind and going back to the hotel instead.

I'm so glad I stayed. It's absolutely my favorite movie of the festival. It's a documentary that follows a handful of teenagers during their senior year in high school in Warsaw, Indiana. That format invites comparison to TV "reality" shows like Laguna Beach -- except that these kids are real people, with all the flawed decisions, enthusiasm, emotional meltdowns and melodrama of real teenagers.

The film captures all the drama of these kids' lives, and it's as touching and funny and -- above all -- hopeful as anything I've seen in a while. And so my festival is not a bust after all! I have found love.

By this point in the festival, you start to feel a little fatigue. You're sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated. And this often manifests itself in a lowered tolerance for bad movies.

That's right, I had my first walk-out of the fest today. I made it through about 20 minutes of Adventures of Power before deciding that life was too short to sit through yet another lame Napoleon Dynamite wannabe.

Hey, look! The main character is a small-town nerd who doesn't realize what a joke he is! He has odd, useless talents that he thinks are awesome! He wears a headband and a fanny pack! Har har!

It's not that it was the worst film I've ever seen. Heck, it's not even the worst film I've seen this week. (That'd be Downloading Nancy.) It was just that on Day 7 of a film festival, you're not as inclined to put up with crap as you are earlier in the week.