Sundance Film Festival

The 1994 Sundance Film Festival came to a close last weekend, with 7,000 filmmakers, agents, publicists and critics folding up their celluar phones and heading home, and the little Utah ski resort of Park City struggling to return to normal. Prize-winners at the Robert Redford-sponsored fete, which celebrates independent American cinema and, this year, was strong in movies about family dysfunction and bodily functions, included: Spanking the Monkey, David Russell's offbeat Oedipal drama, which took home the Audience Award.

It may be the only spot in Utah where, before a movie starts, an official gives the order: "OK, everybody, it's time to turn off your cellular phones. " That's how things begin at the Sundance Film Festival, which, since 1985, has evolved from a teensy gathering of granola-crunching filmmakers into the film-industry equivalent of the running of the bulls at Pamplona. This year's event attracted more than 8,000 people to see roughly 100 movies, of which 16 documentaries and 18 fiction features were in official competition.

THE SUNDANCE Film Festival announced its in-competition films for the 2012 fest and Philly is repped quite nicely (and we're not just talking about "Filly Brown," the story of a Hispanic girl rising through the ranks of the hip-hop elite). In the U.S. Dramatic Competition is "The Comedy," starring Temple boys Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker (of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job" fame), directed by musician Rick Alverson. Here's the synopsis: Indifferent even to the prospects of inheriting his father's estate, Swanson whiles away his days with a group of aging Brooklyn, N.Y., hipsters, engaging in small acts of recreational cruelty and pacified boredom.

You've probably walked over them with nary a thought, the mysterious tiles set in cement around our city. The tiles with their cryptic messages - "Toynbee Idea/In Kubrick's 2001/Resurrect Dead/On Planet Jupiter," for example - have intrigued the observant for decades. And they aren't limited to Philly, although it took Philadelphia first-time filmmaker Jon Foy to make a movie about them. He teamed up with local Toynbee enthusiast Justin Duerr (pictured), along with Steve Weinik and Colin Smith, and set out to tell the story in a documentary called "Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.

SET IN IRAN but shot in Lebanon, for obvious reasons, the coming-of-age drama "Circumstance" stars two photogenic and expressive marvels, Nikohl Boosheri and Sarah Kazemy, as teenage friends and lovers living under the thumb of an oppressive regime. Modern-day Tehran comes alive in the underground club sequences of New York-based writer-director Maryam Keshavarz's feature. Yet the film wages an internal battle between its ripely sensual atmosphere and its often stilted pacing and plotting.

Big news from the Sundance Film Festival, which handed out the awards Saturday night: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles , directed by Willow Grove native Jon Foy , won the U.S. Documentary Competition Directing Award. Foy followed musician/artist Justin Duerr's search for the origin of the so-called Toynbee tiles, which are implanted in streets around the world. Most are in Philadelphia. "I had no idea that such things were possible in life. Just a few weeks ago I was a housecleaner," Foy told the assembled, according to Sundance's blog.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show (3 p.m., NBC10) - Harry Connick Jr. performs; actress Paula Patton ( Precious ). The Oprah Winfrey Show (4 p.m., 6ABC) - Comic Jerry Seinfeld discusses his new show. Warehouse 13 (9 p.m., SYFY) - When an artifact meant for the Warehouse turns up in the small town next door, the team finds itself in the middle of a B-movie meltdown complete with cowboys, gladiators, sci-fi robots, and beach-storming Marines. Their only chance of survival rests with the man who invented television, Philo T. Farnsworth.

LOS ANGELES - It's hard enough to get into the Sundance Film Festival - more than 10,000 features, documentaries and shorts were submitted for just a few dozen slots in this year's festival. But it's almost equally hard to leave the nation's top gathering for independent film with a distribution deal. Only a handful of Sundance titles receive a meaningful theatrical release. Determined to break that distribution bottleneck, the Sundance Institute on Wednesday launched an initiative that for the first time packages festival films under the Sundance name and offers them for simultaneous viewing on six of the Internet's biggest video platforms - Apple Inc.'s iTunes, Amazon.com, Hulu, Netflix Inc., Google Inc.'s YouTube and Rainbow Media's SundanceNow.

LOS ANGELES - Every January, the Sundance Film Festival can be counted on for several things. The presence of a John Hawkes movie. "Intimate" dinner parties for 200 people. And eternal sunniness about the film-sales market. That optimism is running particularly high at this year's event, which opened Thursday in Park City, Utah. The country's most prominent film festival is coming off one of its most robust markets ever, as more than two dozen independently produced movies landed distribution deals last January.

Set in the Netherlands during the last year of World War II, Winter in Wartime follows a plucky teen as he helps and harbors a downed RAF pilot hiding in the woods, watches as his father, the town's mayor, tries to conciliate and placate the Nazis, and gets drawn into dangerous Resistance intrigue via a visiting uncle. A compelling coming-of-age story with a dramatic and historic backdrop, director Martin Koolhoven's handsome film is an adaptation of a 1970s young-adult novel.

Five movies in six years is no small feat. Five movies in six years when you're based in Philadelphia and dealing with the hard realities of indie filmmaking - money, time, distribution, marketing - is no small feat, either. And here Don Argott, Demian Fenton, and Sheena Joyce are happy to say they've had "a little bit of success. " They are the collaborative team behind Last Days Here, a wonderfully strange and affecting portrait of a heavy metal demigod's fall into the abyss, which opens Friday.

THE TOYNBEE tiles are embedded within the very fabric of Philadelphia. Found in seemingly random spots throughout the city, the license-plate-size tiles are etched with a cryptic message: "TOYNBEE IDEAS IN KUbrick's 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER. " The tiles also have been found up and down the East Coast and even in Chile and Argentina. Many have investigated the mystery behind the tiles. Who placed them? What do they mean? But until the documentary "Resurrect Dead," the only person who knew the answers to those questions was the one placing the tiles.

PARK CITY, Utah - Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who met as Temple film students in the mid-1990s, last week prepared for the world premiere of their first feature, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, at the Sundance Film Festival. But just before Sundance began, terrible news broke: They'd been Rango 'ed. "Sundance gang," Heidecker posted on his Twitter feed, "B$M [Billion Dollar Movie] got Rango 'd (large portions of our movie replaced with Rango outtakes)

THE RAZZIES are moving to April. April first, to be exact. The spoof on the Academy Awards picks the year's worst films. The Razzies used to announce contenders the night before the Oscar nominations, which are coming tomorrow. But Razzies founder John Wilson announced yesterday that nominations this season will be released Feb. 25, the eve of the Oscar ceremony. Winners will be announced on April 1. Wilson says Razzies organizers have long wanted to have their awards coincide with April Fool's Day. A news release announcing the change also notes that it will give the 600 Razzies voters "additional time to see the dreck they will eventually nominate.

LOS ANGELES - Every January, the Sundance Film Festival can be counted on for several things. The presence of a John Hawkes movie. "Intimate" dinner parties for 200 people. And eternal sunniness about the film-sales market. That optimism is running particularly high at this year's event, which opened Thursday in Park City, Utah. The country's most prominent film festival is coming off one of its most robust markets ever, as more than two dozen independently produced movies landed distribution deals last January.

THE SUNDANCE Film Festival announced its in-competition films for the 2012 fest and Philly is repped quite nicely (and we're not just talking about "Filly Brown," the story of a Hispanic girl rising through the ranks of the hip-hop elite). In the U.S. Dramatic Competition is "The Comedy," starring Temple boys Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker (of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job" fame), directed by musician Rick Alverson. Here's the synopsis: Indifferent even to the prospects of inheriting his father's estate, Swanson whiles away his days with a group of aging Brooklyn, N.Y., hipsters, engaging in small acts of recreational cruelty and pacified boredom.

In Like Crazy , the roller-coaster love story that opened the Philadelphia Film Festival and begins its theatrical run at the Ritz East on Friday, Felicity Jones is a young Brit studying at a Los Angeles college. She meets a fellow student, an American played by Anton Yelchin . They throw longing looks at each other in class. She writes a mash note. They meet at a cafe, and they're off: Intense, can't-get-you-out-of-my-mind love. "There's an obsessional quality to their relationship," Jones agrees.

At the start of 2010, Elizabeth Olsen was just another student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, a kid with dreams of an acting career. A year later, she had two premieres at the Sundance Film Festival - and one of them, Martha Marcy May Marlene , won the best director prize. Two films at Sundance, and three more in the can, including a comedy with Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener ( Peace, Love & Misunderstanding ) and a thriller, shot in Spain, with Cillian Murphy and Robert De Niro ( Red Lights )

How do you do a film festival? That's a tough enough question for the serious festgoer: tickets, schedules, where did I put that program guide, will there be time to eat? But what if you're actually putting the festival together? And say it's the 20th anniversary, and there are 145 films or so, and two weeks to squeeze them into, with 35,000 movie zealots expected to attend. Those are a few of the issues facing Michael Lerman, artistic director of the Philadelphia Film Festival.

You've probably walked over them with nary a thought, the mysterious tiles set in cement around our city. The tiles with their cryptic messages - "Toynbee Idea/In Kubrick's 2001/Resurrect Dead/On Planet Jupiter," for example - have intrigued the observant for decades. And they aren't limited to Philly, although it took Philadelphia first-time filmmaker Jon Foy to make a movie about them. He teamed up with local Toynbee enthusiast Justin Duerr (pictured), along with Steve Weinik and Colin Smith, and set out to tell the story in a documentary called "Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.