With some 120 features screening at Sundance this year, and a raft of "descriptive" press blurbs that read like pitches, it seems like a near-Sisyphean task just to get a handle on all that's on offer, much less distill it to a neat li'l Top Ten. But that's what we're here for, right? And as I emerge from a Film Guide-surfing frenzy with this list, I note a few encouraging trends: the amount of promising films that focus on women or minorities seems unusually — and hearteningly — high, and the documentary competition pool is particularly strong.

But without further ado, here's what's making my cinephile's heart go pitter-patter in anticipation:

1. The Science of Sleep (Premieres)
After Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all Michel Gondry projects now go to the top of my must-see list. Gael Garcia Bernal, playing an insecure young man who derives all of his confidence from his grandiose dreamlife, doesn't seem like an obvious choice, but then again one could say the same about Jim Carrey and Sunshine. The bonus: Charlotte Gainsbourg — Serge's enigmatically gorgeous daughter — plays Stephanie to Bernal's Stephane. How cute.

2. small town gay bar (Documentary)
While being out in the big city isn't anything to write home about anymore, being gay in the Deep South, and Mississippi specifically, still means being a member of an oppressed and often despised group. stgb focuses on the proprietors of two gay bars and the constant persecution they face as well as the important community which their establishments sustain. I'm crossing my fingers for something as frank, hearfelt, and cutting as the great transsexual doc Southern Comfort.

3. Friends with Money (Premieres)
Director Nicole Holofcener lost her way with the overly precious characters in Lovely & Amazing but I'm hoping she regains her footing with this, the opening night film, which stars a female dream team: Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack, and Catherine Keener as quartet of friends who live in LA. That the oft-underrated Jennifer Aniston, who performed so well as a misanthropic housewife in The Good Girl, gets to take center stage, only has my interest more piqued.

4. Thin (Documentary)
LA photographer Lauren Greenfield's unflinching still portraits of adolescents and women with eating disorders have been instilling viewers with an acid anxiety for years. Here, she makes her directoral debut with a film that tracks four women battling anorexia nervosa in a Florida treatment center.

5. Don't Come Knocking (Premieres)
Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard rejoin forces for this Western-set drama written and starred in by Shepard, who plays hard-drinking movie star cowboy Howard Spence. With the formidable Jessica Lange starring as Spence's woman spurned, I'm earmarking it as the fest's best shot at turning out a film with quote-unquote mature performances — remember those? Plus, shot in locations from Utah to Montana, Don't Come Knocking should offer the best chance to experience the great wide open that surrounds Sundance sans the commercial "village" trappings.

6. Art School Confidential (Premieres)
Truth be told, Bad Santa was not the Ghost World followup that I had hoped from Terry Zwigoff, but here he teams up again with cartoonist-cum-screenwriter Daniel Clowes for this film that turns an incisive eye on a young man's calculated rise in the art world. With John Malkovich starring as a fluffed-up professor, this may provide a happy return to the acerbic-bizarro hilarity in which Zwigoff is only rivaled by the likes of Solondz and Kaufman.

7. Destricted (Park City at Midnight)
Marquee artists and formidable arthouse directors Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic, Gaspar Noé, Sam Taylor-Wood, Marco Brambilla, and Larry Clark all contribute "erotic" short films for this 80-minute skin flick. Given the track record of directors like Noé and Clark for portraying scenes that are decidely sexual yet emphatically unsexy, the jury is out on whether this will be the hottest, creepiest, or most unsettling film at Sundance.

8. Sherrybaby (Dramatic)
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a single mom trying to get back on her feet after getting out of the clink in this film that — if the press still is anything to go on — looks like it could have been made by John Cassavetes in the '70s. (And from where I stand, that's not a recommendation.) But given Gyllenhaal's astounding arsenic-sweet performance in last year's opening night film, Happy Endings, I'm still willing to put my money on this one.

9. American Blackout (Documentary)
Remember that fascinating bit in Fahrenheit 9/11 where the African American senators protest the discrimination in Florida during the '04 election? This new doc explores the history of black disenfranchisement via the experiences of Georgia Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

10. What Remains (Spectrum)
American photographers aren't wanting for attention at Sundance this year, with a second documentary on William Eggleston, photographer Lauren Greenfield's Thin (noted above), and this film, Steven Cantor's second documentary about Sally Mann, who lives in the wilds of Virginia where she shoots her austerely beautiful black-and-white photographs on archaic cameras.