Sounds like someone stomped on Manohla Dargis's snow angel. How else to explain the cynical tone the NYT film critic takes in her Sundance critic's notebook in today's paper, "Sundance, for Indies, A Soft Kiss Before Dying"? [Although we're lovin' those dada heds at the Times.]

So, what's the problem with Sundance this time? La Manohla breaks it down in no uncertain terms:

Well, for starters, "that annual combustion of hype, creative endeavor and wind chill called the Sundance Film Festival" is nothing more than a manifestation of that "collective fiction known as the American independent film movement." Turns out most people today hit Park City intent on celeb-sighting and swag-grabbing and deal-making with other machers rather than actually seeing the films. Bad, shallow people! [This would never happen at Cannes.]

And what about those films? According to Dargis, "Some of this work will have been shot on old-fashioned celluloid; much, if not most, will be shot in digital video and look it. As always, some of this work will be good, most will be adequate and the outright stinkers will be as modest in number as the gems." So far, sounds like a film festival. The big problem, as she sees it, is that the same sort of films screen at Sundance year after year. The documentary slate offers a "tearjerker about a wrongly convicted prisoner," "the obligatory look at the black (bad) experience," and the "fun-with-letters" flick. On the features side, there's the "touching ensemble piece about a group of entwined Angelenos" and the "strained social satire" sporting "idiot kids and wasteland milieu." The fortunate films that come to Utah with distribution deals already in hand angle for critical acclaim to feed the marketing machine so they can earn out.

'Twas not always thus, our celluloid Cassandra reminds us. In the '80s — a time of prelapsarian innocence when Spike, Mike, the slackers, and a couple of dykes were hot — Sundance films bridged the gap between art and industry. Then the studios launched their specialty divisions, and the jig was up. Dargis concedes that "[t]he persistence of the myth that these specialty divisions are independent is a fascinating if understandable phenomenon," but, you know, that doesn't make it right. In fact, when it comes to the movies, "independence" has been reduced to little more than a brand, albeit one signifying "good taste, integrity and all the rest." Which is good for mainstream American cinema, but bad for the true independents jostling for screen time without the infrastructure and deep pockets of a major getting their backs.

But all is not lost. Remember that line about "the collective fiction known as the American independent movement"? In the final graf, Dargis-as-Oracle offers us cinemaphiles a red pill when she grudgingly admits that this "wildly annoying, but invaluable" fiction is the only thing we've got. Sometimes even Sundance programmers "unearth work that is aesthetically and sometimes even politically venturesome — work that is truly independent in the best, most unburdened sense of that oft-abused word." Of course, whether or not it ever gets distributed is another story.

Now, who feels like making snow angels?