Anytime you see a film in the New Frontiers category at Sundance, it's a dicey proposition. The category tends to showcase a lot of edgier and experimental films that push the boundaries of filmmaking, and as a result, you never know for sure what you're going to get. Sometimes New Frontier films are intriguing, sometimes puzzling, and occasionally dumbfounding, but they're almost always interesting and a welcome break from the usual fest fare. Sometimes, I'll see a New Frontier film and not be wild about it at the time, but it will linger in my head and make me think long after the typical fest fare has come and gone. Such was the case with Reversion, the second feature directorial effort by Mia Trachinger, whose first film, Bunny, garnered her "Someone to Watch" and "Best Feature under $500,000" nominations at the Indie Spirit awards in 2001.

I caught a public screening of Reversion at the Egyptian near the end of the fest. There were a good many walkouts (though I tend to expect that for New Frontier films, and consider it more a reflection of the diversity and edginess of the category than of the films themselves) but there were far more people who stuck around for the Q&A, and quite a pack who followed Trachinger out of the theater afterward to talk more about her film.

Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), the feature directorial debut of cinematographer Ellen Kuras, took 23 years to make. The film, about a family caught in the tides of war, is as much a history lesson about a part of the Vietnam War that is little known as it is a story of how co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath came to America at the age of 14 with his mother and nine siblings after his homeland, Laos fell to the Communists.

Thavi's father, a former commander with the Royal Laotian army, was recruited by the CIA to work intelligence along the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War, as a part of the United States goverment's clandestine operations from Laos during the war. When the United States withdrew from Laos, Pathet Lao gained power and Thavi's father was declared an enemy of the state and sent to a "re-education" camp. Thavi, then just 12, was repeatedly arrested because of who his father was, and finally, in fear for his life, left his family to swim across the Mekong River to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he was finally reunited with his mother and siblings two years later.

When it comes to mockumentary type films, there are basically two kinds: good and bad; there's just not a lot of middle-ground with this particular type of filmmaking. Paranormal Activity, which showed at Slamdance, the wild and crazy drunk cousin to the Sundance Film Festival, falls squarely into the "good" camp -- particularly if your definition of "good" includes "will scare the pants off you" and "I had to sleep with the lights on after watching it."

The central idea of the film is that it purports to show actual footage of, well, paranormal activity, in the home of the two protagonists, Katie and Micah, who are living their normal lives until weird things begin happening in their home. Katie, who believes she's been haunted by an invisible, malevolent being since childhood, fears it's followed her to her new home. Micah isn't quite convinced there's anything unexplainable going on, but he purchases a video camera to record their room at night, in an attempt to capture on film any paranormal activity and try to make sense of it. When the camera actually does capture some weird happenings, Micah is at first rather excited by what they have on film; as things escalate, through, both Katie and Micah fear that the entity haunting Katie could turn violent -- or even deadly.

Dysfunctional families and indie films go together like peanut butter and chocolate, and Birds of America, directed by playwright Craig Lucas, has dysfunction in abundance. Morrie (Matthew Perry), who raised his younger siblings Jay (Ben Foster) and Ida (Ginnifer Goodwin) after their father's death, now lives in the family home with his wife, Betty (Lauren Graham). Morrie is a college prof desperately seeking tenure, and the person who is most in a position to make that happen for Morrie is his friend Paul (Gary Wilmes), who lives right next door with his wife, Laura (Hilary Swank), in their perfect house, with their perfectly maintained flower bed, with their perfectly adorable infant.

Morrie is one of those guys who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he represses his emotions so tightly that the stress of it all has manifested itself in a case of constipation so extreme he has a home office set-up in his bathroom so he can work while trying to ... work all that out. Betty, meanwhile, wants desperately to have a perfect life and a child like Laura, but Morrie won't consider parenthood until he makes tenure. Since their whole future happiness is dependent upon whether Paul recommends Morrie for tenure, both Morrie and Betty go overboard in trying not to offend Paul and Laura -- even to the extent of not complaining that Laura's dog does his business in Morrie and Betty's yard. Unlike Morrie, the dog does not have a constipation issue, so they are constantly cleaning up after it.

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.

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.

In one of Smart People's many funny (yet real) scenes, several beers have loosened the inhibitions and tongue of bright, highly motivated teen Vanessa Wetherhold (Ellen Page). As she staggers out of the bathroom, she pauses to ask a bottle-blonde, denim-clad woman "How's it feel to be stupid?" The woman snaps back: "How's it feel to eat lunch alone every day?" Vanessa's drunk enough to be honest: "It f***in' sucks." And that scene, in a nutshell, is what Smart People is about -- how it's one thing to be bright and aware and clever and perceptive, but it also sucks to eat lunch alone. Vanessa's dad Lawrence (Dennis Quaid) is a burly, bearded professor in the English department at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University - sluggish and surly and sleepwalking through his days. It's established -- carefully and well -- that Lawrence lost his wife not that long ago. His son James (Ashton Holmes) is attending Carnegie; his daughter Vanessa busies herself as Lawrence's right hand woman -- preparing meals, thinking of new titles for his book, advising him on office politics. This has two advantages for Vanessa; she gets to help her dad with his problems, and it keeps her too busy to think about her own.

The Wetherholds don't have much of a life, but at least it has some order to it -- order that's disrupted by the arrival of Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), Lawrence's adopted brother. Chuck is a slow-motion wreck of a man, a financial and professional failure, but he knows things his brainy brother and niece don't. Chuck wants to crash with Lawrence for a while, but Lawrence isn't very interested in that; when Lawrence has a seizure that means his driving license is revoked for six months, Chuck leaps in that window of opportunity headfirst. Chuck, by his very presence, destroys the status quo at the Wetherhold home. What we come to grasp is that maybe that status quo needs destruction.

It's not a bad idea for an indie film: Two sisters, still dealing as adults with the aftermath of their mother's suicide when they were children, are stuck in dead-end jobs. Then one of them gets the idea to stop cleaning rich people's houses for a living, and to start a business cleaning up crime scenes instead. That's the basic idea behind Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning, starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin.

Adams plays Rose, head cheerleader back in the glory days of high school, now stuck raising her son Oscar (Jason Spevack) alone. Rose cleans houses for a living, a job she's not crazy about, and she's having an affair with her high school boyfriend, Mac (Steve Zahn), who likes Rose enough to have sex on the side, but not enough to leave his wife for her. Her sister Norah (Blunt) lives with their father Joe (Arkin), who's always got a scheme going for finally getting rich. When Oscar keeps getting in trouble in school, Rose decides she needs to make more money so she can put him in private school, and cleaning houses for a living isn't going to get her there.

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.

One of the many comedies debuting at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Assassination of a High School President is a school-set spoof of film noir, with school paper journalist Bobby Funke (Reece Thompson) going from outcast to in-crowd when he dopes out who's been lifting SAT papers from the administration's office. Funke hits the means, motive and opportunity triple play and pins the thefts on student council president and basketball star Paul Moore (Patrick Taylor); his article earns him a coveted internship with Northwestern's journalism program and the affections of Moore's ex, Francesca (Mischa Barton). It's all looking good. Until it isn't. Funke learns new facts that make his sure-thing story look shaky; Northwestern is calling to fact-check the story, and if they find holes, his internship's over before its begun. But Funke's ready to walk the mean halls of St. Donovan's and scour the Jersey suburbs to get the story right. ...

Many critics and observers have already pigeonholed Assassination of a High School President as"Brick played for laughs." And yeah, that's a fairly simplistic assessment; then again, Assassination of a High School President's a fairly simplistic film. Written by ex-South Park production assistants Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski (and between this film and Hamlet 2, it's interesting how the road to Park City, Utah seems to have had an on-ramp in South Park, Colorado this year), Assassination never quite clicks as a total experience. Yes, it's amusing when Thompson, in his self-celebrating inner monologue, says he'll be on the case " ... like pink rubber bands on your sister's braces." And director Brett Simon finds lively, well-shot moments of visual excitement in the clichés of high school life: detention is shot like the big house, a party sequence moves and grooves with giddy chaos. But Assassination has a meandering plot line that dithers when it should drive forward, and lingers at times it should leap ahead. As Funke works leads, we get scenes that expand the running time instead of advance the plot. And yes, holding this film's central pitch up to the life-and-death stakes of Brick -- one of the best films I've ever seen in seven years of attending Sundance -- is going to make the funny-and-goofy stakes of Assassination seem slighter in comparison.