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After Manure quietly (and not-so-quietly) stunk up the scene at the Sundance Film Festival, the Polish Brothers (Mark and Michael) have returned to the festival circuit with Stay Cool -- a film that leaps into your lap with its perky, original concept, but then slowly but surely fails to deliver ... well, pretty much everything. What we have here is an on-the-verge-of-40 novelist (Mark Polish) who returns to his hometown only to find himself stuck in a really bad, cliched '80s movie -- complete with two bonehead best friends, mean teachers, a moronic high school principal and a hardcore crush on that girl whose meat-head boyfriend is named Brad. And I don't mean cliched '80s movie in a bad way -- that's kinda the point with Stay Cool; our lovable, somewhat-awkward novelist learns that he must overcome the fears and regrets he's had since graduating 20 years ago by living his worst moments all over again.

Some have said Stay Cool is like 17 Again in reverse, which it sorta is -- except there's no magical, supernatural element here. Our guy just somehow finds himself re-living those weird, painful high school moments (as an adult) until he finally comes to grips with his past and his present, and, of course, manages to stay cool.

The Tribeca Film Festival has been in the news lately for significant personnel changes, but what about the movies? This year's edition gets underway on April 22, and Cinematical has received a list of the first 38 of the 86 feature films that will be screened. A few titles that jumped out at me:

The Eclipse. The great Ciaran Hinds stars in an "atmospheric drama about a widower who sees and hears strange things in his house." Hinds was fairly magnificent in the TV series Rome and stood out in Steven Spielberg's Munich. Add to that Iben Hjejle and Aidan Quinn as writers the widower encounters at a literary festival, and this is a drama that I want to see.

The Fish Child. Lucia Puenzo made the well-regarded XXY and now comes a "a passionate love story in the arms of a pulsating thriller." I love the idea that for her sophomore feature, the director has made what is evidently a very different type of movie than her quieter debut drama.

Stay Cool. The Polish Brothers (Northfork) return with a "charming comedy" about a high school reunion of sorts, with Winona Ryder and Hilary Duff. Manure was sharply criticized at Sundance just a couple of months ago; could Stay Cool possibly be any good? Winona Ryder doesn't get seen enough, and Hilary Duff has made interesting choices, so this could be surprisingly good -- or another train wreck.

Outrage. Documentarian Kirby Dick, who made the terrific This Film is Not Yet Rated, turns to the subject of "the hypocrisy of closeted politicians who actively campaign against the LGBT community they covertly belong to." I'm hoping it's as sensational as it sounds.

After the jump: The complete announcement. Browse away, and tell us what looks good to you!

She might be headed back to high school, but Hilary Duff is certainly not headed back to high school men. The Hollywood Reporter posts that the actress has joined the ranks of Stay Cool -- one of those Polish brothers projects that Eugene discussed back in May.

By signing on to the feature, she's joining the strange yet irresistible cast which already includes Winona Ryder, Mark Polish, Sean Astin, Chevy Chase, and Jon Cryer. It's an '80s explosion across the board! I'm sold just on the combination of Ryder, Astin, Chase, and Cryer.

Anyhow, the film is being described as a "knowing-your-age comedy," which focuses on a successful author played by Polish. He returns home to give a commencement speech at his old high school, and has to confront his unrequited high school crush (Ryder). But while he's remembering past lust, he becomes the object of Duff's affections. She will play "Shasta O'Neil, a sexy high school senior who flirts with the visiting author and invites him to the prom."

The film will shoot in Santa Clarita, California next month.

Mark and Michael Polish may not be as well-known a fraternal filmmaking pair as Joel and Ethan Coen, but they could out-weird the Coens any day of the week. Their films range from virtually inscrutable (Northfork) to very strange (Twin Falls Idaho) to merely offbeat (The Astronaut Farmer), but it's clear they won't be getting hired to direct the sequel to Alvin and the Chipmunks. So instead, they've formed their own production company, Prohibition Films, and are shooting two new projects back-to-back.

The first is entitled Manure, a title they should reconsider if only to make lazy film critics' jobs a little harder. Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leoni, and my man Kyle MacLachlan, the movie will explore the world of manure salesmen in 1960's heartland America. Upon reading that I frowned for a moment, but then realized that had you asked me who would be most likely to write and direct a movie about manure salesmen in 1960's heartland America, I would unhesitatingly have said the Polish Brothers.

The debate over the difference between mainstream and independent movies has raged for decades. The line has blurred more and more over the years as so-called independent companies began financing multi-million dollar films like The English Patient or Fargo, which were still labeled as "independents." To make things more complicated, what does one call a movie made by an independent filmmaker for a mainstream audience, say Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, Richard Linklater's School of Rock or Spike Lee's Inside Man? I'd argue that we could call it an acceptable compromise between personal vision and entertainment, and a case in which everybody wins.

That's also the case with Michael and Mark Polish's The Astronaut Farmer. It's the fourth film by the identical twins, who write all their screenplays together and appeared together in their debut, Twin Falls Idaho (1999). Subsequently, Michael has established himself as a director, while Mark has taken on acting roles. Their three previous films, which include Jackpot (2001) and Northfork (2003), certainly cannot be classified as "mainstream." A familiar collection of odd, beautiful wanderers and losers populate their frames, from Siamese twins, to a traveling, professional Karaoke singer and a pair of mysterious, black-suited agents charged with evacuating the site of a future lake. This time the hero of their film does not fit in with this crowd and we have the makings of an American hero: a man who launches his own rocket into space.

No, Warner Bros. hasn't discovered a pair of genius filmmakers in Warsaw. Instead, the studio has extended its relationship with Mark and Michael Polish, a writer-director team that just happens to consist of identical twins. The brothers first got attention in 1999 with their debut feature, Twin Falls Idaho, in which they starred as Siamese twins. The film was well-reviewed, and praised by Roger Ebert for its willingness to discard a focused plot in favor of "meditation on the situation of its characters." Though the years since then have been somewhat lean for the Polishes -- Jackpot (made for $400,000) and Northfork received mixed reviews and were barely seen -- their upcoming feature The Astronaut Farmer has a cast full of stars, and is so well-regard by WB that they've shifted its distribution from Warner Independent to Warner proper, and will be giving it a wide release early next year.

Clearly WB has confidence in the brothers, so much so that it just bought two new projects from them (both of which will be co-written and co-produced by Mark and Michael with the latter directing, as is the case with all their collaborations). The first, entitled Loot, is "a heist movie set in Middle America that a follows a group of blue-collar workers who pull off jobs during tornado season." The second, which sounds completely awesome, is called How Time Flies, and "is a cause-and-effect look at a world where time travel becomes accessible to the common man and how fragile reality can become." Given the style and content of the brothers' projects to this point, it's likely How Time Flies will focus much more on emotions and personalities than the sci-fi side of the story, which means the movie could be something very original (!) indeed.