At Sundance's biggest mess of a screening yet, Mike White's "The Year of the Dog." As they exited the bus at Eccles Theatre, ticket holders met with an agonized chorus of the damned. I was asked for an extra ticket for various multipliers of its value no less than 20 times on my way to the door. Not many of the scroungers got one, and the theater was almost full before most of the the hundreds of waitlisters could be accommodated.

Molly Shannon and her co-stars, including John C. Reilly and Peter Sarsgaard (everyone but Laura Dern showed) rewarded the 1,270 people lucky enough to get inside with a Q&A. One at a time, each cast member answered the most dreaded question of all star-studded Q&As: "What drew you to the project?"

—Jeremy Mathews