In which The Chronicles of Sundance comes to an end.

The continuing adventure of one critic's first trip to the Sundance Film Festival....

Like most movie lovers of a certain age (i.e. the '90s generation), the name "Sundance" first popped up on my radar in 1992 when a little movie called Reservoir Dogs blew the doors off Robert Redford's quiet little independent film festival nestled in the mountain town of Park City, Utah. (Yes, sex, lies and videotape was technically the film that put Sundance on the map in 1989, but Dogs was my personal gateway into indie film.) Reading all the hype about Quentin Tarantino's debut feature made me want to do two things: 1.) Watch Reservoir Dogs as soon as possible, and 2.) Go to Sundance myself. Accomplishing the first task was relatively easy once the movie hit VHS (remember that?); the second took another two decades. But 20 years after Reservoir Dogs first screened, I finally made the trek to Park City, Utah for a whirlwind three day Sundance experience. In those 72 hours, I managed to see 12 movies, spoke with a number of great people and experienced both extremes of Park City's weather, from blinding snowstorms to beautiful big blue skies. Here's how things went down:

What's scarier -- a human centipede or a dirty girl?

If you're going to polarize mainstream audiences by putting the word "orgy" in your film title, you damn well better deliver some serious raunch. Anyone who ventures out to see this Jason Sudeikis-starring end-of-summer flick (penned by veteran comedy writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck), can rest assured that there is plenty of it, complete with group sex and nudity. Phew, right? Sitting through this 98-minute indie flick about a group of longtime friends planning the most epic summer blowout of all time -- whose theme I'm sure you can guess by now -- begged the question: Can it really compete with the 30-minute Party Down "Nick DiCintio's Orgy Night" episode? Let's battle it out.

Do you ever get sick of films that obviously have a large amount of improv? I'm fine with a few riffs here or there, but sometimes I long for tighter editing and, you know, actual writing. A line that I loved in The AV Club's excellent "Michael Schur walks us through Parks And Recreation" article series was when showrunner Schur was discussing the use of improvisation on his series and noted, "[W]e have many, many times thrown away jokes that we thought were way funnier than the stuff we wrote because, completely unintentionally, in the moment, they alter the scene. They change the motivation of the character or they indicate that the character doesn't care about something that he or she cares about or something. And I will always cut those jokes out because it's never worth sacrificing the scene or the story or the character for one joke."

It's been so long since Pam Halpert (née Beesly) has had anything remotely interesting to do on The Office that it's easy to forget the actress playing her, Jenna Fischer, has more range than almost anyone on the series not named Steve Carell. In the first two seasons, she perfectly captured the awkward reserve of a woman so locked onto a specific life course (a dull, but stable clerical job and a looming marriage to a dull, but stable blue-collar guy) that she couldn't -- or wouldn't -- let herself see the professional and personal opportunities cropping up right in front of her. Then when she took the plunge and hooked up with Jim, Fischer took great pleasure in showing how Pam's inhibitions fell away. Certainly, moving to New York to pursue a graphic design career would have been unthinkable to the Pam of Season One. And even now as a happily married mom and office manager at Dunder Mifflin, Fischer is able to occasionally find ways to break through her character's general stasis and show off a little of Pam's newfound swagger and attitude. She's done some strong work outside of The Office as well, from goofy supporting roles in broad comedies like Blades of Glory and Walk Hard to a surprisingly emotional turn in the recent Farrelly Brothers joint, Hall Pass.

The Sundance-approved drama Another Earth is built around an idea that has fueled countless late-night, substance-enhanced dorm room discussions: what if, somewhere up there in the heavens, there was a parallel Earth where another version of you existed. Only instead of following your life path exactly, this Earth-2 you has opted for the opposite of every single decision you've ever made. Instead of Political Science, he/she majored in Marine Biology. Instead of losing the phone number for that hottie at the coffee shop, he/she called it right away. Instead of having Count Chocula for breakfast, he/she had a half-grapefruit. Are they any happier because they picked the second of these two divergent roads? Is their life more complete, their bank account fuller, their work and/or personal relationships more fulfilling? And here's the million dollar question: Would you trade places with them if you could?

The real-world superhero genre has been getting a real workout lately. The teenage wish-fulfillment fantasy Kick-Ass is the most recent and high-profile example, but before that, Defendor and Special followed grown, troubled men in homemade costumes as they pursued a life of crime-fighting. Super walks down a similar road to the latter two, but with Kick-Ass's sense of humor and blood spatter, and the path it takes and the place it ends up are both different enough from the rest to make it worth watching. The mid-notch comedic cast helps, with Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page doing their regular things and Kevin Bacon stealing every scene as the alternately hilarious and scary villain, but the film also surprises the audience with its hallucinatory dream sequences and unadorned brutality, which keep things interesting. Plus, as everyone knows, everything tastes better with Bacon.

Cyrus is the newest film that features Jonah Hill, and in no way is it affiliated with Judd Apatow. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the only thing surprising or interesting about the whole movie.