(Then again, perhaps the budget for Donnie Darko wasn't quite as low as Gilmore is implying. After all, Drew Barrymore - as rich as Croesus after Charlie's Angels - was producer.)"The technology has opened up the way for independent cinema to re-invent itself," Gilmore continues enthusiastically. "What we'll see over this next decade is not a continuation of American independent cinema as we have seen it before, but a re-invention of that form... let's allow independent films to become what they want to be, not what they [critics] think they should be."The Sundance Festival, which runs from 18-28 Jan, is also hosting an online festival. The official website is www.sundance .

There is a long, long sequence in the middle of Cast Away - a kind of Robinson Crusoe Redux - that's so unusual as to be almost haunting. It takes a while for the penny to drop, but then you realise: you're watching what is virtually a silent movie. There is a long, long sequence in the middle of Cast Away - a kind of Robinson Crusoe Redux - that's so unusual as to be almost haunting. It takes a while for the penny to drop, but then you realise: you're watching what is virtually a silent movie. A man has been washed ashore a tiny desert island in the middle of the Pacific, and all that can be heard is the roll of the surf and the whistling of the wind.

There's no dialogue, because the man has no one else to talk to, and there's no music either. What we listen to instead is the more elusive and mysterious sound of a mind plotting its own survival. Rather than bludgeon our ears in the modern Hollywood way, this movie simply presents us with a stark confrontation between man and the elements, and for a while the effect is extraordinary.Cast Away has been touted as the first time Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis have worked together since their Oscar-gobbling Forrest Gump. Like, some recommendation! The moral of both movies roasts the same old chestnut - in life, you never know what's waiting around the next bend - but the piety and schmaltz of Gump have been commendably (if not completely) suppressed this time.Hanks plays a Federal Express executive troubleshooter named Chuck Noland, a stickler for schedules and deadlines who we first see in action haranguing a crew of slackers in Moscow.Chuck is so wrapped up in his work that he barely has time to exchange Christmas presents with his girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt, low-key and lovely) before he's hopping on another plane to his next assignment. "I'll be right back", he shouts to her across the airport tarmac, a sure omen that he'll be back in about the same time it took Ulysses to return from the Trojan Wars.The plane Chuck boards runs into heavy weather and, in the movie's first bravura passage, goes down somewhere in the Pacific.