Thank You, Mr. Redford

In case you missed the "art" that is showing at the Sundance Film Festival, here's a review:

In Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale," one of the best films in a very mixed-bag dramatic competition this year, a divorced father considers an affair with a student, his older son dithers about whether to bed a "nice" girl or the same, wilder student his father's with, and the 11-ish son reacts to his parents' split by masturbating in the library stacks and marking his territory by smearing the result around school.

In Rebecca Miller's "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," a 16-year-old girl raised alone on an island by her father begins rebelling by abruptly asking a visiting virginal boy to deflower her; when he begs off, she lets that boy's punkish younger brother do the deed, thanking him afterward and then hanging the reddened sheet out to dry for dad's edification.

In Miranda July's deceptively lightweight "Me and You and Everyone We Know," a first-grade-level boy who can barely read manages to type out some simultaneously innocent and outrageous Internet proposals about the possibilities of excrement exchange, while his high school-age brother is the recipient of oral favors from two mid-teen girls who want to know if he can tell the difference between their techniques.

In Melissa Painter's "Steal Me," a 15-year-old boy becomes the Don Juan of a small Montana town, while in Arie Posin's "The Chumscrubber," a high schooler comes on strong to the mother of his girlfriend.

In Mike Binder's "The Upside of Anger," a high school girl flaunts her affair with a much older man in her distraught mother's face.

In Marcos Siega's "Pretty Persuasion," three Beverly Hills high school girls deviously engineer a sexual harassment suit against a teacher by using their sexual wiles.

In Rian Johnson's "Brick," all the high school characters talk and behave like characters out of a Dashiell Hammett novel, with sex entering into the equation just as it would for adults.

On the foreign front, Ziad Doueiri's French picture "Lila Says" centers on a mid-teen girl using sexual power as a significantly older woman might, while Park Chul-soo's new South Korean film "Green Chair" is about the boundary-pushing affair between a 32-year-old woman and a 19-year-old male student, who, under Korean law, is still a minor.

Perhaps most startling is David Slade's "Hard Candy," in which an alarmingly aware 14-year-old girl takes revenge on a man who may or may not have preyed upon underage girls by tying him up and cutting him where it counts. The sexual sophistication of her character, not to mention her wherewithal and cleverness, is way beyond her years.