This afternoon I caught a public screening of 'Waitress,' which arrives at the festival on the heels of tragedy: Its director, writer and co-star, Adrienne Shelly, was murdered in her New York City apartment last November by a construction worker who got angry when she complained he was making too much noise.

It's bittersweet for the cast and crew of 'Waitress' even to be here, and that makes for a heartwarming story even if that's the only thing the film has going for it. But to add the whipped cream on top of the cherry pie, the movie's good. I mean really good. Keri Russell plays Jenna, a waitress with a gift for making heavenly pies. (She works at Joe's Pie Diner. Of course.) Jenna's married to Earl (Jeremy Sisto), who's controlling and given to jealous rages; desperately unhappy, she's finally begun plotting her escape. But then she discovers she's pregnant, and despite her indifference toward the baby, she starts going to see the handsome new doctor in town, Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion) -- and the sad, sad waitress and the sweet, neurotic doctor embark upon a halting affair.

Funny, tender, quirky and sad, this is a film blessed with a knockout cast that includes, in addition to Russell, Fillion and Sisto, Shelly herself and Cheryl Hines as Jenna's co-workers, plus the incomparable Andy Griffith as the eponymous Joe. 'Waitress,' with its homespun charms and Southern small-town setting, could have easily gotten overly cute and folksy, and at times it does start to veer in that direction; but Shelly knew the value of subtlety, and therefore the story never gets too corny, and the characters are always believable.

Sunday was a jam-packed day in the Moviefone Unscripted studio on Main, where you couldn't turn around with bumping into a celeb. Lucky for me, I was hanging out there at just the right time to catch the exquisite Vera Farmiga, who was there to promote the film 'Joshua' with her director, George Ratliff.

Up until this past fall, Farmiga wasn't particularly well known despite having drawn universal raves for her work in 'Down to the Bone.' (For my part, I'd seen in last year's 'Running Scared,' and she was by far the best thing about that movie.) Then came 'The Departed,' and now she's finally in a position to bring attention to smaller films like 'Joshua,' a psychological thriller about a mother who discovers that her son's a "bad seed." (Rumor has it, by the way, that there's a bidding war afoot for this film, with Fox Searchlight currently in the lead. Updated: Fox Searchlight nabbed the film today.)

Farmiga looked lovely as she walked into the studio for the interview -- great jeans, cute little blazer, blond shoulder-length hair -- and I'm such a huge admirer that I made up an excuse to talk to her, like the dork that I am. (Me: "You want some water?" Her: "Yeah, that'd be great, thanks!") The interview itself, in which she and Ratliff chatted with each other about the film, went great. She very openly and easily talked about her desire to have a child of her own, and about the ways in which she and her siblings (she's the second-oldest of seven kids) used to torture each other growing up. It involved long streams of drool. They also talked so much about 'Down to the Bone,' which Ratliff and Scorsese both love and used as their basis for casting Farmiga, that I resolved to rent it the second I get back to New York.

When she introduced herself on-camera, incidentally, I learned that I'd been pronouncing her name wrong this whole time. It's Far-MI-ga, not FAR-miga. I can't quite get used to the proper pronunciation. Sounds a little too much like "formica" -- and Farmiga's way too cool to be associated with fake kitchen countertop material. But maybe that's just me.

Greetings from Park City, Utah, where, contrary to what everyone and their mother -- including my own mother -- warned me before I came here, it's nice, sunny and not that cold. Yet.

Part of the fun of Sundance is trying to play prophet and figure out which movies are going to end up becoming the Next Big Indie. Last year, the one movie I truly loved was 'Little Miss Sunshine,' and we all know what ended up happening with that one. So far this year, everyone's asking each other, "What have you heard?" "What's supposed to be good?" and there isn't anything close to a consensus. But we'll do our best to figure it out.

To that end, I saw three films on Friday, the first full day of the festival: 'The Savages,' 'Snow Angels' and 'Rocket Science.' The one I liked best was 'The Savages,' which despite the title is not about a couple who gets stranded in the wilderness and turns to cannibalism to survive. Nope, it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as John and Wendy Savage (get it?), dysfunctional siblings who are forced to take care of their estranged father (Philip Bosco) when he develops dementia. Specifically, he starts writing vulgar words on the bathroom wall using, instead of ink, his ... uh, well, it's a word that rhymes with "grit."