One of the sharpest, best surprises of the festival, which ends Sunday, "Interior. Leather Bar." is a serious yet playful hourlong deconstruction of the representation of homosexuality as viewed through the prism of "Cruising," William Friedkin's 1980 film about an undercover cop, played by a supremely jittery Al Pacino, searching for a killer of gay men. "Interior," directed by Mr. Franco and Travis Mathews, uses as its conceptual jumping-off point a lost 40-minute segment of "Cruising" set in a gay leather bar that Mr. Friedkin has said he had to cut to avoid an X rating. "Interior" primarily turns on the on-set experience of Val Lauren, an actor who appears as himself and as an idea of Mr. Pacino's, while performing in a re-creation of the missing "Cruising" material.

A self-aware exploration of masculine desire and cinematic representation, "Interior" would make an excellent double bill with another of this year's best selections, "Don Jon's Addiction." Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also stars as the title libertine, "Don Jon's" pivots on a New Jerseyan whose addiction to pornography transcends his relationships with living, breathing women. Working in initially broad strokes that become progressively more nuanced as the narrative deepens, Mr. Gordon-Levitt explores what happens to Don Jon when he tries to settle down with a woman (a terrific Scarlett Johansson, doing one of her finest interpretations of a succulent peach), whose realness poses a challenge to Don Jon's reliance on his plastic pleasures. In its current amusingly smutty state, the movie, which was picked up for distribution here, will probably face its own ratings battle.

"Don Jon's Addiction," part of a strong lineup in the noncompetitive premieres section, was one of a number of movies that had attendees wondering if the programmers had sexed up the festival or the world at large had. Whatever the case, titles like "Lovelace," a thankfully nonexploitative biopic from Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman about the life and depressing times of the "Deep Throat" star Linda Boreman, a k a Linda Lovelace (a very fine, vulnerable Amanda Seyfried), were among a number of entries that put sex front and center(fold). The sleaze also rises in "The Look of Love," Michael Winterbottom's flat look at the British sex-entertainment mogul Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan), whose twisted road from naughty to nasty was lined with coke and casualties.

Two other premieres, "Two Mothers" and "Very Good Girls," told much the same tale, though with a generational difference. Enjoyably absurd, "Two Mothers" centers on two lifelong friends (the well-matched Naomi Watts and Robin Wright), who embark on passionate affairs with each other's adult, Adonis-like sons. The French director Anne Fontaine approaches the overheated material with intense gravity, but the excesses of both the story and her choices — it's all terribly blond, sweaty and serious — steer the results toward the perilously parodic. After a screening, Ms. Fontaine told an audience she was surprised to discover that she had made a comedy, an apparent reference to all the earned, unearned, derisive and clearly uncomfortable laughter that her movie inspired.

In "Very Good Girls" the American screenwriter turned first-time feature director Naomi Foner tracks the relationship ups and downs of teenage best friends (a delicate, emotionally nuanced Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen, bringing to mind Ms. Foner's daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal) whose bond is nearly severed by a summer distraction (Boyd Holbrook). Undercut by conventional flourishes like overbearing, telegraphing music and generational miscues — these teenagers don't text, and one reads Sylvia Plath — "Very Good Girls" feels very much like a project that Ms. Foner has been nurturing for some time. In any event, the festival certainly seems to take care of its own: Ms. Foner has long served as a creative adviser for the labs run by its parent organization, the Sundance Institute.

The big, promising news going into the festival was that for the first time women accounted for half of the directors in the American dramatic competition section. As longtime attendees know, women have always done better and received more attention at Sundance than they generate in the outside film world, especially in the studios. (This was confirmed by a new study commissioned by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film, and released during the festival, which looks at the shameful gender inequities in the industry.) At the same time no female directors have been able — or perhaps have received the opportunity — to parlay their Sundance success into the kinds of careers enjoyed by festival alumni who have blown up as big as Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan.

Sundance remains somewhat of a bubble, at least in terms of diversity. When the movies are as good as their good intentions, it can be a beautiful bubble, as with George Tillman Jr.'s touching melodrama "The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete," Andrew Dosunmu's visually splendid "Mother of George" and (at last!) a darkly romantic Beat movie, "Kill Your Darlings" (directed by John Krokidas, with a deeply committed Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg). But once the festival ends, the good vibes and excitement about new, alternative voices and faces fades until next time. There are exceptions. Most recently "Beasts of the Southern Wild," which over the last year has metamorphosed from a Sundance sensation — one partly nurtured by the Sundance Institute — into an Oscar contender. It is an exemplar of representational diversity and true independence among the studio bland and canned.

Those looking for the next "Beasts" at this year's festival, however, would have been disappointed. Although selections like David Lowery's "Ain't Them Bodies Saints," yet another movie dreaming of Terrence Malick, earned eager early word, no one film dominated; rather, a number of titles shared the love and the buzz. Among the most adoringly received was Richard Linklater's "Before Midnight," a near-perfect follow-up to "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset." Once again, the superbly matched Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy resume their roles as peripatetic lovers whose relationship with each other and with the greater world comes alive through their prickly, often very funny and plaintively honest conversations. As they walk and talk, this time in Greece, the lovers worry old wounds and jab open new ones in a movie that shifts from paved street to hotel room, from love to hate with scarcely a stumble.

The independent world has changed profoundly since "Before Sunrise" played in the 1995 festival. By the mid-1990s it had started to feel that Sundance was willingly shaping itself into a steppingstone for filmmakers looking to make the studio leap. Some directors, like Bryan Singer, took the jump, going from "Public Access" obscurity to the "X-Men" franchise, while others, like Mr. Linklater, hewed to a more idiosyncratic trajectory. These days the divide between the majors and the independents is not just blurred, it also can seem irrelevant in a contemporary media world in which directors shuffle from movies to television and back, and sometimes struggle in the nominally independent realm while flourishing in the more adventurous corners of the major studio machine.

Several of the best movies at this year's festival offered further evidence of blurred divides. "Crystal Fairy," which played in the world cinema dramatic competition, was directed by the Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva and features two North Americans, the hilariously contrapuntal Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffman, as reluctant fellow travelers on parallel Chilean trips, one geographic, the other hallucinogenic. As a free spirit who's more complex than she seems, Ms. Hoffman walks away with "Crystal Fairy," often in the glorious and hairy nude. Mr. Cera, who sought out Mr. Silva after seeing his movie "The Maid," also collaborated on another festival title, "Magic Magic," about another Chilean adventure, this one with Juno Temple, that goes wrong, if in a far darker, less appealing key.

Another festival high point, "Blue Caprice," was bankrolled by primarily American producers and directed by Alexandre Moors, a French filmmaker living in New York, which may explain why it wasn't slotted into either the domestic or world competitions. The spare, smart, largely exposition-unencumbered script by Mr. Moors and R. F. I. Porto traces the relationship between the serial killers John A. Muhammad (Isaiah Washington, ferociously magnetic) and Lee Boyd Malvo (Tequan Richmond, a slow heartbreaker) before the two embarked on their murderous sniper rampage in 2002. An exploration of power, madness and grotesque paternalism, the movie refuses any easy answer. Rather, it reveals layer by painful layer how these two, in their crushing isolation and shared madness, transformed from the recognizably human to the monstrously human.