• The Hollywood Reporter has already summed up this year’s festival despite there still being a few more days left. The trade calls both the fest and its films “surprising, quality-filled and not as depressing as some expected.”
• Despite this year bringing quality, though, it didn’t necessarily bring buyers. The L.A. Times has a look at how this year was a buyer’s market, particularly noticeable in the low purchase prices and alternative distribution models. And many of the titles picked up, including The Winning Season, Adam and Black Dynamite, were apparently bought for their “broad” audience appeal over their quality.
• AJ Schnack at All these wonderful things writes on the terrible lack of documentary acquisitions so far this festival.
• Marc Webb, whose feature debut, 500 Days of Summer, premiered at this year’s fest, has already made a deal for his second film. He’ll direct The Spectacular Now, another coming-of-age drama also to be scripted by his 500 Days writers, for Fox Searchlight.
• indieWIRE has the 2009 shorts winners. Jury Prizes went to Short Term 12 and Lies while Honorable Mentions include The attack of the robots from Nebula-5, Protect You + Me, Western Spaghetti, Jerrycan, Love You More, I Live in the Woods, Omelette and Treevenge.
• Most of the coverage of Sundance yesterday consisted of report and commentary on the “Dude vs. Film Critic” non-fight. Karina’s mostly first-hand account can be found here.

Fox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film Adam with intent for a 2009 theatrical release. Other big deals of the past 24 hours include Sony Classics’ acquisition of North American rights to the blaxploitation tribute Black Dynamite and Magnolia’s pickup of worldwide rights to Lynn Shelton’s comedy Humpday, which will get a VOD release a month prior to its debut in theaters this summer.

Check out our Sundance Deals chart for the full scoop on these three deals and the rest of the acquisitions as of this morning.

Here’s our running tally of each of the distribution deals announced just before, throughout the course of, and just after the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We will update this post whenever new information comes in, so bookmark it and keep checking back for the newest latest.

Adaptations: Hot Fuzz, the next film in a trend of respectful spoofs playing with genre cliche.

It’s Friday and here’s the third weekly episode of Spout’s FilmCouch. Subscribe to it in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday.

Sundance has begun. Paul and Dave reminisce over their memories of the festival and debate whether or not it’s actually a theme park. Kevin, Adam, and Paul talk to the writer of Unknown, Matthew Waynee, then discuss the film. Was it deep, or are we reading too much into it?