For ten days in January, the indie world will convene in Park City, Utah for talent scouting, career building, deal making, and buzz creating at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Keener, Matt Dillon, Ashley Judd, Paul Giamatti, Winona Ryder, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Gael Garcia Bernal, Sam Shepard, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Justin Timberlake, Neil Young, and the Beastie Boys are among the stars expected. Can Paris Hilton be far behind? Hey, Tinkerbell, Cesar Food for Small Dogs is an official sponsor! Wait a minute, yup, she's scheduled to hit Park City too: hosting a magazine party.

Although some industry types are already grousing that the movies don’t sound terribly commercial, there are bound to be surprises to rival such 2005 discoveries as Hustle & Flow, The Squid and the Whale, The March of the Penguins, and Murderball. Besides, “commercial” isn’t really the point, is it? (Unless, of course, you’re writing or cashing the checks.) In a year when many of the leading Oscar contenders have yet to crack $40 million at the box office, it’s clearer than ever that quality needn’t translate into quantity for films to have an enormous impact.

Kicking it all off in Park City on Jan. 19 is the premiere of Sony Classics’ Friends With Money, an ensemble dramedy from Sundance vet Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing). Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand star as longtime pals living privileged but not necessarily happy L.A. existences; meanwhile, their friend Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) is floundering, having quit her teaching job to clean houses. Expect offbeat, keenly observed moments; dispatches from the battle between the sexes; and new evidence that Good Girl Aniston’s most interesting film work is being done in indies.

Other gala premieres include eagerly awaited new films from Terry Zwigoff and Michel Gondry. Zwigoff reteams with his Ghost World screenwriter, cartoonist Daniel Clowes, on Sony Classics’ Art School Confidential, a combination murder mystery and skewering of art-world pretentions that stars Bee Season’s Max Minghella (son of director Anthony) and features John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, and Anjelica Huston. Up for acquisition is The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries) as a young man with a volatile dream life, in which Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) continues his probing of the human psyche.

Also hotly anticipated by distributors are Little Miss Sunshine, the tale of a dysfunctional family’s trip to a kiddie beauty pageant, with Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, and Toni Collette; and the psychological thriller The Night Listener, directed by Patrick Stettner (The Business of Strangers) and cowritten by Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) from his novel. Robin Williams stars as a radio talk-show host who receives a manuscript from a troubled young listener, and begins a dialogue with him; the in-demand Toni Collette plays the boy’s guardian.

In the Dramatic Competition, acquisitions execs will be looking for another Garden State or The Squid and the Whale to emerge. Among the candidates: Come Early Morning, starring Ashley Judd (returning to the festival at which she scored her first triumph, in Ruby in Paradise) as a woman in a small southern community who must break out of some bad habits; Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy) makes her writing and directing debut. Actor/comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, whose 1992 film Shakes the Clown was perhaps a bit ahead of its time, has written and directed Stay, in which a young woman (Melinda Page Hamilton) reveals something about her sexual past to her fiance that changes everything. It’s been described as John Waters meets David Lynch, and even if that’s only half true, it sounds promising.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, starring Robert Downey Jr., Shia La Boeuf, Rosario Dawson, and Chazz Palminteri, is first-time writer-director Dito Montiel’s autobiographical look back at life in his tough neighborhood in Queens. Maggie Gyllenhaal is said to deliver a knockout performance as Sherrybaby, a young mother trying to get her life back on track after being released from prison. And Paul Giamatti (Sideways, Cinderella Man), stars as an auto upholsterer whose passion is falconry in The Hawk Is Dying, based on the novel by Harry Crews. (Giamatti also costars with Edward Norton and Jessica Biel in the premiere section’s The Illusionist, a thriller set in 1900 Vienna about a magician, a murdered duchess, and a suspicious detective.) Amber Tamblyn (TV's Joan of Arcadia) and Tilda Swinton face off in Stephanie Daley as a girl accused of killing her baby and a pregnant psychologist with her own tragic past who must determine whether the girl is mentally competent. And finally, for something completely different, there’s Right at Your Door, starring Mary McCormack and Rory Cochrane, about what happens in one couple’s L.A. home after reports are heard on the radio of dirty-bomb detonations and an advancing, possibly toxic cloud of ash. The low-budget, intimate approach to the unthinkable could make this a winner.

There’s nothing quite like walking out of the Egyptian Theater at 2 a.m. after a midnight horror movie like The Blair Witch Project or Saw, and this year the buzz is that Salvage— about a small-town, midwestern college student who gets into her boyfriend’s truck with a stranger—may offer the perfect blend of thrills and chills. (Its brother directors, Jeffrey and Joshua Crook, were just been snapped up by an agency.) There’s also Lions Gate’s The Descent, in which six adventurous girlfriends run into trouble on an expedition in an uncharted cave (look out for those monstrous underground humanoids!).

Sundance has always been a major showcase for documentaries. This year, music is the subject of many of the selections, as the influence and performances of artists as diverse as Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, the Beastie Boys, the Police, and hardcore bands like Black Flag are all celebrated. (We wouldn’t be surprised to see a few special-event concerts popping up around town.) Festival-goers might also bump into Al Gore, whose crusade to address the dangers of global warming is covered in An Inconvenient Truth, and Ralph Nader, whose career as a consumer rights activist is profiled in An Unreasonable Man.

In addition to the Nader film, the Documentary Competition includes ThinLauren Greenfield’s intimate look at young anorexic women in a Florida eating-disorders clinic; Wide Awake, Alan Berliner’s investigation into his struggle with insomnia; TV Junkie, based on 3,000 hours of footage shot by Rick Kirkham, who, with his video camera and a Truman Show-like zeal, documented both his rise in television news (to national correspondent for Inside Edition) and the harrowing events in his personal life; and Wordplay, about New York Times crossword puzzle maven Will Shortz and the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Two other docs cover movie-related topics: This Film Is Not Yet Rated, directed by Kirby Dick (Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist and the Oscar-nominted Twist of Faith), investigates whether the Motion Picture Association of America holds independent films to stricter standards than they do big-studio offerings, why violence and sex seem to trigger wildly different ratings, and why the MPAA operates in such secrecy. And in Who Needs Sleep?, legendary cinematographer and sometime director Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) teams with Lisa Leeman to show how long days on a movie set can lead to tragedy; the catalyst for their blend of disturbing insider anecdotes and medical findings on sleep deprivation was the 1997 death of an assistant cameraman, who nodded off at the wheel and crashed after working a 19-hour day.

All of which begs the question: If a Sundancer goes to see The Science of Sleep, Wide Awake, and Who Needs Sleep? on the same day, what are the chances of catching any Z’s that night?