Short films are the art of omission, and those in this outstanding Sundance program transform non-sequiturs into surreal poetry. Like Mikey Please's animated The Eagleman Stag, which relates the life of an entomologist and explores the meaning of life by way of the title beetle. Lauren Wolkenstein's The Strange Ones skips the beginning, end, and most of the middle in its story of a man, a boy, and a swimming pool, and is all the creepier for it. Somewhere between Kristen Wiig and Miranda July lies the comic vision of Lake Bell's Worst Enemy, about a woman trapped in a girdle. Zachary Treitz taps into Florida weirdness with We're Leaving, as a pet alligator complicates a couple's relocation from a trailer park, and cramped submariners confront a dead woman in Ariel Kleinman's Deeper than Yesterday. Meanwhile, Trevor Anderson's The High Level Bridge and Ruben Östlund's Incident by a Bank are the token docs, sort of.
