PARK CITY, Utah — “The Deal,” a satirical take on the movie business that played at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, opens in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, with the camera swooping down from Hollywood’s famous block-lettered advertisement for itself. “I love this town,” a producer played by William H. Macy declares in voice-over. “It’s a joke. I love jokes.”

One of three affectionate parodies of moviemaking playing at this year’s festival, “The Deal” takes Sundance’s conflicted feelings about Hollywood and puts them on screen. On the one hand, plenty of festival organizers and ticket-buyers would probably agree that Hollywood is a “cruel and shallow money trench,” to borrow a Hunter Thompson line quoted in Barry Levinson’s “What Just Happened?,” which also made its premiere here last week. On the other hand, Hollywood has managed to dig its way up to Park City. What began 23 years ago as an informal gathering of independent filmmakers and other undiscovered talent has become a heady extravaganza of sponsored parties, red carpets, and multimillion-dollar distribution deals. If programmers had wanted to nip such developments in the bud, they probably could have. Mr. Levinson’s film, which boasts a high-profile cast led by Robert De Niro and a budget of more than $20 million, is pretty solid proof that they haven’t.

To be fair, though, the movie establishment makes riotous fun of itself in Mr. Levinson’s film. Loosely based on a memoir by Art Linson, “What Just Happened?” offers a comic insider’s tour of Hollywood: the stress, the backstabbing, the egos, and the all-important bottom line. Following a disastrous test screening, a producer named Ben (Mr. De Niro) persuades his high-maintenance director (Michael Wincott) to re-cut their film. Meanwhile, the leading man of his next project (Bruce Willis, playing himself) is refusing to shave his beard for a shoot that begins in a few days.

“What Just Happened?” unfolds over the course of a hectic week, with Ben shuttling among a no-nonsense studio head (Catherine Keener), a weak-willed agent (John Turturro), a group of shady Israeli backers, his children, and his two ex-wives, one of whom (Robin Wright Penn) he apparently still loves. Ben suspects her of sleeping with a friend (Stanley Tucci), but he can’t keep his phone quiet long enough to broach the subject.

Mr. De Niro’s turn as the besieged middleman is pitch-perfect, and Mr. Levinson’s sense of comic timing superb. Mr. Linson’s writing targets the absurdity of Hollywood with perfunctory jabs, none pithier than the poster in the studio waiting room that looms over Ben and his director as they speculate on the fate of their latest project. It features a gleaming snake’s eye and a straightforward caption: “$810,000,000.” Of course, everyone involved in “What Just Happened?” — from Mr. Linson, who has produced some 30 films, including “Heat” and “Dick Tracy,” to Sean Penn, who makes a cameo — has done well by Hollywood. That may make them hypocrites, but at least they know whereof they speak.

Mr. Levinson’s film is as sharp and knowing as “The Deal” is lame. In this broad spoof of big-budget moviemaking, Mr. Macy (who co-wrote the screenplay with the director, Steven Schachter) plays a shameless producer who starts wooing a sweet development executive (Meg Ryan) on the set of an action film about Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister. The film’s targets are familiar: the predatory suits, the loony stars, the unlikely intersections of Jewish ritual and Hollywood inanity (“You could say a barucha over the bazooka,” Elliot Gould’s rabbi-producer suggests to the screenwriter).

But unlike Mr. Levinson’s film, “The Deal” depicts the movie set as a place of endless mishaps and casual sex. It’s bad enough that the romantic leads don’t click and the jokes are bad. But you also can’t feel the stress, and turning out a costume drama in two weeks, as the characters do, seems to take no work at all — just a dash of luck and the right assortment of zany ideas. Surely there’s more to life in the money trench than this.

There’s a paradox at work here: To successfully make fun of Hollywood, a film has to live up to it. To live up to Hollywood, the filmmakers have to buy into it. Robert Altman’s star-studded indictment “The Player” — which, miraculously, the late director made for $8 million — may have managed to leave a mark when it bit the hand that fed it; achieving any more than that may be impossible.

Such hang-ups are largely absent from “Baghead,” a no-budget examination of the shoestring indie film, written and directed by Mark and Jay Duplass. (Sony Pictures Classics bought it on Friday, while “The Deal” and “What Just Happened?” remain without distributors.) On a whim, four friends living in Los Angeles drive to Chad’s (Steve Zissis) uncle’s cabin to write a movie in which they will star. But interest wanes, and the screenplay quickly becomes a way for the friends to score the roles they want to play in one another’s lives. Chad begs Matt (Ross Partridge) to make his character and Michelle’s (Greta Gerwig) lovers. But Matt has his own agenda.

“We’re just going to be friends,” he says, describing his character and his ex-girlfriend’s (Elise Muller).

“With a sexual undercurrent,” she adds.

In the middle of the night, Michelle has a drunken vision of a mysterious, bag-headed figure prowling the woods. Matt seizes on the bogeyman as an excellent idea for a movie, but then, in what may or may not be a jealous prank orchestrated by someone in the group, the baghead starts haunting them — and their script starts writing itself. All the elements of a bosky horror movie are in place, but “Baghead” is not a talky remake of “The Blair Witch Project.” The visceral thrills — which are brief, and more funny than scary — take a backseat to a nuanced exploration of the ambitions and relationships of artistically inclined youth, a theme the Duplass brothers have explored in their three previous Sundance movies and a primary preoccupation of the “mumblecore” movement with which they are often associated.

Like “What Just Happened?” and “The Deal,” this modest film is a celebration of itself. But it’s awfully hard to accuse a production that consists of little more than a car, a cabin, and a brown paper bag of self-congratulation. After the film’s Sundance premiere last Thursday, a cheeky audience member asked Mark Duplass if he and his brother had shot an alternate ending for the DVD.

“We haven’t shot it yet,” he said, “but if you give us 20 bucks, we’ll do it.”