A critic's inside view of festival

PARK CITY, Utah -- It's nobody's fault, really it isn't, but there's a gap between the way the just-concluded Sundance Film Festival is written about in news reports and the way I experienced it as a critic on the ground, a gap that seemed especially large this year.

Because news coverage inevitably focuses on the festival's numerous winners and because Sundance's dramatic competition is its highest-profile section, who won what where is what gets highlighted. That, and what films got picked up for distribution.

It's not that I'm an enemy of the business aspects of Sundance, far from it. In fact, the most off-putting aspect of this year's event was the festival's insistent "aren't we hip" advertising campaign that pushed self-congratulatory slogans such as "This Is the Renewed Rebellion."

Any festival that showcases the deliriously commercial Kristen Stewart-starring "The Runaways" ought to think twice before hyping itself as "the Rebirth of the Battle for Brave New Ideas."

As it turned out, this year's big dramatic winner was an especially satisfying choice: Debra Granik's "Winter's Bone," which won both the grand jury prize and the Waldo Salt screenwriting nod. Set in the clannish, impoverished mountain communities of Missouri's Ozarks, this intensely atmospheric tale follows a teenage girl's bleak and desperate quest for her father.

Though it didn't win a thing, one of the most impressive of the competition's dramas was Tanya Hamilton's "Night Catches Us." Set in 1976 in a Philadelphia neighborhood that's still feeling the effects of a Black Panther movement now past its prime, this rich and satisfyingly multicharacter drama about the intersection of the personal and the political also showcases wonderful performances by stars Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington.

All that notwithstanding, it's an open secret among Sundance veterans that the dramatic competition is not the best place to be going in Park City if you want a satisfying movie experience. .

A better bet each year, because the directors often have more features in their resumes and the programmers have a wider pool to select from, are the foreign films.

While the bigger titles such as France's "A Prophet" and Australia's "Animal Kingdom" (which deservedly won the world dramatic jury prize) performed as expected, even some of the smaller pictures were a tonic to experience.

Though not the prime focus of media attention, the best things in Park City were the festival's horde of documentaries, always a Sundance strength but better than ever this year, and at 40-strong, so wide-ranging in subject matter and style that seeing a chunk of them was like getting an advanced degree in the ways of the world. If there is a better place to experience the documentary form, it doesn't come to mind.

Clearly, if you missed the documentaries in Sundance, you missed a lot. But don't worry. As we used to say in Brooklyn, wait till next year. They'll be just as good. Guaranteed.