Fruitvale Station won the dramatic grand jury prize and dramatic audience awards at Robert Redford's annual celebration of indie film-making in January.
And it is a crowd pleaser; the tumultuous audience response to "Curves" during screenings at this year's Sundance Film Festival made it a sure Dramatic Audience Award winner.
"The Station Agent," the writer and director Tom McCarthy's vision of an eccentric ad hoc family that grows out of the low-key, charismatic powers of a train-obsessed loner of a dwarf, won the dramatic audience award.
"Maria," which was a dramatic audience award winner here, fits into the genre of ordinary lives shattered that has become an HBO staple in the last year, with films like "American Splendor" and "Elephant".
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a film about a pair of student filmmakers who befriend a girl with cancer, won both the US dramatic audience award and the grand jury prize at the 31st Sundance film festival awards.
The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker's film about the Nat Turner slave revolt, won both the US dramatic audience award and the grand jury prize at the 32nd Sundance film festival awards.
"Dark Days" won the documentary audience award while "Two Family House," a period drama set in the 1950's Long Island from director Raymond DeFelitta that was presented in the festival's American Spectrum section and thus not eligible for jury prizes, won the dramatic audience award.
The latter opened in limited release this weekend after a tremendous premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it received a standing ovation, saw one of the festival's costliest bidding wars ever and went on to win the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award.
But spectator sports have always been dramatic events; ancient audiences did not turn out for chariot races in search of boredom.
Moreover, though the performances here are stageworthy and the dialogue sophisticated in just the way that makes American producers admire the British, the subject -- vice without guns -- is frankly not dramatic enough for audiences who have seen even half an episode of "The Wire".
