SUNDANCE FINAL DAY: THE BELIEVER

You never can tell at a film festival. Just when Sundance audiences felt they had narrowed the favourites to two or three, led by Todd Field's praised family drama In The Bedroom, in comes the dark horse to gallop off with the Grand Jury Prize.

The Believer is a certainly dark - the tale of an impassioned religious student who joins a fascist movement to become that seeming impossibility, a Jewish neo-Nazi - and manages a fair gallop. Coming from a dual career as novelist and Hollywood screenwriter (Internal Affairs, Enemy of the State), director Henry Bean skilfully handles a good cast - newcomer Ryan Gosling as the hero, Theresa Russell and Billy Zane in support - in a movie that goes straight for the ideological jugular. You could call it a sensationalist choice for winner in a festival full of dramas that worked by subtlety and subtext (In The Bedroom, Green Dragon, The Deep End). But then I would have sidelined the lot to give top honours to Richard Linklater's adult animation fantasia Waking Life: life, death, dreams, philosophy, computer graphics - what more could one want?

Best Documentary went to Kate Davis's moving Southern Comfort, all about a cancer-stricken male-to-female transexual in the Deep South. Documentarywise it was that kind of festival: gender-bending, edge-of-the-envelope. Kirby Dick's intriguing Chain Camera (teenagers talking about sex and drugs) and Billy Corben's startling Raw Deal (rape and legal chicanery) must also have been in contention. It all made for a newsworthy festival, something that Sundance will need to be next year when it competes, here in Park City, with nothing less than the Winter Olympics.

SUNDANCE SEVEN: NOBODY'S BABY

"I invented this film because I wanted to come here," writer-director David Seltzer told the world premiere crowd last night. Seltzer has always seemed a Hollywood baby - he helped make Tom Hanks a star with Punchline - but he made the maverick-spirited Nobody's Baby, he says, because he worships the Sundance Film Festival and all it stands for.

At first it didn't look as if Sundancers would stand for this. As abducted baby comedies go it barely does. The plot and ex-prisoner hero (Skeet Ulrich) stand still while contrived imbroglios are thrown at them, ranging from the roadside car wreck that yields up a live baby, to the frenzied money-raising efforts of the tot-adopting Ulrich, his brother Gary Oldman (unrecognizable in specs and wild sideburns) and the trailer-park eccentrics they take up with. These include an overacting Mary Steenburgen, an Indian sage full of wise proverbs (as Hollywood Indians must be) and a girl who shoots dead her lover. Would you try robbing a pawnshop with accomplices like this?

After an hour spent chasing the ghost of Raising Arizona, Seltzer finally calms down. The last act is sweeter and gentler. Oldman starts to act without exclamation marks; Ulrich and the baby make an ever more appealing duo. Sundance applauded, with a few whistles that we'll take as enthusiasm.

In a day for narrow filmic victories we had Jump Tomorrow and L.I.E.. The first, nabbed by some distributors, is a comedy of romantic misadventure that survives the crass stereotyping of its central trio: macho black man, tempestuous Spanish girl, love-obsessed Frenchman whose car number plate reads 'Amour 1'. L.I.E. is the patchy but powerful tale of a boy who acquiesces in paedophilia, finding a transient father figure in the old roue skilfully played by Brian Cox.

DAY SIX: WAKING LIFE

It can all happen in one terrible day. Bad movies; a prolonged sleet storm; and your car is towed away from an adjacent supermarket lot during a screening. Cost for retrieval, $140. As I announced in the first of these columns, you cannot park in Park City, Utah.

Then in the late afternoon, light gleams through clouds and you see Waking Life, the best Sundance feature to date. Writer-director Richard Linklater, whose flair for super-real youth comedies gave us Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia and Before Sunrise, takes his imagination into digital hyperspace with this fantasia about life, death and dreams.

The story is no more than a 'day in the life of', except that the young hero's day or life may be over; he may be dreaming on the other side of the grave; and the motormouthed folk he meets one by one, gabbing every philosophy under the stars, may be afterlifers like him. Like him they are also 'animated' by Linklater's chosen style for the film: computer-painting over live action, so that the visuals are an odd hypnotic blend of art and reality. (He did it at minimal expense on friends' PCs.)

The film's beauty, wit and cogency knock socks off its only precedent in recent cinema, Vincent Ward's painting-in-motion fable of the beyond starring Robin Williams, What Dreams May Come. Its exploring spirit should ensure it critical success, though its density of thought and dialogue may prompt many a multiplex moviegoer to run screaming into an adjoining cinema.

DAY FIVE: GREEN DRAGON

We have had cell phone meltdown at Sundance. Nation may speak to nation at a film festival, but neighbours sometimes have a hard time speaking to neighbours. With mobile phones hiccuping into paralysis thanks to overpopulation, movies have become ever more valuable as a gathering and uniting point. None more than Timothy Bui's Green Dragon, a moving bid to heal the wounds of Vietnam on the American home front and a film empowered by its mix of cultures and languages.

In the 1970s thousands of south Vietnamese refugees were interned in transit camps like that depicted in the film, a maze of huts filled with families each carrying its tragic memories. Bui builds his story round three main characters: the American officer-in-charge (Patrick Swayze), the refugees' camp leader (Don Duong), tending the son and daughter of a sister he guiltily left in Saigon, and a black cook (Forest Whitaker) who befriends the little son. Giving extra richness is the swell of stories lapping at the edge. These touch in every aspect of a life lived and left on the other side of the world, from the girl suffering under the yoke of an arranged marriage to the old General haunted by his nation's defeat.

Bui, whose co-scripting brother Tony had a prizewinning Sundance hit some years ago with the delicate Three Seasons, has a fine eye for visual detail and emotional nuance. Only a last-reel anxiety to leave the audience with strong take-home emotions lets the film down, giving us in too short order a suicide, a fatal illness and a wedding party poignantly but contrivedly broken into by horrors from the past.

DAY FOUR: ENIGMA

The biggest firestorm of flashbulbs at Sundance has been drawn not by a star, nor by a director, but by a producer. The whole of Park City seemed to have squeezed into the Eccles Theatre, nominally to see the war-and-espionage romp Enigma but no less evidently to ogle the well-preserved rock star - one Mick Jagger - who bought novelist Robert Harris's second world war bestseller five years ago and slowly helped it grow into a movie.

At the post-screening discussion Jagger explained how he purchased, at a Sotheby's sale, an actual Enigma decoding machine which he displayed and demonstrated to director Michael Apted and screenwriter Tom Stoppard. With talents like that Enigma had to be watchable, though you shouldn't expect Citizen Kane.

Dougray Scott, resembling the young Tom Courtenay, stars as the love-bruised Bletchley Park boffin tasked with working out, first, how the German U-boats are encrypting their messages on the eve of a mighty north Atlantic ambush and, secondly, why girlfriend and counter-intelligence colleague Saffron Burrows has done a bunk, taking vital documents.

DAY THREE: RAW DEAL and THE BUSINESS OF STRANGERS

No film festival is complete without controversy. Sundance has screened two films about rape that might have been designed simultaneously to inflame feminists and unnerve men. Billy Corben's Raw Deal: A Question of Consent is an absorbing documentary about a Florida legal furore involving a girl who claimed to have been raped during a university 'frat house' party. The students' videos recording the night's activity were confiscated for evidence; the police decided they proved consent and charged the girl with false accusation; whereupon women's rights activists stormed into town and the cops tried to appease both parties by throwing belated misdemeanour charges at the boys.

The result was an unholy mess, recounted by the key players and featuring jaw-dropping excerpts from the videos, copies of which were soon - in accordance with Florida public record law - made available to everyone in the state, with no shortage of requests.

Was the girl raped or was she a false accuser? The film lets us judge, unlike Patrick Stettner's The Business of Strangers, a creepily compelling feature about a businesswoman (Stockard Channing) who, while overnighting in a posh hotel, is lured by a young assistant (Julia Stiles) into humiliating a male colleague.

The girl gives a story about the long-ago rape of a friend, but do we believe her? Even if we do, do we believe this is the man? Either way, a Bacchanal of gender-reversed ravishment ensues, illustrating first that men can sometimes have done to them what they do to women - allowing for physical variance - and secondly that writer-director Stettner is a cool dark-minded stylist who, with a little extra edge, could become an heir to the cinema's misogynist laureate, Neil LaBute.

DAY TWO: IN THE BEDROOM

A film festival can teach us the same lessons as a fishing trip. Excitement when something heavy tugs at your line can become dismay when it turns out to be an old bicycle wheel. And what starts as a minor twitch on the rod can prove the catch of the day. The old bicycle wheels at Sundance have been Kasi Lemmons' A Caveman's Valentine, a portentous mystical thriller starring Samuel L Jackson, and Tom DiCillo's keenly-hyped Double Whammy, a comedy of loose ends with Elizabeth Hurley and Denis Leary trying to make up in mugging for what the script lacks in wit.

The catch of the weekend, surfacing in a small press show, was In The Bedroom, a drama of family love and bereavement so subtly directed that you might mistake it - especially if concussed by the above films - for a problem-of-the-week TV movie.

Sissy Spacek and a Maine-accented Tom Wilkinson play the couple who lose their son to a jealousy murder, when the ex-husband of his girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) rampages through with a gun. Director and sometime actor Todd Field (who played Tom Cruise's bar-pianist pal in Eyes Wide Shut) deals expertly with a screenplay that changes focus halfway through, shifting from the youngsters to the parents.

With a beautifully understated sense of place - the fishing town with its verdant slopes, soughing off-sea breezes and neighbourliness that can swing between warmth and malice - the film shows the testing changes of weather that married love can move through, needing steady nerves to steer a course through anxiety, grief, mutual reproach, reconciliation. The women take the main acting honours, with Spacek and Tomei both superb, but Wilkinson also shines in an unshowy role.

DAY ONE: MY FIRST MISTER

Two truths about Park City, Utah: it's no city and you can't park. The views are stunning. The snow is lovely. The preserved Main Street of the old silver-mining town is a knockout. But the annual influx of Sundance festivalgoers causes crisis congestion in a mountaintop hamlet with barely enough space for the locals and skiers, both of whom historically got here first. Robert Redford's movie spree, 20 this year, carries on undaunted. If necessary you can carry your car into the cinema: the Eccles Theatre is big enough.

The opening movie was the audience-pleasing romantic comedy My First Mister, debut-directed by ex-actress Christine Lahti (star of Bill Forsyth's Housekeeping) who won a 1996 Oscar with her first short film. With Lahti herself setting the warmhearted tone by thanking everyone present almost by name, from guest-seated co-workers to us, the curtains parted for a sweet-sour tale of love between a 17-year-old gothic-garbed misfit, played by Leelee Sobieski with black leather, multiple piercings and Addams Family makeup, and the dapper, repressed clothes-store manager (actor-filmmaker Albert Brooks) she adopts as a cross between surrogate father and platonic boyfriend.

It begins as one of the brightest odd-couple films since Harold and Maude, with funny lines matched by wittily offbeat camerawork. It then dips a little below that apogee, burdened by twee piano music and a fatal-illness plot development. But wondrous work by the stars - Brooks drily twinkling and delivering custom-made one-liners, Sobieski spanning comedy and throaty emotion like a young Helen Hunt - justified the audience's applause and the movie's place as a Sundance opener. More stars are expected, including Elizabeth Hurley, Samuel L Jackson and Julianne Moore just this weekend, and hopefully more twinkling.