A.O. Scott, chief film critic for the NYT, ruminates on the films he saw at this year's Sundance Film Festival  -- especially the diverging paths of docs and drama.

An excerpt:

It was perhaps not remarkable that so many of the nonfiction films addressed social problems and political issues ... But even documentaries that did not directly tackle contentious public matters - like Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's rousing, audience-award-winning "Murderball," about quadriplegic rugby players, or Mark Becker's quiet and poignant "Romántico," about a Mexican guitarist's journey home from San Francisco - seemed motivated by a desire to take hold of some of the hard and strange realities of modern life.

What was striking was how few of the fictional films seemed to share this impulse, or, if they did, to give it persuasive form. Even the best of them - like "Me and You and Everyone We Know," Miranda July's marvelously idiosyncratic debut, which won yet another special jury prize - took place in self-enclosed worlds, delimited either by the preoccupations of the director or by the narrow perspectives of the characters. If the American documentary competition ranged far and wide in history, geography and politics, its dramatic sibling seemed constricted by comparison, surveying a landscape of small towns, suburbs, unhappy families and, above all, troubled teenagers.

A festival devoted to nurturing young filmmakers can be expected to have its share of coming-of-age stories and explorations of adolescent angst, but an alien whose space ship happened to land in Park City last week might have concluded, from the evidence on screen, that the United States is populated mainly by high school students whose consuming interests are drugs, sex and killing themselves and each other.