The sun finally peaked through this afternoon in Park City, causing a bit of snowmelt and sharp ice cicles to come tumbling down from gutters all over this snow covered resort town. After a day of cinematic mixed bags on Saturday, the weather wasn’t the only thing that improved on Sunday, although the documentaries I’ve seen all weekend have been universally outstanding.

I missed the AFC title game, so I didn’t get to relish the Jets demise at the hands of the Colts (sorry New Yorkers, but I’m a Bengals fan and you ruined my January), but the NFL figures prominently in Amir Bar-Lev’s stunning look at the life and death of Arizona Cardinals strong safety turned U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman. The Tillman Story details the five year battle of Tillman’s family to discover just how the oldest of three boys, who was widely used by the Bush administration and the GOP echo chamber as a symbol of unbridled heroism, died in the Afghan mountains on April 22^nd, 2004. Initially told he died valiantly in a Taliban ambush, he was actually killed by negligent friendly fire, a fact the U.S. military went to great lengths hide, especially from his brother Kevin, who served in the same Ranger unit.

Bar-Lev (My Kid Could Paint That) combines archival footage of the absurd media coverage and political exploitation at the time with interviews of his family and fellow soldiers. While the film doesn’t reinvent the wheel aesthetically, former 25 new face Sean Kirby (Police Beat, Zoo) contributes his typical lovely lensing to the affair and it provides yet another startling explanation of the malfeasance of W, Rummy (the most chilling shot in the piece is a Rumsfeld smile after a Congressional hearing on the matter) and, perhaps most sadly, the man currently running our endeavors in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who wrote the initial memo to the Washington brass that institutionalized the cover up.

Entourage star Adrien Grenier has a public image that just screams superficial playboy, but he has dabbled in directing before (his narrative short Euthanasia played Tribeca a few years back) and his inward looking feature doc Teenage Paparazzo was the most pleasant surprise I’ve encountered yet on the non-fiction side. Several years ago, as his fame was just taking off, he noticed that among the paparazzi following him around was a surprisingly young, blonde and savvy photographer. How could a fourteen year old boy be a working member of the LA paparazzi?

Grenier set out to discover just that and in the process of getting to know the world of young Austin Visschedyk, Grenier himself becomes a paparazzi, stalking fellow celebrities like Brooke Shields and Eva Longoria-Parker. With Austin however, he indulges in some of the same exploitation he’s subjected to himself. Sure, he interviews some very smart celebs (Matt Damon, Rosie O’Donnell and, surprisingly, Paris Hilton) and a slew of media theorists, but his primary subject is, despite his seeming sophistication, an impressionable and shallow teenager who valorizes fame and is suddenly best buds with one of Hollywood’s bright young stars. Yet Grenier’s self-reflexive enough to realize this and one of the strongest aspects of this funny and sneakily sad meditation on our national obsession with celebrity is his genuine affection and concern for this industrious but troubled kid, who serves as a poster child for an entire generation of media saturated young people who suffer from a severely warped sense of self-worth.

Homemade in the most literal sense, emotionally wrenching in the extreme and observant of a milieu that just about never gets represented in cinema, Chico Colvard’s Family Affair is a small revelation. Sins of the father don’t just visit the children in Colvard’s corner of the high south and industrial midwest, they haunt them.  Colvard’s documents the sexual abuse his sisters suffered for years at the hands of his father, a race obsessed, Mississippi reared black Vet who was sexually abused by his own mother and habitually sought the comfort of white women as some kind of perverse solace for the racism that did (and continues to) run rampant in the Colvard families’ northern Kentucky and southwestern Ohio orbit. He ultimately married a white woman of German-Jewish descent who reared him his four abused children; she left him and the children after years of abuse and her son Chico’s fateful, largely unexplained shooting of his sister Paula that provides the film’s entry point.

Colvard spent years interviewing his father and sisters while searching for his mother to put together the rest of the pieces. When he finds her, she is living with a second husband in rural Wisconsin and has converted to Christianity. Paula, who has suffered a stroke, two heart attacks and twenty-two surgeries since he accidentally shot her in the leg, doesn’t seem quite as bad off as younger sister Chici, who lives in a west side of Cincinnati hellhole with her own stunted daughter and suffers from schizophrenia. Angelika, the fairest of the three (thus her father’s favorite), seems the most well put together in adulthood, but she suffers from the most irrational and haunting of fears, that she may carry the seeds of child abuse in her genes. There is no escape for these people and very little hope for solace. Colvard’s doc is rudimentary from a technical standpoint, but his incredible story, sense of place and searching camera more than make up for it.

Among the narratives I’ve seen, David Michod’s terrific and terrifying debut, the world dramatic competition entry Animal Kingdom, is clearly the most memorable. Like his stunning short films Netherland Dwarf and Crossbow, it’s a smoothly photographed, moodily scored meditation on a trapped, dim and docile young man who suffers at the hands of a careless and, in this case, criminal family. James Frecheville is stoic and sullen as the lead, who we first glimpse as he’s watching a rancid television gameshow next to an unconscious woman who turns out to be his just recently heroin OD’d mother. Brought into the fold of his criminal clan of uncles by his complicit grandmother, he quickly becomes there errand boy and accomplice in the brutal revenge murder of a pair of policemen.

Michod and editor Luke Doolan specialize in unforgiving worlds. They create a constant sense of dread and bath us and their characters in it, ones who are universally well drawn by the strong ensemble cast of unknowns, save Guy Pearce as the detective trying to get the protag to sell out his pathologically murderous family. Like his previous work, Michod relies on an insistent voice over to provide biting interiority while the unrelentingly grim working class Melbourne milieu is strikingly depicted in slow motion shots and even slower push ins. Jacki Weaver as the grandmother and Ben Mendelsohn as the most sadistic and yet emotionally needy of the brothers’ Brown turn in a pair of near perfect performances. This is as impressive a debut as I’m likely to see all week.

In the US dramatic competition, actor turned director Mark Ruffalo’s Sympathy for Delicious has suffered from low expectations, at least among the members of the jaded New York P&I corp I pal around with. Despite its lame still photos and odd synopsis involving faith healing and hip-hop DJs, I’m happy to report that it’s an altogether winning confection. Screenwriter Christopher Thorton stars as the newly crippled but once prominent DJ Dean “Delicious” O’Dwyer, a hot tempered man of much self-pity and little humility despite his humble conditions, who discovers he is imbued with faith healing abilities and chooses to exploit them in all the wrong ways.

Grounded in the realities of the misbegotten and dispossessed of LA’s skid row as well as the excesses and superficiality of LA’s rock scene, Ruffalo provides us with a truly unlikable protagonist who only earns our sympathy after some hard won lessons in selflessness and grace. While juggling the metaphysical and realistic, Ruffalo manages to steer his high and easily derailed concept to a satisfying ending. Featuring terrific supporting work from a stable of veteran character actors (Noah Emmerich, John Carroll Lynch) and movie stars (Orlando Bloom, Laura Linney, Juliette Lewis), Mr. Ruffalo issues another one of his fantastic performances as a wearied Priest who runs a skid row soup kitchen and who first attempts to steer O’Dwyer’s miracle work toward the ecumenical instead of the capitalistic.

It is often debated but generally agreed upon among scholars of the civil rights era that the election of Jimmy Carter (widely embraced by the burgeoning black middle class in the north and midwest) drilled a final nail into the coffin of the more aggressive and militant black power movement. While its more mainstream counterparts have been enshrined into public valorization, little mention is given to the Stokely Carmichael’s and H. Rap Brown’s in the popular history of the struggle for African-Americans to win equal protection under the law and to unyieldingly pursue life, liberty and happiness. Thus it is striking and yet odd to hear Mr. Carter’s progressive, southern voice hover over the handsome HD images of Tonya Hamilton’s curious look at the last gasps of the Black Panthers in Philadelphia, Night Catches Us.

Anthony Mackie plays Marcus, a man haunted by the past who has recently returned to his working class Philadelphia community after years of exile to attend to his recently deceased father. He’s widely despised; his brother (Tariq Trotter of The Roots, who contributed the score) thinks of him as a louse and quitter. An ex-Panther, he’s widely considered a snitch among the last vestiges of the once vital organization. Thought to have sold out his long dead friend and colleague Neal to the Feds in an attempt to win his away lawyer girlfriend Patricia (Kerry Washington), he doesn’t care much about winning anyone’s trust.

Ably directed and wonderfully acted, it suffers from a confused script, one that seems to be both elegy for and condemnation of the various strengths as well as the many excesses of the the black power ideology. What it wants to say about the legacy of black power I’m not quite sure. Marcus, like Patricia’s upper middle class, non-agitated lawyer boyfriend Carey (the film’s producer and Filmmaker guest blogger Ron Simons), isn't going to be around for Patricia or her daughter in the long run. Fatherlessness in the black community isn’t just the stuff of the Moynihan report, but if all the Panthers, ex-Panthers, anti-Panthers and wannabe Panthers (a heartbreaking Amari Cheatom) are derelicts, hotheads or shameless class climbers, perhaps their absence isn’t such a bad thing.

I also saw Vincenzo Natali’s Splice, but that’s a camp fest that’s only for those who want to watch Adrian Brody wear ridiculous clothing and those who happen to be Sarah Polley completists. Count me among the latter.