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Last year at Sundance, the documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick (Chain Camera, Sick) came to town to premiere the excellent Twist of Faith, about the impact on one American family of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals. This year, Dick is back with a scabrous, provocative and highly entertaining inquiry into another seemingly untouchable institution — the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board — and the result is one of the most buzzed-about films in the festival. Admittedtly, the thesis of Dick's This Film is not yet Rated isn't exactly new. For decades, filmmakers and industry observers alike have leveled similar accusations — that the ratings board is tougher on explicit sex than on graphic violence; that it holds independent films to a stricter set of standards than studio fare; and that, owing to the collusion of newspapers, television stations and theater owners — most of whom refuse to promote and/or play unrated films — the supposedly elective ratings process instituted by the MPAA in 1968 is actually about as voluntary as death and taxes. But the persuasive power of Dick's film lies less in the arguments it presents than in the chorus of impassioned voices making them — namely, the very filmmakers (including Kimberly Pierce, John Waters and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone) whose work has been slapped with the ultra-restrictive NC-17 (formerly "X") rating and/or who've been forced to recut their films in order to avoid such a fate. As they hold forth on their experiences dealing with the ratings board — and as Dick juxtaposes their supposedly incendiary bits of celluloid against scenes from other movies that did manage to pass the MPAA litmus test — a damning portrait emerges of an arcane censorship outfit whose methods are nearly as mysterious as the identities of its supposedly "average American" censors.

This Film is not yet Rated uncovers its share of genuine scoops, not least the revelation that the MPAA's ratings appeals board — a disgruntled filmmaker's last refuge of hope — includes one Catholic and one Episcopalian clergyman. But so brisk and breezy is Dick's style that, as a journalist, he leaves some of his bases uncovered, and already by the time of its second Sundance screening, This Film had generated several negative editorials accusing Dick of omitting important historical information, railing against the establishment without proposing a viable alternative and otherwise bending the truth to suit his own whims. Those claims aren't completely without merit, but to these eyes, Dick doesn't even aspire to more than a cursory overview of the MPAA and its monolithic power. Rather, he has his finger on a different, more troubling pulse — that of a new age of cultural conservatism in a country where, 30 years after Jon Voight's paraplegic Vietnam vet sent Jane Fonda into orgasmic ecstasy in an immortal moment from Hal Ashby's Coming Home, the puppet sex of Team America: World Police is seen as a threat to our moral fiber.

Heaven knows what the MPAA will make of Destricted, an omnibus film (just when you thought, following Eros and Three…Extremes, it was safe to go back into the cinema) presented as part of Sundance's annual Park City at Midnight sidebar. Consisting of eight short films ranging in length from 2 to 40 minutes and directed by a cross-section of film-world and art-world enfants terribles (including Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noe, Larry Clark and Sam Taylor Wood), Destricted promises porn and, for the most part, delivers only artistic pretension or (in the cases of Barney and Noe) unintended self-parody. However, Clark's Impaled, in which a typically Clark-ian teenage slacker screen tests for a role in a porn film against a series of comely (and considerably more experienced) actresses, is one of the best pieces of film (or, to be precise, video) I've seen this year in Park City — sly, sexy, funny and marked by the extraordinary delicacy Clark has time and again achieved with neophyte adolescent actors.

Much the same can be said of Clark's latest feature film, Wassup Rockers, in which a gaggle of Latino skateboarders from the wrong side of the 110 Freeway embark on a satiric odyssey through the garden parties and glittering backyard pools of the West L.A. elite. Suggesting nothing so much as a punk variation on John Cheever's The Swimmer, the film is uncommonly sharp on matters of race and class in Los Angeles, and on the sweetly naïve expressions of teenage sexuality. Wassup Rockers could also be seen in Park City this year, albeit not in Sundance, but rather at Slamdance, which after 11 years of continuous operations can hardly be called an upstart competitor anymore. In the six years that I've been attending both festivals, there have been major discoveries here, including the documentaries Hybrid and Stone Reader, and even Sundance itself (which this year screened Slamdance co-founder Paul Rachman's documentary, American Hardcore, in the midnight program) seems to have buried the hatcher and realized that this town is big enough for the both of them.

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