Salon: When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt's Frozen River at this year's Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie "put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame," my jaw went slack.

A solemn, style-free first feature about two upstate New York single mothers dragged into smuggling illegal immigrants, Frozen River stands for everything Tarantino has dismissed as the dulling of American cinema. And on paper, it sure sounds like a sop to the rich people who go to Sundance for their annual weep over poor people.

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