From watching cop shows and Rodney King on television, the grainy, gritty look has started to be thought of as the real."Of course, there's a long tradition in American documentary films of infiltrating strange corners. Somi Roy, the Executive Director of the New York-based International Documentary Seminars, believes audiences now have "a non-traditional understanding of the phrase "good visual quality"."If you go from 35mm print to The Cruise, you will find The Cruise too gritty," says Roy. It's director Bennett Miller then signed with a big-deal management company."A quarter of the films submitted to this year's DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival were either Hi-8 or DV," says DoubleTake's assistant director Karen Cirillo."Ten years ago you wouldn't have seen art houses showing such cheap-looking films Now theatre owners are picking them up."L. Similarly, The Cruise, somewhat smearily shot on digital film, has prospered in the art houses.

Hands has taken in $505,000 nationwide - a fine sum given that it was shot for $10,000. What's stranger than their David Lynch- like subject matter is that these movies are actually getting theatrical distribution.Though grainily or strobe-ily shot on Hi-8 or digital video, and prone to low-rent subject matter, films like Hands on a Hard Body are making money. In Home Page, a new digital documentary about the weird world of Web confessors, there's a woman who wants strangers to know her as intimately as her husband does, and college student Justin Hall, whose Web diaries include numerous pictures and descriptions of women he's slept with.This is American documentary film-making in the late 1990's - fast, cheap and (slightly) out of control. In The Lifestyle, a group of wrinkly Sun-Belt swingers "sportfuck" on camera, swapping wives' after coffee recipes. The Cruise follows a verbose, pockmarked New York City bus-tour guide nicknamed Speed, a self-proclaimed exhibitionist who sleeps on friends' sofas and delivers rants to his captive tourist audience, including the line: "I see each double-decker loop as another loop toward my death, and therefore toward perfection." It gets tackier. WHAT'S WITH the new American taste for weird-n'-trashy documentaries? In Hands on A Hard Body, the action centres on an only-in-Texas competition for a Nissan "hard body", or truck, in which contestants have to keep their hands on a truck for up to three days to win the booty.

A little bit of old Hollywood magic, at the last.`Playing by Heart' is released 6 August, `Go' on 3 September. Set mostly in rich eyries overlooking the race-riven, criminal epidemic below, it somehow manages to sweep your disgust away. With a cast ranging from Sean Connery to complete newcomers, Carroll's film is the least conflicted love song yet to the city of too few angels. "This isn't about cars or crime - it's about nests, emotional environments... the houses, the gardens, the clubs, the beach."Coincidentally, our old friend Vilmos Zsigmond was employed to turn his lush visuals in kinder directions.