The deadpan comedy "Familiar Ground" and the Chely Wright documentary "Wish Me Away" won the top jury prizes at the Los Angeles Film Festival on Sunday, while the cast of "How to Cheat" were honored for their performances.

In audience voting, the top narrative feature was Joe Cornish's aliens-vs.-street-kids thriller "Attack the Block," which will soon be released by Sony's Screen Gems, and the music documentary "Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest."

Other winners include "Senna," Asif Kapadia's documentary about the Brazilian racing driver; and the shorts "The Wind is Blowing on My Street,"...

Chris Eigeman's and Eric Morris' "Midnight Sun" has been selected as the recipient of a $15,000 production grant funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, while 20 filmmakers have been named to Film Independent's Fast Track Fellows program.

In the past, that program has helped shepherd films including this year's SXSW award winner "Natural Selection," the Spirit Awards nominee "Amreeka" and Courtney Hunt's "Frozen River," which won an Oscar nomination for Melissa Leo.

"Midnight Sun" is a dramatic film dealing with the World War II initiative in which a group of young scientists and engineers were sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico to help design and build an atomic bomb.

The grant and fellowships were announced on Sunday by Film Independent, which runs the Fast Track program in connection...

It's going downtown again.

And this time, the Los Angeles Film Festival will tip off, starting Thursday, without the Lakers wreaking havoc on opening night.

Last year, the festival's opening night screening and party took place across the street from the  Staples Center the same night as Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

This year, there will be no raucous Laker fans clogging traffic at the end of the screening, and no police chief warning the entire city not to travel downtown (even though festival organizers were hoping to persuade lots of Westsiders to do just that).

But the Lakers' victory last year, during the LAFF screening of "The Kids Are All Right," also gave...

The British comedy “Four Lions” and the music documentary “Thunder Soul” were named winners of the audience prizes at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Film Independent announced on Sunday.

Chris Morris, a British satirist, won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature for “Four Lions” (below), which centers on a quartet of bumbling would-be suicide bombers in London.

The Audience Award for Best International Feature went to “Thunder Soul,” Mark Landsman’s film about a pioneering 1970s high school jazz-funk band in Houston.  After the outdoor screening at the John...