Two edgy indie films, Rachel Getting Married and Wendy and Lucy, dominated the year-end prizes announced Wednesday by the Toronto Film Critics Association.

Rachel Getting Married, which recounts the crazy goings-on at an upper-crust East Coast liberal wedding, charmed the TFCA and leads with three wins, taking best director for Jonathan Demme, best screenplay for Jenny Lumet and best supporting actress for Rosemary DeWitt.

Kelly Reichardt’s downbeat drama Wendy and Lucy follows with two, taking best picture and actress. The film stars Michelle Williams and depicts the travails of a girl and her dog, whose road trip is cut short in rainy, grey Oregon.

Along with other winners, The Wrestler and Ballast, the films judged most successful this year by the newly resurgent critics group were a tough, dark-hued lot.

Mickey Rourke’s astonishing comeback performance in The Wrestler garnered him the best actor prize, while Heath Ledger’s last role as The Joker in The Dark Knight was honored with the best supporting actor award.

The melancholy but ultimately hopeful Mississippi character study Ballast took the prize for best first feature. It was joined in the winner’s circle by Andrew Stanton’s best animated feature WALL-E, the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, which won best foreign-language film, and James Marsh’s lyrical account of Philippe Petit’s epic walk across the Twin Towers, Man on Wire, which garnered the best documentary feature prize.

The winner of the Rogers Best Canadian Film award will be announced and presented by Sarah Polley at a gala dinner on Jan. 6, open for the first time to the media and the industry. The honor comes with a $10,000 prize. The nominees are Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze, Stéphane Lafleur’s Quebec-based drama Continental: A Film without Guns and Guy Maddin’s genre-bending My Winnipeg.

The revamped awards aim ‘to bring glamour to the reading of film, in the same way that the Giller has brought glamour to Canadian literature,’ says TFCA president Brian Johnson. ‘We have the Genies, the TIFF awards and TIFF’s Top Ten. But this is the only evening that brings together all sides of the industry to celebrate the year in film — from small Canadian distributors to Hollywood studios.’