Overture Films has thrown its new trailer for “Brooklyn’s Finest” up exclusively on Apple.

You can watch it here.

The gritty Antoine Fuqua-directed film, which stars Ethan Hawke, Richard Gere and Don Cheadle as three cops pushing the edge of burnout, was one of the first big sales of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival back in January (THR reports on the 2010 lineup, announced yesterday, here and here).

The film is intricately plotted, showcases some powerhouse performances and earns its R rating. But many viewers in Sundance suggested that the film’s relentless bleakness and over-the-top (if uncompromising) ending would require some editorial massaging before the film hit mainstream theaters.

Of special, bravura mention for this particular viewer is a lengthy, increasingly emotional voiceover monologue that unspools over cutaways to other characters’ actions while the one speaking engages in a sex act to its logically satisfying conclusion. At first laughable, I eventually decided it deserves kudos for its audaciousness. Let’s hope that sequence wasn’t, uh, touched.

Written by newcomer Michael C. Martin, “Finest” hits theaters March 5.

With this weekend seeing the “Paranormal Activity” train roll on and “Law Abiding Citizen” overperforming for Overture, a curious mini-trend is taking hold: studios are going into the finished-film rough and coming out with gems.

Or, put another way, studios are creating hits by doing exactly the opposite of what their machinery is designed to do: develop from within.

Both Paramount and Overture, the respective distributors behind those two weekend winners, acquired rights to their  films after the pics were pretty much through production by their indie producers (at a fraction of the price than it would have cost to make them). With “District 9,” the in-production diamond Sony unearthed last year and turned into $100+ million in boxoffice bling, that means three of the biggest sleepers of the year were all developed outside the studio system and only released within it.

That may not seem like a tectonic shift. But with every passing weekend at the box-office — a bargain acquisition breaks out here, a studio-developed pic flops there — the balance of power moves slightly away from the development world and toward acquisitions and marketing.

A small release of a very good movie  – the kind of very good movie that should get Oscar consideration — is not something one normally associates with the middle of April.

But that’s the description merited by Overture’s “The Visitor,” Tom McCarthy’s follow-up to “The Station Agent” and the best release by far of any of the titles on the young slates of the new group of startup distribs.

The movie, about an older professor whose life is changed when an immigrant couple comes into his life — and then watches as that couple’s life is itself changed by a callous immigration system — opens in limited release Friday. Like many good films, “The Visitor” disguises its intentions and virtues. What starts as an intimate character study of one man’s awakening from a decades-long deadness turns into an indictment of bureaucracy, an examination of flawed immigration policy and a subtle exploration of how personal development doesn’t come with a lightning bolt and a grand epiphany but small coincidences and realizations. But for an earnest device involving African drumming, it’s close to a perfect film.

The main character is played by Richard Jenkins of “Six Feet Under” (trading in his wisecracking cynicism for repressed restraint) and he, like the movie, embody both hope and pessimism — the belief in the necessity of action even as events underscore the futility of such actions.

So is McCarthy, a New York actor and writer-director who one wouldn’t immediately imagine as an activist, evolving into a firebrand?

Not exactly.

“This didn’t start out an indictment of the immigration system,” McCarthy, whom we’ll be interviewing at a postscreening event for the film this weekend, told us recently in an interview.  ”It started when I spent some time in the Middle East and met these people who had passion for the arts and family and community, and I thought it was rarely well-represented in film, and through my research I stumbled into the immigration system.”

Unfortunately, our technophobia/absent-mindedness prevented us from taping the interview — though for an excellent back-and-forth check out Jeffrey Wells’ conversation with the director at Hollywood Elsewhere — but in the chat McCarthy did say that he hoped to give moviegoers a different take on the problem.

“When you experence anything on a perosnal level and with less rhetoric, it takes on a whole different meaning, whether it’s immigration or race relations or the abortion issue,” he said.

Immigration is a vogueish topic for specialty films, with Searchlight/The Weinstein Company’s “Under the Same Moon” (a film equally sympathetic about immigrants’ plight but far more willing to indulge in Hollywood happy endings) in theaters and SPC’s “Frozen River” and plenty of other movies sure to come.

Not all of them will capture the issue in as much of its human and emotional complexity as “The Visitor.” But McCarthy said he’s hopeful that the movies are finally pushing the issue forward. “How we deal with undocumented citizens is very much a work in progress. Have we done everything right? Absolutely not. But hope comes from the fact that people are taking notice.”