This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
The film touches on the effects of a culture that puts too much emphasis on winning and money at the expense of simple healthy competition.
It finds humor and love in a potentially grim situation without ever belittling or caricaturing the characters.
Mike Birbiglia film isn’t about success or failure as much as it is about the creative life.
Katie Holmes’s character encapsulates her film as a whole: more earnest than remarkable, but with its heart in the right place.
It all climaxes in a literal wrestling with the self that suggests a character finally grasping her own limits as an actress.
Nerdland exudes a self-satisfied smugness in its unvaried focus on the worst of human behavior.
Mueller convincingly posits freedom as being elusive because it’s essentially a violation of human nature.
There’s almost no sense of discovery or emotional evolution as the scenarios grind toward their conclusions.
Bilal Chatman and Kenneth Anderson’s stories both illustrate the injustices of the three-strikes law.
Olds’s film is essentially a standard backwoods noir tale given a topical twist.
It broadly tackles the subject of love without, even at its least successful, stooping to the dire, barrel-scraping cultural condescension of Rio, I Love You.
Joseph Martin and Sam Blair’s Keep Quiet wrestles with the irresolvable dimensions of its subject matter.
Here’s a concert film that’s as fixated on backstage interactions as it is on the live performances themselves.
There’s plenty of life in this honest, impressionistic portrait of a cohort of 21st-century American girls.
Implicit in Hassen Ferhani’s Roundabout in My Head is the notion that there should be a certain level of trust between filmmaker and his subjects.
Conceived like an ambient album, Dead Slow Ahead is at its best when simply airing out its otherworldly energies.
What Means Something lays bare filmmaker Ben Rivers’s own process.
The series is an eclectic, geographically far-flung survey of rising filmmaking talent, rich in provocations big and small.
This year’s True/False Film Fest bursted with new possibilities for the documentary form.
The festival, which runs from March 3rd to 6th, already seems to have the country’s most important social issue on its agenda.