Who knew there’s so much red tape involved if a nun decides to give up everything to work for the poor? If there’s one thing director William Riead’s new film, The Letters, a biopic on the life of Mother Teresa, does well, it’s showing the bureaucratic web the late Mother had to swim through in order to follow her call from God: to help the poorest of the poor, in a still very much caste-driven India.

Especially as we get further from Mother Teresa’s death, at the age of 87 in 1987, the reason this sort of film works, is through filling in the gaps, letting a legend become a human. But whether it’s the shortage of the source material (Teresa shied away from journalistic coverage, and the film is based on letters she wrote to friends and family) or just the reverence of the filmmakers, there seems to be a certain hollowness to this film that’s ironically all about a woman with a lot of heart.

At least the lead was well cast. Juliet Stevenson does a commendable job with the accent (a Macedonian living and India), as well as portraying the humbleness of her character—it’s not so easy reciting lines like “It’s God’s work, not mine” and coming off as entirely genuine. Indeed the first 35 minutes of the film, which focuses primarily on her attempt to convince both the mother general of the girl’s school where she teaches and the pope in Rome that she should be allowed to give up her vows as a cloistered nun in order to work amongst the poor, is very watchable.

But by the time we actually get onto the streets of Calcutta, The Letters becomes something of a lazy movie, both in writing and acting. The dialogue feels cliché and somehow condensed (like instead of going through the trouble of zeroing in on an evolving relationship, the lines from the Indians repeat the refrain “You want to convert our kids to your Christian god?” or “What are you doing among us, white woman?”). It’s as if years of dialogue are abbreviated into just the main ideas. And thus, we never really feel for any of the relationships she makes on the street.

The one attempt at creating a real relationship takes place in the span of about 10 minutes. An Indian man is among her chief critics, but surprise surprise, in the very next scene when she helps his wife deliver her baby, he falls to his knees in gratitude. There’s never again dialogue between the two characters, but he shows up time for time, like in a scene where she tries to turn a temple into a hospice for the poor. It’s just assumed in black and white that he’s giving his support, that the two are forever allied. The music feels equally forced and lazy, heavy strings coming in whenever she teaches a child to read or helps a dying man, as if there needs to be a scrolling marquee above each scene: “You’re supposed to be feeling moved right now.”

The movie requires a lot of assumptions in lieu of actually developing characters and relationships. It’s as if its expected the viewer will come in already in full admiration of the character, so taking the time to show a character arc, or any intimate scenes, is completely unnecessary. But, of course, it is necessary. One of the film’s biggest missteps is in its structure. We start in the modern-day, where a man of the cloth is making the case for Teresa’s canonization as a saint. He serves as the film’s narrator, and tells us of Teresa’s loneliness as shown in the letters and her crises of faith, and yet none of these themes that would have done wonders to make Teresa seem relatable are acted out in actual scenes. It’s as if the script falls prey to that old writing adage, “show, don’t tell.” There’s a lot of telling.

But where there’s not any telling is in a complete failure to address the criticisms laid against Teresa in more modern times (the lack of medical training of her staff, as well as some questions on how money was being used). These criticisms may not be entirely fair, but ignoring them makes the film feel something like a Hallmark channel movie, meant to make the viewers feel good, even at the risk of over-sensationalizing a topic.

The fact of the matter is conflict creates interest. It gets viewers engaged. It creates stakes. And besides the initial arc with the bureaucratic red tape of getting the Vatican to approve her mission, there just isn’t enough conflict to keep the steam up, especially not for two hours. Every encounter on the streets turns into a mini miracle. Not setbacks there. We only get told about her internal struggles in the most periphery way—surely Stevenson could have handled some harder scenes with the subtle grace the part requires. And we don’t even attempt to address contemporary criticisms. The film doesn’t do a lot more to explain who Teresa is than her Wikipedia page, and for a film about a woman who loved the unloved, that seems like a real missed opportunity.

In 2013, I saw the very engaging documentary Plimpton!, based on the legendary literary journalist George Plimpton, who put himself right in the middle of his stories, like the time he joined an NFL team and told the story in a way no outsider could. But director Ryan Mullins’ documentary on Ghanese journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas takes this sort of immersive journalism up a few notches on the stakes ladder. Anas works directly with police in placing himself undercover, where he infiltrates prostituion rings, illegal abortion clinics, and religious cults all for the sake of getting the information out to the people and spurring on social change. His methodologies are controversial—not many journalists place themselves in dangerous situations each time they write—but no one can argue with the power of his stories. He’s like a real-life Clark Kent, except we actually occasionally get to see him write a story.

The filmmakers were clearly going for this larger-than-life superhero angle when focusing their lens on Anas, who takes on a series of “missions” through a mixture of formal recording during the planning stages and hidden cameras while undercover. This persona is built up with street interviews (“He can vanish at any time! He can fly!”) and a dramatic montage at the film’s onset, where he gets a prestigious nod of approval from TED Talks, where he’s shown giving a speech, and President Barack Obama, who mentions him in a speech of his own.

But the film isn’t quite as exciting as the hype.

None of the missions feel terribly dangerous. And, no, I’m not criticizing a lack of violence, but the film’s tone, which at times doesn’t seem in line with the gravity of the situation. The opening scene, where Anas and detectives capture a man who’s raped more than 12 children, seems bizarrely light. Anas is first shown in a van on a cellphone reveling with someone, “I’m got him. Yeeeeessss. Exciting!” To be followed by actually taunting the captured man in the van. “The kids used to say, ‘One day you’ll be arrested,’” he says, smugly. “This is the Day.” It really kind of rubbed me the wrong way. If you’re going for a superhero comparison, you need to balance it out with a little humility: Batman never sat in the back of the Batmobile talking about how cool the catch was. When we follow this scene with a visit to a school where he’s retelling his capers like a teen remembering his glory days on the high school football team, I almost gave up on this film for good.

Don’t get me wrong; I blame the somewhat cocky tone entirely on the film’s editing. Anas’ award-winning journalism is impressive. The missions, which we get to see from start to end, seem well-planned and carefully executed. And, most importantly, Anas is dealing with some very serious human-rights violations, saving lives and putting away very despicable men. He deserves to be the subject of a documentary. I think the well-meaning steps to build up the hype of “Anas, the unstoppable” just lost their footing a little. But, somehow, even with the superhero comparisons, we’re confronted with some surprisingly slow passages. The same mission planning I just commended actually makes up the bulk of the documentary, and when interwoven with additional interviews, sometimes it’s easy to forget what mission we’re planning for next. To compound the issue, the conversations aren’t always easy to follow due to the thick accents of interviewees.

But that’s nitpicking. The true problem here is that no one has a face. A visit to Anas’ hometown doesn’t reveal more about the mystery man other than the fact that he used to sell chameleons as a kid—an appropriate metaphor for a man who is constantly adapting to new situations. But it’s hardly revelatory. Every human being has motivations and weaknesses. We never penetrate the surface of Anas, the man. We also don’t get to know any of the criminals beyond their charges on paper. The undercover footage we watch alongside Anas doesn’t capture the actual ringleaders often, let alone their crimes. Instead, we get a lot of shaky footage of large groups of people and the outdoors, with the occasional brief one-on-one interview. As a result, each arrest feels a bit rushed: crime and capture, without those moments to feel invested in between.

We do get to spend more time on the last mission, a religious cult guilty of a slew of sex crime violations, and the payoff here works for the very reason I’m describing: We finally get a human face when filmmakers track down a 13-year-old girl and her mother. When she tells her story of being sexually assaulted by men who claimed she was possessed, her mother’s face turns from grief to shame when the girl says her mother also believed she was possessed.

This girl’s five-minute appearance steals the show. We needed a dozen more of these moments. These are the people Anas’ stories are truly aimed at illuminating. The film focuses too much on the James Bond elements. Sure it’s hard, even impossible, to get the stories from these people living in isolated conditions and who have been brainwashed and traumatized. But actually relaying those stories is probably why Anas’s stories are engaging—and why this documentary ultimately falls short.

Originally published as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage.

The official Apple website posted a black-and-white photo of former CEO Steve Jobs with the text “1955-2011” on the night of Oct. 5, 2011, and within minutes the Internet was ablaze with reflections on Job’s untimely death to pancreatic cancer. Wired quickly followed, with a memorial splash page, a completely black background accompanied by quotes from influential public figures. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thanked Jobs for “showing that what you build can change the world.” Just when it seemed like the entire Internet might have collectively gone somber, the satirical newspaper The Onion spoke up with the headline, “Last American Who Knew What The F*** He Was Doing Dies.”

It was a death that seemed to cut people deep, and director Alex Gibney, inspired by the world’s response to man who didn’t save lives but made things, sought out to understand just how that response came to be. What he learned turned into Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, a documentary that takes an unflinching look, maybe for the first time, at the man behind our most beloved devices.

Time can certainly bring perspective, and what makes The Man in the Machine different from earlier made-for-TV documentaries, and certainly different from the 2013 feature-length film Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher, is Gibney is not too shy to derail some of the legend. Jobs is a figure people like to romanticize, a pioneer who dropped out of school to pursue creative passions instead. A man who stood up to the 1980 version of Goliath (IBM), and dared to make something based on values like quality and aesthetic purity. But Gibney, known for pulling the curtain on some big-league scams with his documentaries Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, isn’t so interested in expanding upon the Jobsonian myth. The overall tone feels a bit critical, even to the point of editorializing at times.

This works to mixed results. The Man in the Machine is the first time that Jobs’ former girlfriend (and mother of his child), Chrisann Brennan, is featured in a substantial and honest way. Through an endearing interview where Brennan at once seems to fall in love with Jobs again and re-experience the rejection, the filmmakers pan down on a legal document showing Jobs trying to frame his ex-girlfriend as a woman with multiple partners, so he can shirk parenthood and continue playing with circuit boards in his garage. That’s the interview a definitive documentary on Jobs needed to get. Also nice is a thread that continues throughout on Jobs’ attraction to Buddhism and enlightenment. Filmmakers even manage to track down a monk he interacted with on the week of the Apple I’s creation. Considering Jobs eventually would die after trying nine months of alternative medicine, it’s nice to see how Eastern traditions were such a large part of his life and who he aspired to be. But even these parts poke some fun—the monk jokes that he’s still not sure if that first logicboard qualifies as enlightenment.

It’s worth interrupting here to note that an interview with Joe Nocera, a Time magazine technology reporter, shows some of the problems with being critical of Jobs. Brand loyalists love Apple, perhaps to irrational levels. Nocera recalls writing stories on questionable Apple practices—backdating stock options, shifting profits offshore, bad working conditions in their Chinese factories—and getting nothing but hate in the comments. People love Apple. They don’t want to hear it. So while I think this section of the movie drags the most (at one point during the Foxconn section, Jobs largely disappears), perhaps some of my reluctance in viewing can be rooted back to the movie’s greatest obstacle: Jobs has a lot of fans. However, I think this part of the movie that shifts from firsthand interviews to news segments about Apple’s misdeeds (with occasional quips from Jobs from old interviews) just feels too much like editorializing. It feels like the film is trying too hard to be contrarian to what’s already been done on the man. The movie becomes more about Apple than about Jobs, and no matter how much we can speculate that he had to have known, he simply is not the company. Without directly tying him to the events in China, it feels like a stretch. As though the movie’s main theme is “How Apple is not as good as you think,” and not about the man himself.

But for those who have kept up-to-date on past Jobs-based films, the attempt to be different does often still pay off. It’s nice to focus on 1998 onward, rather than the Apple II as Jobs does, as that’s where most of his current legacy is based. It always feels a little bit disingenuous when Jobs’ narratives focus on 1975-85, and that romantic rags-to-riches story, because Apple hasn’t been a startup for a really long time. For its part, The Man in the Machine feels grounded in reality, it feels comprehensive and well-researched. It also feels a little unbalanced, too eager to overcompensate for all the worship Jobs has received in films of yesteryear. But when former employees are shown on screen literally crying as they read a letter to the editor they wrote about Jobs on his passing, it seems to most documentarians the next question would have been, “Why are you crying?” Maybe Gibney’s obsession with “the machine” (both the beginning and the ending posit the question of why we’re so intimate with these mere objects) kept him from capturing the human story that’s very much a part of creating and using technology as well.

Perhaps appropriate for a film called The Great Man, director Sarah Leonor’s sophomore effort focuses on the transition from adolescence to manhood. The film, ultimately a tale of two soldiers as they transition from serving in the French Foreign Legion to civilian life, opens with a voiceover by the preteen son of one of these men. Khadji (Ramzan Idiev) unfolds the tale of his father, Markov (Surho Sugaipov), and his father’s best friend, Hamilton (Jeremie Renier), as they chase a fierce leopard during their time in service in Afghanistan. They get caught in enemy fire, and Markov must abandon his weapons and the hunt in order to carry his injured friend through the sweltering desert to save his life.

It sounds gruesome and traumatic, but the tone set by Khadji’s narration is a far cry from the abrupt assaults that might open a war film like Saving Private Ryan. Khadji’s retelling is dreamlike and a bit larger than life, capturing a spirit similar to the heroes of great legends like Beowulf or The Odyssey. Perhaps due to his age (he’s 11), there’s less of a focus on the why and more of a focus on the heroic characteristics of each man (“If one drank, the other wasn’t thirsty”). Martin Wheeler’s score, with its slow, careful guitar plucking, seems to reverberate for days, giving us a feeling of warmth (and maybe longing), but definitely not fear or anger. This mood of the nostalgic, though we don’t quite know what for, continues throughout this slow-paced character film.

But after 10 minutes, the poetry of the initial voiceover ends, and we’re transported to present-day France. Markov, despite saving his friend, gets dishonorably discharged for disobeying orders. Leaving the barracks, Markov, a Chechen immigrant without papers, reunites with his son and undergoes the impossible task of finding work in a country with strict anti-immigration laws. Screenwriters Leonor and Emmanuelle Jacob cleverly leave any social criticism up to the viewer—this is a film that whispers, not yells. Showing the film’s love for slow-moving tracking shots, Markov spends his first night with his son (who he hasn’t seen in five years) on a tour boat gently gliding along the river. Khadji, feeling a bit abandoned, isn’t terribly interested in hearing what his dad has to say. But Markov persists, retelling the story of how the boy’s mother was hit by shrapnel during a Russian raid. It won’t be the first time people are surprisingly upfront with the boy, whose silent acceptance of everything is hopefully a sign of maturity and not despondency. But as Khadji shows great maturity in accepting the whirlwind information of the day, Markov still ends the night putting his coat on the boy. Khadji is brave, but he still needs a protector.

Despite the film’s lack of action and outward intensity (even when the situation warrants it), it’s impossible not to feel entirely invested in the budding relationship between father and son, which becomes something of a triangle after an injured Hamilton is reintroduced. The war stories, which first Markov and later Hamilton tell to Khadji, are the most thrilling moments of the film. Unexpectedly, given the film’s opening sequence, these retellings are sparse—maybe three in total. It’s almost like their sparsity makes us thirst for them even more, as certainly Khadji does, since they’re the surest way he has of growing close to his father.

Hamilton’s relationship with the boy is a lot less straightforward—partially because Hamilton has some growing up to do himself. He must at first seem nothing like the brave soldier depicted in Markov’s stories, the type of man who can hear the silent encroachment of a snake and with godlike reflexes. After a medical leave, he’s just like any other 20-something, immature and without commitments, set on partying and sleeping with girls he can barely hold a conversation with. But this is his story too, and without hitting us over the head with melodrama, The Great Man portrays how bureaucracy and circumstances can destroy men—or allow them to rise to the occasion. The performances by the three lead men (including Idiev here) are both believable and affecting. That’s why we’re willing to take silent journeys on trains; long, windy motorcycle rides through the streets of Paris; and observe serene but uneventful scuba diving scenes. The film’s sense of spacious, meandering time makes the moments of true intimate conversation feel intense and lasting. Like they may just as quickly be lost. And when we learn why Khadji has taken up the task of remembering the two men, we crave every detail just as much as he does.

The childlike lens Khadji’s narration provides allows for the film to hint at larger sociological issues while still prioritizing the immediacy of relationships. For more than just Khadji, The Great Man is a film about how empowering it can be when one man treats another with dignity and compassion, even when a cold world may not. And in capturing that bond, The Great Man more than succeeds.

A version of this review was first published as part of our ND/NF 2015 coverage. 

Even though it’s been nearly 40 years since Steve Jobs introduced the Apple II, and nearly 25 years since America Online introduced that infamous catchphrase “You’ve Got Mail,” cyber law has always lagged behind the times. This phenomenon reared its ugly head in 2010 when a gay Rutgers University student committed suicide after his roommate live-streamed his sexual encounters via a webcam. Was his roommate responsible for murder?

Of course, cyberbullying is ubiquitous, and director Seok-jae Hong takes us into the heads of a group of college-aged Internet friends who all hang out in an internet cafe in Seoul, South Korea. Things get heated when Min (Yun-Kyoung Ha), a frequent internet troll in various online communities, posts an inflammatory tweet about a military man who has recently committed suicide. Ji-woong (Yo-han Byeon) and Yong-min (Lee Ju-Seung), who know each other from their training to be police offers, take the tweet personally. Yong-min, the more hotheaded of the two, encourages Ji-woong to join the onslaught of hate tweets the group are hurling back and forth with Min. Incensed by her insensitive remarks, the group decides they’re going to head to her house for a real-life “PK” (a gamer term for “player kill”). Although the line of what is actually meant to occur is blurred (as if often the case in conflicts that begin online), presumably nobody actually intended to kill her, just humiliate her—perfect fodder for an online show one of the guys hosts. But when they get to her apartment, the young woman is already dead from an apparent suicide, and the students are appropriately horrified. Therein starts the main question of the film: Was it suicide, or was Min murdered?

Ji-woong and Yong-min decide to put their police training to good use, investigating Min’s murder for themselves. The fact that Twitter may have played a direct role in her death doesn’t seem to deter the two friends (or their gang of gamers) at all, as they decide to show large parts of their investigation on a YouTube show, a manic rendering of all the latest Internet gossip. The popularity of the show leads to online Reddit-style communities looking for Min’s killer, eventually spawning subthreads when primary suspects emerge. Yong-min convinces Ji-woong that their future careers are on the line (who is going to hire two guys who were involved with a young woman’s murder?), so when a message appears on one of the forums from a witness, they decide to meet the anonymous poster in person. This turns out to be the first of several leads that bring them closer to understanding if it’s really possible for someone as confident as Min to kill herself, or if someone else was to blame.

The film has some real things going for it. The script (also written by director Seok-jae Hong) manages to refrain from feeling overly didactic because of Hong’s apparent knowledge of the nuances of gamer culture. The script does a good job of showing how easy things can snowball, how normal these actions feel at the time, and how the cycle repeats itself because no one actually stops to connect the dots of online actions and real-life outcomes. Since a lot of the movie actually involves text overlays on the screen (showing what’s being said on Twitter or in chatrooms), it’s imperative to the film’s success that these interactions feel real, and to Hong’s credit they do. Also helpful is that the three leads (Ji-woong, Yong-min, and Min) feel fairly comfortable in surprisingly conflicted roles (at times, it’s easy to hate each character for their disregard, while at other times their naiveté feels all too relatable). The only exchange that’s a little jolted is an ex-classmate of Min’s who serves as nothing more than a conduit for a flashback about Min’s poor reaction to an in-class writing workshop, revealing that Min might not be as confident as she appears to me. It’s as close as the film comes to telling, not showing. The film’s much more confident when following the young men, who are harmless oddballs individually but vicious when unified by the exhilarating power of shared online hate.

But as spot-on as the dialogue and interactions of the group of guys are, the hunt for Min’s killer is a bit halfhearted. It follows a more generic pattern for the mystery genre, and there are some obvious plot holes too (how do the guys keep returning to Min’s apartment to shoot their little YouTube videos?). Then Ji-woong, in most regards the more reasonable one, decides to steal Min’s laptop to search for evidence. Would the police not have already confiscated it? The saving grace here is that the ending does turn out to be a bit unexpected and reinforces the major theme of the film: how insidious online harassment can be. Without consequences, it festers on and on to more extreme outcomes. It seems the script is more interested in making a point than creating a fully fleshed out story—and since that point is well worth making, it’s actually easy to forgive some of these holes. With cyberbullying becoming more like an epidemic with each passing day, Socialphobia should make for a timely addition to the discussion.

Socialphobia had its Quebec premiere on August 1st at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit http://www.fantasiafestival.com/

In 2011, I didn’t believe in the power of Twitter. Like many dissenters, I didn’t understand why we needed multiple platforms to complain to our friends about how awful Mondays are. My perspective changed during the Arab Spring, when I started following an NPR journalist named Andy Carvin. A tool can be used in many ways, and in March 2011, Carvin and his Twitter following debunked news reports about Israeli weapons being found in Libya—simply by sharing images and research over Twitter. It’s all compiled in this fascinated Storify story. With absolutely no exaggeration, I can say my mind was totally blown.

Given his presence on social media and in Western reporting on the Arab Spring, it’s no surprise that Carvin makes an appearance in director Sophie Deraspe’s new documentary, A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile, a thrilling retelling of the online maelstrom that occurred when a lesbian Arab blogger named Amina went missing in June 2011. While the confusing presence of technology in our lives is a major topic of the film—as well as the growing unrest in Damascus following the Arab Spring—the heart of this documentary is a love story: the bewitching tale of a Syrian woman who meets a French-Canadian named Sandra online, a relationship which emboldens both women to stand up for their beliefs. This has greater inherent stakes for Amina as she attends protests in Damascus (where a man is shot and killed just beside her).

And, indeed, the hidden fear of both women is realized when, 30 minutes into the movie, Sandra gets an email saying Amina’s been kidnapped. The outcry on social media is impassioned and hysterical. It only gets worse when Andy Carvin types four simple words:

“Has anyone met Amina?”

The insinuation would quickly become “because I’m starting to think she’s not real.” Oh, what kind of rabbit hole have you opened, Mr. Carvin? Is Twitter a tool to catch journalists when they slip up, or can it be a dangerous place where novice investigators derail a case—one with life and death consequences?

The bulk of the film follows from that question, and the men and women entangled in the Amina case extend far and wide: Amina’s girlfriend, her online friends (which, while platonic, seem to hold just as passionate of a bond), reporters, crisis interventionists, Syrian gay-rights activists, and more. The voices are varied and span several continents, but everyone shares one common goal: looking for a girl, who, if Syrian tradition stands true, is probably suffering the immediate threat of torture and even death. But a fringe that believes Amina is a con artist undermines the entire investigation.

Where there is never conflict is in the recreated exchanges between Sandra and Amina based on instant messenger transcripts. Sandra repeats the refrain, “be careful, love.” Of course, when there is not a ton of archival footage to rely on, documentaries sometimes opt to create their own imagery—and the filmmakers do here, often portraying a young Arab woman in her room or walking the streets. The way the filmmakers recreate scenes, sometimes sensual, sometimes pensive and reflective, don’t seem just like filler in this film. They’re essential to its tone—instant messages just can’t fully show what being in a relationship feels like. After all, at the heart of this story is a Canadian woman deeply invested in a woman she hasn’t heard from in weeks, so the blurring of fact and fiction does wonders to maintain a tone of conflicting emotions—both lust and confusion. Their romance is intense and passionate, feeling more like a pair of university students falling in love for the first time rather than two 30-somethings behind computer monitors. The depictions of Amina stay abstract and short, like tiny strings of poetry amidst the dark backdrop of a region in war. By the time Amina is kidnapped, Sandra’s terror matches the viewer’s terror.

Documentaries can’t always nail the narrative arc, but A Gay Girl in Damascus certainly does. It’s impossible to not feel invested in Amina’s plight—and by extension the twisted emotions of her friends and lover. By piling on impassioned interview after impassioned interview with everyone who knew Amina, the love story ultimately wins. If there is any criticism to be delivered here, it’s that the actual coverage of the conflict in Syria, and the effects of many journalists choosing to cover Amina versus other conflicts, is only done in a cursory way. One of the conflicts Sandra and her supporters faced was the growing criticism that resources used on Amina could have been used on more important/more universal stories. Perhaps my bias of seeing just how revolutionary some of the informal Twitter reporting was leads me to believe that this film could have been stronger if we weren’t just told, offhand, about one or two stories that were neglected that week, but if we were also shown some of the incredible ways journalism was done right. Harping on the idea that more stories could have been covered, without getting specific, comes off as a little didactic, and that could have totally been avoided. Real people, both journalists and protesters, did some amazing things in 2011 with smartphones and social media accounts.

But I get it. In a film about one topic, you have to pick your battles. And in delivering a modern-day love story-turned-mystery with more twists than your average blockbuster, A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile delivers. And for its part, it offers some necessary cautionary tales for the digital age.

A version of this review was first published as part of our 2015 Hot Docs Film Festival coverage.

One year ago, when I first heard about writer-director David Thorpe’s upcoming documentary on the science of why gay men often have a distinctive voice, I posted the trailer to Facebook along with the entirely naive comment: “Wow, I didn’t know sounding gay was something people worried about.” A former classmate who now works in academia responded, “Oh yeah. I’ve been asked to sound less gay at work.” When pressures to sound more “straight” extend further than schoolyard bullying, even affecting a person’s livelihood, it’s clear that the otherwise clever title Do I Sound Gay? betrays a bit of anxiety as well. And Thorpe isn’t shy to confess his hatred of his own voice. Newly single and seemingly surrounded by happy gay couples as New York City legalizes gay marriage, Thorpe decides that, instead of pining for his old beau, he’s going to busy himself with a question that’s nagged him his whole life.

Thorpe, a journalist by trade, starts his documentary doing what journalists do: interviewing people. Fortunately for him, he has a lot of influential friends ready to talk to on the subject, including the popular sex columnist Dan Savage, humorist David Sedaris, George Takei, Tim Gunn, and Margaret Cho. Perhaps it’s Savage that answers my dumb question from a year ago best: “Teenagers should absolutely be concerned with how they sound, because it often leads to violence.” His commentary goes side-by-side with footage of a high school freshman getting beaten up by classmates for sounding effeminate.

The teenager, who Thorpe later interviews, lets us into his world a bit, but Thorpe himself surprisingly never lets viewers into his own life. He says he blocked out most of his childhood in the Bible belt and seems to have had a pretty liberating college experience and post-grade life in New York City. Indeed, even the interviews keep us at arm’s length. Despite the impressive catalogue of names, there are a lot of surface-level responses here about the gay experience, which seems to ignore the elephant in the room: You don’t make a documentary called Do I Sound Gay? unless there’s something traumatic about it.

The one moment of vulnerability comes when Sedaris stops with the clever turns of phrases long enough to admit: “I’m embarrassed to say this, but sometimes somebody will say ‘I didn’t know you were gay,’ and it’s like ‘why does that make me feel good?’” At times, it’s hard to not wonder whether or not some of Thorpe’s subjects might have handled the subject better, whether it’s Sedaris’ self-deprecating wit or Savage’s no-nonsense approach to sexuality. How did a film with such an interesting cast of characters end up so tame?

Thorpe’s approach seems timid and reserved. While interviews with competing professionals in the field—one that believes that we pick up speech patterns from the people we spend time with (perhaps gay men spend more time with their mothers), and one that believes we’re constantly code-switching (gay men just get confused alternating between roles)—provide something to the discussion on a journalistic level, as a piece of long-form creative nonfiction, Do I Sound Gay? just seems lacking a bit of heart. A long tangent into the history of gay voices in film, from early black-and-white pictures to Disney classics, might be interesting for a college seminar, but here seems a bit like skirting the primary issue. The argument that gay men are picking up their voices from Captain Hook and Simba’s malicious uncle Scar feels like a bit of a stretch, and it takes up too much of the film’s already short screen time.

The most fascinating question raised by the film—whether or not Thorpe’s voice actually changed when he came out of the closet, as his friends suggest—never even gets adequately addressed after it comes up. In a film that gives a fair share of time to the idea of nature versus nurture, a spontaneous change like that ought to be hashed out. Instead, Thorpe relies on humor to talk around the issue instead of talking about the issue. In most scenes actually featuring Thorpe, he’s seen performing amusing one-liners during his oratory exercises (he’s taking speech classes to sound less gay). He seems to have gained more peace with his voice by the end of the film, or at least he says as much, but it’s a shame it wasn’t more of a journey viewers could join in on. Still, credit should be given for asking a question that’s still a bit taboo to ask. Hopefully the response to the film might inspire some more illuminating answers.

Since that day in February 2013, when a black kid in Florida was shot down on his way home from buying a bag of Skittles, the question of racial profiling has remained a fixture in the current national dialogue. But underneath the footage of riots and banter on cable news, there’s a second narrative, for those willing to listen. The critically acclaimed hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar sings on his 2015 track “The Blacker the Berry,” “I’m the biggest hypocrite in 2015” before going on to point out the double-standard of weeping for Trayvon Martin, then, through gang violence, killing another man “blacker than me.”

For black America, the ceasefire doesn’t just need to come from outside but from within its own streets. A new documentary by director James Lipetzky takes this second premise and runs with it in License to Operate, a compassionate glimpse at a group of ex-gang members in south-central LA that are now working alongside police to curb violence and trauma in the neighborhood. Like Lamar’s lyrics, the gang members from different neighborhoods, some of which used to be arch-rivals, are self-aware enough to see that this violence is systemic and requires a new way of doing things. They’re on the streets working with grieving families at the scene of the crime, they talk to the youth in order to try to fend off any retaliation, and they work as liaisons to the increasingly willing-to-listen LAPD.

It sounds like intense subject matter—and indeed it starts out at a breakneck speed with one of the former gang members recounting a life or death experience on the street—but strangely, and maybe thankfully, Lipetzsky’s addition to the national dialogue on race and violence feels like the first glimpse of hope in a while. In 1992, during the Rodney King riots, the Los Angeles Police Department may as well have been the symbol for black oppression. But through interviews with senior policemen, government officials, and church leaders, it’s clear that the former gang members involved in the License to Operate program are now seen as community heroes. When we get story after story about police-instigated hate crime in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, it’s refreshing to hear officers clearly articulate the limits to their role and the profound reach they see the LTOs having. License To Operate shows the power of communication and collaboration. Lipetzsky’s film is a great reaction piece to the Americans that read another story about a young black man shot down and find it hard to see any hope. The statistics show the program is working. And it’s working in Los Angeles, of all places.

To testify to its working, the film follows about 10 volunteers—most prominently Reynaldo “Whiz” Reaser, a former Raymond Crip, who is trying his hardest to adopt a pair of sisters who have been labeled problem children, left to bounce around from foster home to foster home. The older sister, Jasmine, a 16-year-old who just lost her third friend in a year to street violence, is awaiting her own sentencing for assault with a deadly weapon. Across town former Florence-Firestone member Alfred Lomas is working hard to help 17-year-old Jose see he can be more than a kid who steals cars. Fortunately, and another sign that there’s a bit of hope for the situation, there are more happy endings in this film than grim ones. And the film certainly does its job helping us root for the kids—both by letting us into their homes and by interviews with juvenile justice experts, who cite a report that shows the level of PTSD children face in urban, high-crime environments is similar to children who grow up in war zones. The odds are stacked against them.

But as much as the film celebrates the heroes and roots for the kids featured, there seems to be an important character missing: the gang members themselves. It isn’t necessary to glorify violence by taking us on a chase, like an episode of Cops, but by choosing to follow a pair of young girls and a teenager who is more into stealing than shooting, we do seem a bit too cautious to step into violent crime territory. It reminds me a bit of the film, The Case Against 8, a documentary about two same-sex couples who sought to break down California’s law against gay marriage. The attorneys went out of their way to track down the two most wholesome, clean-cut, loveable gay couples you could find in the U.S., lest any blemishes let their argument crumble. The result is a beautifully made movie, but one that at times feels more like a press release, curated by the filmmakers, rather than the whole story. It’s a bit different here. The youth showcased live far from a pristine life, and Jasmine’s story, in particular, is heartbreaking, but the movie seemed too shy to get at the hardest youth to reach. And their absence does beg a few questions—at least it suggests a few missed opportunities.

Regardless, the film remains a ray of hope within a national dialog that could sorely use some. And most of the emotional cues are right on, although at times the sound mixing seems a bit off (a couple of the songs, like a gospel number over a Relay for Life scene, come off a bit loud and thus distracting). But these are minor problems, and the heart of the movie does indeed have a lot of soul. The interventionists aren’t just inspiring but impressive—footage of their training classes show critical thinking skills and calm under pressure that most college students probably could never muster. The best part about the film is that sometimes a little indie can say something the mainstream media can’t, and License to Operate does just that: Things can get better.

The writer David Foster Wallace once famously said, “A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” Self-deception happens to the best of us, but director Charles Stone III’s latest drama-turned-action flick throws in an additional curveball: how does one stay sane in the face of personal tragedy? Lila (Viola Davis), understandably, is scarcely in her right mind after her teenage son is murdered in a drive-by shooting. Her rage amplifies as a pair of cops offer the usual platitudes but seem no closer to finding Stephon’s (Aml Ameen) killer. Lila’s only comfort, however small it might be, is a support group with other grieving mothers who recite at the end of each meeting the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change… Unfortunately, for Stephon’s murderer, Lila isn’t all that into accepting things.

Things shift from an interesting look into a mother’s pain (complete with the obligatory flashbacks to the days before Stephon’s death, just to remind us how tight-knit this single-mother household was), to a cat-and-mouse action thriller when Lila meets Eve (Jennifer Lopez) at one of her group meetings. Eve, who lost her daughter at an undefinable earlier juncture, is able to cut through the bullshit and say a lot of the things Lila is certainly thinking but too cautious to say: “You want the people who killed Stephon to feel what you’re feeling.” And with that, the pair of grieving mothers decide to take it upon themselves to do the police work they’re convinced the earnest Detective Holliston (Shea Whigham) and his legitimately lazy partner Alonzo (Chris Chalk) aren’t doing themselves.

For what seems to be, on the surface at least, a run-of-the-mill revenge flick fancied up with female leads instead of the generic blonde-boy-gone-bad, there’s actually (mercifully) a few bits of subtlety in both the performances and the script (by Pat Gilfillan) that carry the first half of the movie along at a promising rate. Lila’s grief, in the capable hands of Davis, never comes off as off-the-handle angry or even hopelessly grief-stricken—she appears on-screen as a mild tempered but strong woman, one who is going to defend the cheesy efforts of the women in the small group to Eve (“they’re just trying to help”), but at the same time isn’t going to get bullied around by a cop entering her home uninvited (“next time, call first”). We see the other women falling apart—one woman has convinced herself that, like Jesus, her son is coming back from the dead—but Lila, despite her love for that other Biblical passage—an eye for an eye—seems a bit more rational than the others. In fact, she takes the useless group advice to heart (“get a hobby”), and begins a project renovating her house. It’s because of Davis’ moving performance we don’t realize at first that our judgment might be just as clouded as Lila’s. As time goes on, some truths are unveiled: Maybe Detective Holliston isn’t so bad at his job. Maybe the women at the group do genuinely care. Maybe Eve, with her idea of a good night being to stake out Stephon’s potential killers, isn’t the best friend to have around. It’s interesting to realize how skewed the viewer’s perspective is by Lila’s inability to see anything good because, after all, that’s how real grief, real depression works.

But just as the character study gets cooking—complete with working class issues like running out of paid time off, caring for a remaining son with limited support, and starting a relationship with a good-natured man when you’re just not quite ready—in comes the vengeance of Lila and Eve, vigilante mothers taking on a hierarchical local gang, starting with the small fries and working up to the big boss. It’s just not as interesting as the drama that Davis and the support group thread seemed to be setting up, and retroactively, almost makes the earnestness in the acting in the first half seem not noteworthy, but bizarre. A twist near the end shakes the entire premise of the film and feels less “a ha” and more revealing of what the film lacks. Maybe the final dupe is that despite moving performances and an interesting B-plot—how working class mothers find support and healing—the A-plot is rather hollow. Davis is powerful as always, and Lopez actually hits the right note with her reckless, action-seeking Eve, but the performances don’t overcome that the more potent story was abandoned halfway through.

If you’re not up on your Colombian drug lord trivia, in the late ‘70s to early ‘90s, Pablo Escobar (played here by Benecio del Toro) was a man to be reckoned with. He’s credited with starting the Colombian cocaine trade into the US, along with murdering anyone that might pose a threat to him. However, Escobar wasn’t offing just other criminals, but judges, journalists, and even a Colombian presidential candidate. At one point, he killed all 107 passengers aboard a commercial flight just to secure the death of one witness. He was one of the most powerful men in Colombia, if not the most powerful.

Yet somehow, almost inexplicably, none of that gets touched upon in Escobar: Paradise Lost, the newest film from director Andrea Di Stefano. Instead, we follow the footsteps of Nico (Josh Hutcherson), the Canadian husband of Escobar’s niece Maria (Claudia Traisac), who’s staying in one of Escobar’s many Colombian villas. But his terrifying uncle-in-law (Hutcherson spends most of the movie with his eyes popping out of his head in fear) won’t be around for long. He’s secured a plea bargain with the Colombian government, and is to turn himself in the following day. But before then, Escobar has one or two things to take care of. For a wealthy drug lord, it’s the usual: calling together his most trusted men to bury diamonds and other valuables, followed by swiftly executing any witnesses. In a rare, quiet moment before the film’s final showdown, Escobar tells Nico he sees him as a son, then shows him how to use a gun. Escobar orders Nico to meet up with one of his men who knows the location of an abandoned mine. Escobar’s instructions: shoot the man once the treasure is securely buried. This definitely isn’t the paradise Nico envisioned when he and his surfer brother showed up to Colombia a few years prior.

As much as we can sympathize with Nico’s “good guy must grow a pair” dilemma, that predicament has been done to death in movies. Escobar: Paradise Lost is a decent enough action film, but the real problem is with the film’s namesake; he’s just not that interesting on screen. And that’s incredible, because the real Escobar was a polarizing and complicated figure, and Benecio del Toro is an effective and nuanced actor. The real problem is that the writers picked the wrong story to tell. Nico is the protagonist here instead of Escobar, and Hutcherson spends more time making concerned expressions with his face than actually talking. It’s hard to feel invested in him or his relationship with Maria. It’s only when his would-be target calls in sick for the job and sends his 15-year-old son instead that any dramatic tension in the film appears. The unlikely cat and mouse chase that ensues makes for an above-average action caper in the second half, but not enough to overcome the missed opportunity of covering the film’s fascinating and largely untapped source material.

To be fair, Benecio del Toro is transfixing during his time on screen, nailing those subtle tics of suppressed anger. But the problem is more about the lack of any stakes in the film. It’s easy when a writer is so entrenched in a subject to not realize that 1991 is now over two decades ago, and not all moviegoers are going to remember CNN footage like it was yesterday. Without introducing us to the backstory at all (the movie starts in medias res with Nico and his wife frantically attempting to flee the country), we don’t know how important it was to capture Escobar. And since we’re not introduced to the polarizing nature of his character either (he had a bit of a Robin Hood complex, selling cocaine to the rich and giving to Columbia’s poor communities), it doesn’t make a lot of sense when throes of people show up in support as he turns himself in to the police. Even with a quality actor like del Toro, Escobar comes off as nothing more than a generic cutthroat mobster who takes no prisoners.

I’m reminded of another cocaine kingpin film, 2001’s Blow, starring Johnny Depp as George Jung. While not necessarily the genre’s finest either, the script, based on the book written by the drug lord himself, has some ambiguity that makes the character a bit more interesting than Escobar in Paradise Lost. It’s obvious that Jung’s version of events are complete rubbish, but this kind of self-delusion and superman complex, and the task inside the audience’s mind of reconciling truth from fiction, is sometimes what makes for interesting characters. In contrast, Pablo Escobar, at least in this film, is unfortunately transparent, obvious, and lacking any sense of real humanity. For a man that was finally caught because, against his own best interest, he kept making long phone calls to his teenage son (another point the film doesn’t get to), I think there was more dynamism to get to here. And Benecio del Toro is sorely underutilized in that regard. Still, the acting elevates it to something watchable, if not particularly revelatory or enticing. For true history buffs, the 2009 award-winning documentary, Sins of My Father, as told through the perspective of Escobar’s son, might be a more worthwhile investment.

Five minutes into Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor, the hospital’s newest intern, Benjamin (Vincent Lacoste) recalls one of his first E.R. triumphs: treating a former classmate that he just couldn’t stand. Patting himself on the back for his own maturity, he states calmly, “I treated him like any other patient. That’s when I became a real doctor.”

Benjamin is young, a bit cocky, and definitely hoping to impress as he begins his first shift at the hospital. But what’s fascinating about this opening is the way director Thomas Lilti has Benjamin deliver the lines directly to the camera. It’s as if Benjamin is talking directly to us, the audience, trying to convince us that he has what it takes to make it in this high stakes, detail oriented profession.

Unfortunately for Benjamin, not even 12 hours go by before he makes the first of a handful of critical errors. Yet, major lapses of judgement aside, what’s lovely about Hippocrates is that it’s not merely a scathing critique of the French healthcare system, nor a critique of the negligent people within it. A careful script measures the tone with close precision, showing error and blame is not entirely black and white in a medical system hamstrung by budget cuts and an overworked staff. The characters are likable and fully formed, executed by a fairly consistent cast, which makes their decisions, albeit sometimes wrong, at least relatable. It’s hard to know for most of the movie whether to root for or against Benjamin, and for all that complexity, Hippocrates is a thoroughly engaging and emotional watch.

As a foil for the all-too-green Benjamin, we’re quickly introduced to Abdel (Reda Kateb), an Algerian doctor with a bit more experience than Benjamin, who has recently transferred to the country, taking on the “intern” title as a formality for foreigners. Benjamin and Abdel, working in the same department, encounter a lot of the same problems—allowing us to see two ways of handling the same issues, including a jaded and sometimes lazy nurse staff. When Benjamin is told the ECG machine doesn’t work half the time and is a hassle to set up by a nurse, he bypasses the procedure and heads home. But the more astute Abdel doesn’t take the lack of a pump for morphine as a valid excuse, asking the nurse to find one in a different department. The choices both have consequences; Benjamin’s decision causes one patient’s heart attack to go undetected, leaving a man dead and a wife wanting to know why.

While under a microscope their choices seem like night and day, to the script’s credit, Hippocrates makes it easy to understand how choices like this get made. The problems at the hospital—and there are plenty—all point to a larger systemic problem. These people feel human. After deciding not to run the ECG, one of the nurses looks up at the episode of House M.D. playing in the background and jokes, “Borrow their ECG.” It’s not about apathy, it’s about defeat. They’re normal people, not intentionally negligent or ill-meaning. Once things are accepted as commonplace, bad practices just aren’t questioned anymore. It takes a pair of new doctors, shocked and horrified by a particularly bleak first week, to challenge the status quo.

Where the film gets some of its heart is that it’s not as biting as it may seem at first glance—there’s a bit of humanity here. By switching the third-person POV from Benjamin to Abdel and back again, we want both doctors to succeed. Benjamin’s flaws are somewhat explained, while Abdel’s initial terseness is seen through his eyes as compassion and discipline. Indeed, the hot-headed Benjamin, who gets away with more than one verbal argument by being a senior doctor’s son, seems to genuinely get the point of internal medicine. “Internal medicine is about caring for real patients, real people, creating real relationships,” he passionately tells a cocky colleague from intensive care. Benjamin’s not a bad doctor—he just made a bad choice within a bad system.

Part of the reason these nuances work is the acting, especially in the two leads, who swing back and forth between thinly veiled frustration and a certain childlike eagerness with care and precision. Reda Kateb’s Abdel, especially, feels honest, straightforward when he needs to be, and layered, like a man who wants to do his best but understands his limitations would be. The supporting cast offers equal parts frustration and nonchalance, doing a lot to build the climactic water-boiling-over scenes, like a particularly tough hollering match near the end with the hospital’s director.

But the film isn’t just a feel good David vs. Goliath underdog story. No one here is purely evil, and no one here is purely good. Like many passionate people, Benjamin and Abdel are imperfect subjects, and sometimes their efforts are a bit misdirected, even rash and juvenile. Perhaps because director Thomas Lilti has written the script from his own personal experiences (he’s a trained doctor who still works as a physician), it’s easier to acknowledge this gray area, where other films would just portray its protagonists as faultless everyday heroes standing up against The Man. But Hippocrates is a character film above all else, and Benjamin and Abdel’s struggle to balance strict profit-focused policy with their own personal values and that age-old adage “do no harm” (where the film gets its namesake) makes for a compelling story—one that extends past a certain country or a certain field, to anyone that’s ever realized doing the right thing is sometimes much more complicated than it should be.

From the outside, Emma’s (Laura Barrett) life is on the up and up: as a mild-tempered but curious 30-something, she’s long since given up the unstable life of a touring musician for the security of a full-time job and an impending marriage. But when former band mate Gabriel (Jose Miguel Contreras) comes by for an unexpected visit, it’s hard for Emma to deny what she knows to be true: she’s still an artist at heart. Seeing Gabriel immediately awakens something in her, and it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore their chemistry, even as fiancé Stefan (Alex Tindal) is upstairs packing for the couple’s move to their new apartment.

It’s clear that Emma and Gabriel aren’t the only artists. Director Sarah Goodman’s feature debut, shot entirely in black and white, has something of a dreamlike quality. A lot of the film is shot with a shallow depth of field, which seems to draw a macro lens on the intimate stories on display here—not just Emma’s, but also a neighbor experiencing her first love, and an elderly couple across the street confronting a half-hearted romance left to spoil. Even the film’s soundtrack is self-contained, with the two leads (who also happen to be real-life musicians) composing and performing most of the film’s music. The quirky indie tunes seem like something Emma, a slim-figured, mousey girl with clear, hipster glasses, would indeed sing.

The only complaint is that the music might fit the character more than the narrative itself—a close heart-to-heart between Emma and Stefan, where she admits she once dated Gabriel (who has now taken a room in their home for the night), has all the intensity of a lullaby sung to a child right before bedtime (read: none at all). It points to a larger problem of the art direction sometimes getting in the way of the narrative. The whole film has a bit of a stilted quality to it; while we get to go inside Emma’s house, the B and C plots surrounding the teenage couple and elderly couple are shot on each neighbor’s respective porch. It feels stiff, like watching a one-act play, and the lines are delivered with that same sense of restriction.

Laura Barrett’s Emma is the only character that really feels lively here. There is some humor to Goodman’s script (the teenage girl across the street has fallen in love with a Settlers of Catan-obsessed man, who’s decided to literally dress the part with armor), but Barrett alone seems capable of adding the touch of quirkiness to her character with any real humanity. Stefan feels a bit like the jealous alpha-male boyfriend archetype, whereas Gabriel never omits a line with any emotion above that of a stoner. He’s fine in the more romantic scenes though, and especially believable as an introspective singer-songwriter when he sings an acoustic Elliott Smith-type number for Emma on her porch. This easy-going but slightly regretful tone is what most of the movie carries, which is fine when a person is thinking about events much later on in life, but in the moment, it’d be nice to feel like these characters are as engaged with their lives as their art would seem to imply. Everyone feels a bit sleepy and hollow.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of artistic choices needing to really make an impact, and not just existing for the sake of it. According to director Sarah Goodman, the film was inspired by her experiences in her own neighborhood, overhearing little stories here and there. It’s an interesting concept about the way humanity is intertwined, but in actual execution, the tertiary stories are too superficial to feel invested in, and the primary story is lost a bit in the fact that, on film, neither of the lead men have much chemistry with Emma. It’s a beautifully shot 72 minutes of film, with some big picture themes—the three stories can kind of be seen as the circle of life (falling in love, the ebbs of relationships, and the loss of love)—but a stronger central story would have made for a longer lasting impression. Instead, the stories feel as fleeting as the ones we overhear on the street without ever quite digesting them.

Porch Stories opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday, June 19th in Toronto.

We all know the term “Oscar bait.” In one rendition of it, the tragic hero—whether that be Russell Crowe in Gladiator or Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic—overcomes humble beginnings to heroically stave off adversity, winning honor and love. If you scale back that model 100 times, you have the indie version: an everyday guy tries avoiding the path life wants him to take, only to succumb to its inevitability.

Director Edd Benda’s feature-length debut, Superior, follows that much-traveled second route, except this everyday guy is actually two guys: best friends Derek (Paul Stanko) and Charlie (Thatcher Robinson), who in the summer of 1969 just graduated high school, and want one last hurrah before leaving their rural Michigan hometown for that dreaded thing we call adulthood. Charlie’s future is a bit more certain: he’s on his way to Michigan Tech. But Derek, with the Vietnam War in full swing and no plans of his own, fears his days until the draft are just a matter of time.

It sounds like a tailor-made premise to get audiences tearing up about all the good things in life: youth, friendship, and fate.

But even invoking the anxiety and dread of a draft, this film just fails to land any emotional punch. The problem, essentially, is the movie never quite feels like it begins. A title screen at the beginning cues us to the year, but Superior never commits to inviting us into its world. It doesn’t feel like 1969. The clothing (apparently everyone, and I mean everyone, wears flannel and short shorts) feels a bit like a lackluster costume party where the guests go far enough to acknowledge the requisite dress code, but not far enough to show a passion for details. The hair cuts feel modern. The clothes and Converse Chucks could pass just as much for ‘90s grunge as 1969. The laziness extends to the set design—and even the script. There was a way people talked back then, slightly more formal, different colloquialisms. But more egregiously, there are just no cultural references made at all (beyond the war): no newspaper mentioning Richard Nixon, no Marvin Gaye playing in the diner.

It might seem like much ado about nothing, but I think the failure to introduce us to time and place sees parallels elsewhere—most notably, and perhaps most damningly—in a lack of attention in introducing us to these characters. It’s not enough to start a movie and set up anonymous Friend 1 and Friend 2. We need to care about them as friends and that takes emotional preparation via history or conflict. When the boys get the idea to take one last journey together, an ambitious bike ride around Lake Superior, they could have just as well been acquaintances that had one class together in 12th grade. There’s no indication to how deep the bond runs.

This lack of foundation makes the entire first half hard to warm up to. As they tease each other on the road, running into each other’s bikes or splashing each other in the water, we know we’re supposed to feel the bonds of friendship, but the actions feel hollow without a story behind them. It’s only when Charlie and Derek start meeting unusual characters along the way that the film starts to feel like an actual story.

But unfortunately the shots of two teenagers riding through the Michigan wilderness is actually the movie’s high point.

The script’s roadmap is almost as easy to read as Derek’s map illustrating the trails around Lake Superior. Three mini climaxes, via road stops, increase the film’s intensity—or they would if they actually worked—before the final emotional climax (and you can probably guess what happens). But the middle of the film goes from trying and failing to… just being confusing.

The first stop is at a diner in Minnesota where they’re confronted by a pair of waitresses with thick Minnesotan accents, rolling off the line “Youuuu bet-cha!” with the enthusiasm of a Whose Line Is it Anyway? contestant trying to satirize a redneck. It’s here that I started to question if I misread the film as a drama. Is the script trying to be funny? Isn’t that an odd move amidst earnest string music and atmospheric shots of the lake and the trails—not to mention a setup about a teenager on the eve of a draft to Vietnam? The acting is a huge problem throughout this movie, but the spoof-like performances during their stops on the road are the film’s most distracting moments.

Stop #2 finds the boys at odds with a cooky old man who find Charlie and Derek snooping around his seemingly abandoned home. He holds a shotgun to Charlie’s head, until Derek says where they’re from (a source of kinship, evidently, with their newfound crack-job of a friend). “Oh, why didn’t you say so?” he asks, in the same tone as the guard to the Emerald City (after all, that’s apparently a horse of a different color), and he invites them in. Their stay with the man is bizarre, to say the least. By now, I wasn’t just not engaged with the film, but totally confused. Comedy? Drama? What is going on, man?

I could belabor the point, but clearly there’s not much to offer here despite a promising premise. By the time the two boys must face the big “conversation” at the end—the one where they inevitably face their changing relationship, Derek repeating his impending life as a solider—I had completely forgotten the Vietnam thread. It got lost in a convoluted middle section filled with failed humor and misplaced plot points. The only consolation, I suppose, is that for a film about Lake Superior, the shots of the lake are indeed beautiful.

Musician Sufjan Stevens creates serene melodies that float along like the rippling of a rock over water. It’s only when listening closely to his lyrics that his love for working out the complex dualities of imperfect relationships with family and lovers becomes apparent. There probably couldn’t be a more fitting song than Steven’s “Futile Devices” to open up Echo Lake, a quiet and introspective character study of 30-year-old Will Baxter (Sam Zvibleman), whose personal relationships have become not unlike unstable towers of Jenga blocks—one bad move away from utter collapse.

Will’s reached the point where hitting the play button on his voicemail is physically exhausting. Although it’s never fully explained, he’s hit a wall with his long-time girlfriend (Christine Weatherup), who in the film’s early quarter utters those famous last words: “I can’t do this anymore”). His young brother, in a slightly condescending tone, badgers him to follow up on signing paperwork regarding a cabin on Echo Lake, a family vacation home left to him in his father’s will. For his part, Will’s solution to dealing with the death of a parent he’s had a conflicted past with is to not deal with it all. As more of an avoidance mechanism than anything, Will decides to head up to the cabin. The miles it takes to make the drive feel like as much of an escape as the bottles of booze he’s consuming in steady intervals. When Will gets to the lake, nature, time and silence begin to heal him in that way only nature, time and silence can.

Echo Lake marks the directorial debut of Jody McVeigh-Schultz and Zvibleman’s acting debut. Both ease into their roles as if the story is their own. McVeigh-Schultz also supplies the script, and it’s a winner. The film has a way with dialogue—Will’s chats with man-child friends who still drink on weeknights, half-hearted, flirty quips from a girlfriend who has probably become more of a friend, and funny if not slightly tragic negative self-talk sound natural and relatable.

McVeigh-Schultz lets cinematographer Andy Rydzewski and composer Joe Minadeo set the mood, with a complete indulgence in beautiful, soft, de-saturated long shots of nature, allowing us to feel as immersed in Will’s retreat as he does. The music is wandering and glimmering, urging thoughts to simmer as Will takes walks up hills and wades through brushy terrain.

But the script never hits us over the head with that same sentimentality, much to its credit. As the movie progresses, we feel that Will is crawling out of his negative head space. There aren’t any heartfelt soliloquies or dramatic voiceovers of diary entries here. Rather, we follow the gradual shift in tone of his daydreams: the longer he stays at Echo Lake, the more the focus of his memories shifts from annoyances with his ex-lover to tiny moments of joy they shared. I appreciate a screenplay that doesn’t simply tell you that, but helps you feel it. Getting away to reset your mind and spirit doesn’t ever solves one’s problems; it just gives a person the second wind they need to face the music.

I loved this movie, and I don’t often say that so explicitly in a review. The script captures the humanity of an imperfect character more prone to half-heartedly respond to his life and environment rather than be proactive and engaged in it. Zvibleman never pushes too hard at Will’s emotional baggage and hits the subtle comedic notes on point.

I was surprised to read in the film’s liner notes that McVeigh-Schultz often fielded the criticism that Will should be more likable, because I think Will’s character, thorns and all, is the movie. Is it a douchebag move to lie to your girlfriend about coming home and instead hang out at the bar with the guys? Sure. Should you maybe not jack off to porn on her couch as she sulks in her room with the door closed? Probably not. But Will’s not a callous guy; he’s just in that limbo state we all get in where not dealing at all seems like the less painful option. His gradual acceptance and willingness to get back to living is believable and relatable in the hands of a more than capable lead actor and an ambitious script.

However, as much as I’ll praise the script, both for its subtlety and ease with dialogue, I don’t think its delivery is perfectly executed across the board. I didn’t quite buy into the rhythm of the dialogue between Will and his girlfriend, in both the opening sequences and some of the later flashbacks. She says the right things, but the timing and connection between the two is never quite in the pocket. The scenes with Will’s friends (who clearly miss their frat days) do their job but not much more. However, interactions with a sibling pair of like-minded stoners up in the woods does work, bringing a breath of humor to what could otherwise have been a slow middle section. But Zvibleman is the star here, and since, in true Cast Away fashion, we spend the most time with him, other minor lapses are quickly forgiven.

Echo Lake succeeds in large part thanks to its relatability and willingness not to indulge in storybook endings. Like Will, we all deep down don’t want to be gigantic assholes, but sometimes we need a moment to center ourselves and get things right. For a film about moments, not gigantic belts of emotion, first-time director McVeigh-Schultz should be proud for hitting many of them right on the mark.

The cranky but ultimately ingenious Dr. House (of the long-running Fox drama that bore his name) often solved his medical mysteries by relying on one basic truth: everybody lies. But whereas House spewed out those words with a not-so-subtle dash of condescension, a new documentary by director Yael Melamede casts an empathetic lens on nine men and women who told pretty big whoppers—and suffered quite a public lashing for their transgression. Interweaving a fair dose of research and behavioral science (more specifically “behavioral economics,” as we’re told the field is called), (Dis)Honesty – The Truth About Lies does a fairly good job of making everyone from drug-abusing athletes to businessmen convicted of accounting fraud not seem too different from the average Joe.

It’s probably worth noting early on that while the feature-length documentary trend is toward cohesive narratives that feel a bit like traditional dramas, with one singular story arc, this film is not that. It’s educational at heart. Released in conjunction with The (Dis)Honesty Project, an installation art exhibit and corresponding website that crowdsources people’s experiences with lying, the film’s main purpose seems to distill a bit of the information gathered throughout their research. Behind the project is Dr. Dan Ariely of Duke University, who is a central figure in the documentary, both in explaining the science in intermittent scenes at a lecture hall (which is not at all dry because he’s a fairly charming guy) and also leads experiments with real college students at universities across the country. Essentially, this is a documentary about the results of a behavioral science project prettied up with super sleek graphics, compelling human-interest stories, and a relatable, funny tour guide in Dr. Ariely.

But before you get scared, this is a far cry from those monotone one-note documentaries your eighth grade teacher played while catching up on some grading. The filmmakers do one hell of a job making the subject relatable and engaging. If anything, the interweaving of test cases, short lectures, personal interviews, and explanatory animation sequences into potent mini explorations of why people lie reminds me of the better MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses), a newer phenomenon where condensed versions of real university classes are offered for free on a global scale via platforms like Coursera and edX. If you love online learning, the film is a hugely rewarding 90 minutes on an interesting—and as far as I now, not terribly understood—subject.

But for those who crave the documentary format’s ability to showcase vulnerability and raw emotion, the dozen or so vignettes from a few semi-famous public cases of dishonesty feel like some of the most honest moments of nonfiction in recent memory (perhaps ironically). Of the more affecting interviews are Marilee Jones, a former Dean of Admissions at MIT who was fired after 28 years with the university once it was discovered she lied on her application about her educational background, and Joe Papp, a former U.S. professional cyclist who tested positive for doping. Their stories felt ripe with transparency, as if there was nothing left to lose.

Seating their subjects in an empty gray room, the filmmakers used Interrotron, a technology where the subjects see (and thus talk) to the director or Dr. Ariely directly through the camera lens, which gave a great sense of intensity to the stories. The technique really seemed to emphasize the eyes and caught these moments of recognition as these men and women grappled to understand their actions even as they were retelling a story they’ve surely told a million times. The filmmakers are clearly viewable to the subject, but their presence isn’t felt in the resulting film, which emulates intimacy between storyteller and viewer. While the film itself is fragmented in structure, these shorter scenes flow naturally, with no sense of prompting or questioning. They’re the film’s most engaging moments.

But we shouldn’t think of the narrative moments and the more scientific moments as in conflict with each other. In fact, a discussion of tests performed in university classrooms that have proved repeatedly that an overwhelming majority of people will cheat if they see the cheating as small, combined with the laughter from the audience as Dr. Ariely retells their studies—a laughter spawned from a shared understanding of the human condition—all serve to strengthen the empathy we feel toward the “big offenders” who are left retelling their deeply personal descents. The Dishonesty Project seems to suggest the truth to a certain Maya Angelou quote: “We are more alike, my friends, than unalike.”

If any documentary this year elicits introspection and perhaps a small sort of compassion for our fellow humans, (Dis)Honesty – The Truth About Lies might be the one. I promise I’m not exaggerating.

Director Agnieszka Zwiefka found the untold story of untold stories: among an illegal Roma camp in Wroclaw, Poland, 10-year-old Denisa Gabor is an outcast even among her gypsy family and friends. The young girl fell deaf, by the family’s estimation around age two, and without financial or medical support she simply never learned to speak. She gets by with grunts and hand gestures. The only time she seems to really communicate in the way she wants to is when she discovers a Bollywood tape in a nearby dump and plays it on the old TV in her family’s makeshift home. She mimics the moves, and for once, communication doesn’t seem like a barrier.

Denisa, as one can tell from the title, is the film’s heart and soul, but on the periphery of Zwiefka’s narrative are tensions of social class—both the prejudices of being an outsider and the severe limitations of poverty. The city is in the midst of deciding whether to expel the entire population—one newscast asks, “What should we do with people without education, even papers?”

In the film’s first third, the clash of cultures is really fascinating, if not alarming. The filmmakers don’t explain how Denisa can suddenly afford to get fitted for a hearing aid, but she does, and the doctor’s pointed questions double in showing us the living biases this population faces and the catch-22 of their situation (they can’t get a job without an address; they can’t get health care without a job). Perhaps the most shocking moments, especially in a film starring a 10-year-old girl, is the vulgar language hurled, not just at the adults, from seemingly every direction—elderly on the streets, non-Roma children at the parks, and even from within their own community. As a Western viewer, it’s a bit of an awakening to realize that discrimination against Roma communities is hardly a thing of history and folklore.

Where I get lost a bit is with the film’s Bollywood aspects. Instead of Denisa returning to that initial Bollywood movie or making up her own modest routines like a young kid might, we get several full-scale choreographed numbers: dancing atop rooftops with the kids from her camp, floating through the streets as the whole town comes together like a grand finale of A Chorus Line, and a complex number on a basketball court where she takes center stage like a prima ballerina. My criticism isn’t about the musical aspect itself; the numbers are lovely and colorful (quite literally—she dances in Roma-inspired veils of teal and peach), but I think the Bollywood aspect poses an important question about the film’s narrative. Whether or not you’re fine with their inclusion will be based on how liberal your view of creative nonfiction is, because clearly someone has intervened to choreograph and stage these sequences. Seeing the same girl who seconds ago got shooed away by cops while begging for money come to life is nothing short of inspiring. I’m just wondering if it’s helpful. It’s not making up facts, but it’s making up emotions.

Each of these scenes gets placed very carefully after a particularly difficult real-time conflict: her parents arguing with neighboring families, the police showing up, the nightly news talking about the impending court case regarding the settlement. While the adults look dismal, even angry, the camera shifts to Denisa, going silent except a low buzz—indicating that, perhaps mercifully, Denisa can’t hear any of this. Then, like drifting into a dream, we shift into these imaginative dance sequences, where the world’s problems are a million miles away. As a pure storytelling technique the juxtaposition is lovely. They remind me of a powerful scene in the French film Girlhood where a working class band of friends forget about abusive family members and limited future prospects long enough to belt out to Rihanna’s “Diamonds”—the implication being that despite everything that’s happened to them, their true spirits still live inside them. But Girlhood is fiction, and I’m conflicted on the use of this same technique in a documentary.

As a human being, I can’t help feeling thankful someone gave Denisa a moment to be special, but then, of course, there’s this nagging sense that during these interludes, the film stops being a documentary. They’re an intervention, a fiction, and as such it’s hard to know what is really going on in her mind during these tough times. Having no idea what the film’s core subject is thinking feels like a misstep. At one pivotal moment near the end, we see her hearing aid on the ground, indicating that she chose to stop hearing. The film says choosing not to hear was her choice, but we’re given no exposition in the film itself to know that this was the case. There was no way to know it wasn’t simply from accident—or even neglect. So Denisa remains a mystery, albeit one for whom it’s impossible not to root for.

The dance scenes do break up the melodrama with a bit of hope and energy, though; some of the Roma mystical charm—a moonlit dance in front of a fire—is simply enchanting. But it’s hard to know if the hope the dance elements give is real. Oddly, this leaves me asking more humanitarian questions than most films that tell us what to think provoke. Is ignorance really bliss? How will she live as an adult without speech? Surely, a system that allows a girl to go untreated for a decade is broken? This film focuses its camera only on Denisa and doesn’t pose these bigger questions, but perhaps viewers will take the baton and ask them for her.

The media called him Curveball, but the man’s real name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi. If you haven’t heard either name, you might know him as the Iraqi defector who revealed to the U.S. that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the catalyst for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He’s now claiming he made it all up—that he said whatever U.N. inspectors wanted to hear because, in his mind, they shared a goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. As he tells his story in full for the first time, director Matthias Bittner sits across a table, not unlike those used in a police interrogation. Janabi’s eyes water up as he says “To be honest, no one knows the real Rafid.” And thus starts Bittner’s 90-minute conversation with the man who may have started a war.

It’s a big accusation, and War of Lies is a movie trying to make big statements. From Bittner’s first question: “What does the word truth mean to you?” spoken in a dark room with a dramatic hard light on Janabi’s face, it’s clear this movie wants to make grand statements about humanity and personal responsibility. This sort of documentary format—with exactly one interviewee carrying the narrative, largely in a single room—has been done before with some success. But, right away, that very leading opening question betrays some problems. Usually the interviewee, guilty or not, is given the benefit of the doubt, and I can’t really tell from the tone of the interview if that’s the case here. The marketing material for War of Lies posits the question: “Is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi simply a proud Iraqi who helped rid the world of Saddam Hussein, or a brilliant con artist whose story about chemical weapons led the US to invade Iraq?” But the director, and thus the film, seem to have a very clear agenda: to get this guy to apologize.

The format (of essentially letting Janabi talk for an hour) seems a bit at odds with this agenda. Usually if a subject is allowed to give their perspective, they’re given a little leeway, even if the audience still must choose if they’ll extend the same compassion. But these questions are so pointed at times that it seems like the interviewer has completely ignored what was just said, to get the necessary sound byte.

Maybe it’s devil’s advocate. Maybe Bittner needs to be hard-hitting, so he doesn’t lose the audience that wants him to ask the hard questions. But the way he interrogates him, the repeated attempts to drag out emotional scenes (showing Janabi images and video footage of children suffering as a result of the war in Iraq), and the editorial choice to end the movie on a somewhat forced apology (after Janabi spends 90 minutes in no minced words saying that he doesn’t regret any action that got Hussein out of power) seems to indicate the goal is something akin to: “We want to know you feel bad.” It seems to ignore the narrative leads a film can often happily discover when they choose to listen to a subject instead of going in already knowing what they want to hear. In the process of getting this apology, I think the filmmakers miss some interesting follow-up questions. For instance, the insinuation of Janabi’s storyline, for me, seems to be that the U.S. would have declared war on Iraq either way, with or without his existence. When a major military power wants to go to war, they will dig up something to justify it, then pass that on to the media. Maybe that’s a dangerous and preposterous assertion—maybe it’s not—but if that’s the story he’s trying to tell, it seems absurd to put him in the chair and give the illusion that he’s giving his side of the story but to steer the end results somewhere else.

To be clear, it is ambiguous what Janabi’s role is. To his credit, he’s an eloquent individual who throughout the film, even under pressure of very pointed questions, doesn’t seem to change his story. But he has a bit of an Amanda Knox problem in that his nonverbal behavior often veers a little creepy. He laughs at seemingly inappropriate times. He smiles after relaying a story where he was apparently scared for his life while under the custody of the German secret service. But social oddness is hardly an indication of guilt.

But let’s assume Janabi is guilty for a second. The problem is this movie is not really about the war, it’s about one person’s perspective on how he got catapulted to the national limelight. So if we think he’s guilty, which seems to be the filmmakers’ stance, what are we left with? Ultimately, maybe the format of single interview in a room just didn’t work here. Maybe we needed more outside corroboration to know whether or not to feel invested in this man’s story. The documentary is a great format to use for the dissemination of information—it’s a little less effective if the information might not even be true. In the end, I’m not even sure what to do with this film, and that’s unfortunate, because it’s a subject that even 10 years on, begs so much for clarity.

It only took 10 minutes for Detective Jason Vanderwarf to get a search warrant to enter the home of Matthew Stewart, an Army vet growing a personal supply of illegal marijuana in his Ogden, Utah home. It’s up for debate if he knew the plain-clothed officers who broke into his home were police, but the unshakeable fact is that the raid left an officer dead and several other men (including Stewart) severely wounded. It’s one of four instances of alleged excessive force by police officers that directors Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber set their lens on in their compelling and all-too-timely documentary Peace Officer.

The crime scene looks a bit like a makeshift version of a Mission Impossible set. But instead of a grid of complex lasers for Tom Cruise to limbo over and under, crime scene investigator William “Dub” Lawrence has zig-zagged red and yellow string every which way (red indicating rounds fired by the police officers and yellow representing rounds fired by Stewart). After demonstrating projection angles and examining blood splatter, Lawrence, on his knees in the bathroom says, “If we calculated it right, the bullet would have fallen all the way to right here.” With a big grin on his face, he pulls out a bullet from under a hole in the wall. Noticing the distortion and skin fibers on the bullet and knowing who was standing where, he determines Officer Vanderwarf was shot by friendly fire—not Matthew Stewart. OK, so CSI wishes it was that compelling.

But this is real life, and not many people find the consequences entertaining. And what this scene demonstrates, finally, is logical evidence separated from the grief and anger that (perhaps, rightfully) colors a lot of the debate on this subject. It’s one thing, as many documentarians do (I’m looking at you, Michael Moore) to be angry and critical of a system. It’s another to prove it’s flawed with an equal dose of science and compassion. This even-keeled, logical exposé on the silent rise of militarization will certainly find an audience in a generation craving for an untainted source of information.

The filmmakers have an invaluable tool in Lawrence, who not only is a contract crime scene investigator but is also a former police officer and sheriff, and even more bizarrely, was the man who founded Utah’s first SWAT team. This same institution would go on to kill his son-in-law, Brian Wood, back in 2008. It’s become a personal obsession of Lawrence to sort out the case, and others like it, and having worked on a number of high profile cases (including breaking the Ted Bundy case), he’s unusually qualified. Also grounding the documentary is a fair share of history and archival footage dating even before SWAT (the film particularly points out the U.S.’s War on Drugs, and how our gradual reliance on no-knock raids began back in the Nixon era). Well-researched, considerate to both sides, and seamlessly edited to carry a trio of stories in an engaging way, Peace Officer is just about everything we can ask for from a social change-motivated documentary.

There is a huge difference when filmmakers do their homework and when they don’t. The colossal amount of information never feels slow because we’re recreating these scenes from half a dozen perspectives at some times—the parents, the police, the suspects, the prosecutors, journalists, legal action groups, and, of course, Lawrence with the science. We have media footage, police cam footage, and recreations that are graciously not at all cheesy, probably because they have the professional touch of an investigator, rather than the dramatic edge of an actor. For their first feature-length documentary, Barber and Christopherson, along with editor Renny McCauley, have created three (and later four) cohesive and compelling interweaving story lines.

The only place where the narrative feels forced at all is in a couplet of scenes in the film’s later third where Officer Jared Francom’s parents are shown revisiting the scene of their son’s death (he was fatally shot by Matthew Stewart), and the subsequent scene where Lawrence recalls a tragic story about his uncle, a police officer, dying as a result of injuries sustained on duty. Clearly, at this point we’re trying to make the good ol’ “police officers are doing their job most of the time” counterargument—a good and an important point, especially in a deeply human documentary—but it does come off feeling a bit intentional and less seamless than the rest of the film.

Perhaps getting in both sides of the story came a little too late (for instance, we start with the Brian Wood case, but never hear from the cops involved there). It’s a hurdle as a filmmaker when interviews are denied, but well-researched or not, this film’s bias feels clear. When we do get the opposite side, as with Detective Jason Vanderwarf (who suffered a bullet wound to the face, and doesn’t seem at all thrilled about the medals he received for the Matthew Stewart raid), it makes both sides seem human. And what a beautiful argument his inclusion makes in the film: Without the filmmakers explicitly having to make the argument themselves, he seems to be the symbol that excessive force isn’t just hurting the suspects, but the guys wielding the weapons as well. There’s nothing like a hole in a young officer’s face (by Lawrence’s estimates, shot by friendly fire) to put a hole in the argument that these weapons protect police. The reason the film maintains its integrity, and indeed the weight of its argument, is that it never points fingers at individual people, but rather at whole institutions. That’s crucial and somewhat new to this discussion. A good balance of heart and science, Peace Officer has the potential to set one heck of a ball rolling. Let’s hope it does.

Dreamcatcher, director Kim Longinotto’s documentary following one woman’s efforts to stop (or at least relieve the effects of) human trafficking, wastes no time hitting the streets of Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

A few minutes in, and we’re already sitting shotgun to the film’s heroine Brenda Myers-Powell and her partner Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, as they drive their van throughout town, giving a warm ear to working women who need to talk and condoms to those who aren’t quite ready. These stories get dire quick—one of the earliest stories comes from a woman who had been stabbed 19 times and lived to talk about it. She questions why her friends succumbed to their wounds, and yet here she is, living but not really living.

Brenda’s partner, another middle-age woman, offers the only nugget of hope: “When you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you call us, and let us help.” The woman declines—and yet, as is often the case in this film, a sense of hope still lingers.

The reason why this film captures that unexpected redemptive spirit despite dealing with victims of the sex trade, many of whom are high-school aged, lies completely on the shoulders of the film’s star, Brenda. After 25 years on those same streets, a brutal attack left her literally skinned alive—she alludes to the reconstructive surgery to regain her “womanhood,” her face. She started The Dreamcatcher Foundation as a means to intervene in young women’s lives, allowing them the emotional—and when possible legal or financial—support they need to recover.

For people who follow the documentary format, the most obvious comparison Longinotto’s film will recall is A&E’s long-running docuseries Intervention. There are a few differences (other than the sort of addiction) that make this film a bit different from your run-of-the-mill hit-rock-bottom story—the most obvious is Brenda herself. I’ve seen a fair chunk of Intervention’s nine seasons, and purely as a viewer, I have to say, sometimes those interventions gone awry (the ones where the subjects turn volatile as they’re threatened with losing privileges like their home or financial support) made me feel squeamish. Is it effective? I’m not the one to say. But it must feel a bit degrading, even humiliating, and here I am watching this person lose all sense of autonomy from the comfort of my living room. Perhaps, the reason Dreamcatcher feels less hopeless is because Brenda’s methodology completely removes the shame factor. There is no timeline to say “yes.” She’s on these women’s side whether or not they seek help, and whether or not they relapse once they do. That sort of system seems more in touch with reality.

I could say this film has a lot of heart, but that’s an easy assessment to make about a film that takes on a worthwhile cause. Its true strength is that the filmmakers have found such an effective subject in Brenda—who is not just an inspiring person, but shines on screen with all the sass and attitude of a women who could be running her own talkshow, if she weren’t too busy using her words to save lives. Because she’s so effective at what she does, a lot of the film’s arguments are made without explicitly having to say them. Clearly, the strongest medicine a psychologically damaged young woman on the street can be given is another human being. That seems to beg the question, how do we get more state-sponsored versions of Brenda? Secondly, by the filmmakers smartly choosing to focus on the women and not the act (we never see these women in sexually compromising situations), we’re left to remember their humanity. This film, which is comprised entirely of group or one-on-one dialogues, is a montage of women articulating the full range of their emotions. My guess is that chance at self-awareness is not often allotted to many of these women. And it feels real. Brenda, being from the street herself, can talk colloquially, and the filmmakers technically match this on-the-ground approach. We don’t have any studio-lit, dramatic macro-shot interviews. The most touching scene, where Brenda has a bit of a breakdown in her car thinking about the time she’ll need to take away from the women during an upcoming surgery, feels like someone just talking to themselves in the rearview mirror. The film doesn’t pull any cinematic magic tricks to make this woman a hero—she already is one.

The end result is, yes, viewers will know more about The Dreamcatcher Foundation and its co-founder Brenda Myers-Powell, but I think they’ll develop a lot of compassion for the half dozen women at the center of the film as well. When Brenda allows a former pimp to talk at a conference in Las Vegas, she encourages the crowd to keep an open mind because knowledge is power. And maybe for legal reform, that’s what we need: A bit of information. A bit of skepticism about how much of a choice a life of prostitution really is. A curiosity as to whether our courts are trying victims as criminals. Obviously Brenda is one woman and this is just one film, but both have done a commendable job in starting a compelling conversation.

Back when Apartment Troubles premiered at LAFF in June, the quirky comedy about two friends trying to make it in Manhattan on an artist’s salary (translation: no income at all) was called Trouble Dolls. A crumpled piece of paper at the beginning of the movie explains the Guatemalan myth of the trouble doll: A young girl can place one of these toy dolls under her pillow, and the doll will solve all her problems while she sleeps. Hey, a 20-something without financial support in the big city has to try something. But, needless to say, the dolls suck at their job. An eviction notice and one dead pet cat later, Olivia (Jennifer Prediger) and Nicole (Jess Weixler) are on a plane to LA to get away from it all. They stay with Nicole’s aunt Kimberley (Megan Mullally), a has-been judge on an America’s Got Talent-esque program. Nicole, a conceptual artist more prone to quote Chekhov than Katy Perry, can hardly stand in her aunt’s presence without a glass of red wine in hand. But broke and with nowhere to go, Nicole and Olivia take up residence in Kimberley’s home and before long are auditioning for the show.

Apartment Troubles marks the directorial and screenwriting debuts for both Weixler and Prediger. What I found interesting about the script—clearly intended to be a comedy—is that I didn’t do a whole lot of laughing. In some cases the humor seems to have been lost in translation: scenes with Will Forte, who plays a socially awkward but well-meaning guy who offers the girls a ride in LA, just completely fail to land. But jokes about a 30-year-old guy who still cares way too much about his mother’s approval turn out to be far more harmless than the bizarre plot twist with Aunt Kimberley, who takes a liking to Olivia (for more than just her voice). Their scenes together are more uncomfortable than entertaining, and like Forte’s character, completely tangential to the plot.

Where the movie succeeds is with the two leading ladies, and since this is ultimately a character piece with bits of humor thrown in to lighten its existential weight, their performances really do provide enough to make this is a worthwhile venture. I said I didn’t laugh a lot, but intentional or not, that’s something I kind of liked about this movie. It’s easy to take eccentric artsy types and make them into caricatures, but that’s not what this movie is really about. While a show like Girls helps us to laugh with a generation of girls who got their Bachelor degrees and make naive (sometimes absurd) life choices, I don’t think Apartment Troubles is really trying to critique its lead characters. Instead, I think it’s trying to ask if there is a place in this world for people like them, a question worth asking in an age where art degrees are looked at with the same disdain as drug addiction or sexual promiscuity. Nicole’s family treats her art ventures as a harmful and destructive life choice. One she could ultimately change. “I don’t think they want her around the kids,” Kimberley confesses to Olivia on why Nicole’s family may have taken a vacation without her.

Maybe it’s helpful here that Prediger and Weixler wrote the script, because Weixler’s Nicole, particularly, feels eccentric, yes, but like a living, breathing person. She has a way of delivering her lines with a certain calm and carefulness—a bit counter-stereotype for a role like this. There is, however, a deflatedness in her energy on-screen, like if she wasn’t too poor to eat something other than juice smoothies, she might want to try a small dosage of Zoloft. She’s been beaten down, and now her one remaining lifeline, her bestie Olivia, is making strides toward normalcy: successfully making small talk with strange dudes in cars, landing a TV ad, and insisting the girls apply for a silly reality TV show.

To be honest, if someone positioned this film to me as “two east coast girls take a leap of faith and go on a reality TV show,” I would have never hit play. The premise seems prime for obvious and overdone satire, but I think the reason it works here is because we never stray too far from a story of two friends. It’s not about auditioning for TV, it’s about two young ladies, finding their footing in the world. Their response to rejection shows the film’s subtle tension: these girls both desperately need each other and just as desperately need to separate from one another. Outside of the confines of whatever quirky art school they just graduated from, each has to learn to what extent she’ll adapt and which rules of society they’ll choose to play by.

The script doesn’t let Nicole go on depressive woe-is-me tangents, but as far as I’m concerned, this film is all about her, and taking an eccentric personality and treating her with the subtlety Weixler does is an appreciated surprise when dealing with this genre. By the movie’s end it’s not any external circumstance that lets us know she’ll be OK, but the way she quotes Chekov to a starving cat while sitting in a pile of trash outside her apartment (OK, I confess, this sounds hilarious—but it’s a genuinely tender moment). The fact that she can still see beauty in the struggle lets us know Nicole isn’t broken. And maybe it’s not she that needs to change, she just needs to change the minds of others.

It’s not a perfect script by any stretch, and it probably helps if you already have a little empathy for the plight of the artistically inclined, but the film has a lot of heart—and both Prediger and Weixler are transfixing on screen. It’s impossible not to root for them. Even I was able to forget that a conceptual piece about a dead cat could never do well on a cutthroat talent competition. That’s America’s loss.

In one of the films to be shown at this year’s Reel Artists Film Festival, the subject, an 82-year-old art patron, points out that documentary film is an art. That, indeed, taking part in his very own film is art. In this same spirit of discussing the meta nature of creating, the Reel Artists Film Festival will show three feature-length documentaries (along with a series of documentary shorts) that tackle relevant issues in contemporary art. The themes of these films ask big questions: At what point is a painting a forgery? What social responsibilities should cartoonists hold themselves to? And, finally, is a commissioner of art selfish or selfless?

I think these questions are all worth asking, and they’re all the more engaging when tackled via the colorful subjects in each of these films. I got the chance to preview the three full-length documentaries ahead of the festival’s March 26 opening in Ontario, and hopefully the reviews below will whet your palate. For those who can see the films in person, each screening will be followed by a panel discussion or guest speaker you won’t want to miss out on. You can see the full schedule and get more information here.

Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery

Director: Arne Birkenstock
Screening: March 26 – 8:00 pm, March 27 – 9:10 pm
Keynote Speaker(s): Arne Birkenstock, producer, director and screenwriter of Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery, will introduce the film, and then art critic Blake Gopnik will give a talk on the subject of art forgeries.

I probably have to confess that one of my favorite movies of all time is Catch Me If You Can, the Spielberg-directed caper about a teenager who gets away with convincing the world he’s an airline pilot, attorney, and even a doctor. So, naturally, director Arne Birkenstock’s documentary about Wolfgang Beltracchi, a man who spent nearly 40 years selling his own replicas of master paintings for millions of dollars, was right up my alley.

But Birkenstock’s film is not an action thriller—it firmly takes place in the present day with a nostalgic Beltracchi (along with his wife and partner in crime) looking back on some of their “success stories.” When not looking backward, much of the film takes place in their studio, allowing Beltracchi to show us some of the tricks of the trade, everything from peeling off the paint of old canvases (to reuse them) to capturing that perfect this-painting-is-totally-old smell.

The filmmakers are ever so careful to give us a full hour of lust for art before showing us the benefits of Beltracchi’s seedy endeavors: a mansion that might make Mark Zuckerberg jealous, with open glass windows and a magnificent view. Indeed, the editing is key here. By only allowing us see the studio at first, we’re able to feel bad for this passionate older man who is about to lose his home for the much colder confines of a German jail. As the film goes on, Beltracchi’s cockiness is more apparent (apparently Da Vinci is “easy to replicate”), but we’ve already been seduced by his energy and love for detail by this point. Thanks to careful editing and scripting, we go back and forth between being enchanted and remembering, “Oh, no wait. This is bad.”

The film also takes care to interweave as many sides of the story as possible—the buyers, the museum purchasers, and Beltracchi’s family—in order to build the full scope of what circumstances had to exist to let a man get away with this for four decades. But these diversions from the main plot never fully puncture the heart of the film: the childlike thrill of doing something naughty and damn near getting away with it.

Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy

Director: Stéphanie Valloatto
Screening: March 27 – 6:00 pm | March 28 – 8:15 pm
Keynote Speaker(s): At the March 27 screening, producer Stéphanie Valloatto will introduce Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy, and then moderate a panel discussion on political cartooning in Canada with cartoonists Bruce MacKinnon and Brian Gable and editor Haroon Siddiqui. At the March 28 screening, Stéphanie Valloatto will introduce the film, and John Ralston Saul will give the keynote address on the theme of freedom of speech.

French director Stéphanie Valloatto’s documentary Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy couldn’t be more timely, especially after the attack this past January on the Parisian satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Valloatto takes a broad lens in this expose on the political cartoonist, interviewing at least a dozen illustrators from anywhere and everywhere: Russia, France, Israel, Caracas, Mexico, Tunisia, and the USA. As the attack in Paris demonstrates, hostility toward individuals who would dare question the status quo is hardly limited to non-democratic nations, and cartoonists share their struggles on obnoxious restrictions, like an artist who gets around a ban on depicting a leader’s likeness by drawing him as a banana, to terrifying burdens like friends and colleagues going missing or turning up dead. But even when one’s life isn’t on the line, the obstacles are real. Jeff Danzinger, an American political cartoonist for the New York Times, points out the irony of working for an institution that relies on big business to stay afloat but having a job that requires critiquing those same deep pockets.

At nearly two hours, the film could do with a bit of editing—the lengthy feeling might have something to do with the lack of a coherent narrative (this is really a collection of loosely related interviews). Perhaps, it’d be easier to feel invested with less subjects, allowing the individual political climates time to get a little fleshed out. But the breadth the filmmakers cover does have some advantages. Lest we believe the political cartoon is purely a western concept, Valloatto’s wide lens seems to imply that Maya Angelou was all too right when she said, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” Image as satire is a human concept, and the the heart of this film is giving voice to the extraordinary men and women who want to keep overarching governments in check. The fight to maintain the voice to do so is universal.

The image that stood out the most to me was a cartoon made of one of their own: Ali Ferzat is a Syrian political cartoonist who was brutally attacked by President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers while living in Damascus. Not disguising the attack’s primary motivation, Assad’s henchman took special care to break all of his fingers. The resulting comic shows Ferzat in a hospital bed, black and blue with bruises and with casts on both hands. But above the casts, he’s making peace signs and a caption reads: “It hurts when I laugh but when I think that Assad is afraid of a pencil, LOL!” More than any other image it shows that the work done by these artists aren’t cheap shots by third parties several steps removed from the conflict—they live their fight for democracy, and in this case, the pen really is mightier than the sword.

Patron Saint

Director: Michael Kainer
Screening: March 28 – 5:30 pm
Keynote Speaker(s): Director Michael Kainer will introduce the film and moderate a panel discussion with artists Rae Johnson, Phil Richards, Andy Fabo and Max Streicher. Janusz Dukszta, art patron and subject of the film, will also be in attendance.

When I studied writing at an art school, my color theory professor let me write a short story for my final project—using words to depict translucency, saturation, and temperature instead of a paint brush. In a similar way, director Michael Kainer paints a portrait of Canadian art collector Janusz Dukszta in his delightful 70-minute expose on the man. But Dukszta is no ordinary collector. From every crevice of his Ontario house, you’ll find sculptures, paintings, and drawings of just one subject: himself. The public exhibition of these works, once and for all showcasing the 90 portraits commissioned by Dukszta over the course of 50 years, serves as the catalyst for a film that’s both charming and unexpectedly insightful.

Standing on a podium before all the gallery’s guests, a curator posits the filmmaker’s primary concern: Is Dukszta’s collection simply an act of supreme narcissism? But this premise is quickly dismissed as Kainer interviews the many artists and colleagues that make up Dukszta’s circle of friends. “I can’t find anyone who actually dislikes him,” Kainer confesses from offscreen during an interview.

Indeed, the film feels like both a defense of one man—long live the patron of the arts, may as well be its subtitle—but it also feels like a defense of portraiture. It easily succeeds in both regards. Many documentaries have scoured the trenches of the fine artist, the dancer, the musician who can no longer make a living, but in Patron Saint, we see a glimpse of how one man can galvanize an art scene just by respecting young artists enough to pay them their due. We see the confidence an artist builds by being shown the respect a dollar represents. And we see more taboo topics—Dukszta went through a phase where placing himself into classic religious works seemed like it might be a bit of fun—discussed with a certain thoughtfulness, not readily dismissed as disrespectful and self-serving. The film is well-served by an incredibly eloquent group of characters (including Dukszta himself) that elevate the film to a discussion of art interpretation. “Sometimes I think the self portraits are a pre-text for Janusz to have a close encounter with an artist,” suggests curator Gordon Hatt. “Someone who … may bring him in contact with whatever you want to call it: beauty, refinement, intellect, or profound emotion.” Those types of gems keep coming and coming.

Beyond the interviews, a foray into Dukszta’s past as a refugee from Poland during World War II grounds the film in history and goes a long way in defining his motivations. Kainer did his homework, and the result is just as impactful as any other evocative piece of art. Is Dukszta a narcisstic man? Quite possibly. But he’s also honest and more than willing to show a little vulnerability. What more could you want from the subject of a painting—or a film?

Tackling the German surrealist author Franz Kafka is no easy task, but a new film, simply titled K (after the main character), attempts to do just that. Co-directors Darhad Erdenibulag and Emyr ap Richard transport the protagonist of Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle to modern-day Mongolia.

Changing very little from the novel’s original setup, K (Bayin) arrives in an unfamiliar town, where he’s just been summoned by a mysterious governor to serve as the town’s new land surveyor. But his greeting by the townsfolk at the local inn is not at all a welcome one. No one seems to have any recollection of his summons, and getting in touch with the governor seems an impossible task—though that doesn’t keep K from trying. He quickly falls for a barmaid named Frieda (Jula), whose flirtations are the only sign of kindness offered to him by anyone. And, as it turns out, she just might be his in (she quickly reveals she’s actually the governor’s mistress).

But even with Frieda’s favor, his time in the town turns out to be one huge bureaucratic nightmare. No one seems particularly keen on revealing any information, and his task of finding an audience with the governor begins to feel further and further out of reach. Eventually, he takes a job as a school janitor, lowering his social station from stranger to servant (it’s hard to know what is worse).

K, perhaps admirably, attempts to capture the dialogue of its source material almost to a fault, removing whole sections but not rewriting the source material. Ironically, considering the care to not change individual lines, I think inadvertently the breadth of the edits have changed the meaning. In contrast, I’m reminded of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s meaty, 1500-word novel about the French Revolution that’s seen successful adaptations to both stage and screen. Imagine if, in adapting the novel for film, Les Misérables cut out the character of Fantine. Think about it: A writer could actually choose to do that. We could still follow Jean Val Jean’s life—his rise to mayor, his flight from Javert, his death. However, without the guilt he feels for failing Fantine, we completely lose his motivations.

Likewise K seems too focused on maintaining plot points versus honoring themes. We observe as K comes to town, falls into Frieda’s web, and ultimately loses her (as it turns out he was using her to get closer to the governor, and she was, in turn, using him to make the governor jealous). The problem isn’t so much how loyal filmmakers stay to the source material, but whether or not the film in front of us feels impactful. K feels disjointed and confusing, and I credit a lot of the disorientation to the storyline cuts simply being too deep. If this wanted to be a story of love and betrayal, that’s fine (worked for Titanic), but then it should have been reworked to make us feel something for the main characters.

In short, K loses a lot of its heart in this adaptation. Like how Les Mis is really about the human condition of being miserable, not the ascent of one man, Kafka’s story isn’t about falling in love with a barmaid— it’s about the impossibility of getting up when knocked down under a government that’s cold and uncaring. Without making us really understand how trapped K is, and, indeed, by marginalizing the stories of Barnabas and Pepi, who in the novel try just as desperately as K to move up their station in life from the lowest rung on the ladder, nothing feels important. All that remains in this haphazard plot is Frieda’s love affair and ultimate betrayal of K, but it’s so much less exciting when nothing is explained. Frieda here seems like something of a bitch, when Kafka’s Frieda was just another version of all of them: an opportunistic girl, down on her luck, who saw a way to use someone else to get ahead. Indeed, maybe it’s significant that the title has been changed from The Castle, because we’ve lost all sight that bureaucracy is the villain, not some cheating barmaid.

Things are so chopped up that I question if people would even be able to keep the female characters straight. Pepi (Jüdengowa), a young barmaid who takes over for Frieda once she’s dismissed, is introduced to us exactly once in the film’s first half, and yet it’s through her mouth that the whole plot is explained in the film’s penultimate scene. For viewers unfamiliar with the novel, it must seem odd that this random girl knows so much.

What does elevate the film, and does the most to set a Kafka-esque mood, is the art direction. The off-whites and teals that cover the hotel’s rooms feel cold and uninviting, squarely making both K and the viewer feel like this is not home. A lot of the scenes are shot in really innovative ways: often we’re peering into a room from outside a door, reinforcing the feeling that we, like K, are an outsider here. An inventive surrealist scene comes out of nowhere in the film’s last quarter, where weak with hunger, K starts having bizarre hallucinations while talking to a secretary. The screen blurs and spins in dreamlike ways. It’s interesting but maybe a little too late, because by this point K has broken up with Frieda and since their plot was at the film’s center, it’s hard to care anymore.

The source material is slow and plodding, so it makes sense that K, in turn, is slow-paced and a little long-winded. But for a film like this to work, we need to feel rewarded for our investment. Unfortunately, too much of Kafka’s ideas were left on the chopping block here, so there is not much left lingering as the credits roll. Pepi’s explanation of Frieda as a girl who sought simply to make the governor jealous feels rushed and unsatisfying. We never got to know Frieda. We never got to know K. We never got to see their love for each other (unless a quick-and-dirty sex scene counts). It’s hard to feel betrayed when we never felt like there was anything to lose.

One would think a film based on a very simple premise—scantily clad, hot female lead slaying off waves of bad dudes—would know what kind of film it wants to be: slasher flick, comedy, or drama.

But director Joe Lynch’s (Knights of Badassdom, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End) latest film, Everly, feels confused and meandering. Imagine being dropped into the intro sequence of a bloody video game, fighting off hordes of anonymous enemies. Cool. But then imagine it repeating ad nauseam, without the storyline ever beginning. In a video game it works because it’s interactive, and the exposition might get in the way. This is a movie, however, and at a certain point I wondered: where’s the story?

Alright: Writer Yale Hannon does give us some plot, albeit in the broadest strokes. In Diehard fashion, Everly takes place in a single environment: the upstairs apartment of a mob boss named Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe), where Everly (Salma Hayek), presumably a sex slave (it’s never stated outright, but the big guy sending prostitutes to attack her seems to suggest she’s one of them), has decided she’s taking revenge on her boss and breaking free. To add some tension to the proceedings, Everly’s mother (Laura Cepada) and toddler daughter (Aisha Ayamah), both of whom she hasn’t seen in five years, heed some ill advice to show up at the apartment just as things are getting colorful. Taiko’s ordered a hit on the petite but vicious Everly, who is inexplicably one badass mofo with whatever weapon she lays her hands on. In Matrix-style waves (minus the cool special effects) she fells a series of ditzy prostitutes (two end up shooting each other after bickering over who deserves the kill more) and a mob of Taiko’s well-dressed Asian underlings. Obviously intending to model itself after slicker Japanese girl-with-gun films like Kill Bill, Everly just doesn’t have the style, the wit, or hell, even the gore of its muses.

It seems obvious after all, in a film that kills a couple dozen people by the time we get a solid piece of dialogue, that we know what we’re getting ourselves into. If it’s your cup of tea, there can be something cathartic, even fun, about seeing new and creative ways to slice and dice inferior foes. If that’s not your type of movie, this was never going to work out for you anyway. But I’m going to argue that even though there’s essentially no plot and no more backstory than what I defined above, the violence angle actually isn’t taken far enough if this is what the filmmakers were going for. That old cult-film cliché “it’s so bad it’s good” has no room to grow here—she stabs and she fights by hand, but it’s more Buffy the Vampire Slayer than anything, except without the engaging supernatural plot. The one time it looks like Everly might really have the lower hand—she finds herself locked in a cage with a mad scientist who wants to drop skin-rotting acid onto her—he finally drops it on her…leg. Maybe it was a fun day for the makeup artist, but it’s hard to get excited about that. Am I sadistic for suggesting a violent film needs to be more violent? Sure, but that’s the film’s premise.

The sick slasher-flick element occasionally lands, though. The film’s aptitude for embracing irony is clumsy and painful. I’d argue the aforementioned scene between the two prostitutes arguing over who gets to kill Everly as she sits safely in a corner waiting for them to blow each other’s brains out is the very moment the film implodes. That’s kind of unfortunate because it’s maybe 15 minutes into the movie. The thing about dark humor is it’s funny when it catches the viewer completely off guard—it has to hit a certain “holy shit that is so true and I’m a horrible person for thinking so” note. Or it has to be truly ironic. When filmmakers rely on tropes and lazy writing, the audience loses the unexpected element. We can’t laugh along with Everly because it wants to be other movies so badly it can’t create its own ideas.

In fact, even though both Hayek and Cepada give perfectly engaging performances, it’s hard to buy into the dramatic scenes at all. After the silly stripper girls off each other and a neighbor knocks from above (they’re making too much noise), they try to have a heart-to-heart out of the little girl’s earshot about why Everly abandoned her the way she did. It’s hard to take the scene seriously because we’ve just watched 30 minutes of offbeat dark comedy. The dramatic angle’s problems are compounded when a later scene finds a naked man with a hatchet in the hallway going after the four-year-old girl. Even twisted people don’t find placing kids in the middle of absurdist violence amusing. With Everly never explaining her situation, there’s no reason for the viewer to get invested in anything more than her…guns.

Is that it, really? Is this movie just about putting an attractive actress—who might want to rebrand herself as still capable of young, edgy roles—in scantily-constructed outfits and provocative (graphically, not conceptually) situations? The genre can do better than that. This type of guilty pleasure can deliver shock, wit, seduction, and intrigue all in one package when done well. But for that, one would have to watch one of the many films Everly wants to be.

Oh, awkward living situations. For the nameless woman in Canadian director Albert Shin’s sophomore release, In Her Place, that sense of not quite feeling comfortable in a new place takes on a life of its own. The woman (Yoon Da Kyung) travels from her busy city life in Seoul to the countryside of South Korea to spend half a year with a struggling farmer (Kil Hae Yeon) and her meek teenage daughter (Ahn Ji Hye). Not only is the arrangement uncomfortable but it’s a bit taboo: in a culture that values both morals and blood lines, these women hope to arrange a secret adoption that, if successful, won’t spoil either woman’s reputation. This adds a whirlwind of complex emotions: knowing something so intimate about someone else, being mutually complicit in a societal faux pas, and yet still feeling compelled by those same societal standards to act like everything is perfectly normal. Putting up a front is taxing, and the gnawing fatigue felt by each character is palpable through a series of quiet but effective performances.

The beautiful countryside lends itself well to a film that purposefully seeks to take its time. The pacing, both in revealing the reason for the visit and the way the main characters seem to meander through their days, gives a sense of discovery. Everything feels slightly off and not quite comfortable, as being transplanted into a world that’s not one’s own tends to do. The anxiety permeates—Yeon, as the mother, does a lovely job exhibiting a sense of desperation through her modest number of lines (largely she repeats the refrain “Make yourself at home” with a sense of panic that seems to implicitly say “Please don’t leave”). Her nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the Canadian Screen Awards is well deserved.

But the real crux of the film’s dramatic tension lies in the pregnant daughter who clearly is hiding more than just one secret. While the script takes care not to reveal why the woman is there right away—adding a certain intensity to the film’s slow pacing and pale scenery—the momentum all but dies once the girl’s growing belly is revealed. The pacing at that point slows down even further. Minor details—like a five-minute scene of the woman going on a jog—begin to seem like irrelevant tangents after the beautiful slow-burning anxiety of the film’s earlier scenes. Later revelations don’t have the same impact, and perhaps it’s because useful screen time is allotted to scenes with no other point than tone, when the tone has long before been set and what we crave now is a look inside these characters.

Actually, director Albert Shin said in an interview that he set out to create a character film, which is frustrating in that after the film’s first 30 minutes, we aren’t given much more insight into the characters. We don’t ever learn any more about the mother or her motivations—about why, when others would give up on a troubled child, she persists without complaint. When the woman from Seoul discovers the daughter has an unusual disorder, she never seems to evolve past her initial understanding of the girl. Certainly, a character film should have a character arc? Eventually we get glimpses of the daughter’s isolation and sadness through a couple of dream sequences (which add some much needed action to the film’s second half), but we’re never able to resolve just how in control of her actions she really is. Clearly she’s lonely (especially when her sole lifeline to the outside world, a cell phone, is taken from her), but it’s hard to tell if her destructive behavior is a byproduct of choice or mental illness. And considering how underrepresented this girl’s affliction is in the mainstream, it seems a bit irresponsible to even leave room for the audience to interpret the more melodramatic scenes as an overly-simplistic “Well, she was sad.” Surely, letting us understand her motivations a bit more could have only strengthened the film’s quest to make us ache alongside these characters.

Still, these problems seem easily ascribed to the script and not the players, because pacing and narrative holes aside, there’s a quiet intensity to all three actresses. Hye, seen here in her first cinematic role, is tall and quite pretty, but her onscreen character seems to shrink in on herself, in that way unconfident, shy young girls are sometimes prone to do. But she appropriately comes to life in the dream sequences, including one with an ex-boyfriend that quickly shifts a two-hour film of walking and reading into something a little more graphic. She’s believable as a trapped girl who can’t quite exert herself, the type who bows her head as company at the dinner table talk about her, not to her.

But ultimately the film just doesn’t come through on many of its promises, and those it does aren’t satisfying. The daughter’s reservation and secrecy beg for slow gasps of revelation, but of the conclusions drawn on who these people are, none are terribly specific. And that’s a shame because these three actresses gave life to their characters, they just needed a script that had something to say.

Girlhood, if anything, is the coming-of-age genre’s attempt at exploring those pivotal teen years by way of mood. The dysphoria, the sense that growing wiser sometimes comes hand in hand with the world growing smaller—these are the strokes with which French director Céline Sciamma paints the life of Marieme (Karidja Touré), a 16-year-old girl living in a poor suburb outside Paris.

Sure, Marieme, treads familiar water: failing out of school, falling in with the wrong crowd, and awkwardly navigating first love, but it’s the environment more than the events that makes her circumstance feel heavy and suffocating. Just as American Beauty had an affinity for the color red, Marieme’s world here plays with hues of teal and a deep, somber blue. Some scenes just use accents of color in the clothing or walls, but others are washed over in a dark blue overlay—one pivotal scene finds Marieme and her friends disengaging from school yard fights long enough to get all dolled up in a hotel room they’ve rented for the night (surely, their little refuge from the world). The girls sing along shamelessly to Rhianna’s “Diamonds”—the whole song—as if for three minutes of their lives, this is who they choose to be. The effect feels like something of a dream state, like these girls who fear their fathers and brothers at home as they suffer endless abuse, can come alive—but only under the cover of shadows. That’s what the world has left for them.

The rest of the film is anything but diva like, relying on the ordinary: wandering the malls, small-town gossip and fights with rival cliques. This world exists largely in veils of teal—the walls to the room Marieme shares with her sister, the hospital where her mom works as a janitor, the insides of the school counselor’s office as she’s told maybe she should consider vocational school. The color makes one feel exactly as expected: a little off, sickly, uneasy.

If all that isn’t dizzying enough, the film’s lead song, “Girlhood” by Para One, serves as both a transition between scenes and an audible manifestation of Marieme’s anxiety. The bright synths repeat quick eighth notes that hold a certain excitement about new directions—in some ways, falling in with the “wrong” crowd is the best thing that happened to Marieme as it coincides with a slow but certain development of her confidence—but like all uptempo songs, there is also a sense that things might break under pressure. Marieme likewise can never quite find solid ground, choosing to uproot herself from one unhealthy living environment after another. The art direction and music combined give the sense that it’s not just tough odds Marieme must overcome, but the pervasive feelings of confusion and hopelessness that threaten to consume her.

But let’s get this straight: this isn’t a tale of hope and strong-willed determination, a young female knowing what she wants and going after it. Sciamma’s Marieme is more layered than that. It’s actually difficult to pin down who she is until the movie’s end, if even then. As she falls in with her new group of friends, it’s hard to tell if this whole tough-girl act is an appeal to fit in or who she already had become. Sometimes she appears timid and reserved and other times she seems bold and self-assured. Touré proves an astute actress for navigating the worlds of innocence and experience (often at the same time), especially in scenes with younger sister Bébé (Simina Soumare), who serves as a foil for innocence and a bit of a reminder that Marieme’s story will be repeated again and again.

As compelling as Marieme’s relationship with her sister is—not to mention the beautiful character arc created in her engagement with the world in the safety net of a gang of friends—the film’s second half struggles to maintain the same levels of tension and insight. Moving out on her own, all of the complex character relationships are abandoned for would-be antagonists who are never really developed enough to fear. We get the film’s first archetypes, and Marieme’s strides to rise above mean a bit less when her monsters feel faceless. Certainly the day-to-day grind is monotonous, but making this point doesn’t seem to be the narrative’s goal. As the film’s momentum wanes, somehow the issues she faces get more dramatic: bosses who don’t respect boundaries, boyfriends whose expectations fall in line with overarching patriarchal paradigms, and questions about what a girl faced with tough choices will do. But none of these questions seem to resonate. Maybe it’s because the film, while lovely in its portrayal of one girl, struggles when trying to say too many things about the world outside that girl.

But the biggest battle here is with herself, and fortunately this is where we return by the movie’s end. And the payoff feels real. Marieme’s story is a constant game of taking two steps forward and one step back, and yet even without clearcut promises, her path to discovery feels authentic and brave—in the adult sense of the word, when bravery is about considering more than immediate comforts. Self-discovery, when it’s tackled honestly, is a long process, and Girlhood honors that as much as a two-hour film can hope to. Coming-of-age stories sometimes put too much emphasis on nailing down the specifics to that daunting question “What do I want for my life?” Maybe true strength comes from staring that question right in the face and saying, “Not this.”

Producer Nancy Spielberg, the youngest sister of Steven Spielberg, describes the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as a fight between David and Goliath—many people, including the U.S. government, didn’t believe the freshly created state of Israel stood much of a chance for survival. They had a makeshift army and no air force to protect against invaders from an Arab world that still wanted claim to the land. A group of mostly American WWII vets, with planes made from scraps, would launch the pivotal Squadron 101 and steer the outcome of history by air.

The filmmakers had a bit of a David and Goliath situation on their hands as well: how do you tell these personal tales—half a dozen of the pilots shared their stories, along with other family members and historians—while also including enough of the history of a war many viewers only know by name, if that. And, unfortunately, there’s also a bit of a ticking clock. If you do the math, being up in the air in 1948 means these men are getting up there in age. Indeed, many are over 90.

But you wouldn’t know it by these interviews. The film follows a roughly chronological story starting with each man’s personal reasons for getting involved. Right out of the gate, these vets are human: a lust for adventure, a need to be doing something worthwhile. They’re not necessarily the heroic answers you’d expect to get. And there’s a reason why. A lot of the history we’d often like to forget—that anti-Semitism wasn’t restricted to Germany—seeps in through the personal tales of these men’s younger lives: histories full of being bullied in school and not being able to find a job. “I didn’t like being a Jew. I don’t think you could get a job in the fire department or police department of New York being a Jew,” George Lichter remembers. Lichter would go on to train the men that flew the British Spitfires that ensured the end of the war.

The writing and editing here is just lovely—if anything Above and Beyond is one incredible feat of an oral history. Sixty-six years have passed and these men pick up each other’s stories well. It’s like sitting around a dinner table—well, really, director Roberta Grossman has the men seated in airplane hangars, but everyone feels at home just the same. These men remember exact aerial movements, the smell of entering the country, the names of bars—and the interweaving narratives bring everything to a collective life. When history is needed, a handful of scholars chime in with the timeline of events.

If I have any criticism, it’s that somewhere halfway through the film the stakes feel a bit lost—and by that I mean the narrative arc of the war gets a little muddied. Sure, this is really the story of the men who risked their lives, and sure, we always knew who was going to be the winner (clearly, Israel still exists today), but the first half of the film alternates between history and personal stories in such a tight way that viewers can feel invested in both. The script built some beautiful tension: parents of the pilots not wanting them to leave (they just got their kids back home safely a few years earlier); makeshift airplanes mickey-moused from leftover parts kill one man before the team even reaches Israel; and, once there, the successful first mission stops the Egyptian army cold in their tracks—a great feat but one that left me wondering when the Arabs would find out they’re only up against a dozen men, not thousands. We never get the answer to that, and we never really get any true climax. The tension instead bleeds into an image cluster of loosely related personal stories. The war narrative isn’t dropped completely, but it’s less effective when it’s not showing how micro-actions led to historical results (like when Lou Lenart and his three men literally got an Egyptian army of thousands to turn around).

But as fascinating as the historical element is, losing the war narrative might have been worth it to truly get at the personal transformations these men went through. Who the NYPD did and did not hire is the last thing from Lichter’s mind by the end. “We were really fighting and winning by this point,” he says. “As a Jew, I was now proud of being Jewish.” But the most poignant interview comes from a Jewish pilot named Dani Shapiro, an intriguing addition to the interviewees as he shows so much vulnerability—admitting to being terrified before his first flight and nearly being brought to tears when he remembers getting his wings. “This was my wish. Long time since I was a kid. Now I became a pilot in the Israeli Air Force. In my Air Force. My country.”

These men are eloquent and humble, and it’s something of a miracle that these stories got documented when they did (two pilots have unfortunately passed away since filming concluded). But they’re not just beautiful stories—it’s a visually beautiful film. The cinematography does a lot to bring these stories to life. By combining aerial footage and CGI (and it’s pretty difficult to distinguish between the two) with archival footage and old films, these stories are told visually—all with a sort of out-of-focus aesthetic that pays tribute to the passage of time. It’s easy to forget these men aren’t still 24, because in cinematographer Harris Done’s capable hands, we live in the moment.

Lorne Balfe’s music is lovely as well. Mini emotional climaxes, like the arrival of a fresh rotation of foreign volunteers, are accented with modest strings. The compositions never get carried away but pull and tug at the heart in all the right places. Affecting and emotionally honest, Above and Beyond succeeds as a real life David and Goliath story that, thanks to producer Nancy Spielberg, will not be lost to the passing of time.

The New York Times runs a regular series of essays called “Modern Love” in which contributors explore every nook and cranny of the wonderful world of love and lust. In a recent essay, author Mandy Len Catron introduces the idea of a test that supposedly creates intimacy, even between strangers, if you ask a certain series of questions to a partner. The rest of the essay captures the dialogue of her and her partner giving the test a whirl—and you guessed it, it works.

Match, a movie by director/playwright Stephen Belber (adapted from his own play), seems to grapple with a similar premise: What situations–indeed what conversations–are the ones that can make complete strangers feel immediately close? What, if anything, is the trigger in our interpersonal lives that allows us to put our guard down and really let someone see us?

The strangers in this case are really a group of three: Tobi (Patrick Stewart), an older man who has clearly lived but now goes for the straight-and-narrow life of teaching dance at Juliard. And Lisa (Carla Gugino) and Mike (Matthew Lillard), a couple in their 30’s, old enough to make statements like “I was supposed to be more than this,” but young enough that their willingness to settle—both professionally and personally—is still just a bit tragic.

The three first meet at a diner in a more reclusive part of NYC—Tobi’s choice apparently—and Lisa quickly introduces herself as a grad student working on a dissertation about the history of choreography. She’s there to pick Tobi’s well-traveled, ex-dancer brain. Stewart gracefully captures all the eccentricities of an artistic genius—a certain social awkwardness that manifests itself in any person who separates himself from meaningful relationships for too long balanced with a passion and excitement any time the conversation focuses exclusively on dance, which incidentally isn’t as often as you’d think (a point that eventually becomes a source of conflict).

Stewart’s ability to capture the anxiety of the situation—meeting someone new, already being a bit socially awkward, and then being asked to share intimate details of one’s life on tape—is paramount to the film’s success. There are a couple of surprises along the way—you may have guessed it, the couple is there under false pretenses—but this isn’t really a film about plot, it’s a film about human emotion. Certainly, the script’s choice to reveal each character’s secrets to the audience in conjunction with the characters’ confessions to each other helps the tension. We only know what they know. And so, far after we’d expect, the dialogue continues to be uneasy. When Tobi blurts out, “God, I used to love to perform cunnilingus” an hour in, you’re still not sure whether Lisa made a grave mistake sticking around. Are we really going there? But it’s this shared uncertainty between the audience and the characters that makes their decisions to slowly open up to each other more rewarding. This creates a feeling of investment in the risks they’re taking by opening up.

Of course, it must be said that the film’s best moments fall squarely at the film’s center—when the character of Mike is momentarily removed and Tobi and Lisa are left alone to discuss their life’s mistakes and non-mistakes. It’s almost as if the character of Mike only exists insomuch as it helps to illuminate some of the gray areas in the choices Tobi reveals. “I love my life. I regret my life. The lines eventually blur, and it’s just my life,” Tobi says at one point, nailing down the film’s conceptual heart.

But Mike. He’s an archetype: angry dude that needs to show off his masculinity. In a film about tension, it’s obvious that not explaining his anger earlier is all about creating curiosity and suspense, but it’s done in such a heavy-handed way that every line he delivers just serves as a distraction.

It’s when Tobi and Lisa are alone that the film truly hits its stride—and dance it does. When everything does play out, though, what’s left is a script that relies on a pretty overdone plot. But thanks to capable acting, it turns out just a conduit for the film’s real mission–capturing moments. The moment one learns to trust. The moment one learns to let go. The moment one tries once more.