It's fun to be 5

The little festival that could is alive and thriving. Is it time to grow up? Someday, but not now.

April 22, 2007

The Independent Film Festival of Boston turns five on Wednesday, and that's reason to celebrate. The youth-centric programming (many of the filmmakers' careers are younger than the festival itself) is strong, but also not perfect -- there are some naive works, others that are smugly self-aware, and some that pander to the hipsters and self-styled nerds in the theater lobbies. But what the festival's roster might lack in formal ambition, wisdom, and geographical scope, it makes up for in energy, wit, and ideas. This is an exciting six days.

The theme for this year is old-school fun. There's a View-Master on the festival's website and Connect Four on one of the posters, with a tagline that asks, "Can Boston come out and play?" The joke being that IFFB is a bracing, guerilla-ish rebuke of the mirthless self-importance of the city's other film festivals. Some of the movies here simply aren't Connect Four material, however. Instead, they're serious and provocative achievements. Will the festival and its taste mature as its talent does? Or will it become something curiously ageless: Ryan Seacrest today, Dick Clark tomorrow? One day the IFFB will have to grow up, as it has with a few of this year's entries.

In the meantime, it's worth remembering that the festival is only five. If it wants to play with Boston, Boston should certainly come out and play with it.

-- WESLEY MORRIS

"The Killer Within"
Think "51 Birch Street " with an arrest record. Macky Alston's documentary concerns Bob Bechtel , a professor who stuns friends with the revelation that he murdered a man in his youth. At first, "Killer" seems entirely on his side, but it becomes an inquiry into guilt, memory, and the evil of banality. Was Bechtel bullied into a breakdown? Did he let his demons define his reality? The answers are as relevant as Columbine and Virginia Tech. -- TY BURR

"On Broadway"
The one in South Boston, not the one in New York. This locally filmed indie from writer-director Dave McLaughlin is getting its premiere at, appropriately, a Boston film festival. It's about a carpenter ( Joey McIntyre ) who writes a play about his dead uncle's wake and stages it in the back of a pub. Co-starring Eliza Dushku , Amy Poehler , Will Arnett , and -- due to state laws decreeing there must be one Wahlberg in every locally shot movie -- Robert Wahlberg . -- T.B.

"Row Hard No Excuses"
North Shore-born director Luke Wolbach came back to Gloucester in 2001 to film two men preparing to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat. Then he stuck around to capture the race itself, using video diaries from a number of the international crews. The resulting film is a testament to what men (and one woman: Tori Murden , the first to cross the Atlantic solo) can do when they get an insane idea in their heads and refuse to shake it loose. There was no prize money, by the way. -- T.B.

Craig Zobel's comedy is about two Charlotte record producers (Pat Healy and Kene Holliday ) looking for musicians' money as employees of a grifting production company. Zobel has an Altmanesque ear for the way people talk, and he evokes Altman's loose style and cynical sensibility. The film deftly suggests that the tension between being famous and being broke can be illogical and very cruel. -- WESLEY MORRIS

Susan Dynner's contribution to the field of Punkology may be the most ambitious yet (a relative term for a D.I.Y. subject), knitting together interviews with musical forefathers (the Sex Pistols ), their children (Henry Rollins , Jello Biafra ), their grandchildren (Green Day's Billie Joe ), and their great-grandchildren (Good Charlotte , Sum 41 ). The film lets everyone have their say, from those who spit on the sold-out new kids to those who welcome them. -- T.B.

Written and directed by co-star Azazel Jacobs ( son of legendary avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs ), this lo -fi comedy bounces off the festival circuit and lands with a lovely little splat. It's one day in the life of three hapless Los Angelenos: two men named Rodolfo Cano (Azazel and Gerardo Naranjo ) and the free spirit who bounces between them (Sara Diaz). Very rough, very funny, with sensibilities derived equally from Chaplin, Jim Jarmusch , and the Gang of Four . -- T.B.

Aaron Matthews's documentary spends a year or so tracking the tribulations of Penn State's Daily Collegian newspaper. The film has a transparency that permits us to question every decision made by the paper's reporters and editorial board, as they struggle with sluggish circulation, accusations of racial insensitivity (the staff is predominately white), and futile attempts to sex up the content. What we see at the Collegian is a resonant microcosm: This paper's crucible is every paper's. -- W.M.

Actress Sarah Polley's directorial debut takes a topic -- Alzheimer's disease -- that might be better served on the stage or the small screen and makes it big, rich, and mysterious. "Away" also hands Julie Christie a magnificent late-inning role as the afflicted wife, receding from her devoted husband (Gordon Pinsent ) and attaching herself to another man in her care facility (Michael Murphy ). It's a straightforward but engrossing drama about what love is worth when memory is gone. -- T.B.

Take the competitive charm of "Spellbound " and combine it with the cancelled law-school drama of your choice and you get something like Eric Chaikin's look at the bar exam and the six Los Angeles-area men and women desperate to put the test behind them. Chaikin gets on-camera interviews with Alan Dershowitz and other celebrity lawyers, but his real scores are his test takers, one of whom is prepping for his 42 d try. -- W.M.

For at least the first 30 minutes of Julia Loktev's portrait of certainty and doubt, we have only the vaguest sense of what's going on. We follow a bewitching young woman (Luisa Williams ) from a bus to a cheap hotel room. She's blindfolded, fed, and gently coached by masked men. This is a movie that's better left unexplained, since part of what is so breathtaking is Loktev's strength as a storyteller and Williams's expressiveness as an actor. -- W.M.

Take "Cinderella" and set it in New York's Chinatown. Now rotoscope the whole thing: Presto, you have this curio by writer-director David Kaplan , a minor film with the piquancy of a fresh slice of ginger. An Nguyen plays a fresh-off-the-boat illegal forced to work off her debt washing floors in a massage parlor run by Tsai Chin ("The Joy Luck Club "). There's a handsome young prince of a musician (Ken Leung ) and a fairy godmother out of a Chinese folktale (Randall Duk Kim ). The animation is a little Photoshoppy but the thing still glows. -- T.B.

The scandale of this year's Sundance comes to Boston. Filmmaker Robinson Devor has created something quite unusual: a lyrical, non-sensationalist documentary about men who love animals. Springing off from the notorious 2005 case in which a man died after having sex with a horse, "Zoo" circles the secretive community of "zoophiles" and looks for a way to understand a love that knows no genomic boundary. Filmed with visual beauty and conceptual taste -- too much so, say the film's detractors -- it's an eerie glimpse into a secret world. -- T.B.

Two burned-out '60s revolutionaries lay low in Toronto, happily reselling yard-sale trash on the Internet until a fetching baby anarchist rekindles their jealousies and sense of purpose. Written and directed by Reginald Harkema with a sharp eye toward the paradoxes of fighting The Man in the 21st century. -- T.B.

Some documentaries don't seem like much. Take this one, which starts off with an explanation of retro console video-gaming. Then something amazing happens: Seth Gordon's focus narrows into a hilarious and moving study of the obsessive competition between the all-time scoring leader on "Donkey Kong," an odd Floridian, and a father of two who, in his rather innocuous bid to break the record, gets sucked into a world of mind-blowing passive-aggressiveness. -- W.M.

Hannah is a Chicago comedy writer with a romantic's ADD. She falls in love not as sport but as a condition of the heart. It's too tempting to roll your eyes at the film's blissful navel-gazing, but Joe Swanberg has an uncanny talent for making the randomness of downtime feel as alive as it seems generationally true. -- W.M.

"On the Beach" remade by smartass college kids. Apparently sun spots wiped out the human race in 2075; 20 years later, survivors emerge from underground bunkers and try to re-establish civilization while simultaneously bickering and fighting off the legions of Satan. Maybe you could do just as well with a digital camera, your friends, and a decent budget, but the point is you didn't. There'll be a Part 2. -- T.B.

Tony Kaye's epic documentary on the abortion wars stunned Sundance audiences. Kaye includes voices of reason and fanaticism on both sides, and if the ravings of the religious right are hard to stomach, so is the graphic footage of abortion procedures. Which is precisely the point: "Lake" wants to break through decades of encrusted rhetoric to make us think again. With one slow reveal of Norma McCorvey , a.k.a. "Jane Roe ," the movie upends all you assumed about this subject. -- T.B.

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian media theorist, post-modernist philosopher, and all-purpose gadfly; he writes books about Lacanian theory and ad copy for Abercrombie & Fitch . With the help of documentarian Sophie Fiennes (sister of actors Ralph and Joseph ), Zizek inserts himself into classic movies from Hitchcock's "The Birds " to the Wachowskis ' "The Matrix " in an attempt to divine why the movies thwart our desires by pretending to fulfill them. A delightful 2 1/2 -hour repast for mindful film junkies. -- T.B.

Michael Jacobs's fascinating documentary follows Richard Gazowsky , a Pentecostal pastor out of San Francisco, and his devoted flock as they try to shoot a religious science-fiction picture called "Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph" with an estimated budget of $200 million. Gazowsky is not a blowhard, but as he seems to swell past Felliniesque portliness to Wellesian girth, he makes a comical and complex example of the conflict of religious devotion. -- W.M.

Not so much a completed film as a collection of compassionate, vérité-style vignettes that comprise a documentary, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon's movie hunkers down with the displaced New Orleans residents who live in the tent city behind one woman's house. Ms. Pearl is an only-in-New Orleans eccentric who has no shortage of rules for living in her backyard. "I don't want a naked man in my shower without a little notice," she says, "unless it happens to be John Goodman. " -- W.M.

Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney , two recent college grads from Boston, decide to plant and farm an acre of corn in Iowa. For a year they watch their crop grow, only to discover at the end that it's unfit for human consumption. What ensues is an enormously entertaining moral, socio-economic odyssey (and statistical bonanza) through the American food industry. Ellis, Cheney, and Aaron Woolf's documentary is clear-minded and fair, but just damningly descriptive enough to leave you distrustful of everything on your plate. -- W.M.

Jessica Yu's documentary subject here is the act of storytelling, namely the Euripidean model, which deals in interiority and motive. To dramatize this, she interviews four very different men who've undergone some personal but seismic change (a German terrorist, an ex-gay minister). Her stirring film also uses wood-carved hand-puppets as a Greek chorus. See it anyway. -- W.M.

In May of 2004 , artist Steve Kurtz woke to find his wife dead of heart failure and called 911. The police looked at his art installations, which involved harmless microbe specimens, and called the FBI. The FBI charged Kurtz with bioterrorism. Filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson spins an essay on art, government, play-acting, and paranoia; it's easily her best film yet. Actors Thomas Jay Ryan and Tilda Swinton play the Kurtzes, while Kurtz himself appears in interviews. -- T.B.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.