To life!

As always, the roster pulls together independent movies from all over the world to provoke and entertain. Stargazers will have a chance to see Israeli heartthrob Lior Ashkenazi in the opening-night movie, Emily Watson in the closing-night film, and a short film by Natalie Portman, starring Lauren Bacall. The documentary subjects run the gamut, from Soviet refuseniks to Thelonious Monk’s great patron to a director’s jovial hunt for the world’s neo-Nazis.

With “Fiddler on the Roof’’ opening in the Theatre District this week, what better time for a Chilean drama called “To Life’’ to screen? There are also three films with some variation of “broken’’ in their titles. And if you’ve been waiting for a sequel to the 1998 sexual-orientation comedy “Man Is a Woman,’’ you’re in luck. Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s “He’s My Girl’’ makes its North American premiere.

The festival runs from Wednesday to Nov. 15, with a few suburban screenings in the days after that. Here is a critical guide to some highlights, courtesy of Globe staff writers Ty Burr, Mark Feeney, and Wesley Morris.

ELI & BEN The festival’s opening night selection is a muted, sometimes simplistic but ultimately striking tale of morals and loyalty, seen from the vantage point of 12-year-old Eli (Yuval Shevach). His father, Ben (Lior Ashkenazi), is the city architect of a Tel Aviv suburb, charged with taking bribes and proclaiming his innocence. Writer/director Ori Ravid’s debut film is alert to the ways in which a boy’s life can suddenly deepen into complexity and challenge. The film never doubts that people are good, but it also knows how hard it can be to live up to that goodness. Wednesday, Coolidge Corner; Saturday, MFA; Nov. 10, Kendall Square. TY BURR

ROOM AND A HALF Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, the poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) never really left his native St. Petersburg - or at least his imagination didn’t. Andrey Khrzhanovky’s one-of-a-kind film is a tribute to both the Nobel Prize winner and what Brodsky calls “a city whose color was fossilized vodka.’’ Part biopic, part documentary, part meditation, part epic, part comedy, part tragedy, some of it in color, some in black and white, and with several animated segments, “Room and a Half’’ gleefully, robustly defies categorization as it covers the span of Brodsky’s life from Petersburg to America and points between. Spacious and unfettered, it mocks its namesake title, which comes from Brodsky’s famous essay about the cramped quarters in which he and his parents had to live. Thursday, MFA; Nov. 12, West Newton Cinema.

MARK FEENEY

LOOK INTO MY EYES Probably the festival’s big provocation is Naftaly Gliksberg’s documentary in which he combs the planet for anti-Semites, and never fails to hit a mother lode in every country. His approach is best described as affably confrontational. The average exchange goes something like: “Hi, why do you hate Jews?’’ And he winds up raising some rather amazing ideas about hate, and the need to hold on to it. After enough of these intense mini-psychodramas, however, what really seems up for debate is Gliksberg’s methodology, which tends to feel as reductive as the hate-mongers he seeks. Thursday, ICA. WESLEY MORRIS

BROKEN LINES A waitress (Doraly Rosa) at a London greasy spoon meets a young lawyer (Dan Fredenburgh) who’s closing up his dad’s Orthodox-focused haberdashery. They start an affair that neither of their respective partners (Paul Bettany for her; Olivia Williams for him) would appreciate. For us, it’s watchable enough. But none of these wishy-washy, badly written characters or the actors playing them makes sense. Everybody screams or cries and pouts up a storm, as if the filmmakers failed to recognize that there’s a difference between bogus emoting and legitimate emotion. Saturday, ICA; Sunday, Coolidge Corner. W.M.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN The latest from France’s Andre Téchiné (“My Favorite Season,’’ “Thieves’’) lifts off from a notorious 2004 incident in which a young Frenchwoman invented a story about being attacked by anti-Semite hoodlums on a Paris commuter train. In this fictionalized version we see the events leading up to the lie and then its consequences, but the film has too many unarticulated ideas and plot tangents and not enough focus or impact. A disappointment, then, but one with sharp performances from the legendary likes of Catherine Deneuve and Michel Blanc. Nov. 8, ICA; Nov. 12, Kendall Square. T.B.

CAMERA OBSCURA A family of Jewish immigrants arrives in Buenos Aires in 1892. The mother gives birth on the gangplank, literally. The baby, Gertrudis, is thus neither European nor Argentine. She’s an outsider from the very beginning - a status emphasized by her ugly-duckling looks. She grows up to become the unhappy wife of the owner of a country estate. Mirta Bogdasarian, who plays Gertrudis, has the unforgettable face of a fourth-billed Almodovar character. Maria Victoria Menis’s handsome and understated film records the outcome when a French photographer (a budding Surrealist, no less) arrives in 1929 to take the family portrait. What ensues has elements of “A Doll’s House,’’ “The Piano,’’ and, yes, “The Bridges of Madison County.’’ Nov. 10, Showcase Cinema Randolph; Nov. 15, West Newton Cinema. M.F.

THE JAZZ BARONESS Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter - “Nica’’ - was one of the great minor characters of the 20th century. Married to a French baron, she belonged to the English branch of the celebrated banking family. Mad about jazz, she moved to New York after World War II to be amid the jazz milieu. Nica’s great passion was for the music of the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, whom she served as benefactress and close friend. He named one of his most beautiful compositions, “Pannonica,’’ after her. Hannah Rothschild has made a documentary about her great-aunt that’s full of marvelous archival footage and has Helen Mirren in full lioness mode as the voice of Nica. But Rothschild’s such an intrusive presence that a more accurate title might be “The Jazz Baroness’s Great-Niece.’’ Nov. 11, Coolidge Corner Theatre. M.F.

MARY AND MAX Adam Elliot follows up his Oscar-winning short film, “Harvie Krumpet,’’ with a stop-motion “clayography’’ feature that’s just as emotionally affecting and even more unhinged. Mary is an unloved little girl growing up in Australia; Max is an obese New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome; the film spans a 20-year pen-pal relationship that defines the meaning of trust, eccentricity, and friendship. Featuring the voices of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Nov. 12, Coolidge Corner. T.B.

TO LIFE A superior soap opera that benefits from the charm of its leading players: Ana Seradilla as a beautiful Mexican photographer returning to her estranged family in Valparaiso, Chile, and Francisco Melo as the very handsome, very married rabbi she’s very attracted to. South American acting legend Jose Soriano plays her rascal father, atoning for a footloose life by getting bar mitzvahed at 80. Surprisingly touching, and a working definition of “guilty pleasure.’’ Nov. 15, MFA. T.B.

WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND The poet Evgenia Ginzburg was sentenced to 18 years in a Stalin-era Russian gulag. Her crime was being a Trotskyite. The movie’s crime is telling her controversial story as a by-the-numbers melodrama, complete with English actors performing in the Soviet setting without the local vocal color. As Ginzburg, what Emily Watson lacks in accent she makes up for in determination. Director Marleen Gorris (“Antonia’s Line’’) certainly means well, and she stages a few chillingly effective scenes in the later going, but this is a life and story more daring than the movie that’s been made of it. Nov. 15, MFA; Nov.17, Hollywood Hits; Nov. 19, Capitol Theatre. W.M.