In many ways, a comparison can be drawn between Elizabeth Barret's Stranger with a Camera and Ed Pincus and Lucia Small's post-Katrina doc The Axe in the Attic, namely that the filmmakers are forced in both cases to question the ethics and reliability of their processes. Yet while Barret manages to do so with a distinct purpose, using her own questions to explain her troubles in relating to others on the journey, Pincus and Small do so with a self-effacing yet in so self-referential mode, neither of them needing to fall back on the trope, particularly because the film's raw footage is so compelling without their direct commentary.

With her feature debut The Cake Eaters, Mary Stuart Masterson steps behind the camera in a move that is neither particularly good nor bad. Screenwriter and actor Jayce Bartok crafts the story of two families contending with love and loss in small town America, and while it's an everyman narrative set-up, the film is ultimately too general to have everyman appeal. At both its best and worst Masterson has crafted the ilk of forgettable film that no critic may hold against her later.

There's a moment in 'Bama Girl where director Rachel Goslins' thesis comes crashing down around her. A study of the racial politics of Homecoming elections at the University of Alabama, the doc follows spritely queen hopeful Jessica Joyce Thomas as she campaigns her way to claim the coveted title, a historic challenge for black women on a George Wallace-stained campus. The doc's underlying cry for social justice hits home, that is until Thomas undermines perhaps a more important definition in the scope of the film, namely, "Who deserves to be a Homecoming Queen?"

Ilya Chaiken's Liberty Kid feels readymade, its characters, beats and visual markers so widely familiar when packaged that indeed, until it's pointed out, no art can be seen in them. Well in over her head Chaiken misses the grace of a Marcel Duchamp, failing to imprint her authorial mark on a work that's bland in both its small moments of triumph and large ones of tragedy.