It is quickly apparent that Jillian is in no mood to be dealing with hungry customers. Her sassy, hungover comments add juvenile humor to the simple plot line and setting. Her “having a bad day” attitude is apparent and, at times, annoying as she interacts with creepy comic book weirdos, annoyed foreign neighbors, manipulative kids, and hippie hobos with feisty comebacks, complaints, and mannerisms. But her sarcastic bliss can’t last forever, as Jillian’s confrontations with customers start to have an increasingly profound effect on her unintended self-reflection. She hears the inspiring life story of a retired Hollywood star, helps a friend’s sibling confront his addiction, meets her previous evening’s one night stand, and even receives comfort from an eight-year old girl.

Jillian’s constant bad attitude is sometimes off-putting as her shrewdness gets overshadowed by her bothersome immaturity. Her self-realization, the supposed climax of the feature narrative, is very oddly timed and sudden as opposed to gradual, which damages the viewer’s overall satisfaction. A few awkwardly written lines stand out as well, though they can easily be played off as another contributing factor to the “indie” tone of the film. The strongest aspect of the movie is oddly not the overly pessimistic protagonist, but the star-studded supporting roles that the film has to offer. Indie professionals like Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Ritter are minor characters, but their obvious expertise and ability to carry a scene force viewers to ask why they aren’t featured more throughout the movie.

In essence, “Free Samples” takes a seemingly boring every-day plot and tries to juice it with overly quirky characters and odd situations. Though some jokes are laudable and separate scenes stand well on their own, the movie as a whole seems patchy, oddly paced, and overly sarcastic. The movie is definitely not a masterpiece and is not the best among other works in the festival. Instead, “Free Samples” seems like it would fit better as a friendly campus dorm “indie movie night” type of cinema, but nothing further. Maybe Jillian should have stuck to cold showers and black coffee after all.

Zhang Shihe, known online as Tiger Temple, is a fifty-something “citizen reporter” whose distrust of the Chinese government has prompted him to travel and report the overlooked issues in impoverished rural China.

The quirky, cat-loving bachelor began blogging when he captured a brutal murder on his phone’s camera. When police arrived on the scene, their primary concern was not catching the culprit, but questioning Zhang about the photographs he took.  Zhang reminds us that perception is power, and the Chinese government will go to great lengths to preserve its image.

Turning to the newer generation is the story of Zhou Shuguang (Zola) whose attitude towards Chinese censorship is far more volatile. As interested in social awareness as he is in personal fame, the thirty-something blogger reflects a cheekier attitude. While Zhang’s contempt for the government comes from its failures to provide for the people who built it, Zhou’s views are more Westernized. The youth seeks not to protect the forgotten peasantry and elderly, but to promote individuality over the group thinking that dominates Communist culture. Loud and self-promoting, Zhou’s blogs always frame himself—his interactions with locals and his reactions.

The full force of the Chinese propaganda in the film is lost in translation. Best viewed in its original Chinese, “High Tech, Low Life” excels in its ability to capture the irony of modern Communist China, a world best demonstrated by one Beijing local whose shanty home was scheduled to be demolished by the Reconstruction Bureau. He put up posters of Communist party leaders and the great Mao so any destruction of his property could be construed as anti-party actions. This move has halted demolition plans.

Throughout the film, the clash between Tiger Temple’s view of blogging and Zola’s view of blogging is very evident. Nevertheless, the result is the same—a gradual knocking down of the Great Firewall of China.

Last year, “Attack the Block,” a British film about London hoodlums fighting aliens, perfected the formula of action, suspense, and several truckloads of camp to create something brilliant. “Sleepless Night,” directed by Frederic Jardin, might be attempting the same feat—though it’s never clear if the filmmakers are serious in their ineptitude—but comes across as a boring thriller that is funny only in it‘s utter insipidity.

The film opens with a pair of men, Vincent (Tomer Sisley) and Manuel (Laurent Stocker), chasing down and murdering a pair of drug traffickers for their enormous bag of cocaine. Despite the canned music, it is a passable action sequence, and probably the film’s peak. The next scene reveals that Vincent and Manuel are actually cops moonlighting as porters for the local nightclub owner. Vincent even has a sweet little boy named Thomas to return home to, which is bad luck when his buyers get antsy and decide to kidnap Thomas and hold him as collateral. Thus begins the titular sleepless night, in which Vincent staggers back and forth across the club, hoping to stumble into the rescue of his son.

The film would be nothing more than a harmless TV time-filler if not for the blatant and disgusting misogyny that even the most exploitive Bond films avoid. A woman Vincent saves from being date-raped (taking out his manly frustrations on her date by beating him to a pulp in front of her) follows him around like a sick puppy, allowing him to kiss her whenever he spots people to avoid, and even has a pathetic make-out session with his cheek as he scans the club for his pursuers.

The real crime, however, lies in the lady cop (Lizzie Brocheré) who suspects Vincent of his illicit activity. There is an attempt at a fantastic device when she sees him hide the drugs in the ceiling of the men’s room, and promptly switches it to the same place on the ladies’ side. This is a missed opportunity not just in the epic cat-and-mouse game it might have created, but also in the attempt to craft a single meaningful character. When Vincent and the woman come face to face, he grabs her hair and shoves her into the kitchen freezer, slamming her around and crouching behind her as she moans in a disturbingly pornographic manner, not even attempting to fight back. After twisting her arm and leaving her locked inside, Vincent spends the next ten minutes in a pitched battle with her male colleague as she huddles crying in the freezer. There is literally no use for her character but as a punching bag for the surrounding males, who really deserve a solid beating themselves.

By the end of a meager 100 minutes, nearly half the time has been spent hoping for the main character to meet his demise, just so the movie might end. Whatever the director’s intention, this film failed at achieving it; if you want an adrenaline rush, your time is better spent reviewing the Bourne films on pay-per-view.

The film’s biggest issue is that it makes Paul completely unlikeable. We’re supposed to sympathize with him, but it’s hard to feel bad for someone on a scholarship program to graduate school who sits around all day—he can’t work without that single copy, apparently—and complains about his ex-roommate to his best friend and his girlfriend. When Jen finally confronts him about his apathy, her side of the argument—that she can’t keep supporting him while he mopes around without putting in any more effort than a few phone calls—is far more understandable.

Moreover, Nancy is given absolutely no characterization beyond hysterical psychopath. We don’t know why she refuses to return his book, or why she seems hell-bent on thwarting his every effort to reclaim it. At one point, Paul uses his old key to enter her house in the middle of the night to get it back, and Nancy, mistaking him for a burglar, attacks him with a baseball bat. The film paints this incident as an act of malice, but it seems like a completely logical reaction to the circumstances. When they have a final confrontation and Paul yells at her for “ruining his life,” it’s far more tempting to cheer when Nancy punches him and tell him to grow a pair and stop whining.

The film is well shot, and both Rogers and Hendricks play their poorly-written characters as best they can. However, the film still manages to simultaneously bore and infuriate, and though the evil ex-roommate plot has plenty of potential, almost all of it is wasted.

The film opens with twelve New Yorkers stranded in a farmhouse, facing a record-breaking cold and a life-threatening blackout.  Unofficial leader Paul (Paul Manza), owner of the farmhouse, creates an island of drugs, sex, and yoga in this sea of ice. But as the winter drags on and the food rations dwindle, the house begins to fall apart.

Overall the film is beautifully shot. The wintry landscape creates the perfect, barren backdrop for the brewing turmoil inside the house. Manza is brilliant as Paul, a man with good intentions that are perhaps overshadowed by his selfish desires. Using their isolation as a chance to take advantage of the girls living in the house, Paul only seeks his own satisfaction. It isn’t until the arrival of Marie (Lindsay Burdge) and an ever-dwindling food supply that he is forced to reconsider his leadership responsibilities.

A main weakness of the film is over-dramatization of certain events. In one scene, we see the rationing out of their last bits of food. The camera rolls painfully over each outstretched bowl, hands held out as if in offering. But just as it reaches the end of the line, it doubles back and slowly makes it way around a second time—a solid five minutes of metal spoons scraping up last bits of rice and beans. Though trying to emphasize the group’s growth, scenes like this reduce the situation to a comical light and undermine the film’s message.

“First Winter” is sometimes too subtle in its message and sometimes too obvious. Despite a strong cast and good directing, it fails to elicit much emotion for both the plight of the group and the internal struggles characters face in their interactions with one another.

Despite the film’s culminating power, it rests on an abundance of clichés. Rudy (Cumming) is a cross-dressing, lip-synching free spirit who locks eyes with closeted attorney Paul (Garret Dillahunt) from the stage of the gay bar where he performs. A parking-lot blowjob and business card from Paul later, Rudy returns home to find his junkie neighbor blasting music. He confronts her briefly, but when the noise continues late into the night, he bursts through her door to find something he never expected: the woman’s son Marko (Leyva), sitting alone, clutching his doll in the corner. With the mother in jail, Rudy takes Marko into his own house.

Cumming is a relentless whirlwind, playing Rudy as both a sassy spout of one-liners (“This lip-synch thing is just a cover; I really want to be Bette Midler”) and a deeply feeling human being who doesn’t think twice about falling for an overweight, broken boy. His relationship with Marko is achingly beautiful—during their first meal together, Marko says that he usually has donuts for breakfast, to which Rudy replies, “Donuts are poison that make you fat and give you pimples.” He finds cheese and crackers for the boy, setting them in front of him as if they were a French delicacy, making up words and flourishing his arms. When Marko’s blank, misshapen face morphs into a smile, and Rudy smiles back, it’s like something breaks open in both of them.

Rudy’s relationship with Paul pales in comparison. There is clear chemistry from Cumming’s side, but it’s hard to see what the exuberant Rudy would be attracted to in boring, blank-faced Paul. Dillahunt never truly relaxes into physical intimacy, which makes sense when in public, but not in the privacy of their bedroom. Rudy more or less accepts Paul’s closeted nature, barring a brilliant scene in which he mutters, “Good thing the black people had Dr. King instead of you.”

The development of their relationship is mixed up with their interactions with Marko—within several days, they have progressed from a parking-lot encounter to moving in together, so that Marko’s incarcerated mother would sign the temporary custody papers. This rapidity makes it difficult to believe any of the feelings they profess to have. But again, it is Marko who ties them together—when it is the three of them, a tenderness and passion emerge in Paul that make the love story at least slightly plausible. When Marko sees his new bedroom, he asks, “This is my home?” and begins crying. Paul embraces him as Rudy watches from the doorway; it’s clear this is a homecoming for all of them.

Their happy lives together, exemplified by a cheesy but nonetheless affecting holiday montage, is disrupted when the courts discover that Rudy and Paul are not cousins, as Paul repeatedly professes, but lovers. With Marko more or less out of the picture, the film falters, falling victim to stereotyped social workers and antagonistic lawyers who spout textbook lines of bigotry.

The film is nearly overwhelmed by the vigorous proclamation of its political messages, which are especially timely in light of President Obama’s recent statement on same-sex marriage, but there are still moments of immense power. Dillahunt gives a fantastic speech about Marko’s prospects without them, culminating with “No one in this entire world wants him but us.” Leyva delivers the most heartbreaking line of the movie when, after Rudy promises that he’ll bring him home but is thwarted by the court, he is led from the car towards a strange house, proclaiming over and over, “That’s not my home. That’s not my home.” It is here that the real tragedy unfolds; as Paul states in court, the hemming and hawing about “destructive influences” only does further harm to the child.

Paul and Rudy’s hopelessness is nearly incomprehensible today—if such discrimination occurred in a 2012 courtroom, one campaign with CNN should be enough to resolve it. Or so we decide to think. The fact that this story could be transposed with little alteration to the present day is part of what gives the film its power and is a reminder of the terrifying and lingering consequences of prejudice. The message of the film might be heavy-handed at times, but that does not make it any less valid. All we really need to remember are two images: a beautiful, broken boy wandering alone down the highway, and Rudy, with hands outstretched, wracked with grief, singing Bob Dylan’s words: “I swear, my love, we shall be released.”

To decide on a single coherent impression of “Una Noche,” Lucy Molloy’s debut film, is quite the challenge. Under the guise of a coming-of-age story, the film tackles the reality of life in Cuba in a very human way, pairing anguish and frustration with teenage pining in a world seldom seen by American eyes.

At the center of the film are three teens: slick-haired and muscular Raul, with his fantasies of lovely Miami; his friend and coworker Elio, with whom he suffers in a grimy hotel kitchen; and Elio’s sister Lila, whose arm hair provokes her peers to tease her about her delayed womanhood.

While it is primarily Raul, whose desires to leave the country set the film’s action in motion, it is the many women of the film who accelerate the events that unfold, each contributing in her own way to the party’s inevitable departure.

Raul’s mother, a weathered woman with a soft voice, is a compassionate character, forced to prostitute herself to make ends meet. Raul undoubtedly cares for her, but is detached—he resists her physical affection, but scours the city’s black markets in search of Vilatraxina, an expensive drug to combat the effects of the HIV that his mother picked up from “dealing with” tourists.

Younger than Raul’s mother, but not by much, is one of Raul’s mistresses, a fair skinned woman who feeds him rich pastries and gives him American technology in exchange for the sexual reprieve he provides.

On the other side of the spectrum, albeit with a similarly minor role, is a young girlfriend of Raul’s who provides one of the movie’s many comic moments. When her inquisitive father decides to spy on his daughter and she discovers him, we are treated to shrill barks of chastisement in his direction. The point is clear: there is nothing like the wrath of a Latin American woman.

And finally, Lila, whose brief narration consisting of local adages and reflections on the past tie the different parts of the movie together. She is unlike all of other Raul’s love interests; resisting his advances, she pores over their interactions in private, recalling those moments in earnest. This is indicative of her character—beyond the taekwondo-practicing, hair-on-her-arms, tomboyish exterior is an unsteady, unsure pre-teen girl.

From the first frame, what we see is a surprise for American audiences. The film paints a richly colored and sundrenched Havana—dirty white porticos of showy tourist hotels, grainy but rich reds of meat butchered in the filthy kitchens of these hotels, ashy grays of the dilapidated slums of the city, deep blues of the 90 miles that separate the holding pen of the miserable teens and the promises of Miami, a father Raul has never met, the chic populace and wealth waiting to be reaped. However, while his dream is never truly realized, Molloy takes the scenic route, infallibly capturing the local culture and essence through an honest lens.

We live in an age of relative female emancipation—the days of the 1950s housewife, or the 1910s non-voter, are long gone.  However, our culture still wears a tight leash. Sex, America’s favorite three-letter word, takes its toll regardless of how far we’ve come. “Sexy Baby” is Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus’s attempt to take stock of how hyper-sexualization affects females all across the age spectrum, a patchwork of honest documentary footage that sheds light on how deeply the issue runs.

Take 12-year old Winnie, for example. She’s your average, tech-savvy NYC teenage girl. She acts and sings, loves Lady Gaga, and, of course, spends a good majority of her time on Facebook. It is also her obsession with the website that fuels her conflicts with her parents, who at a few points in the documentary go so egregiously far as to, dare I say it, force her to deactivate her account. One such instance followed shortly after she posted a video of her little sister Myrtle singing and dancing along to the profanity-filled hip-hop hit “Teach Me How To Dougie”; another deactivation occurred after she posted suggestive photos of herself from a late-night “photo shoot” with her friend. Suffering from withdrawal, Winnie’s dramatic one-liners come into play, with grim realizations such as, “Facebook is literally 30 percent of my life and it shouldn’t be.” At times, she can be even more melodramatic: “Facebook is a beautiful place and I can’t have it.”

Through Bauer and Gradus’s candid lens, we see Winnie’s attempt to find the middle ground between utilizing the website for whatever a 12-year-old can use a social networking site for, and actually being sucked into the second reality of an online life. Though she is young, she is also precocious. In moments during which she speaks directly to the camera, we see a level of self-reflection beyond her years. Facebook Winnie is not necessarily all that is Winnie, she realizes, but her outward presentation of herself inevitably shapes the person she is offline.

Juxtaposed with the scandalous antics of Winnie are the stories of 22-year-old Laura and 32-year old Nichole. Laura’s story is somewhat of a somber one—she is fully convinced that a labiaplasty, a plastic surgery that will trim her lady-parts into a “designer vagina,” will undoubtedly better her life. We see her at every stage along the way, from the first medical appointment to her post-op recovery. Unfortunately, it is difficult not to find fault with her plight and wonder how altering her “roast beef curtains,” a term used to describe the appearance of the vagina, will ever really change the quality of her existence. Regardless, there are sections of the documentary that are incredibly poignant, especially those shedding light on the tender moments between her and her mother, who accompanies her through all parts of the procedure.

The story of Nichole, however, is a different kind of rebirth story. Attempting to escape her past as renowned porn star Nakita Kash, she removed herself from the industry and began teaching pole-dancing to women instead. The movie shows her in her most average moments—doing housework or roller-blading with her dog—and some of her most beautiful ones as well. We get an inside glimpse at the love she has for her husband, likening their moments of intimacy to pure lovemaking as opposed to the “sport [expletive deleted]ing” of the adult film industry. Finally, we follow her attempts to conceive a child with her husband. In this, the documentary finds its happiest ending. Nichole sheds her old pornographic skin; escaping the sex that society has pushed on her, and reveals herself as an overjoyed new mother.

The dark comedy balances frequent witty one-liners with an array of caustic personalities. In a memorable scene, Carson’s mother, Sheryl (Allison Janey) lets her son know that she used to hide attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication in his food when he was younger when he wouldn’t behave.

Carson, with his single-minded pursuit to become a journalist and his disdain for his apathetic peers, is humorous to watch, but not always relatable. Through advice from his unreliable counselor (Angela Kinsey), who has never heard of Northwestern, he decides to start a literary magazine and submit it to the school to better his chances of acceptance.

Keeping in the vein of teenage movies, Carson is only able to get people to write for the journal after he blackmails the crème de la crème of the school, mostly using their various sexual indiscretions as bargaining chips. While he is nuanced, the other teenagers in the movie fall into the stereotypical roles, such as the cheerleader afraid of leaving home (Sarah Hyland), the jock (Robbie Amell), and the closeted gay theater aficionado (Graham Rogers).

            The film doesn’t spend too much time on the blackmailing, however, which allows the movie to be humorous without relying too much on a gimmick.

            Malerie (Rebel Wilson), Carson’s best friend, provides charm and spunk as she records everything around her with her camcorder. The film disperses her shaky video recordings throughout, including an especially poignant scene where Carson describes why he writes.

            Colfer, who wrote the script, focuses much of his attention on the adults in the film, who give strong, thoughtful performances. Carson and his mother have a comfortable, albeit non-traditional, rapport with each other, as they trade barbs constantly.

            In an especially haunting scene, Sheryl confronts her estranged husband’s fiancée (Christina Hendricks), reminding her that she was once in the younger woman’s position as well. By dint of an absentee father (Dermot Mulroney), a constantly inebriated mother and a grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s and cannot recognize her own grandson, it is easy to see why Phillips is so jaded.

            The film ends the way it begins. We are shown his death, only this time it is in sequential order. Carson does not leave behind any legacy nor does he die loved by the student body. Carson dies before having the chance to reach his prime and while his absence is noticeable, there is no dramatic immediate change, fitting well with the small town society Colfer has crafted in the film.