I love movies and always have since my Mom shared her own enthusiasm. She grew up in a golden age when a few cents got you a newsreel, a cartoon and a double feature with people like Tracy, Fonda, Colbert and Stanwyck. You’d think I’d love film festivals, but I have mixed feelings.

Here in Podunk our annual version, RiverRun, is in full swing. I’ve seen three films so far with a minimum of five more scheduled, but what ought to be unalloyed pleasure has got some drawbacks. Spoiled by the easy chair and streaming at home, being herded like cattle into small uncomfortable theaters is a comedown.

If you don’t arrive early and stand in line out on the street, you can find yourself seated in the equivalent of a plane’s middle seat, one designed for a person four feet tall. You can also wind up behind a pillar in one venue or in the first few rows where you get a kink in your neck along with the price of admission.

Then there’s the fare available. I have been to two big city festivals in my life, and not surprisingly you get a slightly more accomplished slate of entries in such places. There’s a pecking order in fests like everything else, and the Podunk version is less likely to get the pick of the litter. The few surefire films with name actors or directors sell out fast, often to donors who buy the platinum package.

Choosing among the remaining offerings is like picking horses at the track or throwing darts. You might hit a few winners, but the odds aren’t in your favor. Still, hope springs eternal and you might find a Seabiscuit in the bunch. Of course, for the pleasure of panning for gold, to mix metaphors, you pay a lot more per ticket than you would at the corner multiplex or Redbox. And there you at least have a vague idea of what you’re getting yourself in for.

This year’s offerings include a lot of documentaries, which I like. But part of the trick is figuring out which will pop up on PBS or HBO a month or two later. Several, including those about the Texas Tower shooting, the destruction of the rain forests and the looniness of Kim Jong-Un seem likely to be public TV bait.

There are films about films and films about the sort of things young film makers tend to make films about – disrespected minorities, misunderstood young people, and underappreciated creative young people. In other words, thinly veiled autobiographies.

There are also foreign films from and about faraway places with strange spending names – and stranger folkways. So films are available about nomadic horse breeders in Kyrgyzstan, a homeless dog lady in Brazil, and salt gatherers in Bolivia.

So far, I’ve seen a weirdly executed film, “Francofonia,” about a fascinating topic—the unlikely collaboration between a Nazi official and a Louvre curator to keep the museum’s collection from winding up on the train to Germany or in the fat hands of Hermann Goering.

“”Jacqueline Argentine” is a comedy about a French girl hiding out in Argentina who claims to have stumbled on a CIA plot to assassinate a Middle Eastern leader. She has pitched her scoop to TV networks with no takers. Finally she entices a third-string documentary auteur to film her spilling the beans and revealing the documents.

Jacqueline starts well with a likeable star and a clueless film maker who falls for her story. Eventually the target does end up dead, but the documentation has gone astray and no one knows what was real. The conclusion is inconclusive. As the great George S. Kaufman once complained to his collaborator Moss Hart, “All we need now is a second act.” Just goes to show, dying is easy, comedy is hard.

“The Headless Woman” from Argentina, coincidentally, has a suspenseful premise. A middle-class woman takes her eyes off a country road and strikes something and hits her head. She drives on in a daze despite a body in the rear view mirror. She gets an X-ray at a hospital, checks into a hotel for the night, possibly concussed, gores home and is haunted by the experience. She tries to come clean to her husband, telling him she may have killed a person not a dog with the car.

Members of the family tell her she is imagining things, and point out that there’s nothing on the news about a hit and run accident. They quietly have her car repaired, see to it that records at the hospital and hotel vanish, and cover up her involvement.

In its unfolding, the film has something to say about class and gender assumptions in Argentina and can seem to contain a hint of allegory in a country where thousands were disappeared and forgotten. “The Headless Woman” is well-acted and tautly written, but like many shoestring productions suffers a bit on the craft and technical side.

We are spoiled by the professionalism of art direction, lighting, cinematography, sound recording, editing and scoring in even the crummiest, brain dead Hollywood productions. This film could have been really fine with a little more skill in those areas. And, as Hitchcock knew, a suspense film or psychological thriller can be helped immeasurably by a score that ratchets up the tension.

In coming blogs, more reports from the front if justified by what’s on the screen, though the odds of anyone outside a film festival ever seeing many of the films being shown this week is probably slim to none. Despite occasional strikes of lightning, film festivals are frequently the place where movies go to die.