There are problems with film festivals, rarely having to do with the films themselves. They are too expensive, often because they are cultural events taken over by people who want to be seen more than they want to see what’s on the screen. There are often too few showings of the films you want to see, and they quickly sell out.

Oddball venues are pressed into service that have bad screens, bad seats and bad sound systems. The sellouts mean you must arrive long before each show if you don’t want to end up in the front row, trying to watch a picture at a neck-dislocating angle. Despite all that, it is a chance to see films from hither and yon that would otherwise never come your way. Here are five worth seeing that appeared at this year’s RiverRun — two American and three French.

“Fits and Starts is a comedy with Wyatt Cenac of “The Daily Show,” who is making a career of playing hapless victims of circumstance. He was charming a couple years back in a mockumentary called “Jacqueline Argentina” and is even more so in this film. A master of drollery is welcome in the era of Seth Rogan bombast and stoogery.

This time Cenac and Greta Lee are a couple. He met her when he was a short story writing college professor and she an aspiring writer. Now several years later he is still toiling to finish his first novel while she has industriously completed several and is the toast of the town. She gives readings, has an agent and publisher and he is treated as an accessory who clearly lacks the self-promotion gene.

A chance to impress her agents at a salon they are hosting arrives, and she presses him to attend and perform. Every farcical mishap possible ensues which Cenac endures with sweet, long-suffering stoicism until he doesn’t. Both he and Lee deliver finely calibrated comic performances in a very likable variation on Woody Allen territory.

“Strange Weather” is a Southern melodrama starring Holly Hunter and Carrie Coon. Hunter’s son has died, an apparent suicide, years earlier, but she is still unable to come to terms with it when she learns that a business school classmate has made a fortune stealing an idea her son proposed in his thesis. He was also the last person to see her son alive.

This family drama turns into a road trip/detective story as she and her best friend, played by Coon, travel to New Orleans so she can confront the presumed villain. It unspools competently, but something about the picture doesn’t quite ring true. At first I thought this was due to script trouble, but I have concluded the fault is in Hunter’s portrayal which doesn’t seem to modulate or evolve convincingly as the plot advances.

This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the actor playing the villain is amateurishly unconvincing in a crucial climactic scene. In short, an interesting but imperfect film that should have been better. And as is her wont, Coon in a supporting role comes close to stealing the whole show.

In “After Love” Berenice Bejo, best known here as the vivacious star of “The Artist,” plays a glum, anxious, angry woman who has been married for 15 years to her husband, played by Cedric Kahn. They have two pre-teen daughters, but the marriage has failed and they want a divorce. It might be an amicable parting except for the issue of their home.

She comes from money and is the primary breadwinner. The home is hers. But her blue collar husband has invested considerable sweat equity in renovating the property. Until they can reach an accord on the division of spoils, he can’t afford to move out, and the longer he stays the more acrimonious their relationship becomes.

Behind this simple device lies a plethora of socio-economic issues involving class, the distribution of wealth, and gender. They turn a private affair into a microcosm of social rifts. Both the leads are excellent in nuanced roles and my wife noted the extraordinarily natural performances delivered by the young girls playing the daughters.

Like “After Love,” “The Country Doctor” is an intimate drama set in a moment of transition for the leading characters that has complex subtexts about the times in which we live. Francois Cluzot brings soulful understatement to the title character. A solo practitioner in France profonde, he receives a worrisome diagnosis of his own that forces him to confront the need to recruit another doctor to assist and possibly replace him.

A friend recommends Nathalie (Marianne Denicourt), as a woman who spent ten years as a nurse before attending medical school. She is more up-to-date that he, but he knows everything about his isolated community, it’s people and their ills. It turns out they have things to teach each other. Amusingly, this same plot and intergenerational dynamic can be seen in 1947’s “Welcome, Stranger” starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald.

What might have been a slight tale contains larger issues about places underserved medically and about conflicts in the allocation of health resources and information between regions rich and poor, urban and rural.

Finally, “Frantz,” by director Francois Ozon is an historical drama set in the days after World War I. Ozon has a reputation as a woman’s director who has elicited impressive performances from such actresses as Catherine Deneuve and Charlotte Rampling. Here he does the same with Paula Beer, who has the sad-eyed beauty of Loretta Young.

She plays Anna whose fiancée, Frantz, perished in the war. She is living with his parents in shared melancholy when, visiting the grave of the lost soldier she discovers a young man weeping. Adrien is French and says he knew Frantz before the war in Paris.

Soon, he is describing those happy days to both Anna and the parents to whom he becomes a kind of surrogate son. But Frenchmen are not welcome in their small German town and he leaves, promising to write and to visit again. When he fails to do so, Anna sets off to find him in Paris.

There she discovers that Fantz was not the man she thought he was, that Adrien is not the man he pretended to be, and perhaps that she too is someone other than the bereaved German girl she has become. Beautifully shot in black and white, Ozon, as in several of his films, leaves the viewer with an inconclusive ending and the need to rethink what the tale has meant and to imagine what will become of its protagonist in the future.