With a collage-like quality, the film 45365 documents the people and events of Sidney, Ohio, a small town nestled on the edges of America’s heartland. Directed by Sidney natives Bill and Turner Ross, the film captures the many dimensions and bucolic qualities of the region over a nine-month period. And just as the numbers 4,5,3,6 and 5 (together the zip code of Sidney) are used to link different segments of the documentary, the Ross brothers film the disparate pieces of the town to form one tight-knit community.

Brigitte Cornand’s Red Birds features a wonderful premise, a device to create an analogue between the freedom and individuality of her favorite female artists, and the natural freedom and beauty embodied by her favorite birds. According to Cornand, she was struck with the idea for the film while living near New York City. After obsessively shooting video of birds in Central Park and along the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, she realized that these birds represented the spirit and creative joie de vivre of her female artist friends.

Quickly skimming over Neil Jordan’s filmography, it would seem the director doesn’t like to stay in one place for too long. He often switches back and forth between the personal and the commercial, sometimes combining the two through a grab-bag of genres: for better or for worse, crime, historical epic, gothic, comedy, and thriller have all been worked over in various ways by the director. In Ondine, an update on a Germanic folktale, you get the sense that this lack of stability is what ultimately causes the film to fail.

Charming worlds filled with odd characters on even odder adventures is Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s calling card. He’s a French Terry Gilliam sans the crushing despair, with an added dash of the fantastical. Yet, there was a shift taking place in Jeunet’s films, as his last several films saw the fantastical slowly being replaced with a heightened realism. First with Amelie, which featured “real people” and no monstrosities, then more pronounced with A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet’s WWI love story.

Mia Hansen-Løve is a director to watch. Patient and understated, her dark new film The Father of My Children exhibits a hard, unflinching eye as both a writer and a director. Yet, within her grim vision, there is room for hope and humor. It’s a structurally complex story, with a schism in the script that divides the lives of a family into before and after. But the temptation to call it a film in two movements belittles the ways in which it is seamlessly pulled together into a single entity.

For a film devoted to exploring the history of experimental cinema, Visionaries: Jonas Mekas and the (mostly) American Avant-Garde Cinema introduces itself in a rather staid, Ken Burnsian way. Fading in and out of archival film fragments and panning across event flyers, still photographs, and documents, all that’s missing is sober male voice-over narration.