As the 18^th annual Austin Film Festival takes over our town, bringing hundreds of screenings (and more than a few late night parties) through October 27^th, CultureMap contributors are busy trying to catch as many features, documentaries, shorts and panels as possible while also keeping up with festival news to help you navigate the lines (and, of course, plenty of celebrity gossip). Every day, we’ll be recapping our AFF highlights: films we’re begging you no to miss, tips for planning your week and the you-had-to-be-there moments you may have missed.

Day One: Thursday, October 20^th

The good:

Elizabeth Olsen dominates every frame of Martha Marcy May Marlene, in a role that vacillates from the soft, demure naivete of the uninitiated to the impulsively vindictive, and also demands deft emotional nuance and raw physicality. As showstoppers go, it's a sure to earn her an Oscar nomination in February. John Hawkes is the other clear standout performer, ratcheting up his dispassionately brutal persona from Winter's Bone into a frighteningly calm and domineering cult leader. Director Sean Durkin, with only two short films to his prior credit, makes a stunningly assured feature debut—the just-after-sunset gloom of the cinematography works with a tonal, subtly shifting score to make MMMM seem almost like a film Terrence Malick would make if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. It's intensity is the only thing that keeps you from wanting to see it again right away. The line between reality and paranoia is as hazy as the film's visual style, but the grip of Olsen's journey is enough to make the questions surround her character's experience haunting, as opposed to frustrating. [D.C.]

It's a rare film that opts to position The Daily Show's Rob Corddry, of all people, as its emotional center, but opening night selection Butter is that film. The movie is an on-the-nose allegory for the 2008 Democratic primary, with Jennifer Garner as the butter-carving equivalent of Hillary Clinton, and a precocious 11-year old girl named Destiny (Yara Shahidi) standing in for Obama. If all of that sounds kind of weird, well, it is: The movie opts for an especially broad sort of comedy, tossing in a shady used car salesman (Hugh Jackman) and a ruthless stripper/hooker (Olivia Wilde) to a crowded cast of characters that also includes Kristen Schaal as a lonely cat-lady and finally answers the question "whatever happened to Alicia Silverstone?" with "she's playing moms now." There's not a lot of subtlety to Butter, either in its satire or its treatment of its characters (the stripper doesn't go anywhere without wearing her clear heels!), but the jokes are funny and the cast of comedy pros knows how to deliver this sort of thing. For an infamous "black list" script, director Jim Field Smith—whose only previous feature is the forgotten teen sex comedy She's Out Of My League—makes fairly obvious decisions that are maybe a little disappointing, but all that really means is that the movie just never leaves "really funny" to venture into "great movie" territory. There are worse ways to start a festival. [D.S.]

Your opinion of first-time director Brady Kiernan's Stuck Between Stations will hinge largely on your appetite for movies of the "pretty-young-people-having-deep-conversations-for-ninety-minutes" genre. If the idea of watching two attractive white people banter naturalistically with one another while nothing much resembling a plot unfolds doesn't raise your hackles, then you're in for a good time with this one. Movies like this tend to rise and fall directly on the likability of the leads, and Zoe Lister Jones as Becky, and Sam Rosen as Casper (who also co-wrote), both have likability by the bucketload. In fact, the movie at times comes off like an audition reel for the two of them to showcase how good they might be if Hollywood ever cast them as anything other than walk-ons in Law & Order spin-offs—and if it's the case, it may be working, seeing as how Lister Jones is now a series regular on NBC's Whitney. Whatever the motives behind the film's existence, it's a gorgeously photographed (the colors, all bathed in streetlights and bar neons, are especially striking) slice-of-life piece where the plot is secondary to the experience of watching two people fall in love a little bit. Despite unlikely cameos from Michael Imperioli—who leaves his Sopranos accent behind to play a sleazy English professor—and Josh Hartnett, as a tattooed, fixie-riding hipster anarchist, Stuck Between Stations is very much a small picture with low ambitions and plenty of time to meander—much like the characters it showcases. [D.S.]

The bad:

Look, the 4th floor hall of the Austin Convention Center was never going to be the best venue at AFF—that much is obvious from the cavernous size of the room relative to the under-the-radar nature of the films on the screen. But it'd be nice if they made a little bit more effort to keep it at least comparable to the experience of seeing a movie at any of the other venues. For instance, could they maybe turn off the lights on the far left side of the room, or keep the iTunes video controls from popping up on the screen every seven minutes? It's hard to turn that space into something that really resembles an actual movie theater, obviously, but it sure makes it hard to get lost in a land of cinematic wonder when the room is half-lit and you're reminded of exactly how much time is left in the picture every seven minutes. [D.S.]

The behind-the-scenes:

Sometimes it pays to be patient. At last night's screening of Deadhead (which was the first film to play as part of the Dark Matters program), a couple of Film Pass-holders received an unexpected surprise from the filmmakers themselves. About 10 minutes before seating, the AFF volunteer on site at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz (the smallest venue on the AFF roster this year, with only 74 seats) had the hard job of dashing the hopes of many. The staff counted 80 badge holders in line. This meant that those with Film Passes (who are let in after badge holders are seated) were more or less wasting their time. All but three people at the front of the line left. As luck would have it, though, they were handed the magic tickets that trump even badges: filmmaker guest passes. Some of the Deadheads team gave up their tickets and the three persistent Film Pass-holding individuals (two of whom had been waiting for two and a half hours for chance to see the film) were let into the theater before everyone else and were even given a special mention by the directors of the film during the introduction. [B.K.]

The registration process is almost always the biggest drag of a film festival—which, okay, just underscores how little there usually is to complain about at these things—but AFF seems to be doing a good job of streamlining the process. Sure, Goofus may have to wait a few minutes in the "same day registration" line, but if Gallant registered for the festival in advance, he should be in and out of the room at the Driskill in a few minutes. [D.S.]

Hundreds of film fans and fest-goers crowded into the Stage on Sixth for AFF's Opening reception. Robert Rodriguez and Turk Pipkin managed to garner the most buzz, as many fans and industry types wanted a moment and a picture with both of them. Rodriguez says he's got three new projects in pre-pro and Turk, fresh from a press conference announcing the $725,000 the Wildfire Relief Concert raised, continues his work with the Kenya Schools Fund and the Nobelity in Schools Project. He's also in pre-production for a new documentary (which of course he's not quite ready to talk about). Several hundred folks threw down free Dos Equis, mingling and networking, and filling the space. It's what makes the AFF such a cool event: the chance meeting with local filmmakers, screenwriters and producer. [K.B.]

"Is that James Franco?" was a surprisingly frequent question between correspondents on day one, knowing of his upcoming appearance on Saturday. But it turns out there is just an abundance of a certain aesthetic that is easy to mistake for the Sal director and star from a distance. It's like that Where's Waldo where there are hundreds of Waldos and your task is to find the one missing a shoe, but with James Franco. [D.C.]