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 Six: Tuesday, October 25th

The good:

The Artist received a twenty minute standing ovation at Cannes, so this black and white, silent(!) film has quite a bit of hype to live up to. Tonight's screening at the Paramount exceeded all expectations and, judging by the crowd's laughter, gasps and tumultuous applause, is set to garner all sorts of acclaim upon wider release in November. Watching The Artist at the Paramount proved especially delightful. Near the beginning, silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) attends a premiere of his latest movie and the camera gives a full on view of the audience, seated in a theater almost identical to the the Paramount. The audience laughed in appreciation as we viewed a time capsule of ourselves in 1920s evening wear in black and white, underscored with orchestral music. After that playful opener, The Artist delivers numerous delights as the film toys with our expectations of sound and silence. Wait for the moments when Valentin is listening for the audience's applause or when sound suddenly become a menacing enemy or better yet, when the subtitle “Bang!” is used to momentarily confuse the audience. It's a lovely reminder of how much we take sound for granted, especially in our entertainment and of why silent movies were so popular. The actors buy into the conceit gracefully and walk the line between mugging and realism to great effect. Dujardin is charming and roguish as Valentin, and he's so genuinely taken with himself and his adorable dog that it's impossible to root against him. Bérénice Bejo plays Peppy Miller, the girl next door climbing the starlet ranks, pitch perfectly as she wrestles with her love for Valentin and her desire to be a success. John Goodman and James Cromwell also deliver performances so fit for silent movies that it almost makes you wish this would start a new trend. The popularity ofThe Artist at festivals probably doesn't signal the end of talkies, but its ability to rise above its conceit and offer a thoroughly enjoyable and artistic experience will place it first in line come Oscar season. [K.C.]

Michel Haznavicius' silent film The Artist will be the least likely Best Picture nominee ever. A self-indulgent, silly-at-times, wonderfully sentimental homage to the era before "talkies," it's a movie that wowed the festival crowd but wouldn't have seen the light of AFF, or several other festivals, without the good fortune to be picked up by The Weinstein Company for distribution. But it's a grand, opulent piece of cinematic nostalgia, essentially retelling Singin' In The Rain without sound. Unknown leads Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo put on a master class in acting through the subtlety of expression (and occasional shameless mugging), Ludovic Bource's score is just as classic as the film's old-style opening credits. For any fan of cinema history, it's a can't miss experience of what theater's were like over 70 years ago. [D.C.]

The bad:

Psychological thrillers tend to succeed primarily by staying at least two or three steps ahead of their audience, but there’s a responsibility that comes with that, too: they have to be way ahead of us, but they also to make sure that we can follow how they got there. The Woman In The Fifth struggles with the latter part of that objective, before deciding that it doesn’t really matter why anything we see happen is actually happening. The movie stars Ethan Hawke as an English professor and writer who comes to Paris to be closer to his daughter; within the first ten minutes of the movie he finds himself kicked out by his ex-wife, nearly arrested, robbed, destitute and indebted to a stranger who offers him a room in a fleabag hotel on the outskirts of the city. It’s a good start, and the movie sets up a series of salient mysteries: most intriguingly, the hotel owner offers him a job watching a security camera, occasionally allowing people to enter an unspecified room. What happens in that room is one of the many questions that – spoiler alert – the movie opts not to answer in favor of moody, atmospheric cutaways to close-up shots of various bugs and owls. It’s a shame, because if the movie had actually been about any of the things that it set up, there’d be plenty of compelling things to watch. Instead, we get a growly-voiced Ethan Hawke, alternating between speaking in French and English and a movie that it becomes increasingly difficult to care about once we realize that the filmmaker has dropped the stakes down to zero. [D.S.]

The behind-the-scenes:

The pre-screening bumpers at AFF are pretty neat this year, huh? They feature animated versions of various screenwriters – Shane Black and Ron Howard among them – talking about their writing process in quick, witty 20-second snippets. The festival is on day six now, and even if you’ve attended a movie or two a day since it started, it’s still possible to see new ones, which is evidence of a job well done. And, hell – the bumpers before Fantastic Fest films included unedited footage of a vasectomy being performed. The bar for pre-screening bumpers at film festivals in Austin is actually so low that just not being images of vasectomy surgery is enough to qualify as good – the fact that these are actually unique, and relevant to AFF’s marketing as “the writer’s festival,” is a bonus. [D.S.]

Moviegoers were introduced to a new system at the Texas Spirit Theater designed to allay some of the grumbles caused by number of attendees > number of seats equation that happened over the weekend. AFF volunteers gave everyone tiny blue tickets as they walked into the lines, ensuring that the volunteers knew exactly how many seats were left and that pass holders who arrived before the twenty five minute cutoff would be guaranteed a seat, even if a bunch of badge holders arrived at the last minute. The festival crowds shrink come Sunday night, so this was a little bit of locking the barn door after the horse and all that, but kudos to the Texas Spirit team for trying out some new solutions and being attuned to attendees' feedback. This is already a great venue that has shown some of the best films of the festival, so they should give themselves a gold star – or better yet, just change the color of that red star above the screen. [K.C.]

A suggestion for attendees of the Austin Film Festival that hopefully doesn’t come off as unkind: be careful of any world premiere screenings at AFF that include even modestly famous actors in the cast. This is a mid-tier festival, it’s fair to say – while it’s exceptionally well-organized and full of a number of outstanding films, it’s not Sundance or Telluride or Toronto, and we wouldn’t want it to be. But the catch there is that, unless it’s a movie with a particularly special tie to Texas, most filmmakers probably dreamed of premiering their picture at one of those more famous festivals. If a movie like 6 Month Rule, with Dave Foley, Martin Starr and John Michael Higgins, or Searching For Sonny, with Brian Dohring and Minka Kelley, is premiering at AFF next year, there’s a good chance that it’s debuting here because those larger-market festivals rejected it. Feel free to take your chances with some of the smaller or locally-produced world premieres, which can have real gems, but otherwise, might we suggest checking out movies that already succeeded at Sundance or Toronto? [D.S.]

Cinema fatigue has mostly set in after six entire days of festival mania (and the end of the conference portion on Sunday). The balcony remained closed at the Paramount for the screening of The Artist, hotly anticipated as it was, with more than a couple of people angling for the seats in the very back row, where one can rest their head against the wall. [D.C.]