BAM's annual film festival returns for its fifth year with a kick-ass slate of films. Featuring lots of high-profile indies that have been making waves at other festivals, it also "remains a hometown festival," the press release reads, "with nearly half our main slate by Brooklyn filmmakers." We're psyched about making new discoveries and catching up with names we've been hearing about, but if your resources are limited and you want to know what's, like, essential to see, you shouldn't go wrong with any of these, because we were already excited to see them before we heard they were playing at BAM.

If religion is merely a palliative, are those who choose to believe in it fools? Or are they just desperate for solace from life's cruel vicissitudes? Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen poses these questions with severity and tenderness in his new film, The Broken Circle Breakdown. The film revolves around Didier (Johan Heldenbergh), a bluegrass musician, and his wife Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist, tracing their relationship from its blissful conception to its tragic conclusion. When they first meet, the two fall in love almost instantly, bonding over their shared enthusiasm for American music and culture. In the beginning, their relationship is perfect: a whirlwind of sex and emotional intimacy, buoyed by the fervor of performance once Elise joins Didier's band as a singer. But when their young daughter Maybelle (Nell Cattrysse) becomes terminally ill, the fairy tale ends and the two start to question everything they hold dear: love, god, each other.

It’s worth remembering that gifted artists come from somewhere, that the first 18 years of their lives follow a familiar cycle of school years. In The English Teacher, a prodigiously talented playwright returns to his hometown and reconnects with his former teacher, who becomes determined to stage a school production of his latest—and incredibly violent—work while flirting with the idea of having an affair with him. This is a good premise, especially since there are a number of interesting ways for it develop: a biting satire like Election? Or enjoyably light like Hamlet 2? Unfortunately, despite some interesting stylistic choices—like a voiceover narrator who becomes inexplicably hostile—it opts for a conventional story that’s amusing enough but oh-so safe. Julianne Moore is quite good in the role, unsurprisingly, but since she could handle a much more challenging character, it’s almost unsatisfying that she doesn’t get to. Frankly, dramatic stakes are difficult to come by when the story’s antagonists are clearly right: theater full of suicides and shootings may not be the most appropriate for a high school. Ryan Vlastelica

Screens tonight, Saturday and Sunday. More info here.

Emma Roberts—daughter of Eric, niece of Julia—has really been making a go of it with her indie-movie career, to the point of taking almost the same part twice in It's Kind of a Funny Story and The Art of Getting By. In Adult World, she graduates from alluring teenage love interest to showcase role as Amy, a recent Syracuse University graduate and aspiring poet with a Hannah Horvath-y faith in the arts-career she's certain will materialize. After her parents balk at the grand or so she spends on postage and entrance fees for poetry contests (which I guess means she enters 50 or 60), she moves out in a huff and gets herself a for-now job. (As a former resident of upstate New York, by the way, I can confirm that almost no college graduate, even one in Syracuse, makes the want ads her primary source of leads.)

Gemma Arterton has been, for the past few years, an odd bombshell in search of a good genre-role: after playing Strawberry Fields, the more fun and less-used Bond girl in Quantum of Solace, she took on gods and demons in Clash of the Titans and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, plus whatever they were fighting in Prince of Persia. In Byzantium, she plays, perhaps inevitably, a vampire. Arterton has a striking, comic-bookish physicality; she's broader-shouldered and less slight of frame than some of her waifish contemporaries. Her vampirism, then, isn't sallow or skeletal: her Clara is a working woman, albeit as some manner of stripper or prostitute as the movie opens—a less risky profession after you've achieved, more or less, immortality.

There’s a not-insignificant part of the population that considers the biggest corporate threat to America to be not an energy giant or weapons manufacturers but Monsanto, the agriculture giant involved in genetically modified seeds and other “Franken-foods.” A key part of the American food debate, which is so linked to health issues, agribusiness has gotten little attention in movies other than documentaries, which is why At Any Price is a particular disappointment. Like Promised Land, a similarly earnest, similarly unsuccessful attempt to delve into the problems of the heartland, Price never feels comfortable in its own skin.