Last Train Home told the incredible story of migrant workers in China who have left their farming communities to find jobs making exportable products in urban factories. Every year, 130 million of them travel home to visit their families and celebrate the Chinese new year. The scenes of thousands of travelers stampeding through the gates of train stations in the days-long rush to get home is so chaotic you can’t imagine it if you had never seen such a thing before.

The film focuses on a husband and wife working in a garment factory. There are several compelling stories here: Villagers leave the farms to escape the crushing monetary poverty of the countryside, exchanging it for the crushing spiritual poverty of dawn-to-dusk sweatshop labor in crowded factories. Children are left behind by their parents to be raised by a grandparent. Each time the parents make the days-long journey home from the city, their visit only casts into sharp relief how separated they are from their children. It’s no surprise at all when the oldest child of the movie’s central couple, a daughter, drops out of school and finds work in a factory herself because she sees it as freedom from the farm drudgery she’s been left behind to do.

Quite a sad story, in the end, and very well told. I gave it a four.

Human Terrain is a documentary that didn’t seem to know what it wanted to focus on. Its title comes from the Pentagon’s project to teach “cultural sensitivity” to soldiers. Some in the academic community objected to what they saw as the perversion of their discipline, while others, and one in particular known to the film maker, volunteered to go to the field with soldiers to lend their expertise on the spot.

The film began with what I thought was an introduction to the program that could have benefited from tighter editing. It shifted to the question of the ethics of using sociology and anthropology for the purposes of making war, then turned its focus finally on Michael Bhatia, who volunteered his services to a military unit in Afghanistan. There is a brief fourth part that summarizes the questions about academics involving themselves in military endeavors, but unfortunately this comes as too little, too late.

This film’s premise seemed muddled to me. If it was about the question of whether or not academics should lend their expertise to the military, I thought it lacked that focus. If it was a protest against the military exploiting academia, I didn’t see the film maker doing that very well, either.

Finally, there was the story of Michael Bhatia, which framed the film from beginning, with a scene showing Bhatia reading from a report, to the end, with friends and fellow academicians discussing the pros and cons of his involvement. This man’s story, it seemed to be, was the center of the story, and yet it seemed to be tacked on, and not very well, leaving important questions unexplored.

I was very disappointed by this film. It could have done so much more with the subject matter. I gave it a two.

Harmony and Me was the goofy story of how a guy will beat the crap out of himself emotionally after his girlfriend dumps him. Even though I really loathed the guy’s determination to throw his life down the toilet, I gave it a three because the film was such an accurate portrait.

Feed the Fish is a darling of the festival. Tickets sold out on the first day, but no worries, you can see it playing at the Point Cinema in Madison starting Friday and running through the week.

I gave it four stars, but almost didn’t. It was the badger’s fault. If the badger hadn’t bitten the main character’s buddy in the crotch in the first reel, I would have given it a solid four. The movie crossed the line from quirky funny to stupid unfunny when the director went for the crotch humor, but it worked hard to cross back to quirky funny after that, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

The story’s pretty simple: An author’s initial success with a hit children’s book is followed by years of frustration with writer’s block. His buddy shows up one day with two tickets to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and off they go for some away time. From the moment he enters town he meets plenty of quirky but honest Wisconsin people, including, of course, the beautiful waitress he’s going to fall in love with. The wide-open spaces are an invigorating tonic to his creative process, in spite of the sub-freezing temperatures, and he cranks out his next best-selling book, gets the girl and lives happily ever after in Door County. Cute movie. Except for the nut jokes.