A Smattering of Shorts

Flying

Nagaike's ethereal 30-minute meditation on the plague-like ennui blighting four Japanese youths uses the metaphor (or is he being literal?) of a flying man who one day vanishes from his circle of friends and leaves them pensive over the stagnant state of their own lives. Wong Kar-Wai has nothing on Nagaike's colorful, timeless presentation, and this fable for the modern age is nothing short of a joyous little masterpiece. – Marc Savlov

Shorts Program 5: Thursday, Oct. 14, 7:30pm, and Sunday, Oct. 17, 4:30pm at the Hideout

News for the Church

Four characters. Nineteen minutes. And with that Andrew McCarthy – yes, that Andrew McCarthy – takes on the Catholic Church by way of the eponymous story by Irish heavyweight Frank O'Connor. While a young lass (Noone) confesses to a priest (Conroy), a preteen scalawag (O'Reilly) is taught a lesson for stealing a loaf of bread. Cruel, voyeuristic, and hypocritical, the Church sees all and forgives all – at the cost of innocence. Not much room for subtlety here. But McCarthy uses the short form effectively in a promising debut behind the camera. – Marrit Ingman

Shock and Awe

Palmer's remarkable tragicomedy "Shock and Awe" comes with the story of an Iraqi family attempting to enjoy their evening meal as bombs rain down nearby. Palmer's brief, beautifully shot film is six minutes of wartime hell leavened with love and the kind of outrageously disrupted normalcy noncombatants must endure and too many others simply fail to conceive of. – Marc Savlov

Each of above screening in Shorts Program 4: Saturday, Oct. 16, 5pm, and Wednesday, Oct. 20, 7:20pm at the Dobie

Youngster

This Fox Searchlab production packs a lot into its eight minutes: a queasy hand-held aesthetic, offbeat moments of dark comedy, and a sickening sucker-punch ending that drives home the grim reality of teenage drug dealing in a way well-intentioned features have tried and failed. The script is effective and self-contained; this is everything a short film should be but rarely is. – Marrit Ingman

Saturday, Oct. 16, 7:15pm at the Dobie; Thursday, Oct. 21, 7pm at Texas Spirit

Bald Ambition

Cutesy intertitles threaten to push this 10-minute farce into the realm of the aggressively whimsical, but it's hard to stay mad at such a goofy little comedy. Take two bald guys (Lubojacky and Koussa), make them "adoptive brothers," give them whopping religious differences, and crank up the soundtrack (which alternates between melodramatic Francopop and "Jesus Real Loud" by Ray Boltz), and you have this movie. Oh yeah, and there's a water balloon. Funny shit. – Marrit Ingman

"Bald Ambition" screens as part of Shorts Program 1: Saturday, Oct. 16, 9:45pm at Texas Spirit; Wednesday, Oct. 20, 9:15pm at the Hideout