This year’s seventh annual Downtown Dayton LGBT Film Festival lineup definitely addresses a new honest reality, this striving for a sense of urgent authenticity, both through the films and the celebratory events.  

My drive back from the Toronto International Film Festival cracked open the protective cinema dome, and it did so with a vengeance. NPR rudely awakened me to the news of the attacks on the Libyan embassy that resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.  

This year marks my fourth sojourn to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and I have been able to add a few extra days to my usual long weekend mad dash through an impossibly overbooked itinerary that leaves me feeling like a camera-toting tourist snapping pictures of all the officially sanctioned hotspots.  

Take This Waltz focuses on Margot (Michelle Williams), a freelance writer married to a cookbook author (Seth Rogen) but who develops feelings for a neighbor (Luke Kirby), an artist and rickshaw driver. Waltz feels like an avant-garde performance devoted to women on the verge. What happens to women who long for more than life has given them but then encounter an opportunity to grab hold of something more?  

Manny (Ray Romano), Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid (John Leguizamo) are on the road again — well, this is the Ice Age, so it’s really a pre-road time, but these three seem to be laying the pathway out with each new adventure — which means that they are edging closer and closer to drifting into the modern age.  

Tyler Perry’s Madea has long been a rough shelter in the storm for an assortment of outcasts and miscreants in need of tough love, so in Witness Protection, she’s taking in a Wall Street investment banker (Eugene Levy) and his family who are on the lam from the mob. The cross-cultural mash-up is old hat and likely stale, but somehow you just know that Perry’s audience will remain loyal.  

Imagine a team of eager magazine employees investigating a classified ad seeking a companion for time jumping (mis)adventures. Aubrey Plaza, Jake M. Johnson, Karan Soni and Mark Duplass who seems to jumping from project to project this summer (you can catch him in People Like Us and in the upcoming Your Sister’s Sister) star.   

Channing Tatum just might be a real Hollywood swinger and one shrewd customer. Dreaming of fictionalizing his early days as an exotic dancer, Tatum teams up with Steven Soderbergh (after approaching Nicolas Winding Refn of Drive fame) for Magic Mike, which, from the spirited trailers, gives the impression of a return to the fun-loving Ocean’s franchise box office form for Soderbergh.  

Film, as a medium, provides writers and directors the opportunity to tell great stories. But sometimes, as is the case with Jonathan Demme's latest effort, Neil Young Journeys, film simply goes along for the ride with an even greater storyteller as he does his thing.  

Beasts of the Southern Wild, the savage visual poem from debut director Benh Zeitlin (which he co-wrote with playwright Lucy Alibar), takes us on an adventure from its opening frame, yet what makes it so special and downright impossible to imagine in any other form, is Hushpuppy’s voice.