This week, KMUW's Fletcher Powell sets aside his usual weekly movie review and instead looks at a few of the movies he's most excited about at this year's Tallgrass Film Festival.

When the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon came out, there were complaints it didn’t let us see Kaufman as a real person. I didn’t totally agree, but I still defended the approach, because us not knowing the “real” Kaufman was entirely consistent with who the man was. This approach does not work for Judy Garland.

Roger Ebert used to tell a story about being asked what he thought of a recent movie. He replied he thought it was the best movie of the year. The response to that was, “oh, that doesn’t sound like something we’d like.”

I find it fascinating that I still occasionally hear people use the phrase, “well, in this economy,” to describe why they can’t afford something, even though the Great Recession actually ended 10 years ago. The global financial meltdown left deep, deep scars.

The movie adaptation of the first half of Stephen King’s It made $700 million, so there’s a reasonable chance you saw it. And if you did, there’s also a chance you assume you should see It Chapter Two so you can see how the story wraps up. You don’t need to do that.

Imagine, for a moment, you’re a space alien who’s never met a human being, and all the knowledge you have of Earthlings comes from watching mid-tier drama and suspense movies. And then, you decide to make your own movie, starring humans. The movie you’ve made looks something like After the Wedding .

In The Peanut Butter Falcon , Zak is a man with Down syndrome, living in a nursing home in North Carolina. He dreams of attending a wrestling school run by his favorite pro wrestler, the Salt Water Redneck, which he knows about from obsessively watching a decades-old videotape he owns. And so, he escapes in the dead of night to make his way the couple hundred miles or so to where he knows the school is supposed to be. He quickly runs into Tyler, played by Shia LeBeouf, who himself is on the lam

I believe in being transparent about my biases, and so I need to say that I am keenly predisposed to favor a movie that makes liberal use of the music of Bruce Springsteen. Having said that, Blinded by the Light tells a story that’s likely to connect with so many of us that it hardly seems necessary to even be all that familiar with Springsteen, let alone to be a fan of his music.

The Farewell , from Chinese-American director Lulu Wang, is the basically true story of Wang’s own experience with how her family handled her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis. In a nutshell, they just plain didn’t let her grandmother know.

Here’s a fun experiment: Watch the ninth installment in a major action series you’ve never seen before and don’t really know anything about. And find out if any of that makes a difference. OK, I’ll just tell you right now: It doesn’t.