'A Life Without Pain'

(4 stars)

Gabby is 3 years old, wears funny-looking protective goggles and can't feel a thing. She grabs a hot light bulb and blisters her hand — without a single tear. She runs smack into a table corner, bouncing off it like a bumper car. Her dog pounces on her little head. Burns, bumps, broken bones and Band-Aids — these are the constant accessories of children growing up with a rare affliction that prohibits them from feeling pain as chronicled in Melody Gilbert's riveting and shocking documentary. Gilbert profiles three children with "congenital insensitivity to pain," a disease seemingly out of science fiction, charting their injuries, triumphs and setbacks unflinchingly and with a note of hope. It's frightening stuff: As a baby, Miriam bit her tongue off; the infant Gabby, mottled with scrapes and bruises, gnawed her fingers to "hamburger." The film unfortunately lacks explanatory medical scaffolding, but Gilbert's artless portraits finely anatomize parental anguish and superhuman dedication. It is ineluctably touching.

1:30 p.m. March 12, noon March 15 and noon March 19 at the Austin Convention Center.

— Chris Garcia

'Emmanuel's Gift'

(3 stars)

A town with its own inspirational cyclist is a great place to show a documentary about another one. Narrated by Oprah Winfrey, "Emmanuel's Gift" tells the story of Emmanuel Ofusu Yeboah. Emmanuel was born with a shrunken and malformed leg. In his country, Ghana, such a disability was seen as a curse and would doom a person to a life of begging. Emmanuel's father abandoned the family, but his mother encouraged him not to accept his lot in life. Emmanuel's can-do attitude culminated in a bike ride across Ghana to change attitudes about disabled people. The ride transformed his life, and the course of Ghana's history. There's little dramatic tension here — Emmanuel never wavers in being determined, unselfish and good-hearted — and the film has trouble maintaining momentum. But it's beautiful to look at, and the power of one man's example is undeniable.

11:15 a.m. March 12 and 2:15 March 19 at the Austin Convention Center.

— Sarah Lindner

'Tell Them Who You Are'

(3 stars)

Following 2003's "My Architect," "Tell Them" might herald the birth of a new genre: one in which the sons of accomplished but flawed men pick up movie cameras instead of going into therapy, making movies that focus as much on their own insecurities as on their fathers' careers. Unlike Louis Kahn in "Architect," the subject of this film — famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler — is still alive. The interview footage that results, with the elder man lecturing and second-guessing his son, has almost nothing to say about the technical gifts Wexler brought to the cinema; and the way it's put together suggests that director Mark Wexler overestimates the audience's interest in his problematic upbringing. Along the way, though, we do get a good look at the uncompromising politics, contrarian spirit and overlarge ego that likely kept Haskell Wexler from going even further in Hollywood than he did.

4 p.m. March 12 and 6:45 p.m. March 17 at the Arbor.

— John DeFore

'Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party'

(3 stars)

Actor (and native Texan) Stephen Tobolowsky has made a fine living playing bores and blowhards (in "Groundhog Day," "The Grifters," and a hundred-plus films and TV shows), so you mightn't guess that, as a real-life raconteur, he can hold a roomful of people in the palm of his hand. That's what he does here, in what amounts to a one-man show; it's "My Dinner With Andre" minus the "Me." He talks about miraculous encounters with dolphins and about a jerk who wound up becoming his best friend; he remembers being turned down for the role of Ronald McDonald and being beaten by monks in Thailand. He is almost never boring, which is why it's hard to care that director Robert Brinkmann does little more than set his camera up and listen raptly.

9:45 p.m. March 12 and 11:30 a.m. March 17 at the Austin Convention Center; 7 p.m. March 19 at Alamo Downtown.

— John DeFore

'Stagedoor'

(3 stars)

If you've seen the 2003 film "Camp," about Broadway-loving kids at a musical theater camp in the Catskills, it might be tempting to dismiss "Stagedoor" as just a nonfiction version of that film. But while "Camp" had its charms, this documentary is the superior look at Stagedoor Manor. The talents and trials of the young performers are so compelling that they don't need embellishment. The campers possess formidable drive and direction, but also a knowledge of their own shortcomings that would be withering even in an adult. They enthuse about getting head shots the way other kids would about Nintendo games. With its honesty and affection, "Stagedoor" sings.

10:30 a.m. March 12, 12:30 p.m. March 14 and 7 p.m. March 19 at the Paramount.

— Sarah Lindner