'Troop 1500'

(4 stars)

Once a month members of Girl Scout Troop 1500, based in Austin, scrabble into a white van and tool 90 minutes to Hilltop Prison in Gatesville. Along the way the children play games, chatter, giggle; sometimes they just gaze out the window and think. They are en route to visit their mothers, convicted criminals — drugs, murder, stealing, assault — whose bad choices have rent their families, leaving their daughters in the hands of relatives. Filmmakers Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein spent two years with the coltish girls before they flipped on their cameras to record these heartbreaking reunions — complicated combustions of emotion, sharing, life lessons and pizza. Spiro and Bernstein's genius was to equip the girls with video cameras and let child interview mother and vice-versa for unvarnished expressions of guilt, hope and promises. While the visits appear festive, filled with creative projects and bonding rituals, the inevitable separation is wrenching drama, as daughter is pulled, again, from mother. This deceptively simple documentary invokes a range of social issues and a world where individual futures are that much more precious for being so precarious.

1:45 p.m. March 16, Alamo South; 1:45 p.m. March 19, the Paramount.

— Chris Garcia

'The Puffy Chair'

(4 stars)

The studied cuteness and merciless quirkiness of indie relationship comedies have been working my last nerve lately, so I wasn't exactly eager to give "The Puffy Chair" a chance. My bad. Written by and starring Mark Duplass and directed by his brother Jay, "The Puffy Chair" is marvelously smart. Josh (Mark Duplass) goes on a road trip to pick up a recliner for his dad's birthday. Along for the ride are his girlfriend, Emily (Kathryn Aselton, Duplass' real-life love), and nutty brother Rhett (Rhett Wilkins). Complications, of course, ensue. The Duplass brothers (who are former Austin residents) get the giddy, playful highs and nerve-grating lows of a road trip exactly right. The dialogue is sharp but utterly natural, especially the so-real-it's-painful scenes as Josh and Emily miscommunicate about their relationship. The actors, especially Aselton, have an easy charisma. A charmer in itself, the film also holds the promise of great things to come from these filmmakers. Check out "The Puffy Chair" and be able to boast later: "I saw them when . . ."

4:30 p.m. March 16, Paramount; 9:30 p.m. March 18, Austin Convention Center.

— Sarah Lindner

'Light from the East'

(3 stars)

Talk about timing. Mere weeks after Ukrainian voters gave Putin's Russia the cold shoulder, Austin filmmaker Amy Grappell launches her documentary about an American theater troupe present during the 1991 collapse of the Soviet state and declaration of Ukrainian independence. The Americans, including Grappell, were in glasnost-era Kiev for a co-production about Ukrainian experimental director Les Kurbas, one of Stalin's victims and now a cultural hero in his home country. The first third of the documentary, written, directed and co-produced by Grappell, focuses on the rather self-absorbed artists, but opens up to candid records of Ukrainians extemporizing, debating, demonstrating and feeling the first tugs of freedom from Moscow.

5 p.m. March 16, Dobie; 7:45 p.m. March 19, Alamo South.

— Michael Barnes