For the past eight years, the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival has been pursuing a successful strategy for attracting audiences, programming a limited number of films and pairing each one with a local Jewish organization or synagogue. Each sponsoring group promotes its particular film to its members, resulting in strong attendance at each screening and a feeling of ownership of the festival within the Jewish community. This is a great way to keep the festival going, but what it means is that general film fans who are not involved in Jewish organizations often aren’t aware of the festival or don’t attend, and that’s a shame.

This year the festival expanded to include 13 films, showing primarily at the new Performing Arts Center at the Adelson School in Summerlin. I made it out to six of them, a selection showcasing the diversity of Jewish film as well as the festival’s continued dedication to bringing interesting, challenging films to Vegas, and not pandering to its insular audience. For all of the festival’s celebration of Jewish culture, there are films that also show its less positive aspects. Post-screening discussions have been contentious in the past, although the ones I attended this year were respectful and restrained

As one would expect, a number of this year’s films deal with the Holocaust; two of the films I saw are true stories of women living under extraordinary circumstances during those times. They are also, unfortunately, generally dull, unsuccessful affairs, failing to convey anything new about the time period or connect emotionally to the audience. The documentary Blessed Is the Match, about Hungarian poet Hannah Senesh, who was part of a British paratrooper unit and was captured and killed by Nazis, uses staid narration and cheesy, awkward reenactments that drain the passion from Senesh’s life and words. It never makes a convincing case for the greatness of her writing. Nina’s Journey is an even less successful melding of documentary footage -modern-day interviews with Holocaust survivor Nina Einhorn—and dramatic narrative, each one intruding on the other so as to dilute the power of Einhorn’s remarkable story.

Better were films that focused on the more mundane aspects of Jewish life. The best film I saw in the festival actually has nothing to do with religion. The Israeli film Noodle is a charming if somewhat predictable story about a flight attendant who finds herself left with the 6-year-old son of her Chinese housekeeper. Mili Avital does an excellent job of portraying a woman who longs for love without overdoing a Hollywood-style desperation for marriage and children. The child, dubbed “Noodle,” is cute without being cloying, and the resolution to the story is happy without being overly sentimental. What makes the movie work is the relationship drama on the margins of the central story, as the main character, her sister and her brother-in-law all struggle with how to find happiness. There isn’t a single mention of Judaism in Noodle, and other than the occasional glimpse of men in yarmulkes, it could easily take place in any first-world Western country.

The universality of family dynamics also plays in to the slight British comedy Sixty Six, about a young boy who dreams of the perfect Bar Mitzvah, and the Mexican film My Mexican Shivah, about the aftermath of a family patriarch’s death. Sixty Six is directed by mainstream filmmaker Paul Weiland (Made of Honor, City Slickers II), and features plenty of slick feel-good moments. But it’s more honest than your average middle-of-the-road comedy, and that makes up for some of its blandness. Shivah, unfortunately, is just too strained to work, with silly melodrama butting up against a handful of effective moments.

The one movie I saw that most directly addresses issues facing Jews today is actually the worst; indie drama Arranged, about the friendship between two young Brooklyn schoolteachers, one an Orthodox Jew and the other a devout Muslim, is clumsily written, unevenly acted and disappointingly one-dimensional. Its main characters, both of whom are dealing with the pressures of entering into arranged marriages, are thinly sketched, and the supporting players are all stereotypes. Directors Stefan Schaefer and Diane Crespo present a dichotomy between the strict religious world and the hedonistic secular one that offers no room for a middle ground, and end up reinforcing the very values they question. Arranged raises important issues, but its filmmaking leaves much to be desired. Still, it’s not the kind of thing that Vegas moviegoers generally have the chance to see, and offering up an experience like that is exactly what makes the Jewish Film Festival so valuable.