It’s been two years since CineVegas announced its demise, and I’m still missing the presence of a large-scale, general-interest film festival in town. Sure, there are some really strong niche-oriented festivals, including the Dam Short Film Festival, the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival and the PollyGrind Film Festival, but no local event has stepped up to fill the CineVegas void (pretenders like the Las Vegas Film Festival and Vegas Cine Fest don’t even come close). So this past weekend I headed to Los Angeles for my second visit to AFI Fest, which has become an increasingly high-profile event over the last few years, showcasing a mix of big-name awards contenders, favorites from other festivals and new discoveries, much in the same vein as CineVegas. I made it to 15 screenings over four days, including a few talked-about highlights of other festivals that I had been meaning to see.

I was disappointed in a couple of those, especially the British thriller Kill List, which has been getting rave reviews at a number of festivals, including South by Southwest and Toronto. Ben Wheatley’s film starts out as an offbeat take on the familiar hitman-with-a-personal-life genre, with Neil Maskell as the deceptively bland-looking Jay, who’s been avoiding taking on any new clients for eight months. At the urging of his wife, he agrees to do one more job with his old partner, and that’s when the movie shifts gears from hitman thriller to surrealist horror movie, with Wheatley doing a riff on The Wicker Man. It’s fine for a movie to drop lots of vague unsettling hints that indicate dark secrets, but when none of those hints pay off, the result is frustration rather than excitement. Kill List is full of breathless plot twists that add up to very little.

I also found Joachim Trier’s acclaimed drama Oslo, August 31st a little underwhelming, after his lively and creative debut Reprise. The Norwegian filmmaker frames the movie as a study of the title city, but other than an opening that features Oslo-related musings in voiceover from a variety of unidentified residents, it doesn’t really convey any unique regional flavor. Instead it focuses on depressed drug-addict protagonist Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) over the course of a single day as he slips deeper into despair. It’s hard to connect with Anders’ struggles, and the movie keeps him at a distance that blunts its emotional impact.

It turned out that going in blindly to unknown films was a safer bet, and the movies I enjoyed the most were ones I hadn’t necessarily planned to see. My favorite of the whole festival was Alison Bagnall’s lovely, bittersweet The Dish and the Spoon, starring indie darling Greta Gerwig in a wonderfully affecting performance. Gerwig’s Rose, seething at her husband’s infidelity, forms an unexpected bond with an unnamed British teen (Olly Alexander) who’s stranded in the U.S. after his trip to see the supposed girl of his dreams turned out poorly. As they wander around a desolate Delaware seaside town, they explore a halting, unlikely connection, and Bagnall perfectly captures the melancholy of a moment in time that the characters know can’t last.

Other small-scale relationship dramas were festival high points for me as well: The lush Swedish lesbian romance With Every Heartbeat is a little glossy and superficial, but its sumptuous visuals and celebratory vibe carry it past the questionable moments. Sophia Takal’s Green starts out with a relaxed, insightful look at a passive-aggressive relationship between two semi-insufferable hipsters, but starts to lose its way when their harmony is invaded by an overbearing neighbor (played by Takal) who inspires toxic jealousy. It’s a movie that says the most when it’s not trying to make a statement. I’m not sure if you could call Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg a relationship drama per se, but it does feature a young woman figuring out her love life. Tsangari’s strange but relatable film explores the confusing nature of sexuality via the odd and funny journey of Marina (Ariane Labed) as she tries to understand her own desires and cope with the illness of her father.

AFI Fest’s setting, at the Hollywood & Highland complex on Hollywood Boulevard, is pretty Vegas-like, with its collection of restaurants and retail outlets, the throngs of tourists and the costumed characters outside on the Walk of Fame. And sure enough, on the second afternoon I was there, I wandered into the courtyard to discover a whole setup for the Cosmopolitan, which was one of the festival sponsors. The hotel-casino had brought a little Vegas to LA, with a makeshift lounge, a pool table, some fake grass for croquet and a few large screens playing the same hypnotically weird ads that are projected on the Strip marquee. Cosmopolitan publicist Kimberly Diller told me that hotel executives thought a film festival was a perfect fit for the property’s urban vibe, and that she’s hoping they’ll be doing more film-related events in Vegas in the future. So maybe hoping for a new CineVegas isn’t entirely futile, but in the meantime, I’ll be back at AFI Fest next year.