One of the marks of a great film festival is being able to go to any screening without knowing anything about the movie and trust that the festival programmers have picked something worth seeing. Over five years of attending AFI Fest in Los Angeles, I’ve learned to give its organizers that amount of trust; in the past, I’ve walked into screenings completely blind and walked out having seen movies that ended up on my year-end top 10 list. That didn’t happen at this year’s festival, but there were pleasant surprises nonetheless, and even the movies that I didn’t like at all were worthwhile experiences.

Although the Las Vegas Film Festival made a quantum leap in quality this year, film fans looking for the full festival experience that hasn’t existed in Vegas since the end of CineVegas would do well to look to AFI Fest, which offers free tickets to the public every year, and is only a four-hour drive away in the heart of Hollywood (which is much like the Las Vegas Strip). This year’s festival included gala screenings of big-time awards contenders like Foxcatcher, A Most Violent Year and Inherent Vice, but as usual I stuck to the smaller screenings, hoping to catch some unexpected gems.

I managed to do that right away, after missing the first screening I had intended to see and instead starting the festival with The Iron Ministry, J.P. Sniadecki’s impressionistic documentary about the Chinese railway system. It seemed like a daunting way to jump into the festival, but ended up being much more accessible than I expected. Some parts of the film are tedious, and the lack of context can be frustrating to an outsider, but the small portraits build to a powerful overall understanding, and the occasional interviews provide sharp insight and some surprising emotion. I walked out feeling glad that I had to alter my schedule.

Only one movie at the festival ended up impressing me more than The Iron Ministry: David Robert Mitchell’s acclaimed horror movie It Follows, which has been making the festival rounds since premiering at Cannes in May and will be released next year by Radius-TWC. It’s a tense, unsettling story about a sort of sexually transmitted demon, an implacable entity that stalks people who’ve had sex with its previous targets. It combines the casual teen hangout vibe and deliberate anachronisms of Mitchell’s pleasant but somewhat forgettable previous film The Myth of the American Sleepover with abject horror, making for an effective mix of mundane everyday life and unspeakable terror.

I also liked the French movies Breathe and May Allah Bless France, two very different dramas. Two great performances anchor Breathe, Melanie Laurent's story of teenage friendship gone bad. It's a bit Mean Girls, a bit Single White Female, but much more grounded than either of those, at least until the disappointingly sensationalistic ending. That moment of empty shock value aside, Laurent is great at portraying the intensity of friendship between teenage girls, in both positive and negative ways, and her direction is remarkably assured and evocative.

May Allah Bless France is a sort of French version of 8 Mile, with a portrait of the French housing projects familiar from Mathieu Kassovitz’s groundbreaking La Haine. Shot in gorgeous black and white, it’s written and directed by French rapper and author Abd al Malik and based on his own life, starring Marc Zinga as a young Malik, who struggles to escape a life of poverty and crime and turns to music and religion to find his way out.

With its emphasis on world cinema (including showcasing a number of official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar), AFI Fest can be a little intense, but programmers also make space for fun genre movies like What We Do in the Shadows from Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. A vampire mockumentary that starts out as a sort of Flight of the Vampire Conchords, with a very funny first half-hour, Shadows eventually exhausts its single joke and gets bogged down with an actual plot. There's still enough funny stuff to make the rest of the movie entertaining, though.

Crowds packed the theater at midnight for Shadows and stayed for a deadpan in-character Q&A from Clement and Waititi, and most of the screenings I attended were similarly full. As much as the movies themselves, the level of enthusiasm for film culture (mostly from average folks who spend time endlessly refreshing webpages in order to score free tickets) is what makes AFI Fest so enjoyable, a week of cinephile camaraderie that showcases elite content but is open to everyone.