Running at various venues, the second annual Vancouver Just For Laughs Film Festival broadens its schedule with a variety of events including a screenwriters’ panel, a pitch showcase, two programs of shorts, the Gentlemen Hecklers taking on The Notebook at the Rio Theatre (February 13), a night with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg at the Vogue (February 15), and Ken Jeong in conversation at the Vancity Theatre (February 19). All this comes with a strong lineup of features like Pork Pie, Sorry for Your Loss, and the return of Jim Cummings’s excruciatingly hilarious Thunder Road. Read on for three that we liked, and find out all you need to know at the JFL NorthWest website.

Family

Thanks to its performances and well-honed screenplay, JFLFF’s opening-night film squeezes a lot of pleasure from its well-worn premise, in which an emotionally bereft professional becomes whole again thanks to a family crisis and the unwelcome intrusion into her life of a 13-year-old niece. The best scenes here involve Taylor Schilling’s buttoned-up office bitch, Kate, unloading all her adult “wisdom” on Bryn Vale’s gloomy eighth-grader, Maddie. “It’s your ass or your face, kid,” she grieves, between glasses of red. “You don’t get to keep both.” Schilling is a proven comic talent, but she gets great support from everyone here, especially Kate McKinnon as a passive-aggressive suburban mom and Fabrizio Zacharee Guido in the kind of blindingly original character part that Jason Mewes made a career out of. He plays Dennis, who’s so sweet on Maddie that he takes her to the Gathering of the Juggalos, bless his idiot heart, which is where Family touches down, quasi guerrilla-style, for its last 10 minutes. It’s a weird but welcome kink in Laura Steinel’s impressive debut as writer-director.

Vancity Theatre, February 15 (7 p.m.)

Bernadette

Horny 15-year-old Archie goes to Lloyd Dobler High, a tip-off that we’re in early John Cusack teen-com territory with this energetic, nostalgia-powered effort, although Bernadette is far more Better Off Dead than it is Say Anything. That extends right to its basic setup, in which Archie fantasizes about the older French exchange student of the title, and even gets an unlikely shot once he’s been humiliated in a thousand tried-and-tested ways, including having his single mom hook up with a legendary dirtbag (and Archie’s boss), Dixon, played with midriff-baring glee by producer James Psathas. Set in 1994, the film unconsciously adopts the sexual politics of 25 years ago, so there’s that, plus a lot of goofball padding between some hit-and-miss jokes. But Bernadette is easy to like all the same, especially thanks to Sam Straley’s eternally put-upon Archie. If distant memories of stoned hilarity are stirred by the lines “I want my two dollars!” or “Gee, I’m really sorry your mom blew up, Ricky,” then this one’s for you.

Vancity Theatre, February 15 (9:15 p.m.)

An Innocent Kiss

Credit where it’s due: Jason Shirley’s South Carolina–set comedy doesn’t have a mean bone in its body, and avoids the cheap shots it could easily take with its cast of neighbourly small-town folk. Four kids and money strife are putting a strain on Ellie and Billy Barnes’s marriage, and it doesn’t help when Billy’s super-mulleted brother Randy crashes at the family’s modest home for reasons related to his former life as a wrestler. The film’s gentle rhythms and slow-burn humour maybe aren’t fashionable right now, and Randy would be cynically depicted as a “deplorable” in the hands of something like SNL, but An Innocent Kiss loves its characters, and the actors respond in kind, with Whitney Goin’s Ellie giving the film an especially warm centre—even if she’s prey to that troublesome innocent kiss. Beyond that, it sure doesn’t hurt to have Burt Reynolds making a sweet-natured second-to-last screen appearance as Grandpa Barnes.

Vancity Theatre, February 20 (6 p.m.)