Allan Hicks’ fearlessly intimate Keep On Keepin’ On focuses on the relationship between nonagenarian jazz trumpeter Clark Terry (b. 1920) and blind pianist Justin Kauflin who is in his early 20s. Terry joined the Count Basie band in his late 20s, describing it as prep school for the University of Ellingtonia and stayed with Ellington for a decade before becoming the first black musician hired by NBC (he was a regular on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, for example). He’s best known as a teacher, however, with his famous system of doodle-tonguing and thousands of students -- strikingly, Quincy Jones at 13 was his first -- spread his philosophy of music far and wide.

A Swedish family's five-day Alpine vacation is the idyllic setting for Force Majeure, a caustic moral tale that would have done Eric Rohmer proud. The photogenic, seemingly perfect upper-middle-class unit is thrust into a psychodrama that's as darkly comic as it is shocking. As the apparently banal events of the holiday play out with deceptive repetition the family’s emotional reactions evolve above an underbelly of heightened tension.

An inspired original view of the creative process (something that is notoriously difficult to capture on film), 20,000 Days on Earth is a brilliant meta-documentary about the musican and screenwriter Nick Cave.

Two men, as comfortable with one another as the proverbial pair of old shoes, rise and get dressed up accompanied by Chopin’s exquisite Berceuse. It’s a most appropriate lullaby for Love Is Strange, Ira Sachs’ compassionate new film about family and other inter-connected relationships. And it’s just the first of six pieces by Chopin that serve as the principal soundtrack for this sweet, observant story of the ironies of life.

Blink and you might miss this little gem about the creative process that is in the cinematic roman à clef family alongside Almost Famous. Inspired by journalist/author Jon Ronson’s experience as a keyboardist with the Frank Sidebottom band at 20 in 1987, Frank follows a present day naive cubicle-dwelling office worker with pop music dreams as he immerses himself in the strange world of a band with the unpronounceable name “Soronprfbs.”