The best thing about the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival, which wrapped up its 14th edition this past weekend, is the way that festival director Joshua Abbey uses what is mostly a Jewish community event to showcase interesting foreign films and documentaries that would otherwise never get to play in Las Vegas. A dedicated cinephile and festival-goer, Abbey lends his sophisticated taste to the event, which is sponsored by local synagogues and Jewish organizations and thus is usually quite well-attended (which was the case again this year). It was a little disappointing, then, that this year’s festival leaned so heavily on sometimes bland documentaries, with only three narrative films. Still, Abbey managed to bring in a number of filmmakers and other guests associated with the films, which helps the spread-out event (11 screenings over two weeks) feel more like a typical film festival.

The standout among the documentaries was Night Will Fall (which also aired on HBO on January 26), featuring some of the most harrowing Holocaust footage ever shot. A documentary about the making of a documentary, Night chronicles the efforts to reconstruct an abandoned 1945 film about the liberation of the concentration camps. The production team on the original documentary included Alfred Hitchcock, and the restored version has shown at a few film festivals and museums. The raw footage of concentration camps is of course extremely horrific, and the story of how it was captured and then abandoned is relatively interesting. But what would really be interesting would be to see the film that Hitchcock, among others, worked to create before the British government shut down the project. Night includes a few clips, but they serve mainly to create anticipation for a full version that isn’t included.

Of the three narrative films, the most notable was The Farewell Party, an Israeli dark comedy that played at the Toronto and Venice film festivals last year, about a group of elderly assisted-living residents who put together a machine that facilitates euthanasia. It’s neither as brutally funny nor as heartbreakingly serious as it could be, and ends up like a cross between Amour and The Bucket List, although not as tonally unpleasant as that sounds. Some of the humor is bleakly funny, but some of it is just weak comic relief as the main characters deal with increasingly grim situations. It's not easy to make a comedy out of this subject matter, and the filmmakers deserve points for trying, even if they only succeed intermittently.

The rest of the lineup was a little underwhelming, including the opening-night film Jerusalem, a 45-minute IMAX documentary with gorgeous footage of the title city but little substance in its upbeat promotional angle. The Muses of Bashevis Singer, about the women who worked for and with author Isaac Bashevis Singer, is the kind of well-meaning but somewhat dull documentary that often fills out the festival slate. But at least it wasn’t the blatant propaganda of Beneath the Helmet, a slick but empty documentary about young recruits in the Israeli army, with emotionally manipulative profiles of young soldiers and a simplistic us-against-them tone. Helmet comes from director Wayne Kopping, whose fear-mongering 2005 film Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West was praised by Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Helmet isn’t nearly as inflammatory, but it’s the opposite of the inclusive, open-minded spirit of the festival’s usual selections. It was a sour way to end what was otherwise a typically diverse and celebratory event.