One thing you can say for the Las Vegas Film Festival (or the Las Vegas International Film Festival, depending on which side of the festival program you believe) is that it's made a lot of improvements. The event that started out in 2007 in conference rooms at the Orleans and moved last year to conference rooms at the Eastside Cannery still hasn't made it to an actual movie theater, but this year's venue — the Showroom and Shimmer Cabaret at the Hilton — was much more appropriate, and the festival as a whole was more organized and better-attended. New festival head Milo Kostelecky deserves credit for pulling together what has in the past been a slapdash event.

It's too bad, then, that the programming still needs work. I caught six features and one shorts program at this year's festival, and very little struck me as being festival-worthy. Perhaps it's a function of what I chose to see, but far too many of the features engaged in direct-to-video-style audience-pandering, including the boobs-and-MMA thriller Unrivaled (which is already out on DVD); the atrocious crime drama Once Fallen (shamefully featuring respectable actors Ed Harris, Peter Weller and Taraji P. Henson in its supporting cast); and the laughable soap opera-esque murder mystery In My Sleep.

The features that weren't trying to goose audiences with cheap thrills were manipulative in the opposite way, with treacly inspirational messages. Ashley's Ashes used strained comedy to deliver a heavy-handed message about appreciating life, while the one documentary I saw, My Run, was blandly uplifting but no more cinematic than your average PBS special. I liked certain aspects of Mexican drama Sin Ella, about a father trying to reconnect with his kids, although it still worked too hard to tug at the heartstrings (and had an unforgivably contrived ending).

Sin Ella was inexplicably shown from a screener copy with a constant watermark obscuring part of the picture, a sign that the festival still has a ways to go when it comes to professionalism. Still, given the strides made this year, I expect to see even greater improvements in 2011.