This week in movies you missed: This very night, Seven Days is calling all Achievers to a party at Champlain Lanes called the Big LeBOWLski.

In honor of the event, I watched this 2009 documentary about The Big Lebowski fan phenomenon.

What You Missed

In 1998, Joel and Ethan Coen put out a movie called The Big Lebowski, a shaggy-dog story involving crime, bowling, White Russians and rugs that really pull the room together. It was not one of their hits.

Over the years, certain people discovered The Big Lebowski on video and started quoting it. Obsessively. They found one another on internet forums and began calling themselves "Achievers," after the "Little Lebowski Urban Achievers" briefly referenced in the movie. They got together at bowling alleys to celebrate their fandom like a more mellow version of Trekkies.

So was born the first Lebowski Fest, in Louisville, Ky., in 2002. Today, it happens all over the nation and the world. Eddie Chung's documentary takes us to several Lebowski Fests, including an LA event where star Jeff Bridges showed up to perform and mingle with fans (wearing his jellies, of course).

This week in movies you missed: Two "Deadwood" stars play parents too busy finding themselves to notice their kids in this drama set in 1975.

What You Missed

Teenage Maggie Cantwell (Olivia Harris, pictured right) and her three younger siblings return home from school to find their parents' suburban living room full of liquor glasses and party detritus — a mess they tidy without comment. Said parents are nowhere to be found.

Mom (Molly Parker, left) eventually arrives while Maggie is attempting to lose her virginity in the garage. Things just get more awkward from there, as Mom swills drink after drink at dinner, banishes the kids upstairs, and flirts with a married neighbor (Jonathan Brooks) as her husband (John Hawkes) looks on.

Meanwhile, upstairs in their attic playroom, the kids build imaginary worlds insulated from the turmoil. Maggie, on the cusp of adulthood, vacillates between her loyalty to her siblings and her urge to escape.

UPDATE 11/8: Here is Ed Pincus' obituary in the New York Times.

We've received reports that Vermont filmmaker Ed Pincus passed away yesterday.

Pincus spent decades farming in Roxbury, Vt., but his renown as a documentarian of the '60s and '70s is national. His film Diaries (1982) helped kick off the trend of personal documentaries that continued in later years with Ross McElwee and prefigured the YouTube generation.

Pincus founded MIT's Film Section and coauthored The Filmmaker's Handbook, a standard text for generations of aspiring filmmakers. In 2012, when the Film Society of Lincoln Center did a retrospective of his work, Tom Roston of PBS compared him to such documentary giants as D.A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers.

This week in movies you missed: Elaborate tiny doll abodes are just so adorable. But wait, what's that blood spatter doing on the wall? Why are all the inhabitants of this miniature home ... dead?

What You Missed

In the 1930s, a Chicago heiress named Frances Glessner Lee began creating a series of intricate miniatures. This was no idle rich lady's hobby — it was a key step in the development of forensic science.

Lee, a Sherlock Holmes fan with a passion for criminal justice, crafted the 18 Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death as a teaching tool for homicide investigators. Each diorama presents an ambiguous death (or deaths) and is designed to test the observer's ability to follow clues methodically to a deduction. The Maryland Medical Examiner's Office in Baltimore, where the Nutshell Studies now reside, still uses them to educate officers.

Halloween doesn't have to be about costumed ghouls and overloading on high-fructose corn syrup. For the artistically curious, Helen Day Art Center in Stowe is offering, on Halloween night, a visual smorgasbord of short films, accompanied by an original score by DJ Ikail del Toro. 

The second annual Magic Lantern Show Art Film Festival evokes the bygone tradition of magic lantern shows, which were an important precursor to cinema. The original magic lantern shows, which date back several hundred years, were often put on by itinerant impresarios, who would project light through fanciful, painted glass plates while providing an early form of voice-over narration. 

This week in movies you missed: In honor of Halloween, I go looking for a scary movie that scares me.

First contender: The Conjuring (just released on video). The first hour was genuinely disturbing, and I wouldn't give it one star. But once they started explaining everything with hokey backstory, my chills evaporated.

Second contender: a super-low-budget indie called Resolution about a dude who chains his buddy up in a Cabin in the Woods to force him to shake a meth addiction. The few critics who saw it, liked it. The concept was interesting, but I didn't find it scary for a second and had trouble staying awake.

Luckily, the third time was the charm. Returning to the deep and indiscriminate well of Netflix Instant horror, I discovered The Pact.

What You Missed

Young mom Nichole (Agnes Bruckner) is alone in her childhood home preparing for her mother's funeral. She's Skyping with her kid when something odd happens. "Mommy," the little girl asks, "who's that person behind you?"

This week in movies you missed: I play Netflix Instant roulette and watch a movie I never heard of with an intriguing description.

What You Missed

This is a first feature from writer-director Nir Paniry. It is not Mike Judge's Extract.

The description that made me watch:

Thomas Jacobs can enter a person's mind and view their memories, until a freak accident leaves him trapped inside the mind of a criminal. For four years, Jacobs fights to break free, until he makes a desperate bargain with the convict's own thoughts.

What this doesn't tell you is that Tom (Sasha Roiz, pictured) isn't psychic. He has invented a memory-viewing device that, for some weird reason, gives him a third-person view of a given subject's recollections, just like a movie. Once hooked up, you can traipse around somebody's head and experience their dirty secrets without being detected by their subconscious.

Naturally, the Powers That Be (represented here by a single slimy corrections-department honcho) want to use the device to prove crime suspects guilty.

Tom has scruples about signing a contract with a nascent police state. But he also has a baby on the way and needs dough, so he agrees to be hooked up to a scuzzy young convict (Dominic Bogart) who insists he didn't kill his girlfriend and wants his conviction overturned. Shenanigans ensue.

Maybe it's because I just watched Five Corners and Miller's Crossing (again), and he's amazing in both of them. Anyway, that was my first thought when I read about this series of screenings the Vermont College of Fine Arts will hold later in the month at the Savoy for the fall residency of its inaugural MFA in Film program.

Turturro, who's appeared in a score of Spike Lee and Coen brothers films (and, yes, some Transformers movies), will screen his own directorial effort, Romance and Cigarettes (2005, starring James Gandolfini), on Friday, November 1, 7 p.m. at the Savoy. Tickets are free, but as of this writing, just 27 are left. If you want to go, better hustle over here.

Turturro may have the star power, but he's far from the only visiting director worth checking out at these Savoy screenings.

This week in movies you missed: When Cinephiles Go Too Far, the movie.

What You Missed

So you consider yourself a fan of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Maybe you watch the 1980 flick every Halloween and croak "redrum" every chance you get. But do you really know what The Shining is about, or what makes it a masterpiece? According to the five film critics who narrate this documentary from director Rodney Ascher, you don't know jack (or Jack).

You see, The Shining isn't actually about a haunted hotel, a psychotic writer or the dangers of cabin fever. It's about the genocide of the Native Americans. No, wait, it's about the Holocaust. No, wait, actually, The Shining is Kubrick's way of confessing that he participated in faking the Apollo moon landings on a soundstage. That's just so obvious when we see little Danny wearing his Apollo 11 sweater.

This week in movies you missed: In 1979, a gay couple sets out to adopt a kid "nobody else wants," only to find out society isn't ready for a two-dad family.

What You Missed

Rudy (Alan Cumming) is a drag queen from Queens who makes his living lip-synching  to disco hits in an LA gay bar. Paul (Garret Dillahunt) works for the DA's office, wears three-piece suits and is still deep in the closet.

Their one-night stand turns into something more when Rudy seeks Paul's legal help to deal with a touchy situation. Rudy's junkie neighbor (Jamie Anne Allman) has been carted off to jail, and her neglected teenage son, Marco (Isaac Leyva), who has Down syndrome, won't stay put in a foster home. Rudy has formed a bond with Marco and doesn't want to see him slip through the cracks.

Paul opens his home to Rudy and Marco, and the three quickly become a family. But when the state becomes aware of the two men's relationship, they must defend their right to raise a child — with the odds stacked against them.