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Shot over a three-year period in Brooklyn, All This Panic offers a frequently disjointed look at the interior lives of several ordinary, middle-class Brooklynite teen girls as they search for meaning. This period is often quite innocent, despite the influence of drugs and parental mental illness, with immediacy rendered in bizarre aesthetic framing and frantic editing.

Directed by Jenny Gage in close collaboration with cinematographer Tom Betterton, All This Panic is largely a retread of teenage documentary and ethnographic narratives that have previously offered a more interesting study of New York City’s youth (Jim McKay’s Our Song and Mark Street’s little-seen Rockaway — also a Tribeca selection from 2005 — come to mind first). The girls being traced are never quite as interesting or engaging as Gage and Betterton believe them to be, navigating teen topics such as boys, drinking, tattoos, college, and eventually having a family. Opening as a diary of sorts,...

Inside America is a study of institutionalized behavior turning its lens to Brownsville, South Texas and to conditions that may produce either a homegrown terrorist or several individuals that are dangerous to themselves and others. The images present in a racially mixed community along the Texas-Mexico borderland are the antithesis of the American exceptionalism on display in the Jersey Shore and MTV’s adaptation of the British sitcom Skins: this is what rouge capitalism producers – an immigration pool that came here to satisfy a demand to find jobs and opportunities shut out.

The institutions writer/director Barbara Eder studies are an educational system broken by security that interrupts an English class for a random backpack check, the schools Rotc, and foster families. It also encourages students to sell cookies for a fundraiser with a reward of a class field trip. Juxtaposing the legitimacy of this economy with an underground economy that develops,...

The 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, announced films in four competitive categories Wednesday. The festival, which runs April 19-May 1 in Lower Manhattan, will feature fictional films and documentaries in two categories, dubbed NY, NY Narrative Features and NY, NY Documentary Features. The fictional features, which range from dramas focusing on the effects of 9/11 to slapstick comedy and suburban tales, include: Adam & Steve, directed by Craig Chester; Alchemy, Evan Oppenheimer; Bittersweet Place, Alexandra Brodsky; Conventioneers, Mora Stephens; The F Word, Jed Weintrob; Four Lane Highway, Dylan McCormick; Great New Wonderful, Danny Leiner; Laura Smiles, Jason Ruscio; Life on the Ledge, Lewis Helfer; Love, Vladan Nikolic; Puzzlehead, James Bai; The Reception, John G. Young; Red Doors, Georgia Lee; Rockaway, Mark Street; Satellite, Jeff Winner; and Slingshot, Jay Alaimo.