So many movies!

The Kansas International Film Festival has been evolving on the fast track.

It’s not a matter so much of quantity as of quality. This year’s edition shows a genuine step forward with a slew of provocative documentaries, fiction features that push the envelope on cinematic style and hard-to-find classics like the fest’s collection of Andy Warhol films.

Moreover, it’s now more than just a series of movie screenings. Founder Benjamin Meade reports that a record number of filmmakers — directors, actors, producers — will be on hand to screen their work and talk with audiences.

With more than 50 titles playing over seven days, the festival, opening Friday at the Glenwood Arts, can be almost too much to get your head around. What you need is some handicapping advice.

Now I can’t claim to have seen every movie being shown at KIFF this year, but I’ve spent the last four weekends watching videos of many of them. That was enough for me to come up with a list of ought-to-see movies. Undoubtedly there are several real gems among the films I haven’t seen (I’ve heard terrific things about “Why Neal,” “Jesus, Mary and Joe” and Barbara Hammer’s documentaries “Resisting Paradise” and “History Lessons”).

Here are my Top 10 picks of the fest:

■ “Cavite”: In this astonishingly well-made thriller, a young man returns to his native Philippines and discovers that his mother and sister are being held by Islamic terrorists. Through a cell phone they guide our protagonist on a desperate journey through the city of Cavite. The film is so real and immediate it feels more like a documentary than fiction.

■ “Derailroaded”: For 40 years Larry “Wild Man” Fischer has played his sing-song music on the streets of L.A. This documentary is a heartbreaking (but often terribly funny) study of a paranoid schizophrenic who may be a musical genius (he was once a protégé of Frank Zappa). At the very least, Wild Man is the poster boy for outsider musicians everywhere.

■ “G”: Who’d have thought that The Great Gatsby could be adapted so perfectly to the world of rap music? See story on Page 24.

■ “Peaceable Kingdom”: Jenny Stein’s documentary starts out as a look at the kindhearted souls who run a farm for ailing animals abandoned as useless by slaughterhouses. By the time it’s over, it’s a full-blown indictment of modern corporate farming practices, in which animals spend their lives in the dark, packed cheek to jowl with other doomed animals. Even if it doesn’t turn you into a vegetarian, this film will have you shopping for free-range meat.

■ “Phantom of the Opera”: Lon Chaney’s 1925 classic restored. (Story on Page 27.)

■ “Pledge of Allegiance Blues”: California physician Michael Newdow opened a real can of worms when he brought the landmark “under God” lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court. Lisa Seidenberg’s documentary examines the legal aspects of his argument and the harassment and threats Newdow and his family received from good religious folk.

■ “Razor Eaters”: In this uber-violent Aussie drama, a group of young men go on a rampage, systematically terrorizing and murdering drug dealers and their families. The bulk of Shannon Young’s film consists of the video footage taken by the vigilantes as they stab and shoot their way to bloody infamy.

■ “Red Cockroaches”: In the near future a young man meets and falls for a mysterious woman who may be the sister thought killed in a car accident a decade earlier. I’m not sure I understand everything writer/director Miguel Coyula is up to in this bizarre production (and I wish he’d chosen a different leading man), but on a low budget he has created a universe in which everything seems pregnant with unspoken and unsettling meanings.

■ “Special Ed”: An M.D. who’s bad with people has his life changed by a patient — a smarmy, selfish, obnoxious salesman — who is the most promising subject in his cancer research project. Greg Germann, who played a smarmy, selfish, obnoxious lawyer on TV’s “Ally McBeal,” here takes the role of the anti-social M.D. The real star of the show, though, is veteran character actor D.W. Moffat, giving a monumental performance as the easy-to-hate patient.

■ “Waiting to Inhale”: Jed Riffe’s documentary ostensibly is about medical marijuana and the individuals who require it to ease a variety of ailments. But it’s also a methodical and damning denunciation of this country’s drug policy.