Anthem

Armed with the phone numbers of a few dozen well-known people and two video cameras, fledgling filmmakers Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn hit the road to check the pulse of the American dream. While their findings are hardly revelatory, their journey is enjoyable and even sporadically inspiring, largely because of their tenacity and the beauty of the territory they traverse.

Los Angeles residents Gabel and Hahn criss-cross the continental US, talking with a strange mix of familiar and not-so-familiar names in politics and the arts. They also chat with a few regular folks they met along the way, quelling the film's dominant irony: most of the subjects they've cho...