Speed Racer took his victory lap around Tribeca this past weekend, the awards have all been given out (huzzah to the two young stars of Somers Town, who shared the Best Actor award!), thus officially: the fest has wound down. Today's final recap will highlight women artists — still an underrepresented force in today's culture — followed by Premiere's Top 10 from Tribeca '08, with hastily scribbled observations.

Paul Hasegawa-Overacker and Cindy Sherman in Guest of Cindy Sherman Courtesy of Tribeca

Superstar photographer Cindy Sherman, known primarily for her chimerical self-portraiture work, has been notoriously press-shy since rising to celebrity status with her 1979 "Untitled Film Stills" series. Flash-forward to the '90s, as a former artist of middling success named Paul Hasegawa-Overacker (better known as "Paul H-O") began playing sarcastic tour guide to the New York art scene as the in-your-face host and creator of public-access TV's GalleryBeat. Who could have predicted that this low-rent jester would entice one of the art world's biggest luminaries to not only do several interviews, but to date him for the next few years? Co-directed by Tom Donahue and a humorously self-deprecating Paul H-O, Guest of Cindy Sherman is a riveting, witty and quite sophisticated portrait of three overlapping subjects of varying depths, which belies the self-serving sameness of most artist docs.

On its surface, appropriately, the film offers a rare opportunity to see the mysterious Sherman in the limelight, albeit a cheap one attached to H-O's ever-present camcorder. Pulled back further, the art world is scrutinized for its corporatization and hypocrisies, a topic previously explored but seldom from inside the castle walls. And at its lonely, confessional heart, the distinctively male strain of anxiety that comes from living in the shadows of a famous lover (to the point where an embarrassing dinner party moment sits H-O several tables away from Sherman, his generic place card giving this doc its title) shifts the film's focus from a scene to a feeling: the husbands of Elton John and Molly Ringwald discuss their shared neurosis, context that proves cathartic for H-O and revelatory for us.

Paul Hasegawa-Overacker and Cindy Sherman in Guest of Cindy Sherman Courtesy of Tribeca

Ultimately, it's a lot of ground to cover in an hour and a half, and the intelligence needed to pull that off so casually and comically is best exemplified in the editing. New insights from art icons like John Waters, Eric Bogosian and Robert Longo aren't the meat of the matter, but the stuffing between H-O's GalleryBeat footage and samples of Sherman's artistry, curated either thematically or chronologically for narrative flow. The extreme contrast between their successes is cringe-inducingly felt, further illustrating the complexity of their relationship; more one-sided in summary than execution, H-O's acknowledged complicity in their split renders them both sympathetic. What's most surprising is that, although she is never once blamed for wronging her now-ex, Sherman has publicly denounced her participation in the film: "As my name is in the title and my work and self are so abundantly represented, I would like to counter any assumption that I am or wish to be personally associated with it... Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at its inception." Maybe that's true, or could it be hype?

Sita Sings the Blues Courtesy of Tribeca

A break-up story of loftier ambitions, Sita Sings the Blues marks the beautifully audacious feature debut of long-time comic strip artist Nina Paley, who wrote, directed, produced, animated and edited this vivacious autobiography-cum-retelling of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. The latter tale, for those not up on their ancient Indian culture, is a dharmic poem concerning Hindu goddess Sita, who is subjected to purity tests and banishment by her blue-skinned husband Rama after she is kidnapped by a demonic king. As it unfolds, an analogous storyline in present-day San Francisco and NYC reveals a squiggly, strip-style "Nina" (voiced by Paley) in the throes of a disintegrating marriage, as her husband takes a job in India, dumps her over email, and still she wants him back. Incredibly personal, if overly exalted in drawing parallels to a mythic tale, the modern segments may be forgiven as a framing device to give real-world relevance to its historical counterpart. But the Ramayana bits are impressive on their own, especially for their trio of mixed styles: In one, soft watercolors, possibly hand-painted, allow Rama and Sita's relationship to play as a straight, focused narrative. Another using cutouts and collages gives a rambling, Broadway Danny Rose-conversational version of the story as told by a trio of Indian-accented shadow puppets. But most unusual and striking is a series of bouncy music videos sung by '20s jazz siren Annette Hanshaw out of Sita's mouth, featuring the slickest, computer-aided aesthetics yet: Shag-meets-Bettie Boop geometry, so that Sita's eyes are as perfectly circular as her breasts. There are about a dozen of these interludes, each a break-up doozy, which are perhaps overkill without more variance in songs or flair, but it's a minor complaint. Paley should be applauded for creating an enchanting, playfully funny cartoon for adults, and there's not even a Pixar logo in sight.