From the story of BlackBerry to a Stephen Curry documentary, there’s a film for everyone at the PFS SpringFest this weekend

From Air Jordans to Tetris, movies this spring have focused on how popular consumer products of past decades came to fruition. This weekend, Philadelphians will have a chance to see the story of the smartphone they may have owned in the first decade of the century, come alive on screen.

BlackBerry is the story of the rise and fall of that pioneering Canadian smartphone and the company, Research in Motion, that made it. And the film features a familiar face to Philadelphians: Glenn Howerton, who stars as Dennis on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and also codeveloped the long-running series. He plays the starring role of Jim Balsillie, cofounder of Research in Motion.

“I’m really excited about Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry,” Michael Lerman, the Philadelphia Film Society’s artistic director and senior director of programming, told The Inquirer, calling the film “a little bit Big Short and a little bit Glengarry Glen Ross.”

BlackBerry will show at 8:30 p.m. Saturday on the main stage of the Philadelphia Film Center. It’s part of PFS SpringFest, the annual weekend minifestival that the Film Society is hosting for the sixth time as a midyear counterpart to its October Philadelphia Film Festival.

As with most years, the schedule is filled with films that debuted at other festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, or Sundance and South by Southwest earlier this year.

The festival will show 18 films between Friday and Sunday, with the Film Society utilizing both its main stage at the Film Center and smaller Greenfield Screening Room upstairs, usually at the same time.

The lineup is heavy on biographical documentaries, including a look at basketball superstar Stephen Curry on Friday, at children’s author Judy Blume on Saturday, and films about two beloved sitcom actors, Mary Tyler Moore and Michael J. Fox, on Sunday. The Fox film, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, was a late addition to the lineup.

Between BlackBerry and the documentaries, Lerman saw a through-line in this year’s lineup.

“I think that we are in kind of a reflective period where we’re looking at history a lot, in cinema,” he said. “Obviously, that’s also reflected in the fact that we’re showing so many of these bio-docs … In a way, we’re in this period that’s very much about looking back on this history of where we are and how we got here.”

Other prominent films include Sisu, a Finnish action film from director Jalmari Helander about a gold prospector fighting Nazis; Somewhere in Queens, the directorial debut of Ray Romano; director Nida Manzoor’s feminist heist comedy Polite Society; and Master Gardener, the latest in the late-career renaissance of filmmaker Paul Schrader.

This year, the Environmental Film Festival will no longer be a stand-alone event. The Film Society, however, will continue to offer Science on Screen showings.

PFS SpringFest runs April 14-16 at the Philadelphia Film Center, 1412 Chestnut St, Phila. For tickets and full schedule, visit filmadelphia.org/springfest.