As the Tribeca Film Festival winds down its seventh edition this weekend, Robert De Niro’s pet project, which is sandwiched between international programs at Sundance and Cannes, continues to feel its way in the film market. Though some of Tribeca’s biggest films may have made their premieres elsewhere (“The Wackness,” “Elite Squad”), or have no need for a festival opening (“Baby Mama”), the wide array of films on display this year ensures that Tribeca is making strides toward coming into its own.

Appropriately, then, this year’s roster has featured a wide selection of coming-of-age films that twist the themes normally encountered on the cellulite path to adulthood. As with the more general selection at the festival, these films present a mixed bag, but some are definitely worth catching before the festival closes its doors.

Jonathan Levine’s “The Wackness” (which opens nationwide on July 3) led the pack with its depiction of a quintessential New York summer in the life of Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck). Luke spends the summer of 1994 dealing marijuana, falling in love, having his heart broken, and forming a strange friendship with his therapist, played with odd bewilderment by Ben Kingsley.

Oddly, the most touching film straddling the chasm between adolescence and adulthood is a vampire gorefest. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s “Let the Right One,” which was presented yesterday with the festival’s Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, follows a lonely 12-year-old as he battles his adolescent demons and befriends a lonesome girl, who turns out to be a vampire. Sporadically ghoulish, the film often teeters near farce, but between the moments of violence lies an amazingly touching adolescent love story.

Shane Meadows returns to Tribeca this year with a sweet story of adolescent bonds in “Somers Town.” Again focusing his lens on the young actor Thomas Turgoose, who so masterfully captured the ideological desperation of a lonely boy in the director’s 2007 entrant, “This Is England,” Mr. Meadows focuses here on the bond of circumstance between two boys. When Mr. Turgoose’s Tomo wanders into the life of Polish immigrant Marek (Piotr Jagiello), the peculiar little friendship they form is a wonderful thing to watch.

In Brian Hecker’s “Bart Got a Room,” a young man on his way to the prom travels down the far more treacherous adolescent road of unrequited desires. Cheryl Hines and William H. Macy play the unlikely parents of young Danny (Steven Kaplan), who quickly learns that picking the right bowtie won’t bring his hopes and dreams to fruition.

As this is Tribeca, though, most of the stories are far from wholesome. Adolescent awakening comes to a particularly depressing end in Tom Kalin’s “Savage Grace.” The film follows the disintegration of the familial bond between Bakelite heir Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane), his wife Barbara (Julianne Moore), and their son Tony (Eddie Redmayne). Mr. Redmayne’s performance flits between entrancing and terrifying. As Tony grows into adulthood in the shadows of this deliciously twisted environment, the film savors the lush things that money can buy and languishes in the disturbing aberrations that it cannot fix.

Shifting from the possibilities of what lies ahead to what will never be, “Finding Amanda” pits Matthew Broderick as a former drug addict and current gambling addict who sets out for Vegas to help his young niece (Jenni Blong) get over her affinity for prostitution.

Two Australian entries also take a twist on the impact of death on — and of — a teenager. “Newcastle” is a competitive surfing picture that features some amazing shots and a wide array of sexually charged imagery, even if it has little to add to the genre beyond some titillating new hard bodies, while “Bitter and Twisted” follows the effect that the death of a teenager has on his family and loved ones three years on.

But one of the best entrants into this genre is the story of a late bloomer — about 70 years late. First-time filmmakers Lucas Jansen, Adam Kurland, and Spencer Vrooman tell the story of J.L. “Red” Rountree in “This Is Not a Robbery,” the real-life tale of a man who decided at the age of 87 to take up robbing banks. While following the story of how this once straightlaced businessman took to a life of sex, drugs, and crime, it’s hard not to get swept away by a man who offers only one reason for changing his calling so late in life: “I like to rob banks.”

mkeane@nysun.com