Bigger is better. At least, that seemed to be the prevailing philosophy last year, when the organizers of the sixth Tribeca Film Festival announced a sprawling program that was larger and more ambitious than anything they — or almost any film festival, for that matter — had previously attempted.

Audiences and critics alike seemed surprised — some might say overwhelmed — by the size, scope, and price of it all. At venues spread out across Manhattan (and for some events, into the outer boroughs), and at an average price of $18 a ticket, 160 feature films rained down on cineastes trying to make sense of it all. Some festivalgoers were intrigued by this wide-open populist alternative to the carefully curated New York Film Festival, but most were just confused and disoriented. In the end, it seemed the festival was too big and bulky, too unfocused and unwieldy, to follow.

The film producer Jane Rosenthal, who launched Tribeca in 2002 along with Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff in an effort to help the neighborhood recover from the terrorist attacks of the previous autumn, is the first person to concede the point, and to explicitly spell out the fact that this year’s festival, which begins April 23, is in some ways a conscious reaction to that criticism. “This is our seventh year, and obviously we’ve grown a lot, and learned a lot, and taken our share of criticisms, though at the end of the day we are our toughest critics,” Ms. Rosenthal said. “But as a producer, you learn that whoever has a good idea about something, no matter where it comes from, you should listen to it. So this year, we’ve listened to what people had to say last year, and that’s really part of the maturation and curatorial process, as the event grows and learns about its audience.”

Last year’s lesson was that the Tribeca Film Festival audience has limits in terms of how far it will travel and how many titles it can comfortably process and navigate — though, evidently, still no limits in terms of commercial appeal: This year’s festival will open with the Tina Fey vehicle “Baby Mama” and close with the mega-budget digital spectacle “Speed Racer.”

“Clearly, a problem for our festivalgoers in the past has been that there’s too many pictures, and they haven’t been able to find the pictures in an easy way,” Ms. Rosenthal said. “After our first two years, we seemed to lose our hub, and this year we’ve restored that. We’ve made the festival easier to maneuver and slimmed down a slate that is still very large and diverse by any measure.”

Unlike last year, when some events were held as far uptown as Morningside Heights, this year’s festival remains limited to downtown venues, chiefly located in TriBeCa and the East Village. The total number of features has also come down, by about 25% from last year’s total, to 122. While we’re at it, nix those $18 tickets, too; this year’s average ticket price is $15, with special reduced prices of $8 for late-night screenings and weekday matinees.

More than just for a slimmer schedule and smaller map, this year’s TFF is notable for its lack of new initiatives. In recent years, each festival has introduced a slew of new programs and projects, whether it was the ASCAP Music Lounge, “Tropfest at Tribeca,” or the ESPN Sports Film Festival. All of these programs remain — in addition to the annual street fair and the Tribeca Drive-In — but organizers have made an effort not to add more to the mix. Outside of a few specially designed question-and-answer sessions, dubbed “Behind the Screens,” following some of the festival’s more prominent films, the focus this year seems not to be on spreading the festival’s wings but simply spotlighting the films in competition.

That might seem an obvious focus for a film festival, but Tribeca has developed something of a reputation in years past for failing to produce any hit films. This year, Ms. Rosenthal and company can proudly say that a few films from last year’s festival, mostly documentaries, broke out of the pack. “The King of Kong” and “Planet B-Boy” drew healthy audiences around the city in the year that followed Tribeca, with the former making its way onto several year-end top-10 lists after a lengthy stint at IFC Center. And Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side” was one of the big winners at this year’s Academy Awards, upsetting Michael Moore’s “Sicko” and Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight” for the feature documentary Oscar and suggesting that Tribeca can be a prominent launching pad for nonfiction hopefuls.

“I couldn’t be more proud about Alex Gibney winning with ‘Taxi,'” Ms. Rosenthal said. “Beyond that, you have ‘Autism: The Musical,’ which debuted on HBO, and other nonfiction films that have taken off. It’s part of the process, that you start to refine your process and find the films that will connect with the audience. How long did it take for Sundance to get ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’?”

That would be 11 years. Founded in 1978 (seven years before Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute took the event over), the Sundance Film Festival didn’t really take flight until Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 breakout hit put it on the map — not that Tribeca organizers are content to wait that long. After thinking small and then thinking big, and after overplaying its hand last year, the grand Tribeca Film Festival experiment resumes April 23, determined to get the mix just right.

ssnyder@nysun.com

The Tribeca Film Festival runs between April 23 and May 4 at various venues across the city. For more information, visit www.tribecafilmfestival.org.