It is hard to trust a cop in a noir. This is still true in the U.K. trailer for Black Coal, Thin Ice. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival last year and is starting to make its way to both U.K. and U.S. distributions. It comes from writer/director Diao Yinan. …
The Tribeca Film Festival of 2015 closed the books on Sunday as it always does, with a day full of screenings of the prize-winning films. And, as I noted on Day Three, it bears noting that the festival’s reputation of being for “indies that aren’t really indies” almost never bears out during the awards ceremony. …
The big opening at Tribeca on Sunday was Henry Hobson’s Maggie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first indie role, as a father in a zombie-style apocalypse who has to deal with the infection of his daughter. However, your humble correspondent won’t be able to see that film until later this week. Fortunately, there were no …
Luckily for us, they don’t think Tribeca is a silly place. Variety reported on Wednesday that the legendary British comedy troupe, Monty Python, is set to reunite for a special screening of their famed film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. The reunion will happen in New York for …
Tribeca is looking to bring more to the table than just a general film festival and their latest line-up looks to be both innovating and immersive. The line-up for the tech and innovation events includes a handful of potentially big projects from companies such as Google and AOL. The headline exhibit will be Storyscapes, the …
It looks like Tribeca will be digging into some early festival hits when it announced the list for its special screenings, Midnight, and Spotlight. The full listing was released on Thursday with the festival including some of the big films that screened recently at the Sundance Film Festival. The listing included Slow West, a western …
Manos Sucias Directed by Josef Wladyka Colombia, 2014 It’s not hard to see why the great Spike Lee would want to get his hands on the drug-trafficking dramatic thriller Manos Sucias. It’s exceptionally made and extraordinarily tense. It also profiles a culture that’s both rarely depicted in art and quite underserved in real life. Lee …
Next Goal Wins Directed by Mike Brett and Steve Jamison United Kingdom, 2014 For sports fans, there’s nothing more hopeless than cheering for a perennial loser. Die-hard supporters of the Detroit Lions, Cleveland Browns, and Kansas City Royals, among other notoriously bad franchises, know the agony of defeat all too well. But they’ve got nothing …
A Birder’s Guide to Everything USA, 2013 Directed by Rob Meyer Written by Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny A Birder’s Guide to Everything is a fairly standard coming of age story, but it has enough heart and creativity to make it something special. Like many coming of age tales, this one deals with a young …
Run & Jump Germany, Ireland 2013 Directed by Steph Green Written by Ailbhe Keogan Run & Jump tells an emotionally charged tale of an Irish family shaken by a freak trauma after the head of household, Conor (Edward MacLiam), suffers a stroke that drastically alters his personality and perception of the world. His stalwart wife, …
The Reluctant Fundamentalist India, Pakistan, USA 2012 Written by William Wheeler Directed by Mira Nair The Reluctant Fundamentalist deals with timely and important concerns like terrorism, prejudice, and paranoid xenophobia. And yet it undermines its relevance by packaging its premise in an overtly dramatized narrative. There’s no question that the filmmakers want to handle …
The Machine wins right out of the gate by mentioning Alan Turing and his Turing Test in the context of a sci-fi thriller. Turing became one of the fathers of modern computing during World War II thanks to his engineering efforts on the side of the Allies, and his Turing Test measures whether a computer can dupe a human being into believing that it is human. The Machine starts by imagining a computer which is capable of passing the Turing Test, raising stakes that are realistically grounded and immense for the future of mankind.
There are a great many regions in America for which prescription drug addiction is no joke. In fact, a documentary playing at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, Oxyana, addresses how prescription drugs are devastating West Virginia, and there are precious few laughs to be found there. However, that is not the approach taken by Enid Zentelis’ Tribeca film Bottled Up, which is not quite a comedy but mixes in a fair amount of laughs with the addiction drama that it turns upon.
It is an instinctual response to want to assign fault after a horrible accident. It takes concentrated and open-minded reflection to achieve a fair evaluation of tragedy, and Bluebird opens the door to thoughtful deliberation in its treatment of complicated moral issues with nuanced simplicity. This is a film of moods and feelings, not generalizations or judgments. The setting transports us to a little Maine town, where the primary industry is logging. Winter has cast its gloomy pall over everything and created a deceptive sense of stasis.
The abuse of prescription drugs, particularly Oxycontin and related medications, has reached epidemic status in many rural American communities, but nowhere is it worse than the Oceana section of West Virginia, nicknamed “Oxyana” by the residents. Oceana’s levels of drug abuse are so high that at one point during Sean Dunne’s new documentary Oxyana, a doctor claims that an entire generation of residents has become lost – even those who do not die may never have a valuable contribution to society.
The very first shot of the Tribeca entry Mr. Jones is very clearly shot by a handheld camera, from the inside of a car, by a couple who are heading off into the wilderness for some reason. “Fantasic,” the thought might come, “yet another found-footage horror movie. There have only been a million of those in the past five years.” And Mr. Jones is a found-footage horror film, no question about that, but it has a unique and interesting take on the format which works perfectly on its minuscule budget.
From the first shot of Trust Me, Clark Gregg makes it obvious that his satirical picture owes a huge debt to Sunset Boulevard. Both are film noirs set in Hollywood that concern themselves with female actors clawing desperately at fame, but each is told from an opposite end of the spectrum. Billy Wilder’s classic memorably depicts an aging has-been desperate to reclaim her former glory, and Trust Me follows an up-and-coming starlet willing to go to any lengths to obtain celebrity. And the allusions just pile on after that.
At Any Price USA, 2012 Directed by Ramin Bahrani Written by Hallie Elizabeth Newton, Ramin Bahrani Established indie director Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo) sharply evokes layered complexity among character performances and ideologies in his new farming family drama, At Any Price. Co-written by Hallie Elizabeth Newton, the film tells …
Movies about teenagers can tolerate cliche much better than movies about adults. The reason for this is fairly obvious: teenagers haven’t learned enough yet to avoid doing the wrong things that characters in movies shouldn’t do. Teenagers haven’t learned enough about love to avoid the wrong relationship, haven’t learned enough about crime to avoid getting caught, haven’t learned enough about necromancy to avoid reading from the Book of the Dead. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing to say that Mo Ogrodnik’s Deep Powder employs a number of plot or character points that have been seen before – these teenagers will have to learn their lessons the hard way, as all movie teenagers do.
Tribeca’s 12th annual festival, running from April 17-28, surpassed its first week and has just announced the winner of the first ever Heineken Affinity Award to director Ava DuVernay. DuVernay, of Los Angeles, won the Best Director Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film, Middle of Nowhere. Below is the official …
In 1985, a confrontation occurred in a West Philadelphia neighborhood between the Philadelphia police and an activist group that called itself MOVE. By the conclusion of the incident, a fire had broken out that destroyed several blocks’ worth of residential homes. Eleven people died.
Frankenstein’s Army Netherlands, 2013 Written by Chris W. Mitchell and Miguel Tejada-Flores Directed by Richard Raaphorst I don’t like to insert myself into these reviews, but at this point it’s important that you know something about me: I have a strong stomach, movie-wise. I didn’t even flinch the first time I saw the birthing scene …
Tribeca’s 12th annual festival, running from April 17-28, is now underway and we have a wide variety of films to look forward to. Below lists some of the selections we are most looking forward to and will be covering throughout the festival. For a full list of our coverage, please check it out here. …