The Tribeca Film Festival began on Wednesday night with the premiere of Live From New York!, Bao Nguyen’s documentary about the history of Saturday Night Live. Although your humble film critic was unable to see that film, the festival will offer more than a hundred movies of various flavors from April 15-26, and in this critic’s opinion, the lineup in 2015 is stronger than any in the last five years. Starting today, this is your place to find a brief run-down of the films that played the festival the day before, either in public screenings or in pre-festival press screenings.
Although it may not sound as entertaining as an oral history of America’s leading sketch-comedy program, Democrats comes surprisingly close. Documentarian Camilla Nielsson was given unprecedented access to two of the framers of a democratic constitution in the country of Zimbabwe: one man representing the government of dictatorial president Robert Mugabe, who is in danger of being thrown out of office by the new constitution; and one man from the opposition party, which has been foiled by Mugabe’s strongarm tactics for years. The entertainment comes from how candid the two men are when the camera is on them, with the pro-Mugabe aide pulling such tricks as arguing the meaning of the word “volatile” and dismissing free speech and the democratic process as “useless weapons” employed by his opponents. That candor, plus the horse-trading involved in the actual drafting process, makes the film feel like a real-life episode of The West Wing with somewhat less witty dialogue… Grade: B+
Writer/director Gregory Kohn’s film Come Down Molly is billed as a comedy, and there are some laughs to be had therein, but the film will not resemble any other comedy to be released this year. The titular Molly (Eleonore Hendricks) is a thirty-ish wife and mother who is having something of a midlife crisis, and takes off into the woods with her all-male crew of friends from high school. The movie is dedicated to the day they spend dropping out, doing mushrooms, and the semi-nonsensical stoned conversations amongst friends. The laughs are real (if a bit mild), the Hudson River valley has rarely looked better on screen, and Kohn deserves credit for not going to the most obvious place with his story (“I’m not looking to get f—ed,” Molly tells her husband, and for a wonder, she’s right). But some film-goers out there are going to be frustrated by the fact that this expressionistic picture has no plot, no tension, and an extremely vague climax. As a movie, it’s like the shrooms that its characters take: not for everyday consumption, but able to expand your mind in small doses… Grade: B
There will be inevitable comparisons between the documentary The Birth of Sake and the sushi-making doc Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but there’s just one problem: sake, the alcoholic beverage that is synonymous with Japan in restaurants worldwide, is simply not as fun or delicious-looking as the preparation of sushi. Traditional sake-making requires much of the same dedication and discipline as was seen from Jiro Ono , and the Tedorigawa brewery has many of the same human dramas involved as Jiro did, right down to a son that is looking to move into the family business. Those are all admirable qualities for this film to dedicate itself, but director Erik Shirai doesn’t give the brewery’s story any vigor or energy. If not for a moment of unpredictable real-life tragedy that happened during filming, there would be little power behind this narrative… Grade: C+
The bare-bones approach of the Irish thriller The Survivalist is apparent from the very first shot, which illustrates the collapse of human society with nothing more than a pair of graph lines against a black background. Years after this vague apocalypse, Martin McCann stars are a nameless man who runs a subsistence farm designed to feed only one, until he faces the difficult decision to take in two more desperate wanderers. Writer/director Stephen Fingleton’s screenplay made the Black List of best unproduced screenplays, which is doubly impressive since this film has long dialogue-free stretches. The Survivalist still manages to be incredibly tense during those silences, thanks to phenomenal cinematography that makes the most out of every light and camera move (including a dazzling crane shot that beats any special-effects moment in a Hollywood blockbuster this year). Weak stomachs be warned: this film has a few graphic moments, mostly involving home surgery. But they should not be enough to turn people away from a strong effort that may turn out to be the best genre film at Tribeca this year… Grade: A
Sarah Bolger (known for her TV roles in The Tudors and Once Upon a Time) plays Anna, a babysitter whose job becomes more than it appears in the midnight-movie thriller Emelie. The children who play her charges are uniformly stellar, which is a victory in itself for director Michael Thelin — building a film around three actors who have not yet reached puberty is a dangerous job. The film also boasts an incredible first hour, in which tension builds with one of the best slow burns since Aliens. The problem is that the film’s first hour is so creepy, and implies a coming horror so terrible, that almost any third act would be a let-down. Thelin’s directing skills also let down in the third act, including the strange decision to show Bolger’s face in only one shot during the movie’s last twenty minutes. But that first hour is scary enough to carry the film through and make it worthy of a recommendation… Grade: B
Coming tomorrow: An ace, a three, and a Jack
-Mark Young