Friday, April 22, 2011

Here are 25 films to see at the Tribeca Film Festival...

...currently going on just blocks from me in New York City. Here's the list from Vulture:


This year’s Tribeca Film Festival began on April 20, and by the time it ends on May 1, 93 feature films will have screened. To figure out what to see with that many films available, you need professional guidance: That’s why Vulture's critics and writers watched as many of the films as we could before the fest — about two thirds of the offerings — to pick our top recommendations. (We also included a few that weren't made available for previewing, but that we're still anxious to see, bringing us to a list of 25.) We found that while some of the more celebrity-heavy films don't deliver, many others do — particularly in the very strong documentary lineup. Our picks range from a terrific documentary on school bullying (The Bully Project) to a Sam Shepard Western (Blackthorn) and a tense lesbian drama about Swedish friends on an equestrian acrobatics team (She Monkeys).

For its opening night, Tribeca kicks off with a party: a behind-the-scenes documentary by Cameron Crowe, not yet screened for critics, that captures Elton John and Leon Russell as the two collaborate on their album of the same name, which was released last fall. Russell was an enormous influence on John, who, you may recall, contributed his song “Tiny Dancer” to Crowe’s Almost Famous.

In Jerry Rothwell’s unusual documentary family portrait, a young woman conceived through sperm donation registers online with the Donor Sibling Registry and turns up dozens of half-brothers and sisters with eerily similar mannerisms, interests, and facial features. When the brood decides to seek out their fabled father — who turns out to be a pot-tokin', fiftysomething wack job (albeit a good-natured one) holed up in a Venice Beach RV — fascinating questions are raised about the definition of family, both in our heads and in our DNA.

Alex Gibney is the doc king of Sundance: His film Taxi to the Dark Side premiered at Tribeca and went on to score an Oscar. Last year, he premiered four films: Casino Jack and the United States of Money, My Trip to Al Qaeda, a slice of Freakonomics, and his excellent Elliot Spitzer documentary, Client 9. This year, he arrives with a tale (which hasn’t screened for critics) of scapegoats and curses, as he explores the life of Steve Bartman, the Cubs fan whose life was upended when he fatefully (and tragically) interfered with a foul ball during the 2003 National League Championship, and was vilified by Cubs fans all over the globe.

Two total neurotics slowly, hilariously find love in the world of high-end chocolate. True, we pretty much know every step this Belgian trifle is going to take, but it’s hard not to enjoy the ride – especially since the likable cast makes it all seem so effortless, something today’s American romantic comedies seem to have forgotten how to do.

While Apartheid South Africa was imploding, the alcoholic, troubled poet Ingrid Jonker – daughter of a conservative politician – was slowly disintegrating in other ways, even as she produced work of unbearable beauty and sadness. Her brief, tragic life gets the full-on prestige biopic treatment here. The structure is standard; its emotional effects are anything but, thanks both to Carice Van Houten’s powerful turn as Jonker and the film’s wise decision to foreground the writer’s poems.

Chinese actor-director Jiang Wen made one of the last decade’s most corrosively brilliant and despairing films, 2000’s grim Japanese-occupation drama Devils on the Doorstep. On a very obvious level, his latest historical epic-action-comedy, with its breakneck pacing and go-for-broke humor, is nothing like that earlier film. But with its generous heaps of ghastly violence and cavalier willingness to kill off major characters, this new one is in some ways even more disturbing. Utterly insane.

Turns out Butch Cassidy wasn’t killed after all and is hiding out in the Bolivian mountains, dreaming of home. Mateo Gil’s heartrending Western stars Sam Shepard in one of his finest performances as the grizzled, reflective outlaw, with Eduardo Noriega exuding snakelike charm as his young, crooked friend.

Lee Hirsch gets unprecedented access to the day-to-day lives of seriously tormented schoolchildren — and the educators who turn a blind eye to bullying — in this enraging, heartbreaking documentary, which mostly skips the (ostensible) experts and instead spends time with kids and parents.

Tony Kaye, the provocative director of American History X and Lake of Fire, casts Adrien Brody as an indifferent substitute teacher who flits from one school to another before finally settling into a rough school that changes him. The film, which hasn’t screened for critics, also features Christina Hendricks, Marcia Gay Harden, and Betty Kaye.

Cédric Klapisch’s latest might sound like a romantic comedy — a woman loses her job and winds up working as a maid to the financial shark who brought her company down — but this is a farce that turns into a romance that turns into a social thriller. As the betrayals mount, it all builds to a deliriously chaotic finale.

The great Italian actor Toni Servillo (Il Divo, Gomorrah) gives one of his expertly restrained performances in this gripping slow-burn drama about an ex-gangster whose new life in Germany is disrupted when his past catches up with him. Director Claudio Cupellini builds the tension masterfully.

Whether you like the band Kings of Leon or not, Stephen C. Mitchell’s excellent rock doc is a thrill. The concert performances are just the backdrop to the family drama of how three sons of a sinning Pentecostal Tennessee minister — Nathan, Caleb, and Jared — and their cousin Matthew ended up wearing tight pants and rocking out on the cover of Rolling Stone (which their cousins didn’t see until the magazine was advertised on The Price is Right). The hysterical, charming, and downright bizarre relatives who surround the band at a ramshackle whiskey-swigging reunion muster just as much star-power as their more famous relatives.

Alma Har’el’s doc follows three people in Bombay Beach, a decrepit town on the shore of California’s hypersalinated, filthy Salton Sea. The unabashedly stylized film pairs intimate access with staged dance sequences, and plays like an odd American folk song — which is why its use of music by Beirut and Bob Dylan is so apt.

More probing than 2002’s Spellbound, Greg Barker’s documentary looks at young Muslims who have memorized all 600 pages of the Koran for a recitation contest in Cairo. There are stressful competition sequences galore, but visits to the kids’ diverse homelands are just as compelling, and even more revealing.

This hysterical film reedits the best bits of Michael Winterbottom’s six-episode, heavily improvised TV comedy series, in which Steve Coogan and Gavin and Stacey's Rob Brydon play fictional versions of their goofball selves while riffing endlessly on a Northern England road trip. To be trapped in a car with these cut-ups would be a hellish heaven.

The sophomore effort by Mexican director Yulene Olaizola is a naturalistic portrayal of the unlikely connection between a heroin-addled young woman and a pot-smoking fiftysomething widower at a decrepit oceanside resort. The feature offers a visceral, whisper-thin story line, luscious cinematography, and a deceptively languorous pace — all while avoiding the sensationalist traps that plague many films of its ilk.

Discomfiting depictions of carnal female lust are deeply woven into Lisa Aschan’s bold, beautifully shot Swedish drama, which focuses on the escalating tension between two friends on an equestrian acrobatics team. But the real highlight is the protagonist’s hypersexualized 8-year-old sister, played with unusual verve and complexity by newcomer Isabella Lindquist.

Musical partners and real-life lovers Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová charmed the movie world in the Oscar-winning indie drama Once, and this gorgeous doc follows them in the uneasy wake of that success. Whereas Once was a fast-budding romance, this is a stately, sad road movie about how things fade.

There’s no denying the overheated, Slumdog Millionaire sweep of Gemma Atwal’s twisty, tabloid-ready HBO documentary. The film recounts the drama of Budhia Singh, a slum kid from eastern India who, at the age of 3, is encouraged by a mentor to run six half-marathons. By age 6, the child hero is running 42 miles, when – yanked between mentor, mother, and government – he becomes a lightning rod for controversy that culminates in a murder.

Hot off its well-received premiere at Sundance and subsequent controversy pitting director Michael Rapaport against Q-Tip, this documentary about the epochal rap act is sure to stir up more debate among hip-hop heads.

Sally Rowe’s snappy portrait of charismatic enfant terrible chef Paul Liebrandt and his controversial, avant-garde creations — such as eel with violets and chocolate — follows his struggle within post-9/11 New York’s comfort-food culture through the opening of his Michelin-starred Tribeca restaurant, Corton. Get ready for bitchy kitchen antics, tension with former Times critic Frank Bruni, and plenty of food porn to salivate over.

That title isn’t meant to be ironic: Hong Kong film legend Tsui Hark’s latest is a historical wuxia fantasy-cum-mystery-thriller: Think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon meets Sherlock Holmes, only a lot more fun. Imperial officials are spontaneously combusting, and it’s up to our exiled hero to track down the culprits. The resulting adventure has the kind of sweep and offhand poetry that made Tsui’s earlier films such a joy to watch, making this a welcome return to form.

A shy, nerdy Glasgow youth falls in with the wrong crowd (“NEDS” stands for “Non-Educated Delinquents”) and grisly consequences ensue, in the latest from prolific actor and erstwhile director Peter Mullan (his last turn behind the camera was the grim 2002 hit The Magdalene Sisters). This may seem at first like a standard coming-of-age tale, but look closer: Veering between comedy and horror, youthful boisterousness and terrifying violence, it’s one of the strangest, most tonally offbeat films at this year’s festival.

In less sure hands, a documentary about a Zambian HIV-positive woman (and her layabout, polygamous husband and his two other HIV-positive wives) could play as nothing but sensational tragedy. But with uncommon composure, debut documentary filmmaker Margaret Betts delicately crafts an astute depiction of difficult lives in the middle of an epidemic.

As a director, Edward Burns’s last few films (The Groomsmen, Purple Violets, Nice Guy Johnny) have not been very well received — so it was a surprise when Tribeca picked his latest film, Newlyweds, as its closing-night selection. The ultra-low-budget film, which has not screened yet for critics, was shot in the fest's neighborhood and stars Burns and Caitlin Fitzgerald as lovers easing into the early days of marriage.

-Joey's Two Cents: Tops on my list is Newlyweds, but I'm an Ed Burns fan...thoughts?
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1 comment:

  1. Joey MagidsonApril 22, 2011 at 4:15 PM

    Also as a side-note, the article overstates the reception of Burns' last films at Tribeca. They were mixed to positive, not negative.

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