"Duck Butter" and "O.G." - Star Vehicles for Unexpected Stars

by Murtada

Tribeca is such a wide-ranging film festival that it's hard to pin its personality down. But perhaps the best type of film it regularly offers is the star vehicle for non-stars. We're talking great actors who get to take the center of a movie (for a change) and give it their all, reminding audiences of their big talent.

In O.G. reliable supporting player Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) headlines as a prison inmate navigating the last few weeks of a 25 year sentence. Understandably he’s nervous about life on the outside particularly when he’s forced to deal with the victim of his crime. Life inside also gets complicated when he tries to mentor a young inmate just starting a prison sentence as long as his. Wright is in almost every frame of O.G. and it's a true showcase for his considerable talent. If your love for Wright started with his towering portrayal of Belize in Angels in America, (which won him the Tony in 1994 and the Emmy in 2004), then this is the movie part you've been waiting years for him to receive...

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Tribeca 2018: Sebastián Lelio's "Disobedience"

by Jason Adams

Movies are hard on people who leave. Homecomings are where it's at - the triumphant reestablishment of the family unit over adversity. Those who go away were mistaken. They were selfish. They were only looking out for themselves. Disobedience is about a woman who leaves. And it's about her homecoming, but one fraught with error - one we'll see slowly unravel as a ruse; not at all what it seems. 

Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is a photographer in New York who gets a message that her father in London has died. She flies back for the burial, and as she does we see she comes from an Orthodox Jewish community and her father was a beloved Rabbi - slowly, the black hats close in around her. And from under them suddenly a friendly face - Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), and soon after his wife Esti (Rachel McAdams). These three clearly have history. These early scenes are thick with unspoken things - the trio move slowly through quiet spaces, sorting themselves into place...

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Tribeca 2018: Obey

by Jason Adams

A pack of teenagers walk towards the camera in the opening shot of Obey - goofing off, sex talk, up to no good. Before you know it one of them has smashed a car window - improbably the window-smasher, all seemingly eight feet tall of him, doesn't even register at first. Leon (Marcus Rutherford) is all long limbs but vanishing into the periphery at the same time. A wallflower on skinny stalks, he's too big not to notice, and yet.

Leon uses those long limbs to awkwardly straddle a socio-economic divide from the dingy flats of no-rent London towards a more stable ground - he is trying, and failing, at upward mobility. There's a great small scene in the center of the film where he goes job-hunting on an unthought-through lark - he just randomly walks into the middle of an office and asks a man sitting at his computer for work. It doesn't go well.

Obey is smart enough to not play this as a joke...

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Review: Lean on Pete

by Eric Blume

Andrew Haigh, the director of the new film Lean on Pete, is a major, major talent.  He pulled a career-best (and Oscar-nominated) performance from Charlotte Rampling in his last film 45 Years, made a splash a few years before that with the lovely two-hander Weekend, and his big HBO show Looking was for my money one of the best gay anythings ever made.

Haigh has a particular talent with actors, and also for establishing moments of quiet power within a story. What's more he trusts that that power is enough.  These talents are firmly on display in Lean on Pete, the story of 16 year-old Charley (Charlie Plummer) who finds himself completely alone alongside the eponymous, discarded quarterhorse...

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The Men in the High Castles

Jason Adams reviews Chappaquidick, new in theaters this Friday

"I am a collage of unaccounted for brushstrokes - I am all random." Those are among the last words spoken by Stockard Channing's character in Six Degrees of Separation as she flees another ritzy party, her sense of self in tatters. Who are we, just an assemblage of stories we tell ourselves, and others? Is there something in between the molecules, if you drill down deep enough, or does infinite digging render everything dug? When we get up and look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning, are our eyes showing us Fake News? The post-modern self is an existential crisis in overdrive, but at a certain point don't you have to just stop drilling and take stock of what you actually see? Where does the scrutinizing of facts end and the perversion of them begin? Who writes our histories?

On July 18th, 1969 in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge and a 29-year-old woman named Mary Jo Kopechne died. What happened in the hours following that accident has been the subject of numerous books, not to mention many a feverish speculative daydream of right-leaning politicians and pundits. But it hasn't gotten the movie treatment until now with John Curran's Chappaquiddick, starring Jason Clarke as Kennedy and Kate Mara as Kopechne, out in theaters this Friday. Curran seeks to write that history...

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