Tribeca: The A.I. doc "Sophia" is more human than well you know

by Jason Adams

If you're into egregious public humiliations (and who isn't) then has Sophia has got a doozy for you. Jon Kasbe and Crystal Moselle's new documentary about the inventor David Hanson and his quest to perfect "the most realistic humanoid robot" has a scene so cringe that I nearly crawled right out of my own humanoid skin suit and called it a day. It's obviously a testament to the filmmakers skill that I found myself so emotionally invested in this verité science doc when it's basically just a portrait of how the sausage gets made. The "sausage" in question is a twitchy real-doll with feelings named Sophia... 

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Doc Corner: The Cowgirls of 'Bitterbrush'

By Glenn Dunks

Emelie Mahdavian’s first documentary feature was set in Tajikstan. The remote mountains of Idaho in the American west may seem like something of a remarkable jump, but it’s really not one at all. Topographically speaking, the two are quite similar. Certainly more so than Idaho and at least half of the rest of the US. That Mahdavian was so easily able to embed herself into the world of Bitterbrush shouldn’t surprise, then.

This is a quiet film, a film about loneliness and struggle and about the physical toll of a genuine hard day’s work. Unlike something like Buck or the more thematically similar Sweetgrass, that its two subjects are women lends Bitterbrush a unique entry-way into its world that brings with it a lot of connotations even before its opening shot...

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Tribeca 2022: David Lynch is The Man Behind the Curtain in "Lynch / Oz"

by Jason Adams

Like many of you I have deeply embedded childhood memories of watching The Wizard of Oz on television as a child. And probably also like many of you the film was presented to me as a generational hand-off, a passing of the cinematic baton. My mom was a lifelong fan, and now twas my turn to become the latest Friend of Dorothy (if she only knew). That yellow brick road stretches in one ear and out the other across eighty entire years of movie-lovers, mother to son to son to daughter and on to every Auntie Em adjacent, with something in there for everybody. I can trace my love of Horror Movies right to it – how many nightmares have those short-jacketed cater-waiter flying monkeys stormed through? Others, probably you, can trace your love of the Movie Musical from sepia-toned Kansas where Judy first regaled us of rainbows...

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Tribeca 2022: "The Lost Weekend: A Love Story"

by Jason Adams

Time is a funny thing, slippery. An elastic band behind our eyes that can stretch as far back as we can remember before snapping us back to here and now -- sometimes gentle, sometimes with centrifugal violence like a start. There's no logic to what lingers longer than it lasted, and to what whooshes by -- the best moments a single glance etched in stone, while the worst nightly nestled beside us. To John Lennon his eighteen month romance with his personal assistant May Pang circa a 1973 split with Yoko Ono he called it "a lost weekend" -- meanwhile for Peng here she is fifty years later recounting the experience for the documentary called The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, premiering this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival.

That slippery sense of time weaves its way through directors Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, and Stuart Samuels' fascinating ninety-seven-minute doc...

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Doc Corner: 'The Janes' on HBO Max

By Glenn Dunks

If you were paying close enough attention to the ways the American political winds were blowing, you likely could have foreseen how relevant The Janes would ecome. Well, even more so than it already was. Still, even as recently as its Sundance premiere in January, it’s unlikely that filmmakers Tia Lessin (her first since 2013’s Citizen Koch) and Emma Pildes could have envisioned its release a mere few months late would coincide so frighteningly with the systematic dissolving of the rights their subjects were fighting for. Right in front of everybody’s eyes.

That The Janes is a film for this very moment isn’t what makes it so good. Although it helps...

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