Tribeca: Hong Chau in "Driveways" and "American Woman"

Murtada Elfadl reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival

Almost 18 months after the release, we are starting to see the results of Hong Chau’s breakout role in Downsizing. At the Tribeca Film Festival this year, Chau is top-billed in two movies Semi Chellas’ American Woman and Andrew Ahn’s Driveways. The two give this adept performer a chance to showcase her talent and prove she’s ready for leading lady status.

Despite the top billing Chau is not the lead in Driveways. She plays Kathy, mother to shy 8 year old Cody (newcomer Lucas Jaye) whose unlikely friendship with the curmudgeonly widower next door Del (Brian Dennehy) is the primary narrative of the film. Del becomes their neighbor when they travel to a new town to clean and sell Kathy’s late sister’s house. Their stay is longer than they planned and Del becomes an integral part of their lives...

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Tribeca 2019: "This is Not Berlin"

Team Experience reporting from Tribeca 2019. Here's Jason...

Most of us never have the benefit of being at the right cool place at the right cool time. Or even if we do we don't really get to realize that while its happening. It's only in hindsight that we can shape that experience into a start and finish; that our lives can be packaged for proper consumption. It's always too messy to start with --the hair's gotta come down and the high's gotta wear off before you can see anything straight.

That whole tale's right there in the title of This Is Not Berlin. Hari Sama's fierce new coming-of-age film does indeed not take place in Berlin, but rather astride the post-punk burgeoning New Wave art-scene of Mexico City in the mid-80s...

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Review: "Little Woods"

by Tony Ruggio

Little Woods, North Dakota: not far from our border to the north, and a poster child for the death of the American Dream. Tessa Thompson is Ollie, a woman hardened by a life selling oxy and a an allergy to hope. Her adopted mother has passed and she and her younger sister Debbie (Lily James) are left to pick up the pieces, namely a pittance of a house and what’s left of Ollie’s former life. She’s nearing the end of her probation and you know what that means. Life’s about to throw her a curveball, sending her back to the wheelin’ and dealin’ trenches, where seedy characters and searing guilt are part of the job. Debbie needs help and Ollie’s good at doing, so she’s back at it to pay the mortgage and get her sister the medical care she needs. It’s all very predictable, but it hardly matters...

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Tribeca 2019: "Knives and Skin"

Team Experience reporting from Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams

If someone you had a crush on in high school suddenly handed you a crude anatomical drawing of your genitals how might you have reacted? I, uhh, sure can think of a few reactions I might have had. But several of them would have involved a smile, a chuckle - anything but utmost sincerity, which in this instance would have a tinge of the absurd. And that tinge turns trickle turns ten-fold flood in Knives and Skin, writer-director Jennifer Reeder's surreal small-town murder-mystery that feels beamed in from another planet; one where the reactions are all upside down.

It all starts with a missing blonde girl, tipping its Twin Peaks cap right off the bat...

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Tribeca 2019 "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"

Team Experience reporting from the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams...

I always think of Amy Poehler's funny line on SNL about "soggy board-games and cat skeletons" when I think on the concept of hoarders. Sad people beside blackened sinks. But what if the hoarder's instincts turn out to be less a mental illness -- something more, grander? Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project uncovers that exception in a woman who obsessively recorded 35 years of news programming, from the Iran Hostages through 9/11 and up to Sandy Hook. And in the process the film argues that, as with superstition being science we just haven't yet confirmed, perhaps some of Marion's documentarian's madness wasn't madness, but prophecy...

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