"We the Animals" coming in August

by Murtada

It’s hard to describe what We the Animals is about. It’s easier to tell you how I felt after seeing it. It’s akin to a recalling a hazy memory, one that you don’t quite recall but sharply and clearly remember how it made you feel. I felt elated, moved, joyful, sad and knowing I saw a fantastic film that I won’t soon forget.

We the Animals is a coming of age tale about three brothers. It is also about the summer (or year or years --time is an unclear element) that changed one boy’s life and his relationships with his two older brothers and their parents forever. The story flirts with magical realism while staying grounded in the economic desperation of industrial upstate New York. It’s a queer story about the secrets we hold so close that they are bound to either destroy us or set us free... 

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Tribeca: "Nigerian Prince" is a thrilling debut

by Jason Adams

Sitting inside my email spam folder right now there is a letter from "Mrs.Celine Peters from United State Of America" who is dying of cancer and wants to "donate my funds to you, so you can disburse to charities, widows, orphans and less privileged." There is also a notification that I have won the Swiss Lotto, which is quite a bit of mad luck since I have never played the Swiss Lotto. Oh and there is a warning from "FBI Cyber Security" that I have been dealing with African cyber scammers and if I will just stop doing that I will somehow be given 29 million dollars! I'm not sure how to follow the logic on the last one.

Have you ever stopped to think about who's writing these spam messages? Writer/director Faraday Okoro clearly wondered the same thing, and he used that question as the gateway into his thrilling debut feature-film Nigerian Prince. Who would do such a thing? This is who, and this is why...

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Tribeca: Trine Dyrholm makes a great "Nico 1988"

by Jason Adams

Although I might have been hallucinating by the time, given the sheer length and purposeful boredom of the experience, I'm pretty sure there's a portion of Andy Warhol's four-hour double-projector experimental film Chelsea Girls where the Velvet Underground singer Nico just sits and cuts her bangs for twenty straight minutes on camera. It felt like twenty straight minutes, anyway. And that was my introduction to her. Catherine Deneuve heroin chic - too cool for anybody, herself included.

That's the baggage one drags into a bio-pic about the singer, and that's what Susanna Nicchiarelli's film called Nico, 1988 insists on clipping away like those bangs. It's right there in the title - this is 1988, twenty-two years after Underground, after Andy, and this is a fully fifty-year-old woman with dark brown hair and a debilitating drug habit who does not give a shit...

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Tribeca 2018: Mary Elizabeth Winstead stuns in "All About Nina"

by Jason Adams

If you hear a sliver of Margo Channing's famous warning echoing across All About Nina you should know it's not just because the title's a riff on that Bette Davis classic. It is indeed going to be a bumpy night, a series of them actually, for Nina (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and for everybody that comes into contact with her. Although there are interstitial daylight-breaks, Nina's life revolves around nights and the things that bump them. She's a comedian, and we know well by now how those lives are structured. Bump, bump, POW. Fasten them seat-belts, baby...

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"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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