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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Tribeca 2018: To Dust

by Jason Adams

Shmuel is a sinner. He keeps repeating that. This is a sin, this is a sin. His children are convinced he's possessed, and he kind of is. He haunts graveyards; he rows them into the middle of a lake and makes them cry. He stuffs a plastic bag over the head of a large pig and suffocates it in front of a community college science professor. Things are nuts!

Shmuel's wife has just died from cancer, see, and he's having troubles reconciling what that means. Not in the spiritual sense - Shmuel is a Hasidic man, and such things probably ought to concern him more than they do - but in a more practical sense...

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Tribeca 2018: The Night Eats the World

by Jason Adams

Post-apocalyptic fiction exists for basically one reason and one reason alone - for us to contemplate what kind of people we are. Meaning deep down, when it really comes down to it - the life and death stuff. Are we the sort of person who would suddenly find wells of inner strength to overcome? Are we a survivor? Or are we gristle caught in a ghoul's teeth? And since there's not a massive audience for movies about watching somebody die slowly and terribly of a real-world disease like cancer, voila, zombie movies. They let us wrestle, through the safe filter of fantasy, not just with our own mortality but with the mortality of everyone we know...

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Jason Reitman & Diablo Cody, Round Three!

by Murtada

By now you’ve all heard about the post-screening Tribeca Film Festival panel that went around the world. The moderator at a Scarface 35th anniversary screening, asked Michelle Pfeiffer about her weight during filming.

As the father of a daughter, I'm concerned about body image. The preparation for this film — what did you weigh? 

The horror! The audience met the question with groans, and Pfeiffer handled it superbly, focusing on her work for the film.

I was at another Tribeca event happening at the same time. One that was markedly devoid of sexist questions and uncomfortable moments. In fact it was the opposite of that...

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