Tribeca 2017: Sex Games and Ticking Clocks in "The Exception"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival yet again!

Let me just be clear about his right up front: I like thinking about Black Book. Paul Verhoeven's sexy 2008 Holocaust thriller with Carice Van Houten is one of my favorite movies and I've seen it at least a dozen times by now. And so it turns out that enthusiasm is open to re-interpretations, because a full half of The Exception plays like an off-Broadway re-staging of that earlier movie, and I still liked it plenty. No, director David Leveaux doesn't have nearly the handle on making moral hay of human contradictions so deftly as Verhoeven does, but who does? Leveaux makes a go of it, at least...

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Tribeca 2017: "Sweet Virginia"

Nathaniel R reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival

Christopher Abbott and Jon Bernthal develop an awkward friendship in "Sweet Virginia"

Sweet Virginia begins with an unnerving burst of violence in the bar of a small Alaskan town. Initially the carnage and resulting grief feels as senseless as all violence does. What a world. But this being a slow burn neo-noir, we know from rich movie history that the killings won't prove to be random. Caught up in the aftermath of the crime are two newly widowed women (Imogen Poots and Rosemarie DeWitt) who aren't as grief stricken as they should be, the non-local murderer (Christopher Abbott) who decides to hole up in town for a bit, and the owner of the local motel "Sweet Virginia," a retired rodeo champ (Jon Bernthal) who, as it turns out, has been carrying on an affair with the widow for years prior to the picture...

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Tribeca 2017: Pilgrimage

Jason Adams reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival

There is a real interest at times in wrestling with faith and violence and the intersection of the two in Pilgrimage, director Brendan Muldowney's post-Crusades action film starring Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal, that is reminiscent of Scorsese's Silence. Unfortunately Muldowney's ultimately a bit too infatuated with the violence - in the squalor of grinding organs and bashing heads - at the near obliteration of anything concrete to say about faith. Of course what is faith but a question mark? Some spilled brains?

It's the 13th Century in Ireland and a band of not-so-merry monks are living along the remote coast protecting a most holy relic, and also doing some light gardening....

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Tribeca 2017: "Abundant Acreage Available"

Nathaniel R reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival

It's been 10 years since Amy Ryan broke through to "prestigious character actress" fame, whilst nabbing herself an Oscar nomination and critical hosannas for Gone Baby Gone (2017). In the years intervening, it's been fairly obvious that Hollywood didn't know what to do with her thereafter, often casting her in less than challenging roles as sympathetic wives (think Win Win or Bridge of Spies) or ex-wives (think Birdman). But she's finally no one's wife in the humble drama Abundant Acreage Available, and that lack of 'belonging to' is both writer/director Angus Maclachlan's (best known for the screenplay to the wonderful Junebug, 2005) and Ryan's own secret weapon, giving the movie its most appealing frictions...

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Tribeca 2017: Guillaume & Marion in "Rock'n Roll"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival

As the fifth movie I saw in a single day at the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend (a new personal record!) I couldn’t have chosen wiser – Guilluame Canet’s movie star satire Rock'n Roll is as broad and goofy and absurd as they come, and while it might overstay its welcome (I’d say no comedy should run over two hours but Toni Erdmann did recently prove that golden rule incorrect) it’s also a lively good-natured farce that had the audience half rolling in the aisles. 

Canet co-wrote and directed Rock'n Roll, and he stars as Guillaume Canet, famous French actor and director, partnered with and father to the child of Marion Cotillard, world-famous Oscar winning actress – the two actors (and a troupe of famous French faces that they enlist to star alongside them and fill out their world) all send up their own images, taking them to absurd (and man does it go there) extremes...

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