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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Tribeca: Jon Hamm Gets a ‘Corner Office’

By Abe Friedtanzer

 

Offices in movies and television are typically represented in a stark and uninteresting way, where joy goes to die and monotony rules each boring day (even in comedies like The Office). That’s certainly the case in Corner Office, a Tribeca entry that casts Jon Hamm as Orson, a new employee who is intent on following a carefully-set schedule that ensures no time for shenanigans and nothing more than a five-minute break each hour for any sort of non-work activity. While Orson is dull and has no ability to read social cues, he too finds his time in the office draining, until he discovers a door to a large and old-fashioned office that no one else seems to know exists…

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Doc Corner: Tribeca '21 — 'Socks on Fire' and 'North by Current' explore queerness in rural America

By Glenn Dunks

It’s thankfully no longer all that rare to see stories of queer people in rural settings. Especially in documentary. But that doesn’t make it any less special to see their stories—once so often relegated to traumatic narratives centering violence—told by queer filmmakers. Two films in particular at the recently wrapped Tribeca Film Festival examined the changing dynamics of (some) American small-town life. Both take elements of memoir and even non-traditional storytelling to create unique films that make strong arguments for the sheer human decency that many in minority communities desire.

While Bo McGuire’s Socks on Fire and Angelo Madsen Minax’s North by Current tell stories that confront the still very tangible realities of being LGBTQ+ outside of the more accepting big cities, they do so with artistic flair and the confidence that comes from generational change...

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Tribeca 2021: "The Novice" proves Isabelle Fuhrman to be anything but

by Jason Adams

You will most assuredly think of the crackling and dangerous worlds of Darren Aronofsky while watching The Novice, Lauren Hadaway's splintering character study by way of electrifying sports drama which finally gives Isabelle Fuhrman (so captivating in 2009's trash-thriller Orphan), a leading role to sink her now adult teeth into. The film, which just premiered at Tribeca and won several awards (including a deserved Best Actress for Fuhrman), is Black Swan sluicing the water, The Wrestler via regatta, Pi by port. It's a mad rashy rush to the finish line, red knuckled and raw with tension, and Fuhrman delivers a bloody true star-turn.

She plays Alex Dall, a college freshman who joins the crew team almost on a lark, and becomes single-mindedly obsessed with making it to the top boat on the varsity team, no matter the cost to her body and mind...

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Tribeca 2021: "Lorelei" review

by Jason Adams

It's always a thrill to see fantastically talented supporting actors who don't always get the leading roles they deserve actually get the leading roles they deserve. Director Sabrina Doyle's post-prison drama called Lorelei, which just debuted at Tribeca, gives us a two-fer on that front. It stars Pablo Schreiber (of Orange is the New Black and American Gods) and Jena Malone (of Donnie Darko and The Hunger Games and I could just keep going -- she's a long-time personal fave) as, respectively, the ex-convict looking to set his life straight and the girl he left behind. Lorelei starts out kinda obvious but ultimately ends up swerving, thanks to the sheer willpower of its leads and an openness by its filmmaker to follow an idiosyncratic path alongside them. It veers into far more interesting territory than you might first guess. 

Schreiber and Malone each have enormous screen presence, if not necessarily in the same ways...

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