15th Tribeca Film Festival
New York, NY
April 13-24, 2016
tribecafilm.com
This
year’s Tribeca Film Festival again adroitly mixed new features and shorts with fistfuls
of documentaries, for which the festival is becoming increasingly known. There
was also a new wrinkle: TV programs, like the new multi-part documentary epic
about O.J. Simpson, O.J.: Made in America,
received showings on Tribeca’s big screens.
 |
| Elvis & Nixon |
Of
the features, Elvis & Nixon—the festival’s opening night film—was an
amusingly cockeyed imagining of the fabled meeting between Elvis Presley and President
Nixon in the Oval Office, with Presley railing against hippies and drugs and
Nixon, while doing the same, tossing some barely concealed acid at the King
himself. Kevin Spacey’s winning Nixon impersonation is equaled by Michael
Shannon’s Elvis, which shrewdly isn’t just another Elvis impression, but a
full-bodied (and funnier) characterization. Liza Johnson’s directing keeps this
one-joke movie from ever spinning off the tracks.
In The
Meddler, Susan Sarandon plays the most annoying mother ever, always
bothering her daughter even while they live on opposite sides of the country:
that understanding and love eventually win out is a distinct given, but that
doesn’t make Lorene Scafaria’s comedy any less authentic, especially with
necessary emotional grounding given by Sarandon—despite a wavering Brooklyn
accent—and the delightful Rose Byrne as her daughter.
 |
| Courted |
French
director Christian Vincent started auspiciously with 1990’s La Discrete, then floundered for awhile;
his latest, Courted—whose English title cleverly puns on the near-romance
between a conservative judge and a beguiling juror with whom he has a history—is
as enjoyably fluffy as his last, Haute
Cuisine, especially for pairing the incomparable Fabrice Luchini with one
of Denmark’s most accomplished leading ladies, Sidse Babett Knudsen.
This
year’s documentaries ran the gamut from the arms trade to sex offenders to the
ballet world to a last conversation with one New York’s great directors. By
Sidney Lumet is essentially one long discussion with Lumet that
director Nancy Biurski conducted before his 2011 death, concerning his early
days in television to his film work that included a string of ‘70s and ‘80s films
that took the pulse of his city (Serpico,
Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City) and even the nation (Network, Running on Empty). Throughout,
Lumet is smart, funny, personable and compulsively listenable, while Biurski
shows copious clips from his most—and least—celebrated films.
In Betting
on Zero, director Ted Braun documents more shady dealings on Wall
Street: the case of Herbalife, a company accused of being a pyramid scheme with
its investors being taken for a ride. The movie cleverly begins one way than
takes an unexpected turn, asking the question: is the company a fraud or not? Even
more heinous is what’s shown in Johan Grimonprez’s absorbing Shadow
World, a grim look at how the global arms trade has overtaken both governments
and the private sector when it comes to our current state of perpetual war.
The unbalanced
American justice system is targeted in two films, clear-eyed and restrained in
their venom. The Return is director Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie
Galloway’s study of the effects of California’s three strikes law, which threw
many (mainly black men) in jail for decades for as little as a bag of weed
because it was their third arrest. The law, which has since been overturned, has
affected families and individuals profoundly, as the directors humanely show. In
Untouchable,
the emotions embroiling incredibly stringent sex-offender laws passed in states
like Florida are brought to the fore, as director David Feige tactfully explores
all sides of an issue that is far more complex than it might appear at first
glance: for example, some experts think these laws are doing far less good than
they should be.
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