Tribeca Film Festival 2019
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“Each Film Speaks with its Own Voice”: An Interview with Composer Nathan Halpern
It’s been quite a year for composer Nathan Halpern. He had four films at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival—the feature-length documentaries After Parkland and One Child Nation and the narrative features Goldie and Swallow—and while he hasn’t slacked in his new output, all four of these projects have gone on to impressive post-festival activity. One Child Nation (directed by Nanfu Wang, a previous collaborator of Halpern’s) premiered at Sundance in 2019, and was acquired by Amazon Studios for a theatrical run in August; it’s now streaming on Amazon Prime. And three of the films are hitting theaters right now: After Parkland (directed by Emily Taguchi and Jake […]
by Randy Astle on Feb 27, 2020 -
A Film on the Arrogance of Man: Josh Murphy on His Environmental Doc, Artifishal
“We are on a path to where eventually there will be no fish, and we will have spent billions of dollars to get to that point.” This dire warning is from one of the many experts in Artifishal: The Road to Extinction is Paved with Good Intentions, a new documentary from director Josh Murphy and Patagonia that opened on multiple platforms this past week. It premiered last spring at Tribeca, followed by screenings at Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride and the Seattle International Film Festival, near the heart of the film’s action. From there it’s moved into a series of 550 festival […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 8, 2019 -
Tribeca 2019 Critic’s Notebook: Coming(s) of Age
Blood and guts in high school is a theme that never loses its appeal to filmmakers, even as its universality—from Zero for Conduct to Heathers—demands greater risk and originality from filmmakers who, arguably more often than not, are recasting episodes from their own diaristic memory banks. This year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which wrapped up last week, served up a predictable share of films that fit into the coming-of-age category, yet the most notable of those efforts proved to be anything but cookie-cutter. The best film I saw at the festival, Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin, even felt like something brand […]
by Steve Dollar on May 13, 2019 -
Tribeca 2019 Critic’s Notebook: Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Rewind, 17 Blocks, All I Can Say
Now that every 10-year-old has a pocket-sized film studio and multiplex in their hands via the smartphone, and debates over the cinematic legitimacy of streaming platforms rage on, there’s a certain sweet nostalgia associated with dead formats of a less pixel-saturated age. VHS was perhaps the most physical—and vulnerable—of physical media: cheap plastic shells containing magnetic tape that could easily tangle in a faulty player. Yet, along with the camcorder, which likewise came into common use in the early 1980s, it has found a permanent niche in pop-culture consciousness that is, perhaps, greedy for a certain archival innocence—a throwback to […]
by Steve Dollar on May 7, 2019 -
Burning Cane Wins Three at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival; Scheme Birds Wins Best Documentary
Burning Cane, the Louisiana-set debut feature from freshman NYU film student Phillip Youmans, won three top prizes at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. At a ceremony last night at the Stella Artois Theatre at BMCC TPAC, Burning Cane scored the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, the Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature Award (to Youmans as well), and the Best Actor in a U.S. Narrative Feature Award, to the film’s Wendell Pierce. Haley Bennett, star of another well received film at the festival, Swallow, won Best Actress in a U.S. Narrative Feature, while Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 3, 2019 -
Five Questions for Director Kevin McMullin About His Tribeca-Premiering Teen Crime Drama, Low Tide
New Jersey-born Kevin McMullin, a shorts and commercial director who runs the NYC production outfit Boy and Star, makes his feature debut in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Narrative Competition with the location-rich teen crime drama Low Tide. Alan (Keean Johnson), Red (Alex Neustaedter), and Smitty (Daniel Zolghadri) spend their summer breaking into houses along the Jersey Shore, an enterprise that escalates from youthful petty crime into something much darker when one particularly valuable score — a bag of gold coins — is discovered. The gang is fractured apart, a division exacerbated by the presence of the local beauty, Mary (Kristine […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2019 -
Five Questions for Director Marshall Curry About His Tribeca Short, The Neighbor’s Window (and Cory Booker)
Oscar-nominated documentary director Marshall Curry — and a 2005 Filmmaker 25 New Face — makes his dramatic fiction debut at Tribeca with the short film, The Neighbor’s Window. Starring Maria Dizzia, Juliana Canfield and Greg Keller it employs the urban Rear Window concept in order to tell a delicate tale in which envy bleeds into empathy. Dizzia and Keller are a married couple suffering through the relationship doldrums of early parenthood when a young, sexually adventurous couple move in directly across the way. Drawing the blinds isn’t something the younger couple even deigns to do, and the voyeuristic thrills they […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2019 -
“I Saw the Film as a Mystery — To Try and Understand Someone Who Didn’t Want to be Understood”: Matt Wolf on His Doc, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
With Matt Wolf’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project opening today at the Metrograph in New York, we are reposting Scott Macaulay’s interview with Wolf prior to the film’s Tribeca premiere. Wolf will be doing a number of Q&As opening weekend with various moderators, including, tonight Lynn Tillman, as well as, this weekend, Charlotte Cook, Melissa Lyde, Sierra Pettengill, Collier Meyerson, Stuart Comer and Macaulay (the latter at the Saturday, 1:15 PM screening). From 1979, just before the launch of CNN, to 2012, when she passed away, Marion Stokes — an African-American Philadelphia woman, communist, public access television host, collector of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2019 -
29 Features, Shorts, VR Pieces, Talks and Immersive Theater Works to Check Out at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival
Tonight’s opening night is Roger Ross Williams’s HBO doc, The Apollo (held at The Apollo Theater, no less!), the centerpiece is a “final cut” screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (in glistening new visual and audio tech) and the closing night is a new Beatles-themed, alternate universe pic by Danny Boyle — the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival is here. As evidenced by the above selections, Tribeca brings a lot of firepower to its annual event, programming prowess that includes not just the big names but support for a range of work and creators, from immersive theater pioneers to emerging […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2019 -
Tribeca Film Festival Announces 2019 Feature Lineup
The Tribeca Film Festival has announced the feature lineup for this year’s edition, which runs this year from April 24 to May 5. The slate breaks down to 103 features: 52 are narrative, 51 documentaries. New to the festival are the Critics’ Week slate, a selection of five films chosen by NY-based film critics including K. Austin Collins, Bilge Ebiri, Eric Kohn and Alison Willmore, as well as the “This Used to Be New York” section (highlighting films about NYC’s past). Potential highlight among the US narrative slate include Gully, the feature debut by 2017 New Face of Film Nabil Elderkin and; Initials […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 5, 2019
