Tribeca Film Festival
-
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 -
Don Hahn Talks Howard Ashman, Musical Animation, and his Documentary Howard
For a few brief shining years Howard Ashman was one of the most influential filmmakers in Hollywood. With the composer Alan Menken he had already created an Off-Broadway hit with Little Shop of Horrors, and, at Walt Disney Animation Studios in the late 1980s, he was a pivotal force in creating The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin—films that galvanized an industry-wide animation renaissance—as not just a lyricist but a producer, writer, and director. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, however, while the latter two of these films were still in production: Beauty and the Beast was dedicated “to our friend Howard, who […]
by Randy Astle on Jul 23, 2018 -
Tribeca Film Festival 2018: Ghostbox Cowboy, The Great Pretender and Diane
Nothing else I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival was as vividly out of its mind as the improbable sight of actor Robert Longstreet roaring across the neon-lit night in Shenzhen, China, rendered absurd in the Toni Erdmann-like drag of a white wig and dental prosthetics. The busy Texas character actor is part of the eccentric circus called Ghostbox Cowboy, which takes a satirical harpoon to the American Dream, parading its deflated form before the funhouse mirror of 21st century China. The writer-director-cinematographer John Maringouin (Big River Man) lathers the frame in a visual texture that captures the psychic […]
by Steve Dollar on May 7, 2018 -
Tribeca 2017: Erik Nelson on A Gray State
Originating as a concept trailer tapping into an increasingly burgeoning pocket of anti-police-state paranoia, David Crowley’s A Gray State was a film that warned of big government (FEMA = bad) taking over its innocent citizens to enslave and execute them. Like The Purge but with more guillotines and public massacres, Crowley’s footage depicted a low-budget world of state-led slaughter in the streets taking place to control those it sought to protect. A rebellion would be imminent, the story implies, and its tagline, “by consent or conquest,” sounds as much like generic action movie marketing as it does a patriotic call-to-arms. To doubters, the film would […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 28, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Drew Xanthopoulos on The Sensitives
There’s a certain feeling of disappointment when you knowingly choose to keep your cell phone, doubling as your alarm clock, near your face when settling in for an evening’s sleep. Having been warned of radiofrequency waves’ ability to cause cancer, keeping an electronic device that close to your brain for hours on end is not, we’re told, a wise decision to make. There are so many electric and synthetic materials in today’s everyday devices that to avoid them all would be to effectively remove yourself from modern society. You accept the potentially harmful results in order to live and work […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 28, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017 Critic’s Notebook: Performance Anxiety
Ever searching for an identity, the Tribeca Film Festival returned — for a 16th time last week — to Midtown, the Upper West Side, Chelsea and, yes, the neighborhood for which it’s named. These days the festival never opens with a genuinely great (and thematically appropriate) film like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 or a goofy overstuffed blockbuster like J.J. Abrams’s Mission Impossible III, but usually with a low-key doc centered on iconic New York stuff: comedy (Bao Nguyen’s 2015 SNL doc opener Live from New York!), fashion (Andrew Rossi’s The First Monday in May, which opened last year’s edition) and music — the Nas doc which […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 24, 2017 -
The Best VR of 2016: Arnaud Colinart and Amaury La Burthe on Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness
This year’s DOK Neuland, DOK Leipzig’s interactive component (housed in what resembled an intergalactic pop-up tent in the beautiful, wide open Markt) allowed me a second chance to experience what will surely go down as the best work of virtual reality seen widely in 2016. Fortuitously, I’d been able to catch Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness — the accolade garnering (Storyscapes Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest) VR companion piece to Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s much heralded documentary — at the charming Savannah Film Festival’s VR Showcase just the week before. […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 26, 2016 -
Five Questions for Burn Country Director Ian Olds
Every city has a learning curve. In Burn Country, opening today from Samuel Goldwyn, an exiled Afghan writer (Dominic Rains) arrives in rural California eager to immerse himself in the culture and customs of an American town. He befriends an unbalanced local (James Franco) in his search to “get to the source of things,” as he describes it, but the outsider soon becomes confronted by a culture he can’t quite comprehend. Burn Country marks Ian Olds’s first foray into fiction filmmaking after a pair of documentaries shot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Below, Olds speaks about the film’s origins, the Northern California landscape and his prior […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 9, 2016 -
Watch: Francis Ford Coppola on “Live Cinema” and His Career at Tribeca
One of the highlights of this year’s on-stage conversations at the Tribeca Film Festival was this sit-down between Francis Ford Coppola and his unlikely interrogator Jay McInerney. For years now, Coppola has been kicking around the concept of a “live cinema,” which is tricky to define, but he gets down to brass tacks in this conversation, which lasts just under an hour.
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 27, 2016
