The tenth annual Tribeca Film Festival came to a close last night in New York, marking the end of a week-and-a-half whirlwind of red carpet premieres, concerts, neighborhood events, and even a film or two… or 93. As the festival kicked off, we plucked the ten most-buzzed titles from the Tribeca menu, and many of them lived up to the hype (Everything Must Go, Catching Hell, Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, The Swell Season). But often, the best films at Tribeca are the ones you’ve never heard of — the quiet indies, the impassioned documentaries, and so on. After the jump, we’ll take a look at ten more Tribeca must-sees.
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Last night’s screening of the Cameron Crowe documentary The Union (and the post-film concert by its subject, Elton John) marked the kick-off of the tenth annual Tribeca Film Festival — a notable milestone, though it still makes Tribeca a bit of a rookie compared to, say, Cannes or Sundance or the New York Film Festival. Perhaps as a consequence of its youth, Tribeca has yet to establish the kind of definitive brand that some of those festivals have. But the grab-bag quality of its annual slate is much of its charm; star vehicles, documentaries, and micro-budgeted world cinema all share the Tribeca screens, and often the lesser-known films benefit from the spotlight of their better-known brothers. After the jump, we’ll take a look at ten of the most-buzzed titles in the 2011 line-up.
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1. Ricky Gervais and Will Arnett will be among the guest stars in The Office‘s season finale. Should we take this as a sign of a David Brent takeover? [via EW]
2. The latest high profile firing from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark: veteran choreographer Daniel Ezralow, who is being replaced by Chase Brock, a little known dancer from Brooklyn. [via NYP]
3. Tommy Lee is hosting a new reality series for SyFy in which he’ll “attempt to uncover various rituals, symbols, and other mysteries of secret societies.” Says Lee: “This is the first show that I’ve been a part of that will blow our minds and reveal things that will explain almost all our questions.”
4. Unless Paramount can find a co-financier, Brad Pitt’s super expensive zombie apocalypse movie World War Z (which is based on the popular Max Brooks book of the same name), may be dead. [via Vulture]
5. The Tribeca Film Festival is taking its digital strategy to the next level by introducing the Tribeca (Online) Film Festival this year; you’ll be able to reserve free tickets for any of the six feature films that will be offered online beginning on April 12th if you’re an American Express card member, and April 18th if you’re not. [via Mashable]
Bonus link: Watch the video that proves Rebecca Black ripped off Conan O’Brien
The Tribeca Film Festival kicked off yesterday with the premiere of the fourth and supposedly final Shrek movie. But you don’t care about that. You want to hear about the films that you’ll actually want to see. With nearly 200 of them screening, there is a dizzying array of choices sure to send any serious movie buff into an existential panic. It would be impossible to catch everything, but we’ve sussed out the five flicks you definitely don’t want to miss. Check them out and watch accompanying trailers after the jump.
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While we won’t be posting any of the photos from Ashley Dupre’s spread in the May issue of Playboy here (spoiler alert: boobs!), in related news, you can now check out a clip from Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney‘s upcoming documentary on the rise and fall of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. The untitled film is still in production and will be screened as a work-in-progress at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month. It’s a collaboration with Fortune editor-at-large Peter Elkind, whose book on Spitzer, Rough Justice
, hits shelves today.
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Editor’s note: This review originally ran during the Tribeca Film Festival. We’re re-posting it because the film opens in theaters nationwide today.
Moon is a collage of sci-fi cinema whose cut and paste pieces will be familiar even to those not comfortable dropping terms like Replicant or Sleestack into polite conversation. That’s not to say it lacks originality — there’s a star-cluster of clever twists and style — but Moon manages to find that magical middle ground where both zealots of the genre and newbies will feel satisfied to spend 90 minutes on board. With only one actor. Much of this has to do with Sam Rockwell, and the simple concept that gets pulled in a number of contortions that are easy to follow yet avoid the soap-opera-in-space-syndrome that plagues too many frames of contemporary sci-fi celluloid. Read More »
Hipster porn star Sasha Grey was barely a year old when director Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape came out; now she’s the unlikely star of his latest film, a low-budget digital project called The Girlfriend Experience. The fragmented story follows Chelsea (Grey), a high-priced call girl who provides companionship and conversation to Manhattan bigwigs in the weeks leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Surrounded by various businessmen and clients concerned with the collapse of U.S. economy, Chelsea keeps her sanity by making $2,000 an hour and living with an understanding boyfriend. Of note: This film doesn’t include a single sex scene. Read More »
Statesmen of note, like celebrities, elicit heartfelt responses — after all, both happen to be chosen representatives of the common folk, endorsed through ballot and ticket. So it came as no surprise that Rudy Giuliani’s brief appearance in Barry Levinson‘s epistemological film essay, PoliWood, drew an auditorium’s worth of gusty whistling and hissing, as if his actual person was present. Indeed, the tony world premiere at Tribeca of Levinson’s wry labor of love proved to be a festive and surprisingly participatory occasion, especially when the satiric director joined cast members Ellen Burstyn, Josh Lucas, Matthew Modine, Tim Daly, Wendie Malick, and Frank Luntz for a post-screening panel that produced a dicey comment: “Opinions are like belly buttons, everybody’s got one. Except Rush Limbaugh.” Read More »
Now that the broken sprocket holes have been swept off the projection room floors, and New York’s Village VII can go back to being a mediocre theater full of bloated summer blockbusters, let’s take a look at some of the cinematic highlights from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, shall we? While there wasn’t any of the Spider-Man 3 glamor or United 93 controversies, of recent years, there were enough quality films to keep our eyes from crusting over. After the jump, a list (in no particular order) of a few favorites that we hope will be coming to a theatre near you some time soon. Read More »
