The sprawling Tribeca Film Festival seems to get pared down each year, to the point where 100 or so features actually seems manageable. With so many films being shown, and of such disparate quality, one's experience of the fest is completely dependent upon what choices one makes, often with limited information.
Or maybe not. Anyone who saw more than a handful of movies at Tribeca this year probably had a similar experience to mine, which is to say that like the festival itself, which is not limited to the neighborhood it's named for, but includes screenings in the East Village and Chelsea, the quality of the films was all over the map.
One can usually count on the festival to premiere some outstanding documentaries. The highlights this year included two scathing indictments of the Obama administration's post-9/11 overreach. Kate Davis and David Heilbroner's The Newburgh Sting examines an FBI operation, targeting the Muslim community in a depressed upstate New York town, and led by a shady informant with little real oversight, which used a lot of government resources to convince four desperate and poorly educated men to participate in a make-believe bombing of a Jewish center in a wealthy nearby town. James Spione's Silenced, meanwhile, looks at the fate of three whistleblowers prosecuted by the Obama administration for following their consciences and going public with information about governmental abuse of power after the chain of command failed them. Both of these documentaries are smart, involving, and wholly convincing. Doc masters Jessica Yu and Marshall Curry came through again as well, with thematically trickier films that were sharp and cinematic. Curry's Point and Shoot, about a young, sheltered American adventurer in Libya, was compelling in its exploration of the millennial's undying need for self-documentation, while Yu's powerful, thought-provoking Misconception, about population control, was perhaps the best of the festival.
The doc selection faltered with A Brony Tale. While a relatively lighthearted, well-made doc like An Honest Liar, about magician/psychic debunker The Amazing Randi, is always welcome, A Brony Tale, like last year's entry Lil Bub & Friendz, provides little insight into the phenomenon it purports to examine, and seems to exist only to capitalize on a current meme.
Narrative features at Tribeca are always a dicier proposition. The tonal breadth of the fest leads to such misfires as, well, nearly every comedy they showed. Movies like the sentimental bro-ish The Bachelor Weekend, the unfocused, silly, and bro-ish Intramural, and the overly familiar and unconvincing female bromance Life Partners all featured name actors and solid production values, but didn't really feel like festival films. Megan Griffiths' Lucky Them, on the other hand, with its unvarnished woman lead (Toni Collette), indie quirk, and portentous A-list cameo, did feel like a festival film, just not a particularly good one. Perhaps most disappointing was Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, which features a typically complex and wonderful performance from Elisabeth Moss, but increasingly floundered the deeper it tried to go into its superficially intriguing but unsustainable premise.
One of the better romantic comedies of the festival was still a bit of a disappointment, coming as it did from the screenwriter of 2005's wonderfully original Junebug. Angus MacLachlan's Goodbye to All That, starring the talented Paul Schneider, was still kind of unique in taking a more realistic and gently critical look at the kind of unrepentant man-child on display in so many romantic comedies these days.
The biggest disappointment, drama division, was probably documentarian Amy Berg's narrative debut, the crime drama Every Secret Thing, which featured a screenplay by the great Nicole Holofcener and some solid performances, but felt tonally incoherent. The other celebrity screenwriter of the festival, Joss Whedon, fared better with Brin Hill's ridiculously romantic but generally charming In Your Eyes. Another high profile feature, Kelly Reichardt's environmental terrorism thriller Night Moves, was predictably deliberate and gorgeous, but also surprisingly suspenseful and creepy.
There was a surfeit of coming-of-age dramas typical of film festival programming. Zero Motivation, about bored female Israeli soldiers stationed at a remote outpost, was enjoyably unpredictable and admirably uningratiating. Low budget indie Beneath the Harvest Sky, about teen best pals in a small farming community whose lives are going in different directions, was familiar, but lovely and authentic in its details. The Swedish drama Broken Hill Blues deals with similar plot points, but feels overly schematic in its unremitting bleakness. Sean Gullette's Traitors looked like it was going to be about an all-girl punk band in Tangier, a storyline which would seem to offer plenty enough drama on its own. Gullette turns it into a drug trafficking thriller, which is competently done, but less interesting. Still, the fierce lead performance by Chaimae Ben Acha and the Savages songs on the soundtrack kept it engaging. Starred Up, meanwhile, may be veteran filmmaker David Mackenzie's best work to date. It takes familiar prison drama elements and takes them in unexpected directions, and it features searing performances by Jack O'Connell as Eric, a violent, uncontrollable young prisoner and the great Ben Mendelsohn -- arguably the best actor working today -- as Eric's father, a career criminal whom the young man gets to know, for better and worse, in prison.
In sum, it was a typical Tribeca Film Festival, with some essential documentaries, and a few nice discoveries among the narrative films. Tribeca may never ascend to the ranks of the great international film festivals, but it has its place, even if you can't quite pinpoint it on the map.
Catch up on several of the films screened at Tribeca in the Festivals category of the AllMovie Blog.