Women Who Kill (And The Women Who Love Them)

Team Experience is reporting from the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Women Who Kill.

Replace the hard gray rocks of a Provençal lake with the hard gray sidewalks of Park Slope Brooklyn and you'll find there's a lot in common between the gay men of 2013's Stranger by the Lake and the gay women of Women Who Kill, Ingrid Jungermann's droll black comedy screening today at Tribeca. Sure the lesbians are wearing a lot more clothes, but nature is nature, and who hasn't found themselves fetishizing sexy danger for the right mysterious someone? We want what we want, sanity be damned. (It doesn't hurt when maybe-crazy comes in the form of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night's sultry-eyed Sheila Vand either.)

Women Who Kill vibes on humor over heavy petting though, and the laughs are steady and smart and nigh on rollicking at times in Jungermann's script, and beneath her sharp straightforward direction - I probably recognized even more of myself in the foibles of these Brooklyn ladies, with their terror of swans and urine-stained grass, than I did their gender-flipped French counterparts. I'm just one serial-killer podcast and an urban rooftop garden away from a perfect storm of commiseration. Who isn't?

Grade: B+

Tribeca Drops First Half of Festival Program, Chocked Full of Potential Discoveries

Daniel Crooke here, salivating over today’s first wave of films from the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival’s line-up. While the Spotlight, Midnight, and Special Sections programs won’t drop until March 8, the US Narrative, International Narrative, and World Documentary Competitions, and Viewpoints showcase hit the internet today and there’s plenty to buzz about. Scanning the films, you’ll find an embarrassment of riches hiding in the programming, plot details, and cast lists. Here are some personal points of interest:

US Narrative Competition

Ingrid Jungermann’s webseries F to 7^th was an astutely, hysterically observed slice of queer life in New York, giving voice to a uniquely cutting female perspective in the process, so her feature debut Women Who Kill shoots straight to the top of the list. The Fixer sounds intriguing in a small-town-with-secrets kind way, James Franco as an “eccentric local” a little less so. Queens of charting the path from comfortable malaise to all-out soul-search, Amy Landecker and Melanie Lynskey – who, in particular, is quietly giving the best lead performance on television – pop up in Dreamland and Folk Hero & Funny Guy. Current faves Keith Stanfield (Short Term 12, Straight Outta Compton) and Dan Stevens (The Guest) will star in Live Cargo and The Ticket.

International Narrative Competition

It’s hard to ignore the promise of a collection of short films from the likes of Chilean shaggydog provocateur Sebastian Silva and actors Mia Wasikowska and Gael Garcia Bernal in Madly, sounding like an I Love You, anthology movie but if the city were Relentless. Argentine Cinema had the international stage last year with the raucous Wild Tales – although Lucretia Martel eternally has her own platform in my heart – so fingers crossed for another cross-hemispheric success with The Tenth Man (El Rey Del Once) and its culturally and generationally intersectional premise.

World Documentary Competition & Viewpoints

Documentary-wise, Betting On Zero positions Herbalife as a pyramid scheme, Do Not Resist exposes the military-industrial nature of America’s police culture, and LoveTrue boasts the wacko cred of (my Northeast Los Angeles neighbor) Flying Lotus on score and Shia LaBeouf as executive producer. Equals with Kristen Stewart and Nic Hoult premieres in the Viewpoints program, along with raunchy R-rated animation Nerdland (trend-chillin’ with Anomalisa and Annapurna’s Sausage Party) and the divisive British class flick High-Rise.

You can view the list of released Tribeca titles here – what catches your eye?