Tribeca 2021: "Werewolves Within" is a Full Moon of Fun

by Jason Adams

The alchemy of the Horror-Comedy is a notoriously tricky mix -- add too many snips and snails and nobody's laughing; too much sugar and spice and you can make a person's face being torn off smell like a bouquet of roses. Neither of those extremes are necessarily bad -- I like roses! -- but you want to somehow straddle both extremes at once, goosing the gore-hounds while tickling the easily-terrified. Basically you're asking a damn lot of yourself and your audience, but when the routine really lands it'll be 10s from every judge, and Werewolves Within, Josh Ruben's new horror-comedy (based on the VR game) that just premiered at Tribeca this week, lands... well 9s. Let's say 9s.

Werewolves stars Veep's Sam Richardson (who somehow mixes cheerfulness with a deadpan dullness that always delights) as Forest Ranger Finn...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: Tribeca '21 — 'Stateless' and other racial justice docs

By Glenn Dunks

The idea of statelessness is sadly a timeless one. In the last year alone there have has been Michèle Stephenson’s documentary Stateless (Apátrida) about Dominican-born Haitians, and the Australian refugee drama of the same name (yes, the one with Cate Blanchett as a cult leader). Plus you only need to turn read the news about Palestine or Syria or too many other places on this Earth to see it and it can often feel like there is nothing that can be done. Is it statelessness or hopelessness?

In the commanding Stateless, director and producer Stephenson—whose most noted film to date is 2013’s Emmy-nominated and Sundance-winning American Promise—ventures into the politically fraught island territory of Hispaniola. It is the home of both the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and the Canadian filmmaker of Haitian-Panamanian descent (who resides in the United States) has made a really quite remarkable work that is eye-opening for both its story as well as its rich visuals.

Click to read more ...

Tribeca 2021: "The Justice of Bunny King" review

by Jason Adams

I know from untold years of movie-watching experience that it's nowhere near as simple as "just turn the camera on and point it at an incredibly gifted actor (or two)" to end up with a great film worth watching. There have been too many painful yet well-cast examples to the contrary to count. But it's hard to feel that argument in all of my heart in the wake of watching Essie Davis and Thomasin McKenzie in The Justice of Bunny King, first-time filmmaker Gaysorn Thavat's powerhouse drama that's just premiered at Tribeca. These two actors, especially Davis, really seem at this point unstoppable. They just have faces you want to stare at, surroundings be damned.

That's not to say that Bunny King lets them down... Thavat's proves to be an instinctively gifted storyteller, foremost knowing the value in those faces and performances...

Click to read more ...

Tribeca: "Italian Studies" review

by Jason Adams

About a year after I first moved to New York a friend pulled me aside at a party to tell me two secrets about a mutual acquaintance of ours. The first secret was that this mutual was secretly fabulously wealthy, which one never would have guessed from the way she presented herself -- after twenty years of living in NYC I've come across this type often enough that it doesn't seem novel anymore, but it surprised me then. But it was the second secret that has really stuck with me all these years -- this friend would occasionally take a week off from her life, check into a high-scale hotel uptown, and pretend to be a different person. She told stories of romances and adventures in disguise -- a dalliance outside of one's daily existence; a vacation from one's literal self.

The second secret obviously couldn't exist without the first one -- only a rich person would be able to do such a thing -- but it struck me then and now as the most genuine benefit of wealth I'd ever heard. Rolexes are pretty, but the ability to actually escape, to slough off your worries and cares and just live somebody else's life for a collection of minute sounds priceless. I thought of those secrets watching Adam Leon's meditative new film Italian Studies at Tribeca this week, which stars the ever-riveting Vanessa Kirby...

Click to read more ...

Tribeca 2021: This "Poser" Sneaks Up on You

by Jason Adams

It is said that our 20s are spent trying to figure out who we are, accumulating likes and dislikes, testing out identities like stage costumes for some great reveal, to be determined. You fake it until you make it, the "it" being some semblance of a self. It's a precarious and unsettling time for a lot of people, and Ori Segev and Noah Dixon's film Poser, screening at Tribeca, does a fine job actualizing on-screen that amorphous state of flirting with emptiness, giving us a slow-burn Single White Female for the 21st century in the process...

Click to read more ...