Tribeca Dispatch: “Checkpoint Zoo,” “Driver”

I often find observational documentaries the most fascinating, and several made their world premieres at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Below, I reviewed two documentaries that took vérité approaches or made extensive use of first-hand, on-the-ground footage, Checkpoint Zoo and DRIVER. You can also read my review of another terrific vérité doc that premiered at […]

Tribeca Review: “Satisfied”

If you were alive of a reasonable age between 2015 and 2016, you’ve heard of Hamilton. More likely than not, you, along with much of the rest of the world, were a little obsessed with it, Broadway fan or no. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop interpretation of the life of America’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander […]

Tribeca Review: “Following Harry”

When we meet Harry Belafonte at the start of Following Harry— Susanne Rostock’s documentary culled from footage from the final 12 years of his life— he’s well into his 80s, and wearing a gray hoodie emblazoned with the name “Trayvon.” It’s an image that Rostock doesn’t linger on, but it’s nevertheless striking: that this man, […]

Tribeca Review: “1-800-ON-HER-OWN”

It’s difficult to condense a whole life into one feature-length film. Dana Flor’s 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, a documentary centering on 90s folk music icon Ani DiFranco, wisely chooses to focus primarily on just one segment of her subject’s very full life and career. The issue, however, is that Flor concentrates on arguably the most banal period of […]

Tribeca Review: “New Wave”

When Elizabeth Ai set out to make her documentary New Wave, it was to strictly be a film about the music phenomenon that originated in Orange County, California in the 1980s. The city’s Little Saigon area saw a large influx of Vietnamese immigrants relocating due to the Vietnam War, and the trend capitalized on that […]

Tribeca Review: “Pirópolis”

It begins with an image of staggering horror and beauty: flames and smoke engulfing a line of trees, the sounds of crackling and popping overtaking the natural landscape, signifying its rapid destruction. Director Nicolás Molina lingers on this shot for quite some time before cutting to a closer up look at the trees, then pulling […]

Tribeca Review: “Black Table”

1994 saw the highest number of Black students enrolled in Yale in the university’s history. But that statistic didn’t necessarily indicate increased inclusivity on campus. Enrollment among Black students at Yale peaked in 1997. Many of those Black students chose to band together, sitting at a table in the school’s lavish grand hall that was […]

Tribeca Review: “Missing From Fire Trail Road”

At the end of 2020, Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, a resident of the Tulalip Indian reservation outside Seattle, vanished in plain sight. Her husband, a white man with whom she had reportedly been experiencing some marital issues, reported her disappearance to the authorities and then washed his hands of the matter. Officially, the investigation is at […]

Tribeca Review: “Linda Perry: Let It Die Here”

Most people likely know Linda Perry as the lead singer and songwriter of 4 Non Blondes, the San Francisco-based rock band who had a smash hit single with the song “What’s Up?” from 1992’s “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!”— their first and only album. But Perry’s career has been anything but a one-hit wonder. After 4 […]

Review: “Flipside”

Chris Wilcha begins his documentary Flipside at an art gallery, where photographer Herman Leonard is exhibiting some of his work. Leonard is most well-known for his stunning photographs of some of the greatest jazz musicians who ever lived, and gives the viewer a mini tour of images of Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and others. […]