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 […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Daughters,” “Ibelin,” “Agent of Happiness”

For my final dispatch from this year’s True/False Film Festival, I’m highlight three movies that had their world premieres at Sundance at the start of the year. They are also all, coincidentally, highly emotional works, accomplishing everything from memorializing a life to examining what makes people happy to highlighting the need for systemic change in […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Allo la France,” “A Band of Dreamers and a Judge,” “sr”

This collection of capsule reviews from the 2024 True/False Film Festival is all about quests: movies in which a filmmaker goes on a road trip to locate her country’s last remaining phone booths (Allo la France), in which stories involving giraffes across human history are gathered from virtually every corner of the world (sr), and […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Obsolete,” “Boyz,” “Alien Island”

In this dispatch from the 2024 True/False Film Festival, I’m looking at two observational films that center around people at very different points in their lives. Sylvain Cruiziat’s Boyz depicts a trio of zoomer friends coming face-to-face with their vulnerabilities at a transitional moment in their lives, while Sumira Roy’s Obsolete looks at an elderly […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Three Promises,” “A Photographic Memory,” “Background”

Quite a few films that screened at the 2024 True/False Film Festival dealt with memory, using photos and videos of the past to create a dialogue with the present. The three films I’ve reviewed below all take this approach in a broad sense, but use it to different ends: to learn about a mother her […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “As the Tide Comes In,” “The Other Profile,” “Flying Lessons”

This theme of this year’s True/False Film Festival was “the human paradox”, and while such complicated questions as what it means to be human and live a fulfilling life, often in a world where the odds are stacked against you, was evident across all the film’s programmed at the annual non-fiction festival, the immense variety […]