Review: “L’immensità”

In Emanuele Crialese’s L’immensità, Andrew (Luana Giuliani) is a 12-year-old boy wresting with his gender identity. Born Adriana, his parents Felice (frequent Crialese collaborator Vincenzo Amato) and Clara (Penélope Cruz) still call him by that name, and address him as “young lady.” They aren’t exactly hostile, and yet, their inability to understand or, in the […]

Tribeca Review: “Öte”

“Wait—you’re here alone?” That’s a question I’ve received a lot over the years, the almost guaranteed first reaction of strangers when I strike up a conversation with them in a city that isn’t my own. I’ve mostly gotten used to it, first from traveling for work, and then from traveling on my own for pleasure. […]

Tribeca Review: “Cinnamon”

Writer/director Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr.’s stylish debut feature film Cinnamon is described as recalling 70s Blaxploitation films. Naturally, this requires some unpacking of that subgenre, whose name was coined literally from a portmanteau of the words “black” and “exploitation.” As much as Blaxploitation movies—whose stories usually revolved around crime and graphic violence—centered around empowering Black […]

Tribeca Review: “Smoking Tigers”

When we first meet 16-year-old Hayoung (Ji-Young Yoo), she’s wandering around the neatly-appointed furnishings of a clearly upper-class home. She finds the bathroom, sits in the bathtub, stretches out. But as much as she seems at ease with making herself at home here, this house isn’t hers. As we glean from the next scene, in […]

Tribeca Review: “Hey Viktor!”

Chris Eyre’s 1998 coming-of-age road trip movie Smoke Signals is more than just a beloved indie comedy and favorite on the film festival circuit. Considered the first Native American directed, written, produced, and acted movie to reach the mainstream not only in the United States but also abroad, it marked a watershed moment in representation […]

Tribeca Review: “The Future”

In writer and director Noam Kaplan’s The Future, the world—or at least, the city of Jerusalem—is recognizable, yet rendered ever so slightly, ever so unsettlingly, off-kilter. Israel is on the cusp of launching a manned mission to the moon. Upbeat commercials advertise new tech of the bleakest sort: a program that uses an algorithm to […]

Tribeca Review: “Break the Game”

Narcissa Wright is more than just an avid gamer. You could say that video games are her life. She’s set speed run records in many games (that’s when you beat a game as fast as possible in one go), competing in competitions and winning awards. Thousands of followers watch her Twitch streams. But as supportive […]

Tribeca Review: “Chasing Chasing Amy”

In 1994, Kevin Smith’s black-and-white, low-budget comedy Clerks took the indie film world by storm, first at its Sundance premiere (which it entered with virtually no buzz), then critics and audiences, cracking many end-of-the-year lists. Smith’s 1995 follow-up Mallrats was less well-received. But it’s Smith’s third film set in the same universe, the 1997 romantic […]

Tribeca Review: “Breaking the News”

In early 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as President, and the Women’s March on Washington served as a scream for many of America’s frustrated and scared inhabitants. Amidst the fear and uncertainty, journalist Emily Ramshaw saw a possibility. She left her steady job with the Texas Tribune along with colleague Amanda Zamora and started […]

Review: “Twilight” (1990)

Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér’s 1990 noir Twilight (Szürkület), loosely based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novel The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, is a film that’s been so rarely seen, there isn’t even an existing Wikipedia article about it, and the press release announcing its new 4K restoration wasted no time drawing a comparison to […]