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 […]

Review: “Blackberry”

Ask most people now, and they probably would consider the BlackBerry a bit of a joke. One of the first iterations of the smartphone, the rapid decline of the company paired with the design of the phone itself—rather clunky, with a keyboard that takes up half of its surface, compared with the sleek all-touchscreen iPhone—would […]

Review: “Passion” (2008)

When friends gather at a restaurant—a glimpse at the sign above the entrance, El Secreto, not-so-subtly foreshadowing what’s about to occur inside— to celebrate Kaho’s (Aoba Kawai) birthday, the jovial gathering spirals into an evening fraught with questions and confusion when Kaho and her boyfriend Tomoya (Ryuta Okamoto) make an announcement that ought to have […]

Review: “The Taking”

John Ford. John Wayne. Cowboys and six-shooters, Native Americans and horses and epic battles to survive not only squabbles with other humans, but the unforgiving landscape they’ve settled in, one made of both towering beauty and abject terror. These elements, and dilemmas physical, moral, and spiritual, have come to define the western film genre. Just […]