[The Daily] Tribeca 2018

The seventeenth Tribeca Film Festival opens tonight in New York with Love, Gilda, Lisa D’Apolito’s portrait of beloved comic actress Gilda Radner, and screens around one hundred more features before wrapping on April 29. Throughout the festival’s run, I’ll be gathering reviews of note here. First up, though, a few recommendations culled from lists out there, and we might as well begin with a couple from Robert De Niro, who co-founded the festival in 2002 with Jane Rosenthal.

De Niro talks to Mekado Murphy in the New York Times about a handful of premieres, including Liz Garbus’s The Fourth Estate, a documentary about the NYT’s coverage of the first year of the Trump administration. “It’s a necessary film to see what people at the Times are doing to cover stories that seem to be changing every minute,” says De Niro.

Brian De Palma, Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Steven Bauer will be on hand for the world premiere of the new restoration of Scarface (1983). De Niro made his onscreen debut in De Palma’s The Wedding Party (made in 1963, though it wouldn’t be released until 1969) and then appeared in De Palma’s Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970). “Brian always got a kick out of whatever we tried as actors, whether it was improv or other things, he got great joy out of watching us. I remember when Al was thinking about directors for Scarface, telling him, ‘I hope you do it with De Palma.’”

Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Embeth Davidtz will discuss another anniversary restoration, Schindler’s List (1993). De Niro: “It’s resonant now because of what’s happening in this country.”

Ben Kenigsberg, also in the NYT, recommends the festival’s third restoration, In the Soup (1992)—image above—noting that “fans of 1990s indies won’t want to miss Alexandre Rockwell’s 1992 Sundance winner, restored from what is said to be the only archival print. A self-deluding filmmaker (Steve Buscemi) falls in with an eccentric, lovable crook (Seymour Cassel) who may finally be his ticket to artistic success.” Rockwell and Buscemi will be there, along with Jennifer Beals, Sam Rockwell, and cinematographer Phil Parmet. Kenigsberg has seen forty “new fiction features and documentaries and sampled about two dozen more,” and writes up seventeen he can recommend.

Rolling Stone’s David Fear and Jason Newman have drawn up a list of twenty recommendations. Here’s Fear on Diane:

Critic, programmer and cinephile extraordinaire Kent Jones drops his first narrative feature, a character study about a middle-aged woman (viva Mary Kay Place!) dealing with a drug-addicted son (Jake Lacy), a dying cousin, small-town drudgery and a life disappointed. It’s the sort of gritty, unfiltered portrait of quiet desperation that you associate with the margins of 1970s indie cinema—it actually feels like a lost film from the Me Decade—and Jones isn’t afraid to let his deep-cut influences (Cassavetes, Akerman, Bresson, Barbara Loden) show. Then he slowly edges the movie into more transcendental territory, and you suddenly realize he's got bigger ideas in mind. Every year, the fest manages to slip a tiny diamond-in-the-rough entry into the lineup. Here it is.

The team at IndieWire writes about eleven “Must-See” films, and here’s David Ehrlich on Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda:

One of the most influential, prolific, and flat-out enjoyable composers of the last thirty years, Ryuichi Sakamoto exploded onto the scene by writing unforgettable scores for films like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor, and his work has only grown increasingly instrumental (ha) to the movie world since. When Sakamoto was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, he decided to devote whatever time he had left to an album that could serve as his legacy. Lucky for us, he’s still alive and going strong. Luckier still, Stephen Nomura Schible was there to capture the recording process on camera, following Sakamoto as he muses about life, records ambient noise around the ruins of Fukushima, and reconsiders to the sounds that have reverberated through his life. The result is a portrait of an artist that’s nearly as powerful and necessary as the artist himself.

Writing for Variety, Gordon Cox has five recommendations for theater lovers, including Every Act of Life, Jeff Kaufman and Marcia Ross’s documentary portrait of Terrence McNally, “the veteran, out-and-proud playwright and four-time Tony winner behind Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ragtime, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and more. The biopic—which counts Audra McDonald, Christine Baranski, Angela Lansbury, Meryl Streep, and Bryan Cranston among those involved—touches on everything from McNally’s romance with Edward Albee to his alcoholism and the time Lauren Bacall chewed him out for spilling a drink on her.”

9 at 38 is Catherine Lee’s short documentary about violinist Hyungjoon Won’s dream of performing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with musicians from both North and South Korea—on the 38th parallel. Rowena Santos Aquino for VCinema: “Lee structures Won’s past and present experiences and aims in relation to this project in a smart and thoughtful manner that provokes both surprise and dismay due to the events that transpire. In the process, she shares a refreshingly different contemporary perspective of the North-South divide.”

Women and Hollywood has been sending out a list of questions to directors with films in the lineup, and so far, we read replies from Gabrielle Brady (Island of the Hungry Ghosts), Laura Bispuri (Daughter of Mine), Sarah Kerruish (General Magic), Keren Ben Rafael (Virgins), Madeleine Sackler (O.G.), Norah Shapiro (Time for Ilhan), Ioana Uricaru (Lemonade), and Stephanie Wang-Breal (Blowin’ Up).

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