This year, the Tribeca Film Festival gave awards to pointed portraits of political engagement. These documentaries raise thoughtful and tangled issues about how the very personal becomes political. Point and Shoot A shy OCD-beset young guy, Matt VanDyke, left his mother’s Baltimore basement and his girlfriend for a North African-to-Middle Eastern odyssey, and plunged into […]
Directed by Alex Gibney Produced by Gibney and Jack Gulick Released by Kino Lorber US/UK/Nigeria/France. 119 min. Not Rated Finding Fela started out as the making-of the Tony-winning Broadway show Fela!, before journeying with the American production’s tour to superstar Fela Kuti’s home base in Lagos, Nigeria. With the discovery of rare performance outtakes and […]
Directed by Steve James Produced by Zak Piper, James and Garrett Basch Released by Magnolia Pictures USA. 118 min. Rated R Perhaps the most shocking thing about the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself is the revelation that Ebert became a full-time paid film critic at a major newspaper in the third largest city in the […]
Directed by Dan Krauss Produced by Krauss and Linda Davis Written by Kruass, Lawrence Lerew and Davis Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories USA. 79 min. Not rated As a result of the violence they witness, soldiers often walk a fine line between morality and sanity, a demarcation that’s been well fictionalized in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of […]
The Power of Art: Real or Fake Documentaries on artists are an annual presence at the Tribeca Film Festival, but the breadth of art this year is exceptional. Tomorrow We Disappear By the time directors Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber finally got around to finishing Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children (just before I […]
Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Rossato-Bennett Released by Bond 360 USA. 74 min. Not rated Just imagine the pitch: “It’s a documentary about geriatrics with advanced Alzheimer’s, many of whom have no family to visit them and are on the brink of death, listening to iPods for the first time.” No studio executive would […]
Directed by Jafar Panahi and Kambozia Partovi Edited, Written, and Produced by Panahi Released by Variance Films Farsi with English subtitles Iran. 106 min. Not Rated With Kambozia Partovi, Maryam Moghadam, Hadi Saeedi, and Panahi Closed Curtain starts out looking like an allegory in some future post-apocalyptic society. But the repression in Iran today emphatically […]
Directed by Joe Berlinger Produced by Berlinger and Caroline Suh Released by Magnolia Pictures USA. 107 min. Not Rated Have movies that glorify hit men getting away with murder inured us to the victims, their families, and the thwarted justice system? Let alone when real cases inspire notable films? Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) was […]
Produced & Directed by Riley Morton Released by First Run Features USA. 86 min. Not rated Evergreen: The Road to Legalization is an in-depth film documenting all of the difficulties and nuances activists faced on the road to passing I-502, a piece of legislation in Washington State legalizing small amounts of marijuana. It is a […]