The Playlist

Tribeca Review: 'Whole Lotta Sole' Is An Insufferable Comic Take On The British Gangster Movie

By Drew Taylor
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April 27, 2012 9:04 AM
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1 Comment

Festivals

The title of "Whole Lotta Sole" is the kind of gratingly obnoxious flourish that makes you hate the movie immediately. First of all it sits in your mouth like a blob of half-chewed gummy bears; secondly, it sounds like a direct-to-video independent movie produced in the mid-90s that the Weinsteins picked up on a whim; and thirdly its implied double meaning – it's the name of a fish market in the film but its phonetic weight means something too ("whole lot of soul") – is meant to deepen the movie but instead leaves you even more irritated. The movie is pretty much exactly like that – it tries to sugarcoat the British gangster movie (and we're using the "British" term pretty broadly; it's set in Belfast) and leaves you totally annoyed and unsatisfied.

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Tribeca Review: 'Supporting Characters' Is A Middling Movie, But A Decent Would-Be Pilot Episode For A Show We Might Watch

By Gabe Toro
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April 26, 2012 8:05 PM
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0 Comments

Reviews

What fascinates about “Supporting Characters,” the new relationship comedy premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, is that it’s greatest strength also registers as its most notable weakness. This decidedly Noo Yawk tale of an editing team in New York City and their satellite friends wouldn’t be at home as an extended pilot on IFC, with these two best friend leads getting into all sorts of middle-aged male troubles. It’s good, and bad, just like TV.

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Tribeca Review: 'Graceland' Mashes Together Suspense Thriller With Sobering Child Trafficking Drama, With Mixed Results

By Gabe Toro
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April 26, 2012 7:35 PM
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0 Comments

Reviews

Mild-mannered husband and father Marlon Villar is just having one of those days. The boss is on his case. His wife is being needy. His daughter is acting up. The cops are bugging him. “Graceland” begins as a compendium of what some adults would call a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Wah wah.

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Tribeca Review: 'Beyond The Hill' A Slow Burn Without The Burn

By Christopher Bell
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April 26, 2012 7:02 PM
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Reviews

Initially a proficient micro-budget character study with promises of suspense, "Beyond The Hill" squanders its tension by hitting repetitive notes and devolving into a heavy-handed parable. Emin Alper's little bag of tricks can't sustain an entire film and no amount of beautifully-photographed landscapes make up for the fact that movie is essentially a slow-burn without the burn.

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Tribeca Review: 'Deadfall' Starring Eric Bana & Olivia Wilde Is Trapped In A Blizzard of Coincidence & Two-Dimensional Characters

By Drew Taylor
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April 26, 2012 6:17 PM
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4 Comments

Festivals

"Deadfall" starts off strong enough – three criminals, led by Addison (Eric Bana) and his sexy sister Liza (Olivia Wilde) speed away from some unspecified job (it's later revealed to be a casino heist). It's icy out and their driver (the only black character in the whole movie) overcompensates, avoiding a deer, which sends their car cart wheeling over a snowy embankment. As Addison and Liza climb out of the wrecked car they notice their very-dead driver, his head through the windshield. "He should have been wearing his safety belt," Bana grumbles, dripping a syrupy Southern accent on top of his natural Australian drawl. It's a perfect way to begin the movie – darkly comic, oddly thrilling, weirdly sexual (there's definitely an incestuous vibe between the siblings) – but these opening moments are probably the strongest in the movie's 94 minute running time.

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Tribeca: David Riker & Abbie Cornish Discuss Immigration Tale 'The Girl'

By John Lichman
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April 26, 2012 3:45 PM
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1 Comment

Features

Known for his neo-realist film about the plight of Latin American immigrants living in New York City, "La Ciudad," indie writer/director David Riker has spent the better part of 14 years evolving story of his latest feature, "The Girl" which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week. In the minimalist drama, Abbie Cornish plays Ashley, a minimum wage earner working in a podunk South Texas chain store, who is determined to get her son back; taken by child services after a drunken mistake. She finds out her wandering, absentee father (Will Patton) is on a self-proclaimed "lucky streak" which turns out to mean he's using his truck driving job to sneak Mexican immigrants into the country. When she tries her hand at it out of desperation, it goes terribly wrong --except she now has to deal with Rosa (Maritza Santiago Hernandez), a little girl that forces her to help find her mother and deal with her actions.

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Tribeca Review: 'As Luck Would Have It' Is The Jewel Of The Fest

By Gabe Toro
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April 26, 2012 2:02 PM
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3 Comments

Reviews

Alex de la Iglesia’s “As Luck Would Have It” features, in supporting roles, Salma Hayek and Carolina Bang, two of the most ravishing and talented Spanish language actresses to ever grace the screen. Most viewers are well aware of Ms. Hayek, who has aged gracefully into Hollywood’s demeaning mother-ghetto for actresses over the age of 35. Few know of Ms. Bang, who was the centerpiece of de la Iglesia’s last film, the criminally-insane “The Last Circus.” Both command the screen with old school Hollywood glamour and mature sexuality, and yet neither manages to obscure the machinations of de la Iglesia’s sharp media satire. This, as Queen once sang long ago, is a kind of magic.

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Tribeca Review: Troubling Doc 'Sexy Baby' Looks At The Indoctrination Of Women Into A Porn-Centric World

By Gabe Toro
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April 25, 2012 6:32 PM
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8 Comments

Reviews

“Sexy Baby,” a new documentary premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, is problematic from it’s early, explicit pornographic sequences to its bewildering final shot close-up of an actual newborn baby. Ostensibly, the narrator-less film uses the stories of three separate white girls to illustrate the indoctrination of female objectification and pornography at a young age, though their subject seems awfully broad, and their net entirely too small.

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Review: 'Keep The Lights On' A Moving & Engrossing Chronicle Of Two Men In Love

By Simon Abrams
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April 25, 2012 6:03 PM
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0 Comments

Reviews

With "Keep the Lights On," co-writer/director Ira Sachs has made a triumphant return to Sundance. His latest drama is a beautiful exploration of a relationship’s progression from start to finish. With great tact and depth of feeling, Sachs shows us that the most remarkable thing about any relationship is not the beginning or end but rather the maintenance of what could only unfairly be called a dysfunctional couple. Unlike Sachs’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning "Forty Shades of Blue," which focuses on a singular moment in a marriage’s disintegration, "Keep the Lights On" follows a couple as they struggle to stay together.

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Tribeca Review: 'Hysteria' Is The Vibrator Comedy Movie You Can Watch With Your Mom

By Kevin Jagernauth
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April 25, 2012 4:01 PM
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0 Comments

News

It turns out that all Sabina Spielrein needed to get over her hysteria was not Freud or Jung or the talking cure, but just a really good fingering. Indeed, the course of sexuality and/or psychoanalysis might have been irrevocably altered had Sabina taken a trip to London to visit Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), in "Hysteria," a "based on true events" comedy about the invention of the vibrator. But like any bad lover, the film is heavy on foreplay but when it finally takes its pants off, the resulting encounter is less than satisfying.

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