‘American Pain’ Clip: “We’re The Disneyland Of Pain Clinics” [Tribeca Exclusive]

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThough it’s been consistently overshadowed by more dramatic breaking news stories, few issues have dealt 21st-century U.S. society such a crippling blow as the opioid crisis.

Manori Ravindran International EditorWhite Pine Pictures executive Andrew Munger has re-launched his outfit Ultramagnetic Productions with a slate of drama and documentary projects.Munger first operated Ultramagnetic Productions from 1997 to 2004, producing non-fiction projects including “Walmart Nation,” “Campaign: The Making of a Candidate,” “Xanadu: In Search of Domestic Perfection” and “Make Some Noise!” for networks such as the CBC, Discovery, History and Life/Slice. He shuttered the company in 2005 to run television production at World Vision, Canada’s largest non-profit organization, before moving to Toronto’s White Pine Pictures in 2014.After eight years, Munger is stepping down from his role as director of unscripted development at White Pine in order to restart Ultramagnetic.

Our thoughts and prayers to Caleb Swanigan’s family and friends. The world lost a gentle soul last night. Love you Biggie.

“I hid for 75, 85 years and this is actually basically the first time I’ve ever come out,” said Maybelle Blair, 95, who came out publicly for the first time during the Tribeca Festival premiere of the Amazon Studios series “A League of Their Own.” Blair was a member of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League that the 1992 film and the new series are based. Photo: Screenshot from Instagram page of Amazon Studios series “A League of Their Own.”

“Of Medicine and Miracles” could have been a podcast. It could have been a newspaper feature.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterESPN Films has acquired worldwide rights to the documentary “Fate of a Sport,” Variety has learned exclusively.The deal was struck ahead of the film’s world premiere on Wednesday at the annual Tribeca Film Festival. Directed by Michael Doneger and written by Dan Crane, the expansive sports story was produced by Matt Tolmach (of the “Jumanji” and “Venom” franchises) and Doneger.“Fate” follows trailblazing athlete Paul Rabil, who spent eleven years as one of the most dominant and controversial players in a professional lacrosse league that filmmakers described as “anything but professional.”  Rabil and his brother Mike took matters into their own hands, and document their journey raising capital, attempting to poach top players, fight off lawsuits, and persevere through a global pandemic to launch the Premier Lacrosse League.

If there hadn’t been a body count, Chris and Jeff George’s escapades might have made for a divinely trashy TLC reality show. The brothers had gargantuan appetites, a habit of breaking the law without consequences, a flair for exaggeration, and a knack for spending money as fast as it came in on all the things that would keep a certain kind of viewer coming back: strip club visits, firearms, McMansions, and jacked-up trucks.

A sibling is usually your first friend and your first enemy, someone who cares about you like your parents but will get into shenanigans with you. These relationships are complicated, especially when you go in different directions in life and potentially feel estranged from the complex trappings of family.

“American Dreamer,” which premiered this week at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Based on a segment from the podcast “This American Life,” MacLaine plays a lonely widow who offers a cash-strapped professor (Peter Dinklage) the chance to buy her sprawling estate for mere pennies.

A standard hagiography that is far less interesting than the subjects it features, “Turn Every Page” aspires to none of the depth and complexity it champions throughout its too-long 112 minutes. A serviceable accounting of both a historian and a historically important editor, the documentary makes a strong case for the importance of both, yet in so doing, demonstrates that these men need no such help.

Artfully toggling between the ephemeral memories associated with the infamous Chelsea Hotel, and the more granular concerns of its present residents, Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s new documentary, the Martin Scorsese executive produced “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” is a concise reflection of the erasure of historical monuments in the name of gentrification. Centralizing the protracted construction process that closed down the hotel in 2011, but allowed its long-term residents to stay, the doc mainly follows the hold-outs in their ninth year of construction, many who view the hotel as one the last examples of bohemian, and affordable, living in Manhattan.

The movies have given us man-children for decades, dating back to Carl Reiner’s “The Jerk,” leading all the way to a bumper crop of “dudes stuck in arrested development” productions through the 2000s and 2010s: “Cyrus,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Adult Beginners,” “The Comedy,” “Step Brothers,” “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” Alex Heller’s feature debut, “The Year Between,” descends from this overdone tradition and leaves a new wrinkle on the formula: Bipolar disorder, a formidable condition characterized by extreme mood swings and thus a clear goldmine for slacker burnout comedy.

A minor but affecting character study about buried family trauma, Clara Stern’s feature-length narrative debut “Breaking the Ice” works well as both a sports drama — focusing on an Austrian minor-league women’s hockey team — and a romantic drama. While perhaps too contained within its protagonist’s point of view, Stern’s film is nevertheless an impressive debut.

Set in the Fall of 2005, Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s piercing feature debut, “Good Girl Jane,” tracks the grooming of the title character (Rain Spencer), Jane, a young outcast teenage skater enduring an endless summer that nearly undoes her. Jane and her older sister Izzie (Eloisa Huggins) have recently transferred to a new school.

“American Dreamer” is a mess of a movie, in which scenes of startling wit and emotional truth co-exist alongside entire subplots that are utterly inexplicable. It’s all over the damn place; its good ideas in near equal proportion to its bad ones, feeling less like a polished production than a filmed first draft, released as a rough assembly.

This weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, Academy Award-winning documentarian Ross Kauffman (“Born Into Brothels”) debuts his newest documentary, “Of Medicine and Miracles,” to the world. The film tells parallel stories of an incredibly resilient child battling a rare form of leukemia and the researcher who pioneered her treatment.

“I come from a family of geniuses and criminals,” confesses inventor David Hanson. And it’s not at all apparent if Hanson is the former, or a less pernicious version of the latter.

We usually flash back to New Kids On The Block, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, and the likes when we think of the manufactured boy band. But when you think about it, the godfather of the modern boy band is arguably Menudo, the Latin American group from the late 1970s and 1980s.