'Cowboys': Film Review | Tribeca 2020

Lily Collins "inherits" her tycoon father's terrible secret — a captive Simon Pegg — in this overlong, implausible thriller.

Stop me if you've heard this before. Someone who's always been on the wrong side of the law is determined to go straight and start a new life.

Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae are a quarreling couple out to solve a murder, but the first movie directed by Michael Showalter since "The Big Sick" is a crime comedy that aims lower than it thinks.

As a grieving cop, Mary J. Blige serves and protects a tricky storyline in this socially-engaged supernatural thriller.

"I didn't have any goals; I just went where the winds of curiosity blew me." So says Diana Kennedy, a groundbreaking authority on Mexican cooking, in Elizabeth Carroll's intimate portrait. On the superficial face of it, those words might sound disingenuous, but they go to the heart of Kennedy's unconventionality and lifelong pursuit of authenticity.

An intriguing and well-executed attempt to supply something Americans were denied in 2014, Roee Messinger's American Trial: The Eric Garner Story uses non-actors and real community members to imagine a trial that Staten Island grand jurors inexplicably refused to hold: In this conjured reality, unlike our own, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo is indicted for reckless manslaughter and first-degree strangulation in the killing of unarmed New Yorker Eric Garner.

Set aside the fact that present circumstances may make viewers resentful of a film motivated by its makers' urge to see exotic tourist destinations and eat in expensive restaurants that are closed now. The format of Michael Winterbottom's Trip series, in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take luxurious foodie vacations together, has served up various pleasures for moviegoers in the past, and there was no way of knowing how tone-deaf it might appear upon its mid-lockdown release.

A shaky narrative is given ballast by two vivid and well-matched leads in Sabrina Doyle’s exasperating, sporadically touching feature debut, the blue-collar melodrama Lorelei. As former high school sweethearts reconnecting amid dire socioeconomic circumstances, Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone hustle to overcome movie-ish dialogue and clichéd story dynamics, investing their life-bruised characters with authentic feeling.

Clementine

A documentary built around previously unheard audiotaped interviews with Stanley Kubrick captures a director who didn't like to talk about his films...talking about his films.

Befitting a documentary executive produced by Errol Morris, Enemies of the State is polished, assured and chilling. But as director Sonia Kennebeck traces a tale of hacker culture, government surveillance and extreme family loyalty, the smooth surface buckles.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] In the hard-hitting and heartbreaking documentary Jacinta, a young mother suffers the effects of heroin addiction that plagued her own mother as well, prolonging a cycle of abuse and incarceration that repeats itself across a generation. Stories of drugs, jail and recidivism are, alas, nothing new in America.

[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] There's plenty of wild and intimate beauty and not a little blood in Kokoloko, the first feature from Gerardo Naranjo since his 2011 international breakout, Miss Bala.

[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] If nothing else (and there is plenty else) Bo McGuire strikes a campily confident pose. Hirsute of face and loud of shirts, a Virginia Slim always dangling from his lips or fingers, this Alabama-born artist swans his way through his feature debut, Socks on Fire.

For his lucid and perceptive look at Stanley Kubrick's unparalleled body of work, Gregory Monro excerpts a number of archival clips. It's not the filmmaker who's at the center of most of them but his collaborators, testifying to his exacting methods.

An unhealthily close bond between mother-and-daughter addicts forms the dark heart of Jessica Earnshaw's gripping, characterful doc debut.

[In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] For those of us whose memory of Hurricane Maria boils down to footage of President Donald Trump scornfully tossing out paper towels to a crowd at a disaster relief center, Cecilia Aldarondo’s documentary Landfall offers up a welcome flipside: images of Puerto Ricans proudly and painfully trying to rebuild their island amid a

Producer-director Maria Finitzo’s feature documentary The Dilemma of Desire was robbed, like so many other works, by the coronavirus pandemic of its moment in the spotlight when its premiere at SXSW was cancelled in March. That fate seems extra cruel given that the movie is all about celebrating female sexual pleasure and especially the much-misunderstood clitoris in defiance of patriarchal efforts to silence, stifle and suppress female desire.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] The Brazilian government's efforts in the run-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics to clean up crime in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a program dubbed "pacification," were part of a widely reported broader sweep to hide the city's poor from international visitors.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select fest entries that elected to premiere digitally for critics.] Whether the Storage Wars crew would have recognized the value of a box of letters discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit in 2014 is open to debate. But it's a good thing that directors Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera did.