'Lorelei': Film Review | Tribeca 2020

Inventive and infectious, TT The Artist's head-turning debut fuses the forms of documentary and music video to honor Baltimore's vibrant social fabric.

Dehumanizing power dynamics underscore Prateek Vats’ enjoyable debut about a guy ill-suited to his new job as monkey chaser in Delhi.

Liz Marshall's smooth, accessible documentary may change some minds as it unpacks the specifics of the slaughter-free "clean meat" movement.

Milkwatertakes its title from "The Consecrating Mother" by Anne Sexton, the Pulitzer-winning mid-20th century American poet who wrote with stark confessional candor about the intimate physical and emotional experience of womanhood. That makes it natural to expect a singular focus in Morgan Ingari's likable first feature about a directionless young woman who impulsively decides to become a surrogate for an older gay man she barely knows.

The helmer of HBO's 'Los Espookys' delivers a serious, sensitive look at Monterrey's Cholombiano subculture through the eyes of an endangered cumbia dancer.

In a genre heavy on outright gastroporn, Abby Ainsworth's polished documentary on Spain's celebrated Mugaritz restaurant inspires more curiosity than hunger.

Don Millar's documentary about Fernando Botero, one of the world's most popular living artists (the most popular, if you believe the film), proves similar to the many artworks it displays.

The phrase “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” which has often (and perhaps erroneously) been attributed to American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a familiar saying by about 1920. And it makes perfect sense that the phrase roughly coincides with the dawn of cinema, because filmmakers have been cinematically paraphrasing it for much of the last 100 years.

Andrew Patterson’s retro sci-fi thriller “The Vast of Night” has the look and feel of a restored 1950s Cadillac. There are certain aspects that appear new, but your first impression of the car is of its original time and era, a place that seems both modern yet quaintly of the past.

In a recent piece for The New Yorker, Bill Buford movingly recounts the kind of romantic apprenticeship most aspiring chefs imagine when they hear the word "stage": Having moved to Lyon to absorb French food culture, the American humbly offered himself as a student hoping to learn from the crusty character who made the town's best bread. A skill was passed from master to learner, a friendship developed, and a new evangelist for the region's traditions was born.

“The High Note” began life as a screenplay titled “Covers,” and at times the music-themed drama turns into a tribute to the power of a cover song performed by someone other than the person who originated it: Aretha Franklin with Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Share Your Love,” the Staples Singers with the Band’s “The Weight,” P.P Arnold with Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” the Dixie Chicks with Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” …

A sharp documentary looks at the intensity of smartphone addiction, and how it was all engineered.

Jon Hyatt's documentary doesn't exactly go out on a limb by positing that we're becoming ever more addicted to technology.

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.