'Pacified' ('Pacificado'): Film Review | Tribeca 2020

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.

[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.] What a pleasure to see the underrated Steve Zahn in a leading role that fully capitalizes on the contradictory currents coursing through his screen persona — of mellowness and wired energy, grounded warmth and off-kilter unpredictability.

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.] 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.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] An uncompelling spinoff of the director's 2017 film about women sentenced to death row, Sabrina Van Tassel's The State of Texas vs. Melissa interviews the family and supporters of Melissa Lucio, a woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter in 2007.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] Joshua Leonard's 2011 feature debut, The Lie, explored a sort of identity crisis that resulted when a new parent (Leonard) used his baby as an excuse to ditch work. The crisis starts earlier in Fully Realized Humans, which again sees Leonard and Jess Weixler playing a couple who perhaps shouldn't be trusted with a baby.

A native of the place strangers call Easter Island amplifies a call for self-rescue in Eating Up Easter, Sergio M. Rapu's eco-themed documentary.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] For Dee's Tots Daycare in New Rochelle, New York, that last word in the mom-and-pop enterprise's name is a misnomer, or at least an understatement. The business of teaching, entertaining, feeding and straight-up loving a houseful of children who range from infants to tweens isn't limited to the daytime; it's a 24-hour operation.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] An alumna of the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence program who has earned attention with her short films, Israeli writer-director Ruthy Pribar makes an assured feature debut, balancing sobriety with emotional intensity in Asia.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Israeli director Eytan Fox, who landed on the map with his 2002 gay military romance, Yossi & Jagger, brings sensitivity, restraint and slow-burn sensuality to a story of cross-generational emotional awakening in Sublet.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] It's fitting that Wake Up on Mars opens in winter. The frozen Swedish landscape is an apt backdrop for this real-life tale of suspended animation: Two teenage sisters, in side-by-side beds, lie in a coma-like condition that's variously known as uppgivenhetssyndrom, apatisk (apathy) syndrome and resignation syndrome.