Tag Archives: Tribeca Reviews

Tribeca 2025: Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (***)

June 20, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

How does one describe Sun Ra’s music? Whether you label it “free jazz”, “avant-garde”, “experimental”, or “free-form”…to the uninitiated ear, it might as well be music from outer space. That perception would suit its creator just fine, because he was from Saturn, after all.

I should probably back up a moment.

Herman Poole Blount was actually born in Birmingham Alabama, and as we learn in Christine Turner’s bio of the late jazz pioneer, was a natural musician. He starting playing piano as a child and was composing and sight reading by his early teens. The “Saturn” quotient entered his personal mythology at some point in his 20s or 30s (the timeline was subject to change, depending on to whom he was recounting his story of being “teleported” to the planet, where alien beings instructed him to speak to the world through his music).

The veracity of this story is moot; because whatever (or whoever) sparked this visit from the Muse, from that moment forward Sun Ra dedicated every waking minute of his life to not only push his musical boundaries, but to create a simpatico cosmology that embraced elements of philosophy, quantum physics, and Black consciousness.

Turner mixes recollections from former members of the Arkestra, historians, music scholars, and archival Sun Ra interviews with amazing performance footage to paint a fascinating (if not definitive) portrait of a unique artist whose true origin remains a bit of a mystery. I’m compelled to quote my favorite line from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “Einstein was probably one of them.”

Con Game, Neo-Noir, Road Movie

Tribeca 2025: Ride or Die (**½)

June 19, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

Never pick up a stranger. Aspiring St. Louis filmmaker Paula (Brianna Middleton) has a chance encounter at a checkout counter with former classmate Sloane (Stella Everett), who is running the register. There is an instant spark between the pair; it turns out that Paula had a secret crush on Sloane in their high school days.

Faster than you can say “Thelma and Louise”, free-spirited Sloane quits her job and sweet-talks the hidebound Paula into a spontaneous road trip to California-against the advisement of Paula’s mother, who senses (as we do) that This Girl is Trouble. Paula is too head-over-heels to pick up these signals (and clearly, she has never seen Something Wild).

Director and co-writer Josalynn Smith honors the venerable “road noir” tropes well enough, and the two leads have good chemistry, but the third act fizzes a bit by leaving a startling narrative development curiously unexplained. Still, it’s a promising directorial debut.

Behind the Music, Documentary, On Music, Rock 'n' Roll

Tribeca 2025: Billy Idol Should Be Dead (***)

June 19, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

Jonas Åkerlund ‘s rock doc is a fairly straightforward portrait of William Michael Albert Broad, noted member of the Bromley Contingent. Okay…you know him better as Billy Idol, and “The Bromley Contingent” (which featured future members of The Clash and Siouxsee and the Banshees, among other seminal punkers) was basically an unofficial fan club that followed the Sex Pistols around on their earliest UK gigs. Billy, of course, was destined for bigger things, so he did not remain a mere fanboy for long.

Mixing archival footage with present-day ruminations from Idol (still alive!) Åkerlund retraces the rocker’s trajectory from co-founder of Generation X (one of the first punk bands to perform on the BBC’s Top of the Pops program) to MTV superstar and beyond.

The price of fame is paid in full along the way; sex, drugs, and rock and roll takes its toll…but like some kind of sneering, leather-clad Energizer Bunny, Idol somehow just keeps going, and going. The present-day Idol is thoughtful, self-reflective, and surprisingly candid about where he’s been and where he’s headed. Being partial to Idol’s pre-MTV output, I found his punk era to be the most absorbing portion of the doc, but overall it should be an enjoyable ride for fans.

Culture Clash, Eco-doc, Politics, The Environment

Tribeca 2025: Yanuni (***1/2)

June 18, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

Tribeca’s closing night selection this year is a riveting eco-doc that profiles Indigenous rights activist Juma Xipaia (the first female Indigenous chief of her people in the Middle Xingu) and her husband Hugo, who heads up a government special ops team that locates and shuts down illegal mining operations in Brazil’s Amazon region.

Richard Ladkani’s doc unfolds like a Costa-Gavras political thriller; early on in the film we see harrowing footage of Juma participating in a protest outside of the National Congress Palace in Brasilia where riot police suddenly fire a fusillade of live rounds into the crowd. A distraught Juma kneels beside a tribal activist who appears to be gravely wounded, pleading for him to respond (he doesn’t) until fellow demonstrators pull her away, out of the line of fire.

Juma, we learn, is no stranger to the threat of violence; she has survived a number of assassination attempts over the years and continues to be under threat. Yet she soldiers on, fighting outside and (eventually) inside of Brazil’s political system for her people…as does her husband (Juma and Hugo form an eco-warrior power couple).

Ladkani follows Hugo and his team on several missions; these scenes play like they are straight out of an action film, but instilled with an all-too-real sense of danger (the illegal miners are frequently armed and rarely happy to see the government commandos). Mining has been prohibited since Brazil’s Federal Constitution of 1988, as it not only wreaks havoc on the Amazonian ecosystem, but has a number of negative health effects on the Indigenous peoples of the region.

Ladkani’s film is slickly made and lushly photographed, but doesn’t pull any punches regarding its heavy subject matter. When you consider 10,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest are destroyed every day, the sense of urgency here becomes all the more palpable.

Drama, The Environment

Tribeca 2025: The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard (***)

June 17, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

Many were increasingly of the opinion [that humans] made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

― Douglas Adams, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

What makes us “human”…is it nature, or nurture? How many times have you heard admonishments like “don’t wolf your food” or “you’re acting like an animal”? Are we not mammals, after all?

Writer-director David Verbeek tackles that age-old question in this speculative fiction yarn about the discovery of a young woman (Jessica Reynolds) who has literally been raised by wolves. Naturally, her first accommodation in the “civilized” world is a cold, clinical research facility, where she is poked and prodded and ogled at by people in white coats.

Frightened and confused, she barely has time to acclimate to these alien surroundings before a pair of cultish survivalists spirit her away to an abandoned offshore oil rig. The couple imprint themselves as parental figures and methodically indoctrinate her into their vision of an impending environmental apocalypse.

The trio seem well on their way to forming a cozy family unit-until the young woman discovers (much to her chagrin) that her “parents” have feet of clay (you can take the wolf-girl out of the forest…).

I see touchstones like The Wild Child, The Emerald Forest, Altered States, and Charly; but Verbeek has put a unique 21st Century spin on some time-worn themes. His secret weapon is Reynolds, who delivers an extraordinary performance that runs the gamut from running around on all fours and dining al fresco on small game to making small talk with her customers at the grocery checkout counter.

Art world, Documentary

Tribeca 2025: Maintenance Artist (***)

June 13, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

Rimmer: [pretending to be interested in art to impress Legion] Now, this 3-dimensional sculpture in particular is quite exquisite. Its simplicity, its bold, stark lines. Pray, what do you call it?

Legion: The light switch.

Rimmer: The light switch?

Legion: Yes.

Rimmer: I couldn’t buy it, then?

Legion: Not really. I need it to turn the lights on and off.

– From the comedy series Red Dwarf (written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor)

That exchange is chiefly played for laughs of course, but it also makes a point about the subjectivity of “art”. In my 2007 review of the documentary My Kid Could Paint That, I wrote:

Whose judgment determines the intrinsic and/or monetary value of a painting-a local newspaper reporter, a New York Times art critic or Mike Wallace? Does the eye of the beholder still count for anything? Does it really matter who painted it, if you feel it’s worth hanging on your wall? Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays-Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, and do you care? Does it really matter that the Monkees didn’t write any of their hits or play their own instruments?

How about an artist whose “art” was literally garbage? Would you label their work as same? In this fascinating documentary, director Toby Perl Freilich profiles the life and work of performance artist/self-billed “eco-feminist” Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who holds the title of (unpaid) Artist in Residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation.

That is not to say all of her work is garbage. Frelich mixes the septuagenarian artist’s recollections with archival footage to glean what led to Ukeles’s decades-long obsession with transforming the mundane tasks of everyday housewives and maintenance workers into a form of socially-conscious high art.

Ukeles didn’t pop out of the box fully formed. Early in her career, she experimented with everything from abstract sculptures to inflatable “air art”. But it wasn’t until after her marriage in 1966 that she discovered her path. In a 1969 manifesto, she stated in part:

Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs=minimum wage, housewives=no pay. […] Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. “We have no Art, we try to do everything well.” (Balinese saying). […] My working will be the work.

Maintenance Artist is a thought-provoking film worth hanging on your wall.

Dystopian

Tribeca 2025: A Bright Future (*1/2)

June 9, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

More lo-fi than “sci-fi” (as it is billed), Lucia Garibaldi’s minimalist drama suggests a near-future Uruguay wherein dogs have disappeared, ants are to be feared, youth is revered, and everybody’s weird. The story centers on a sullen and taciturn 18 year-old named Elisa (Martina Passeggi), who lives with her mother in a dark and dreary apartment complex. Elisa has been chosen by some nebulous government institute to go to “the North”, which appears to be a coveted Shangri-La to the citizenry. Problem is, once people go there, they are never heard from again (like Elisa’s sister, for example).

Regardless, it’s considered an honor to be chosen; there are even lotteries for a chance to make the journey (echoes of Logan’s Run, where people about to turn the state-mandated life termination age of 30 hope for a chance at “renewal”-which no one ever seems to achieve). Elisa’s mother is scraping and saving for a lottery ticket; and she’s chagrined at Elisa’s ambivalence about her own luck.

When a 30-something female neighbor with a prosthetic leg and dubious intentions takes a sudden interest in becoming Elisa’s bestie, complications ensue. A scene where Elisa offers the “smell of youth” for a fee was nearly a bail point for me. While there are a few interesting ideas, none of them really go anywhere, much less the narrative. Unfortunately, A Bright Future is little more than a dim bulb.

Drama, Male Bonding, Neo-Noir

Tribeca 2025: Inside (**1/2)

June 8, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on June 7, 2025)

Every time I try to swear off prison dramas…they pull me back in (and throw away the key). In the case of writer-director Charles Williams’ Inside, I was intrigued by the casting. Guy Pearce plays a grizzled long-term inmate who becomes mentor to a young man (Vincent Miller) who has just been transferred from a juvenile facility. When a notorious lifer (Cosmo Jarvis) who fancies himself a religious prophet takes an interest in the new inmate, an uneasy surrogate father triangle ensues.

There are three solid, intense performances here by the leads, but there are jarring narrative jumps which require some heavy lifting by the viewer. It’s possible that I was thrown off by the odd tics of Jarvis’ character. It’s an interesting performance (along the lines of Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade character), but frankly I could not understand three-quarters of his dialog (perhaps a second viewing wherein I have the option of close-captioning will clarify some plot points for me). Until then…a guarded recommendation.

Dramedy, Drug Culture, Writers

Tribeca 2025: Gonzo Girl (***)

June 8, 2025 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on June 7, 2025)

Mother of God, man…another film about Hunter S. Thompson?! Well yes…and no. Because you see, the adrenochrome-addled gonzo journalist pecking away at a bullet-riddled typewriter in Patricia Arquette’s dramedy is named “Walker Reade” (Willem Dafoe). A starry-eyed super-fan and aspiring writer named Alley (Camila Morrone) lucks into a gig as Reade’s writing assistant.

Reade’s muse has gone fallow; he has writer’s block and is under deadline pressure from his publisher to deliver a new book. While she takes initial warnings from his long-time, world-weary live-in assistant (played by Arquette) with a grain of salt, Alley soon learns that “writing assistant” could mean anything from “babysitter” to “caregiver”.

As one might expect, there are echoes here of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Where the Buffalo Roam (and yes, there is a requisite “first acid trip” escapade). That said, the film vibes more like a hybrid of All About Eve and Get Him to the Greek. Jessica Caldwell and Rebecca Thomas adapted the screenplay from Cheryl Della Pietra’s eponymous novel (which the author based on her real-life stint as Hunter S. Thompson’s assistant).

While at times a bit uneven in tone, Arquette’s directorial debut is,for the most part, an enjoyable romp for Hunter S. Thompson fans. Morrone gives an impressive performance, and Dafoe portrays Hunter with a typically idiosyncratic flourish (sans the somewhat self-conscious mannerisms that Bill Murray and Johnny Depp deployed in their characterizations).