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Tribeca 2021: Adrien Brody’s ‘CLEAN’ an Ugly, On the Nose Neo-Noir With Intense Dumb Guy Energy 

In Clean, Adrien Brody is a garbage man named Clean. After a tragedy in his past that haunts him to this day, Clean has gone clean. He’s trying to redeem his past mistakes by cleaning up the streets of Utica. Taking out the trash, literally and metaphorically. Dirty cops and rancid garbage, all must go. An ugly and hilariously on the nose watch, Clean is the kind of self-serious neo-noir that amplifies its navel-gazing faux-grittiness to a point of self-parody, complete with stuffy, gravelly voiceover, written as an obvious attempt to ape Alan Moore’s oft-copied steely nihilism, with streaky, smoky nighttime cinematography that adds nothing but another layer of comical try-hardiness to the overall picture. Read More

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Tribeca 2021: Endearing Werewolf Whodunnit ‘WEREWOLVES WITHIN’ Channels Edgar Wright

Like Clue with lycanthropy, Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within is an ensemble-driven horror-comedy with lots of earnest charm and plenty of satisfying laughs. A hairy whodunnit about a small Vermont community terrorized by what they assume to be a werewolf, Werewolves Within is that rare effective video game adaptation, reworking Ubisoft’s multiplayer Mafia-like VR game of the same name into an endearing and tongue-in-cheek werewolf whodunnit. Read More

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Tribeca 2021: ‘ULTRASOUND’ a Hypnotic Layer Cake of Mindf#ckery

From the very first moments of Ultrasound, something is off. In fact, a lot of things are off. There’s the obvious fact that the movie starts with a brilliantly uncomfortably ‘car breaks down in the rain’ moment where a soaked man seeks shelter in the only house nearby, the kind of scene audiences are instinctually trained to beware in movies. But there’s little moments too. Little touches that you’ll catch where something is certainly not as it should be. A woman’s bulging pregnant belly is there in one scene and gone in the next. A fully-stocked room service tray is wildly out of place on a deserted country road. Like a Find-The-Mistake picture book (think Dr. Seuss’s ‘Wacky Wednesday’) the anachronisms and scrambled bits of reality in Ultrasound just keep stacking up. Read More

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Tribeca 2021: Cloaked in Disillusion and Furs, ‘WILD MEN’ Battle Existential Crises

In Thomas Daneskov’s Wild Men (original title Vildmænd), Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) has lost his way. A family man with a wife and two daughters at home, Martin’s absconded to the craggy mountains of Norway, clan in Viking attire and armed with a makeshift bow and arrow. He plans to get back to his roots and live off the land like his hunter/gather ancestors of 3000 years ago but his aspirations are beyond the reach of his skillset. We’re witness to Martin’s plentiful limitations as he hunts a goat, striking it in the haunch from afar but unable to track the bloody trail to his would-be dinner. Left instead to smash and charbroil a small toad. The next scene he wretches up his amphibian meal, hunched over and helpless, into the icy river below.

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Tribeca 2021: Darren Aronofsky-Produced Revenge Thriller ‘CATCH THE FAIR ONE’ A Grim Swing and a Miss 

Native American women go missing, are sexually assaulted, or are murdered at an average of ten times that of the non-native population. These crimes are predominantly carried out by non-native criminals. Reasons for these staggeringly high rates range from a lack of institutional concern, indifferent law enforcement policies regarding missing young women, and the multitude of jurisdictional cracks between Federal and Tribal lands. All point to an overall lack of care and concern for the most marginalized within these communities, with about a third of these victims being under 18 years of age. And yet the statistic persists.  Read More

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Tribeca 2021: Collegiate Athlete Possessed by Competitive Spirit in ‘THE NOVICE’

Ernest Hemingway famously opined, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” I’ve taken this sentiment to heart in my own life, allowing a competitive spirit with myself to drive my ambitions, both professionally and athletically, rather than trying to compare my skill with others. The Novice, the arresting debut feature from writer-director Lauren Hadaway, explores what happens when an obsession with besting yourself goes too far. As witnessed here, there is no nobility in obsession.  Read More

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Tribeca 2021: India’s Illuminating ‘The LAST FILM SHOW’ a Deeply Personal Love Letter to Film

In Pan Nalin’s The Last Film Show, the death of film has never hit harder. The Samsara director and Indian auteur has established himself over the years as a filmmaker with a distinct flair for visual storytelling, his films a kaleidoscopic whirl of images that speak to the simple power of colors and lights to evoke an emotional response. With an impressive career making documentaries, feature films, shorts, commercials, and television, Nalin looks back on his own journey to becoming a filmmaker in The Last Film Show, his most autobiographical and personal effort to date. 
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Tribeca 2021: A ‘POSER’ Plagiarizes Her Way to Popularity in Devious Stalker-Thriller

Art is similar to pornography in the sense that I know it when I see it. There is a very fine line dividing art – whether that be performance art, music, poetry, or visual arts – from empty vacancy or ugly vandalism. Sometimes those lines can be blurred, much like a nipple on Instagram or the modern differentiation between television and film. This is even more apparent in avant-garde expressions of art, made to challenge traditional norms of what can and cannot be classified as art. A founding tenant of any counterculture movement is rooted in artistic pushback against tradition, and, importantly, the perspective of the artist themselves. In Ori Segev and Noah Dixon’s simmering psychosexual music-thriller Poser, the fine line between artist and con-artist melts and refracts as an obsessive podcaster infiltrates the inner sacrum or the Columbus underground music scene. Read More

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SXSW 2021: ‘SOUND OF VIOLENCE’ Is the Ultra-Campy ASMR Slasher You Didn’t Know You Needed

There is a scene early on in the absolutely bonkers horror camp-fest Sound of Violence where murderess-musician-mistress Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) kidnaps a homeless man and rigs him up like an electric drum set. Part-hardware, part-flesh, done up as if Kevin Mcalester and Jigsaw were there to help perfect the evil mastermind mechanics. A meat tenderizer dangles above his skull, a mallet aimed at his kneecaps, scalpels bisecting his wrists like cello bows. Alexis nervously puts on her earphones and gets to work.  Read More

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SXSW 2021: Urgent School Shooter Teen Drama ‘THE FALLOUT’ is the First Defining Movie of Gen-Z 

We’re only minutes into The Fallout before the carefree world of 16-year old Vada (Jenna Ortega in a star-making role) is turned upside down by a school shooting. Up to that point, her biggest concerns were nagging parents, knowing the answers to an upcoming quiz, and which flavor cake-pop to get at the Starbucks drive through. When her doting little sister Amelia (Lumi Pollack) texts her “911” (she’s gotten her first period and needs to be talked off a ledge), Vada goes to the bathroom to provide some much-needed sisterly advice. She’ll remain trapped there, with popular girl Mia (Maddie Ziegler), when gunshots start ripping off in the hall outside, accompanied by piercing screams of abject terror.     Read More