{"id":23398,"date":"2024-06-12T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-12T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=23398"},"modified":"2024-06-11T19:41:57","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T02:41:57","slug":"tribeca-dispatch-of-nonfiction-and-noblemen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/tribeca-dispatch-of-nonfiction-and-noblemen\/","title":{"rendered":"Tribeca Dispatch: Of Nonfiction and Noblemen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve been covering the Tribeca Film<\/s> Festival longer than any other \u2014 since 2009, when I was simultaneously dazzled by the absolute wealth of viewing possibilities, and sort of shocked that many of them were not very good. This has always been the puzzle of Tribeca, a festival run by savvy and smart folks (chief among them its most famous co-founder, Robert De Niro), yet with little sense of quality control, and that sense has only increased in recent years, as the fest\u2019s novelty has worn off and led to such desperate measures as an AI program<\/a> and a DeNiro fan-con sidebar<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve discovered some truly great movies at Tribeca, and also some of the worst cinema I\u2019ve ever seen, at a festival or otherwise. But once you learn the ground rules, you\u2019ll be fine. The ground rules, for the record: anything with big stars that premieres there instead of Sundance is probably terrible, anything by an actor-turned-director that premieres there is probably terrible, and you\u2019re usually pretty safe with the documentaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve seen, over the years, an especially noteworthy number of documentary films about<\/em> films at Tribeca \u2014 understandably, it\u2019s a receptive selection committee \u2014 and this year\u2019s slate includes several fine additions to that tradition. Chief among them is Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger<\/em><\/strong>, from one of the fest\u2019s frequent boldfaced names, Martin Scorsese. To be clear, Scorsese did not direct (that credit goes to David Hinton); he is the executive producer and, per the credits, \u201cpresenter\u201d in the best British tradition, which means he appears on camera to narrate and frame the picture in his own experiences and history with the subjects, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it feels like an extension of his \u201890s cinephile documentaries A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies<\/em> and My Voyage to Italy<\/em>; he adopts a similarly hybrid position of professor, filmmaker, and fan, walking through the Powell and Pressburger filmography picture by picture, breaking down themes, narrative, technique, specific choices, and (most intriguingly) the explicit connections to his own work – how their films influenced his, in detail. He doesn\u2019t just cover the highlights and classics; he\u2019s just as intrigued by their deep cuts and occasional misfires. Throw in well-curated interview and film clips, and you\u2019ve got straight-up catnip for the #TCMParty crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Classic movie fans should be similarly delighted by Nanette Burstein\u2019s Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes<\/em><\/strong>, which finds the icon, in effect, narrating her own story, via recently discovered interview audio dating to 1964. Burnstein (American Teen, On the Ropes<\/em>) moves through her life at a rapid clip, and while the various romantic entanglements, scandals, and tragedies have been well-documented, what\u2019s of note here is Taylor\u2019s tremendous candor and self-awareness. Of the split personality she had to develop between private life and public persona, she notes, \u201cOne is flesh and blood, and one is cellophane\u201d; of her notoriety, she explains, with admirable directness, \u201cI am not illicit, and I am not immoral. I have made mistakes, and I have paid for them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only drawback of the lost audio is that it can only take the story so far, so the picture suffers from an inherent lopsidedness due to the source materials, hustling through the last several decades of her life in a minutes-long montage with only a comparatively surface Dominick Dunne interview from 1985 to provide a bookend. But that\u2019s a small complaint; this is a fine film, giving us new food for thought about a figure about whom it might seem everything has been said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Less directly cinephile-friendly, but still of keen interest to those who love nonfiction filmmaking, is They\u2019re Here<\/em><\/strong>, Daniel Claridge\u00a0and\u00a0Pacho Velez\u2019s exploration of UFO culture in upstate New York. Claridge\u00a0and\u00a0Velez\u2019s approach is witty but not condescending; they know exactly how seriously to take this stuff, and that there\u2019s not necessarily a direct line between that and how seriously to take their subjects<\/em>. In passages, especially early, it recalls the Errol Morris of the Gates of Heaven<\/em> era, in which he would just point his camera at quirky people and give them space to exist (\u201cThey were nice,\u201d says a woman who claims to have been abducted by aliens over a dozen times, \u201cI can\u2019t complain about \u2018em\u201d). But then the filmmakers take a little leap, in faith and style, in the closing sections, and pull it off with grace.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to say that the only films worth seeking out at Tribeca are the documentaries. (Just the safest, but I KID.) The tale of Henry VIII has been told plenty of times over the course of cinema\u2019s history, though rarely with as much urgency and verve as in Karim A\u00efnouz\u2019s new telling Firebrand<\/em><\/strong>. The focus here is on his sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), whose progressive ideals are ignited by the Tudor court\u2019s persecution of a radical friend; power machinations and power struggles abound as Henry (Jude Law) lays on his deathbed. Law does not play Henry subtly, nor should he; he makes a meal of the character\u2019s considerable madness and sickness, and when he harnesses his fury, it\u2019s legitimately scary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That rattles Katherine badly, and the script (by Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth) adroitly addresses his psychological hold on her, the pall of their abusive relationship, as one more hurdle she must overcome. This is the best work Vikander\u2019s done in years, capitalizing on her ability to say things she doesn\u2019t really mean, and telegraph that deception with a subtlety other characters wouldn\u2019t pick up, but the camera does. A\u00efnouz\u2019s staging is convincing \u2014 it feels lived-in, no small achievement in the kind of movie that could have easily been a museum piece \u2014 the psychosexual dynamics keep it from getting too stuffy, and it has the kind of ending that can only be summarized by the Arrested Development<\/em> \u201cgood for her!\u201d meme. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our first report from this year\u2019s Tribeca Festival includes new documentaries on Elizabeth Taylor and Powell & Pressburger. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":23401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419],"class_list":["post-23398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23398"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23405,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23398\/revisions\/23405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}