Tribeca Film Festival
Spring has been on the cool and gloomy side in New York this year, and the Tribeca Film Festival, Gotham's annual flower show for the indie-film trade, has been downsized and shorn of at least some of its self-appointed glitz and glamour. That's mostly a good thing. About the festival, I mean; we cave-creatures of the Northeast could stand a little sunshine right about now.
Of course this year's stripped-down Tribeca had nothing to do with the weather, and only a little to do with the perilous state of the economy. But it felt like a leaner, meaner film festival for an era of recession, with its tendency toward celeb-effluvia dampened. We got inside out of the wind and drizzle, we sat in unassuming little theaters with our fellow citizens and we watched movies, many of them invigorating, challenging and even, perish the thought, difficult. Hey, if they made us forget about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for a couple of hours at a time, then -- as we say in these parts -- it was a mitzvah.
This year's Tribeca movies didn't offer many life-changing moments or aesthetic breakthroughs, but at least we were spared the massively-hyped premieres of mind-meltingly mediocre films, attended by C-list celebrities, that have plagued this festival in the past. (Even David Mamet's misbegotten martial-arts drama "Redbelt" does not belong in that category.) Tribeca in 2008 gave us a stronger, far more solid roster this year, mainly comprising American premieres of noteworthy foreign films and New York showcases for American indies that have built some buzz at other festivals. (I don't think any of the 10 films on my list below were Tribeca world premieres.)