Jackpot: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK The kind of quick-witted, high-toned genre flick programs like Cinemania were made for, Magnus Martens's Jackpot is a black-comic ride once again demonstrating that sudden windfalls of cash aren't all they're cracked up to be. Though likely to attract remake-rights attention, the pic's success with such worn-out tropes would be tough to replicate, especially considering how much entertainment value comes via idiosyncratic performances from its Norwegian cast.

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In a twisty, flashback-reliant structure recalling The Usual Suspects, we slowly learn how Oscar (Kyrre Hellum) came to be in police custody as the sole survivor of a massacre in a strip club. The manager of a recycling company that employs ex-cons, he had the misfortune of joining a betting pool with killers, only to win a sum so large nobody would want to share it. But the double-crosses don't arrive predictably, and attempts to hide evidence of each betrayal lead to increasingly outlandish violence.

Director/screenwriter Martens handles the wild implausibilities spinning out from this premise more effectively than the makers of the current arthouse release Headhunters, also based on a story by Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo. He moves things along briskly and gets a wry, skeptical performance out of Henrik Mestad (as the detective investigating the murders) that's so off-kilter we don't need Fargo allusions -- a gag with the recycling plant's plastic-shredder one-ups that film's wood-chipper scene -- to tell us how seriously, or not, to take the action.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Cinemania
Production Company: Fantefilm fiksjon as
Cast: Kyrre Hellum, Mads Ousdal, Henrik Mestad, Arthur Berning, Andreas Capellen, Peter Andersson
Director-Screenwriter: Magnus Martens
Producers: Are Heidenstrm, Martin Sundland
Director of photography: Trond Hines
Production designer: Lina Nordqvist
Music: Magnus Beite
Editor: Jon Endre Mrk
Sales: TrustNordisk
No rating, 82 minutes

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Free Samples: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK A showcase for up-and-comer Jess Weixler, Free Samples lets the sweet-faced actress play sour, bouncing off a score of costars while her character endures heat and hangover in a desolate parking lot. Jay Gamill's feature debut may get some commercial play from supporting players Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Ritter but, with neither onscreen for long, relies entirely on Weixler's ability to win viewers over.

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Weixler plays Jillian, a law student who has taken a semester off from both Stanford and her fianc Danny -- intending to pursue something artistic but spending most of her time drinking and sleeping around. Awakening at her friend Nancy's house after a blackout drunk, she's coerced to repay the hospitality by filling in for Nancy at work: Spending the long day alone in a beat-up food truck, giving free ice cream to anyone wandering this forsaken neighborhood.

Most of those encounters are snarky, one-joke interactions, but a loose arc finds Jillian starting to see the need to escape her rut. Ritter and Eisenberg notwithstanding, the real highlight in the supporting cast is Tippi Hedren, playing a long-retired actress who refuses to be seen by old colleagues now that her looks have gone. (Never mind that Hedren's a beauty even in her 80s.) Hedren's poignant recollections of love and regret lend some weight to Jillian's petty grousing, setting the stage for an encounter that brings this very bad day to a head.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Spotlight
Production Companies: Film Harvest, New Forum Films
Cast: Jess Weixler, Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Ritter, Halley Feiffer, Jocelin Donahue, Whitney Able, Tippi Hedren
Director: Jay Gammill
Screenwriter: Jim Beggarly
Producers: Eben Kostbar, Joseph McKelheer
Executive producers: Michael Potts, Nick Mystrom, Kevin Iwashina
Director of photography: Reed Morano
Production designer: Jeffery Givens
Music: Eric Elbogen
Costume designer: Alisha Silverstein
Editors: Franklin Peterson, Jay Gammill
Sales: Preferred Content
No rating, 80 minutes

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Joe Papp in Five Acts: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK An admiring portrait of a transformative figure in the New York theater, Joe Papp in Five Acts shows how much of what this city takes for granted was pioneered by a poor, tough kid from Brooklyn who hid his immigrant roots until well into his career. Stuffed with testimonials from famous collaborators, it will have no trouble attracting and pleasing viewers on public TV.

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The story starts with the kind of utopian project nobody could have expected to last: After mounting free, outdoor Shakespeare plays for working-class audiences in the East Village (one production drew a New York Times rave despite being rained out after the first act), Papp built a portable stage and brought shows to outer boroughs, determined to replicate the literature-democratizing experience he'd had as a child. But it did work, and when that portable stage broke down in Central Park, an institution was born.

Filmmakers Tracie Holder and Karen Thorsen trace Papp's political tendencies from his youth, when he and friends would watch for evictions and then move families back into their apartments after sundown, through his defiance of HUAC in the '50s. It seems only natural, then (if only in retrospect) that he'd be involved with the emergence of counterculture plays like Hair, restage Hamlet with female and black actors in the lead, and foster the careers of playwrights Ntozake Shange and Larry Kramer.

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Some of those playwrights pay Papp homage here, as do actors including Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and James Earl Jones. Roscoe Lee Browne encapsulates Papp's democratic impulse when he recalls being embraced by the impresario a mere 12 hours after deciding to become an actor.

The interviews, clearly conducted over a long time span, chronicle colorful skirmishes with establishment villains like Robert Moses and Jesse Helms. A section on Papp's more personal feuds, which led to bad blood with collaborators and a few divorces, is underplayed -- not surprising for a film that clearly idolizes its subject.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Special Screening
Production Companies: The Papp Project, Thirteen's American Masters, ITVS, WNET
Directors-Producers: Tracie Holder, Karen Thorsen
Executive producers: Susan Lacy, Sally Jo Fifer
Directors of photography: Toshiaki Ozawa, Jem Cohen
Music: Don Byron
Editors: Brad Fuller, Deborah Peretz, Sam Pollard
Sales: Tracie Holder, pappproject@gmail.com
No rating, 82 minutes

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The Flat: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK An astonishing trip into buried history and the human capacity for self-delusion, The Flat follows filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger as he stumbles across a remarkable bit of history and slowly becomes a part of its thorny psychological terrain. Prospects at the arthouse are strong, assuming marketers can convey what an unusual take on the Holocaust is being offered here.

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When his grandmother dies, Goldfinger is the only relative with much interest in the ancient ephemera piled up in her Tel Aviv apartment -- which, since his grandparents held on to their German identity for decades after their pre-WWII emigration, is so full of German culture it feels like "Berlin in Tel Aviv."

In the clutter he finds newspapers that appear to be Nazi propaganda, all revolving around one man's "Nazi travelogues." In them, a pro-Zionist Nazi named Leopold von Mildenstein travels the world, including a stint in Palestine; bizarrely, the articles are accompanied by a commemorative coin featuring a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other. Shockingly, Goldfinger learns that both his grandparents accompanied Mildenstein on these trips.

Realizing that no one else in his family has any knowledge of this -- Goldfinger's mother doesn't even know, as he soon learns, that her grandmother was killed in a concentration camp -- the filmmaker travels to Berlin to meet Mildenstein's daughter Edda, who greets him warmly and reveals that his grandparents were actually close friends with the family, traveling together and becoming close again after the war ended.

From here, the film's detective work -- both in terms of historical documents and the memories of surviving family members -- should be left for viewers to discover, but suffice to say that Goldfinger is forced to decide for others what they should know about their own loved ones. The answers don't come easily, but on camera the director remains an impassive presence, courteous but surprisingly unanimated -- refusing to make himself the center of this drama, which rightly belongs to the vaporous connections between one generation and the next.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, World Documentary Competition
Production Company: Zero One Film
Director-Screenwriter: Arnon Goldfinger
Producers: Arnon Goldfinger, Thomas Kufus
Directors of photography: Philippe Bellaiche, Talia Galon
Music: Yoni Rechter
Editor: Tali Halter Shenkar
Sales: Ruth Diskin Films
No rating, 97 minutes

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Journey to Planet X: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK Journey to Planet X is certainly not the first film to document the quixotic ambitions of filmmakers whose visions far exceed their skills. But it does so with a refreshing empathy for its subjects, two men motivated by sheer love of make-believe. Some of the footage presented here would have been far more novel in a pre-YouTube world, but even so, Journey is a well put-together crowd pleaser.

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Florida geologist Eric Swain has been making DIY versions of Hollywood epics for years -- a short but tremendously entertaining montage shows the not-so-special effects he's used to make himself a fighter pilot, astronaut and sword-and-sorcery hero. Then he met Troy Bernier, an eager collaborator with a scientist's eye for detail. Intent on raising the production values of their output -- "I don't want to make anything that is sub-standard," he says with endearing confidence -- Bernier sets out to make Swain's next sci-fi opus festival-worthy.

Documentarians Josh Koury and Myles Kane have enough film-world experience to see that Swain and Bernier are unlikely to produce anything releasable in the forseeable future, but there's never a sense of mockery in their film: Even as we see the auteurs auditioning ridiculously untalented actors (Bowfinger comes to mind here and elsewhere) and struggling with their own mishmash of a script, the tone is one of bemused admiration.

Swain and Bernier do, after all, take some steps to produce better work. They wisely hire a comic-book artist to storyboard their project (a read-through of that storyboard, complete with sound effects, suggests what Planet X could become), they procure a refrigerated warehouse to film scenes set in the freezing depths of outer space, and they even bring a little Zenith TV to their green-screen soundstage, so they can see what they're shooting as they go.

Most viewers will conclude that, if making a career of filmmaking is their goal (as the pair's wooing of film-fest organizers seems to suggest), these guys are throwing their money away. But they're having so much fun doing it, you have to hope they don't let failure make them stop.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Viewpoints
Production Company: Brooklyn Underground Films
Directors-Editors-Directors of Photography: Josh Koury, Myles Kane
Producer: Trisha Barkman
Music: Jonah Rapino
Sales: Steven Beckman, Cinetic FilmBuff
No rating, 77 minutes

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Wavumba: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK Steeped in legends of spirits but ultimately dominated by the most tangible fact of life, Jeroen van Velzen's Wavumba casts a quiet spell as it follows an old fisherman whose strength has left him. Persuasively atmospheric, the doc -- which earned van Velzen Tribeca's Best New Documentary Director award -- will be well liked on the fest circuit but may have trouble in the commercial arena.

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The director, who lived in Kenya as a child before attending English boarding school, returns to a fishing village there and meets Masoud, a grizzled old man known in his heyday as The Commander. Though reportedly able to catch huge sharks single-handedly in his youth, Masoud now appears to eke out a living wading the shallow waters and stabbing small octopi and ugly fish out of holes in reef formations.

We follow as Masoud and his put-upon assistant Juma set out to see if the old man, who freely and often remarks on his fading strength, can still catch a shark. Van Velzen (making his feature-length debut) follows his subject in long, unhurried takes accompanied by almost solemn voiceover. Lennart Verstegen's photography is vividly moody, evoking the spirit world constantly alluded to here -- a world whose disappearance mirrors the fading of Masoud's vigor -- while also attending to physical details like the creases and scars transforming the old man's hands.

Some viewers may balk at the Dutch filmmaker's use of a local shaman and his romanticization of local myths; the movie does flirt with exotica for its own sake. But a climactic midnight sequence, in which Masoud hunts sea snakes to use as bait and clubs them violently by torchlight, is otherworldly enough to justify much of the narration's reverent mood.

Bottom Line: Kenya-set doc adds the spirit world to a poignant old-man-and-the-sea tale
Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, World Documentary Competition
Production Company: SNG Film
Director: Jeroen van Velzen
Screenwriters: Jeroen van Velzen, Sara Kee
Producer: Digna Sinke
Director of photography: Lennart Verstegen
Music: Jeroen Schmohl
Editor: Stefan Kamp
Sales: Sasha Wieser, EastWest Filmdistribution
No rating, 80 minutes

Primary Cast: Mohammed Masoud Muyongo, Juma Lonya Mwapitu

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Whole Lotta Sole: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK In both his own films and his collaborations with Jim Sheridan, screenwriter-turned-director Terry George has invariably been drawn to serious subject matter, covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland (In the Name of the Father, The Boxer), the corrosive aftermath of family tragedy (Reservation Road), and true stories of an IRA hunger striker (Some Mothers Son) or heroism in the midst of genocide (Hotel Rwanda). He takes an abrupt turn toward the light in Whole Lotta Sole. The calculatedly charming crime comedy could use a tad more vitality in its central character, played by Brendan Fraser, but nonetheless packs enough pleasing elements to ensure a respectable commercial path.

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Written by George with Thomas Gallagher, who hatched the elaborately plotted original story, the movie angles for the quirky buoyancy of the Roddy Doyle Barrytown Trilogy adaptations (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van), with the darker edges of Guy Ritchie and Martin McDonagh. And while the hostage-crisis narrative is burdened by a few too many colorful characters and a creeping case of the cutes, the plotting is sufficiently tight to pull off the combination.

A quick flash of pre-titles action in Massachusetts shows Joe Maguire (Fraser) fleeing from his wife, a screaming banshee later revealed to be the daughter of a South Boston Mafia kingpin. Fearing repercussions, Joe hides out by minding his absent cousins antiques shop in Belfast. His paranoia is fueled by Jimbo (Martin McCann), a shifty-looking youth who appears to be stalking him, and by a cryptic visit from local gangland boss Mad Dog Flynn (David OHara).

While shyly courting beautiful Ethiopian refugee Sophie (Yaya DaCosta), Joe takes a backseat for much of the story. Focus shifts to underemployed Jimbo and the inflated gambling debt he incurred after he and his wife recently had a child. He owes Mad Dog $5,000, but since the gangsters girlfriend wants a baby and he shoots blanks, he offers to take Jimbos kid and call it even. (This exchange is negotiated in a torture scene lifted directly from McDonaghs play The Lieutenant of Inishmore.)

Reasoning that seafood vendors rake it in on Fridays in Catholic towns, JImbo holds up the fish market using an ancient hair-trigger submachine gun retrieved from an IRA stash. Hes unaware that the market, which gives the film its title, serves as a front for Mad Dogs illegal operations. In his haste to get away with a meager cash haul, he grabs a bag with compromising contents for the gangster.

All that is merely a painstaking setup for the main action, an extended siege in which Jimbo, who is saddled with his baby while fleeing the crime scene, holes up in the antiques shop, with Joe, Sophie and a couple of surprise stowaways as hostages.

Hitting familiar notes of cranky, gruff and profane, Colm Meaney is the detective managing the crisis. That escalates when the Ministry of Defense (represented by Tom Hollander in an unbilled cameo) starts fretting about maintaining fragile peacetime equilibrium and sends in an SAS swat team. Meanwhile, Mad Dog and his flunkies dig up another piece of old IRA hardware, planning to blow away the evidence, and inside the store, Jimbo enlightens Joe about a possible connection in their pasts.

George who won a live-action short film Oscar this year for The Shore, produced with his daughter hasa firmer handle as a director on character-driven scenes than on the jaunty action stretches. But the botched fish market robbery amusingly recalls 1960s screen capers, and the resolution pushes the requisite buttons of emotional uplift while tidily untangling the multiple plot strands. The film is visually undistinguished, but ably employs local accents, flavorful language, specific character types and quaint storefronts to define its milieu. Droll references to the Troubles serve as a humorous reminder that memories of the conflict endure.

Frasers performance is a little sleepy but otherwise likeable enough. Meaney and OHara sparkle in roles that dont stretch their range; McCann conveys the touching vulnerability of a truly desperate and confused young man; and the lovely DaCosta brings welcome delicacy and warmth.

Leaning to the twee side,Whole Lotta Sole is not going to sway audiences expecting gangster turf to yield grit. But a packed house at the Tribeca Film Festival, where the film world-premiered, seemed tickled, suggesting that it should find a niche at the undemanding end of the specialized market.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival

Production companies: Menlo Park and Seamus, in association with Limelight Media, Premiere Picture, Northern Ireland Screen, Archer City Film Group, Molinare, Jeff Steen Enterprises

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Colm Meaney, Martin McCann, Yaya DaCosta, David OHara, Michael Legge, Colin MacNeill

Director: Terry George

Screenwriters: Thomas Gallagher, Terry George

Producers: Simon Bosanquet, Terry George, David Gorder, Jay Russell

Executive producers: David Rogers, Jason Garrett, Barrie Osbourne, Anand Tiwari, Brendan Fraser, Mark Huffam, Robert Lewis, Jeff Steen, Michael Henry, Chris Hunt

Director of photography: Des Whelan

Production designer: David Craig

Music: Foy Vance

Costume designer: Hazel Webb-Crozier

Editor: Nick Emerson

Sales: Essential Entertainment

No rating, 89minutes

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The Hives Unleash 'Lex Hives' in New York: Concert Review

Witnessing a concert by The Hives is to witness The Pelle Almqvist Show: the 33-year-old frontman, whose stage persona combines the peacocky swagger of Mick Jagger and the theatrics of a manic, 19th-century circus ringleader, commands -- no, demands -- full attention from his audience.

"This stage might not be big enough for my ego," he snarled during Thursday's "secret" show at New York City's Webster Hall, which reserved its 300-capacity "Studio" for the occasion.

"Feel my hand, ladies and gentleman," quoth Almqvist, offering his sweaty palm to the crowd, his Swedish accent shrill and Schwarzenegger-ish, as if amplified for comic effect. "I want to see you sweat and naked!"

The audience howled in return, soaking up the showman's antics: he is undeniably charismatic, engagingly obnoxioius, handsome-prep-gone-bad, a retro rock star. Coming on the heels of an acclaimed, buzzy performance at the Coachella Music Festival, Almquvist and his fellow hives -- including brother Nicholaus Arson (backup vocal, guitar) and bassist Dr. Matt Destruction -- collectively delivered another energetic performance to promote the cult Swedish garage-rock band's fifth studio album, Lex Hives, which drops June 4.

The group, sporting top hats and Victorian-era black-and-white suits, opened with "Come On!" -- a call to arms, get-up-and-dance track from the record, their first in five years. They also played new material including "Wait a Minute," which has an irresistibly catch refrain, and "Patrolling Days," wherein Almquist belts, "My patrolling days are over, and I've shot nobody since!" Also: "Go Right Ahead," where he repeatedly whacked himself on the head.

"Do you love our new album?!?!?" he intoned, announcing he would "dedicate it to myself because I am, but none of you is ... Pelle Almqvist!"

Meanwhile, sibling Arson, during the band's early-aughts hit "Hate to Say I Told You So," strutted out to the front of the stage, where he proceeded to make creepily intense eye contact with ecstatic concertgoers, at one point licking his lips and shooting a guitar pick out of his mouth in a fans' direction.

Hey, when it's The Pelle Almqvist Show, you gotta stand out somehow.

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While We Were Here: Tribeca Review

Kate Bosworth looks even more gorgeous in black and white as evidenced by While We Were Here, an Italy-set relationship drama that makes the most of the luminous beauty of both its star and the locations of Naples and the island of Ischia off the Amalfi coast. Unfortunately, this tale of an illicit romance between an unhappily married woman and a younger man traffics in far too many genre clichs, beginning with its idyllic locale. If one were to judge solely by the movies, no one is having affairs in, say, Detroit.

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The film written and directed by Kat Coiro (who previously collaborated with Boswoth on Life Happens) begins with the arrival in Italy of Leonardo (Iddo Goldberg), a classical musician preparing for an important orchestral concert, and his writer wife Jane (Bosworth). Although they dutifully make love upon getting to their hotel, its quickly apparent that the relationship is suffering.

Despite his rarified profession, Leonardo is a meat-and-potatoes man (literally -- at one point disparaging Italian food in favor of steak and kidney pie) who is, gasp, unable to express his feelings. Whenever Jane attempts to bring up deep philosophical questions -- such as, for instance, why author David Foster Wallace killed himself -- he brings the conversation to a screeching halt.

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Jane, depressed over a miscarriage and her subsequent inability to have children, is working on a book about her British grandmothers wartime remembrances, heard in interview recordings (voiced by Claire Bloom, who manages to steal the film without even appearing in it).

When Jane is hit on by footloose 19-year-old American Caleb (Jamie Blackley), shes initially resistant to his charms. But he quickly wins over with such impulsive gestures as reciting a poem in Italian and skipping out on their restaurant bill. Later, after a typical evening with her husband in which he foregoes going out on the town in favor of a nice cup of tea, she tracks Caleb down and informs him, I think I need to be less serious.

And so the affair begins, with sequences depicting the rapturous lovers frolicking on the beach as Jane signals her renewed lust for life by literally letting down her hair.

Its all familiar stuff, but it works to a certain extent thanks to Bosworths sensitive performance and Goldbergs nuanced turn as the cuckolded husband.

And, of course, there are the stunning locations, which should prompt viewers to immediate book vacation tickets to Italy, even if it might provoke anxiety in insecure spouses. Although shot in color, the film is presented in black and white, which both adds romanticism to the visuals and recalls the Italian neo-realist films to which this effort harkens.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (1821 Pictures, Dead Serious Films)
Cast: Kate Bosworth, Iddo Goldberg, Jamie Blackley, Claire Bloom
Director/screenwriter: Kat Coiro
Producer: Lauren Bratman
Executive producers: Terry Dougas, Paris Kasidokostas Latsis
Director of photography: Doug Chamberlian
Editor: Adam Catino
Music: Mateo Messina
No rating, 83 min.

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Deadfall: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK A modern outlaw Western that brings Southern Gothic flavor to the wintry North, Deadfall is slicker and more compelling than its overdetermined script has any right to expect. Headlining Eric Bana in wryly subdued psycho mode, the sinewy genre piece builds to a bloody Thanksgiving dinner faceoff over roast goose and pumpkin pie. Magnolia might want to consider ditching the title for something less generic and positioning this as a nasty slice of holiday counter-programming.

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Shot by Shane Hurlbut with an atmospheric feel for the snowbound landscapes (Quebec locations stand in for Michigan's Upper Peninsula), the film is directed with a deft balance of action scenes, explosive violence and intimate character interludes by Stefan Ruzowitzy, best known for the Austrian 2008 foreign-language Oscar winner The Counterfeiters. First-time screenwriter Zach Dean elevates the story a notch above simple crime pulp by interweaving the strands of three troubled families, all with their own bruised relationships and painful histories.

The punchy opening has Addison (Bana) and his sister Liza (Olivia Wilde) speeding into an oncoming blizzard with a car full of cash from a casino heist when an accident takes out their driver and totals the vehicle. First casualty of Addisons killing spree is the state trooper who arrives at the scene. Somewhat improbably, Addison decides they should split up on foot and try to get to Canada, tossing sis a few lingering looks that suggest the borderline-incestuous ties that bind them.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, former Olympic boxer Jay (Charlie Hunnam) is fresh out of prison and already getting into trouble in a clash with his shifty trainer. Hotfooting it out of town, he heads for the farmhouse of his caring mother June (Sissy Spacek) and unforgiving retired lawman father Chet (Kris Kristofferson). Dodging cops, he picks up Liza along the way, just as weather conditions hit whiteout. (She appears about to slip into a hypothermic coma, but her makeup is flawless.) The two fugitives spend the night at a motel, where some hot sex and a little tenderness leave conflicted Liza for the first time contemplating a life away from Addison.

Also bound to turn up at June and Chets dinner table is their family friend, marginalized local deputy Hanna (Kate Mara). Her hard-ass dad, Sheriff Becker (Treat Williams), whom we assume has driven her mother away, treats Hanna as a girly liability on the force, shutting her out of the manhunt for the casino robbers.

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Addisons path of crime across the snowy wilderness gets a bit preposterous, but theres an enjoyable throwback frontier-action feel in his vicious encounter with a Native American hunter, during which he loses a finger. However, its stretching plausibility to have him wander along at precisely the right time to witness an abusive drunkard maltreating his family in an isolated cabin. Dean employs this incident with eye-rolling obviousness to cue the ugly revelations from Addison and Lizas Alabama upbringing that forged their unhealthy attachment. But strained as it is, the detour does yield an exciting chase sequence on snowmobiles, with more blood spilled.

Even when the writing gets clunky or takes lazy shortcuts (how did the roads get cleared so quickly after a major blizzard?), Ruzowitzky does a solid job of keeping the parallel plot strands in play. With his dark intensity and quite convincing sinister Southern drawl, Banas nuanced performance keeps us glued, tempering remorseless Addisons menacing behavior with deadpan humor. A little more of that knowingness from the other actors might have given the material the edge its missing.

Tonally, Deadfall seems to be aiming somewhere between Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan and the brilliant Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos, with a classic Western showdown at its climax. But the pedestrian writing holds it back.

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Its more than a touch schematic to have June and Chet represent exactly the kind of loving family Addison and Liza never had. But Spacek and Kristofferson bring such iconic Americana screen presences that they can dignify just about anything. Wilde looks gorgeous but struggles to graft much psychological complexity onto messed-up Liza. Hunnam does buff-and-brooding capably enough, but Williams is wasted in a one-dimensional role. Better use is made of Mara, whose quiet, observant Hanna shows resourcefulness while nursing her own wounds.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (Magnolia Pictures)
Production companies: Mutual Film Company, 2929 Productions, StudioCanal
Cast: Eric Bana, Olivia Wilde, Charlie Hunnam, Kate Mara, Treat Williams, Kris Kristofferson, Sissy Spacek
Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Screenwriter: Zach Dean
Producers: Gary Levinsohn, Shelly Clippard, Ben Cosgrove, Todd Wagner
Executive producer: Mark Cuban, Josette Perrotta, Adam Kolbrenner, Winfried Hammacher, Olivier Courson, Ron Halpern
Director of photography: Shane Hurlbut
Production designer: Paul Denham Austerberry
Music: Marco Beltrami
Costume designer: Odette Gadoury
Editors: Arthur Tarnowski, Dan Zimmerman
No rating, 95minutes

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The Playroom: Tribeca Review

A rare example of a grown-up story compellingly told from the perspective of children, The Playroom is a modest gem. This 70s-set drama depicting one tumultuous night in a suburban familys lives benefits from the admirably subtle approach by director Julia Dyer, working from a sensitive screenplay penned by her late sister Gretchen, with their brother Stephen serving as one of the producers. Unlike the dysfunctional one depicted onscreen, this family unit works together perfectly.

The title refers to the where the Cantwell children -- teenage Maggie (Olivia Harris) and younger siblings Christian (Jonathon McClendon), Janie (Alexandra Doke) and Sam (Ian Veteto) -- gather to tell each other stories by candlelight.

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When their parents return home one night, it soon becomes apparent that the family dynamics are frayed, with the mother Donna (Molly Parker) clearly a heavy drinker and father Martin (John Hawkes) affectionate but distracted. Still, everything seems normal enough, with Martin even conducting an impromptu spelling bee during dinner.

It isnt until the arrival of another couple (Jonathan Brooks, Lydia Mackay) for a night of cards and drinks that things begin to unravel, with Maggie catching her mother passionately kissing the family friend and the evening devolving into loud drunken arguments and a physical altercation.

These events are mostly fleetingly observed through the eyes of the children, who are otherwise preoccupying themselves with games and horseplay, including Christian accidentally falling off the roof into the pool, an event his oblivious parents fail to notice.

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The film beautifully captures both the innocent bafflement of the younger children about the adults behavior and the cynical teenage perspective of Maggie, who has just lost her virginity that day.

There are a couple of too clever ironic touches. The film is set on the day of Patty Hearts capture, with Maggie obviously relating to the fugitive heiress. And when she has sex with her boyfriend in the family garage, theres a cut to a shot of one of the children threading a needle. What, no tunnel going through a train?

But these are small quibbles about an otherwise quietly moving and well-wrought drama marked by superb performances, including newcomer Harris in her screen acting debut. And its a pleasure, especially after his recent standout turns in Winters Bone and Martha Marcy May Marlene, to watch Hawkes solidly deliver the goods in a non-villainous role.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (Red Mountain Entertainment, Ten96 Films)
Cast: John Hawkes, Molly Parker, Olivia Harris, Jonathon McClendon, Alexandra Doke, Ian Veteto, Jonathan Brooks, Lydia Mackay, Cody Linley
Director: Julia Dyer
Screenwriter: Gretchen Dyer
Producers: Stephen Dyer, Angie Meyer
Executive producers: Don Stokes, Lawrence Mattis
Director of photography: Russell Blair
Editor: Michael Coleman
Production designer: Robert Winn
Costume designer: Jennifer Schossow
Music: Bruce Richardson
No rating, 83 min

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Jack and Diane: Tribeca Review

Imagine a teenage lesbian love story directed by David Cronenberg and youll have some sense of the weirdness of Jack and Diane. Bradley Rust Grays attempt to weave horror elements into a fairly conventional narrative yields diminishing returns in this overly stylized effort receiving its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

The title characters -- not to be confused with the subjects of John Mellencamps hit tune -- are Diane (Juno Temple), a waif-like British teen spending the summer in New York City with her no-nonsense aunt (Cara Seymour), and Jack (Riley Keough), a tomboyish local with whom she forms an instant attraction.

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The romance encounters various roadblocks, although their respective inarticulateness is less a problem for them than for bored viewers. Rather, its that both seem to be emotionally damaged, which results in bizarre physical manifestations. Diane suffers from a series of torrential nosebleeds and has a habit of turning into a fearsome, werewolf-like monster. Both traits eventually transmute to Jack, who also suffers severe cuts to her face when shes hit by a cab while bicycle riding.

Gray throws some half-hearted comic relief into the mix, such as Dianes gagging when fed Jacks favorite snack of sushi with ketchup, and her disastrous attempt to shave her pubic area which, judging by the amount of shaving cream she uses, apparently forms most of her body.

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But the animated opening credits and intertitles and bizarre creature manifestations signal that the filmmaker is going for something deeper and more phantasmagorical. While these sequences superbly created by the Quay Brothers are certainly visually arresting, theyre neither scary enough to interest horror fans nor sufficiently symbolically resonant to give the film the depth to which it obviously aspires.

The young leads fulfill their roles perfectly, with Temple effortlessly projecting adolescent anxiety and Keough displaying real charisma as her tough-talking butch lover. But their striking efforts are not enough to lift this languidly paced, pretentious effort above the level of bizarre curiosity.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (Magnolia Pictures)
Production: Deerjen Films, RCR Media Group
Cast: Juno Temple, Riley Keough, Cara Seymour, Kylie Minogue, Dane DeHaan, Michael Chernus
Director/screenwriter: Bradley Rust Gray
Producers: Jen Gatien, Karin Chien, So Young Kim, Bradley Rust Gray
Executive producers: Ricardo Costa Reis, Rui Costa Reis, Eliad Josephson, Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli, Riaz Tyab
Director of photography: Anne Misawa
Editors: Bradley Rust Gray, So Yong Kim
Production: Chris Trujilo
Costume design: Audrey Louise Reynolds
No rating, 110 min.

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What’s in a Name? (Le Prenom): Film Review

A bunch of forty-something buddies find their dinner date transformed into a dinner disaster in Whats in a Name? (Le Prenom), an amusing and well-acted French farce in the pure tradition of boulevard classics Le Diner de cons and Le Pere Noel est une ordure. Adapting their highly successful stage version to the screen with keen comic-timing but much less cinematic panache, Mathieu Delaporteand Alexandre de la Patelliereoffer up a lively take on love, friendship and baby-naming that should titillate Francophone audiences and upscale offshore distributors.

Released on French screens opposite Marvels The Avengers, the Pathe title placed second on opening day and should continue scoring solid numbers during the annual pre-Cannes dearth of bankable Gallic fare. Certainly, the filmmakers already a successful screenwriting duo (Renaissance, The Prodigies) have taken little risks with their hit 2010 play, bringing back four of the five cast members and sticking to their guns by more or less confining the story to a single Parisian apartment.

After a Jean-Pierre Jeunet-style prologue introduces the players via quick vignettes, archive footage and a tongue-in-cheek voiceover, we land at the home of Sorbonne professor, Pierre (Charles Berling, the only non-member of the original cast) and his schoolteacher wife, Elisabeth (Valerie Benguigui) as they scramble to get dinner ready for their guests: Elizabeths brother, the suave real estate agent, Vincent (Patrick Bruel) and long-time friend and classical trombonist, Claude (Guillaume de Tonquedec).

Although the gang seems to hang out often, this particular soiree is the occasion for Vincent to announce the name of his upcoming baby to his sister and friends. Without giving it away lets just say that it wouldnt make Elisabeths Jewish mother, Francoise (Francois Fabian), very proud the name provokes an uproar among the group, and by the time Vincents pregnant gal, Anna (Judith El Zein) shows up, everyones panties are in a bundle.

The bickering continues as a series of shocking revelations boil to the surface, and soon enough blood is spilled, couscous is thrown and someone is accused of adultery. As in many such a farce inspired by the genres godfather, Georges Feydeau, the twists and quid pro quos ultimately force the various characters to face truths about themselves and one another, and nothing is ever quite as bad as it seems.

With plenty of rehearsal time on stage, the cast delivers all the zingers and insults with ease, and singer-actor Bruel (A Secret) is especially adept as the smooth-talking but vulnerable Vincent.

Cinematographer David Ungaro(Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky) does his best with such a limited setting, while the theatrical staging makes one long for a live performance instead of whats essentially a slickly crafted piece of filmed theatre.

Opens: In France (April 25)
Production companies: Chapter 2, Pathe, TF1 Films Production, M6 Films, Fargo Films, Nexus Factory, UFilm
Cast: Patrick Bruel, Valerie Benguigui, Charles Berling, Judith El Zein, Guillaume de Tonquedec, Francoise Fabian
Directors: Mathieu Delaporte, Alexandre de la Patelliere
Screenwriters: Mathieu Delaporte, Alexandre de la Patelliere, based on their stage play
Producers: Dimitri Rassam, Jerome Seydoux
Director of photography: David Ungaro
Production designer: Marie Cheminal
Music: Jerome Rebotier
Costume designer: Anne Schotte
Editor: Celia Lafitedupont
International sales: Pathe International
No rating, 109 minutes

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Lola Versus: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK A breakup-breakdown comedy providing a welcome showcase for Greta Gerwig, Daryl Wein's Lola Versus marks a strong step up for Wein and his returning Breaking Upwards co-writer Zoe Lister-Jones. Convincing in its depiction of late-20s romantic anxiety (if not of that age bracket's real estate realities), it is broadly appealing without bowing too deeply to formula.

On the morning of her 29th birthday, Lola (Gerwig) wakes from one dream (she's doing yoga on a beach strewn with high heels and sex toys) to find another: Her loft-dwelling, adoring and handsome boyfriend (Joel Kinnaman) wants to marry her.

Just as plans for the big day are made and paid for, though, the fianc gets cold feet, leaving Lola to flounder through a year of anxiety eating and poor decision-making. As the movie's title suggests, Lola has a hard time figuring out who exactly is standing between her and the "real life" she imagined for herself.

Gerwig is predictably charismatic in ambivalence, and viewers will find it easy to identify with her wounded slide into the arms of best friend Henry (Hamish Linklater, nicely cast as a good guy balancing friendships with both Lola and her ex). Describing him as not a rebound but a "layup," Lola leads Henry to believe they have a chance (an illusion Wein enhances with a happy montage through the streets of New York) but is simultaneously sabotaging herself.

The movie's humor is low-key throughout, less about hijinks than the kind of throw-your-hands-up attitude that might inspire a frustrated waitress (Lola helps at her mom's restaurant) to throw whole apples in a pitcher of wine and call it sangria when diners persist in ordering Spanish drinks in an Italian restaurant. Lister-Jones, playing Alice, offers a sharp-elbowed take on the familiar best-friend role, getting more than her share of laughs by refusing to pretend Lola's the only one with a troubled love life.

The script is particularly strong in its last act, avoiding easy fixes and new romance and instead allowing its heroine to act out just enough to finally get tired of herself. Its solitude-is-okay message is hardly novel, but Wein's comfortable way of reaching that point will resonate with viewers still trying to achieve that particular brand of enlightenment.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Spotlight
Opens: Friday, June 8 (Fox Searchlight)
Production Company: Groundswell Productions, Fox Searchlight
Cast: Greta Gerwig, Joel Kinnaman, Zoe Lister-Jones, Hamish Linklater, Bill Pullman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Jay Pharoah, Debra Winger
Director: Daryl Wein
Screenwriters-Executive producers: Zoe Lister-Jones, Daryl Wein
Producers: Michael London, Jocelyn Hayes Simpson, Janice Williams
Director of photography: Jacob Ihre
Production designer: Teresa Mastropierro
Music: Fall On Your Sword
Costume designer: Jenny Gering
Editor: Suzy Elmiger, Susan Littenberg
R, 86 minutes

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Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK Building a surprisingly powerful portrait around a single, long-forgotten scrap of film, Raymond De Felitta's Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story combines present-day reporting with archival material to investigate an unsung hero of the Civil Rights era. Beautifully put together in just about every way, it will be potent stuff on the small screen but deserves its moment in theaters.

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De Felitta, maker of modest charmers like Two Family House and City Island, is the son of TV veteran Frank De Felitta, who made docs for NBC News in the 60s. After posting some of his father's work on YouTube in an effort to preserve it, he heard from Yvette Johnson, the granddaughter of one of Frank's subjects; together, the two explored the fascinating story of a black waiter named Booker Wright.

Wright's appearance in the 1966 report Mississippi: A Self Portrait almost didn't happen. The elder De Felitta had intended to depict only the white community of Greenwood, a town known for its hostility toward desegregation. But part of that white society revolved around a restaurant where black waiters recited a vast menu for the amusement of an all-white clientele, and Wright was among the place's most popular waiters.

He also, despite being illiterate, ran his own restaurant on the black side of town. The filmmakers met him there to film a recitation of the menu, and were surprised when Booker continued to talk once he was done -- cheerfully discussing his ways of handling the daily humiliations his job entailed. De Felitta knew this footage would be inflammatory when the program aired in Greenwood; he used it anyway.

That choice had consequences. But before revealing them, Raymond De Felitta greatly expands on his father's work, interviewing blacks and whites who survive from the time of its making (some of whom appear in the 1966 film) and, with the help of Yvette Johnson (who, poignantly, had never fully understood her grandfather's actions before discovering the film online), exploring the state of race relations in Greenwood today.

Crisp black-and-white photography underlines the doc's the-past-remains-with-us themes, and even viewers well versed in Civil Rights lore may marvel at the fresh perspectives it finds. Viewer involvement only deepens in the final third, as our assumptions about where this is all going prove wrong more than once.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Spotlight
Opens: Friday, April 25 (Tribeca Film)
Production Company: Eyepatch Productions
Director: Raymond De Felitta
Producer: David Zellerford
Executive producers: Steven C. Beer, Lynn Roer
Director of photography: Joe Victorine
Music: David Cieri
Editor: George Gross
No rating, 91 minutes

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Any Day Now: Tribeca Review

Depictions of custody battles have become a cinematic staple, but few register with the heartfelt emotion of Any Day Now. This 1970s Los Angeles-set drama about a gay couple fighting to adopt a Down syndrome-afflicted teenager is only loosely inspired by a real story, but the smart screenplay by director Travis Fine and George Arthur Bloom has the ring of truth. And the issues raised by this film receiving its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival remain all too sadly relevant.

The central characters are drag queen Rudy (Alan Cumming) and his new lover, closeted district attorney Paul (Garret Dillahunt). Their sweetly depicted romance is a whirlwind one, with the flamboyant, uncensored Rudy immediately drawing the reserved lawyer out of his shell.

Rudy lives in a rattrap apartment next door to a drug addict mother who habitually neglects her son Marco (Isaac Leyva). When she gets arrested and sent to jail, Rudy impulsively decides to care for the helpless 14-year-old rather than leaving him to the vagaries of the Family Services system.

After the mother agrees to hand over temporary custody to Rudy, he and Marco move in with Paul and they quickly become a loving family, as beautifully etched in an 8mm film montage. But when Pauls homophobic boss becomes suspicious it doesnt take long for the authorities to take Marco away, with his newfound parents forced to embark on a battle to get him back in a legal system marked by anti-gay prejudice.

While some of its plot elements feel forced (did Rudy really have to be a drag queen lip-synching disco songs in a gay bar?), Any Day Now nonetheless exerts a powerful hold, with even the most melodramatic scenes handled in effective subtle fashion. And the supporting characters -- including a no-nonsense judge (Frances Fisher), a take-no-prisoners lawyer (Gregg Henry) and a sympathetic special needs teacher (Kelli Williams) -- defy easy stereotypes.

The superb performances add immeasurably to the films impact. Cumming, who also gets to show off his vocal abilities, delivers Rudys hilariously bitchy wisecracks with estimable comic flair while also revealing his underlying vulnerability. Dillahunt perfectly conveys Pauls quiet strength, and Levya is deeply touching as the doughnut-loving teen who finds himself a helpless legal pawn.

Besides handling the handling the dramatic aspects with keen sensitivity, director Fine gets the period details exactly right, especially the awful 70s era wardrobes and hairstyles that leave modern audiences cringing.

Tribeca Film Festival (PFM Pictures)

Cast: Alan Cumming, Garret Dillahunt, Isaac Leyva, Frances Fisher, Gregg Henry, Don Franklin, Chris Mulkey

Director: Travis Fine

Screenwriters: Travis Fine, George Arthur Bloom

Producers: Travis Fine, Kristine Fine, Chip Hourihan

Executive producers: Maxine Makover, Anne OShea, Wayne LaRue Smith, Dan Skahen, Anne OShea

Director of photography: Rachel Morrison

Editor: Tom Cross

Production designer: Elizabeth Garner

Costume designer: Samantha Kuester

Music: Joey Newman

No rating, 97 min

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Rubberneck: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK A character-driven take on true-crime fare, Alex Karpovsky's Rubberneck marks a solid dramatic turn for a filmmaker best known for playing comedic parts in indie films like Tiny Furniture. Though not showy in any way, it could find enough support on the fest circuit to justify a theatrical run.

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Karpovsky plays Paul, a scientist who strikes up a conversation at a party with new coworker Danielle (Jaime Ray Newman), winds up having a passionate night with her, and then finds her uninterested in further romance. Eight months later, Danielle's a cordial but impassive colleague and Paul's seething: sneaking glances at her constantly, bristling at the way she flirts with another man in the lab, occasionally needing to duck into the men's room for a gasping anxiety attack.

Though it's clear something bad will happen, Rubberneck doesn't play like a thriller, turning screws until someone breaks. Karpovsky and cowriter Garth Donovan take their time fleshing out Paul's character, from the abandonment issues in his childhood to the awkward ways he now seeks companionship. James Lavino's subtly effective score suits this approach, and doesn't go for broke even when things take their inevitable turn.

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Once Paul snaps, Rubberneck breaks a sweat without really abandoning the thoughtful mood it has established. A sequence at the lab, with Paul pretending everything is normal while disaster looms, is especially involving. The aftermath of his breakdown offers surprises without exploitation, and resolves itself far more realistically than thrillers typically do.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Viewpoints
Production Company: Blameless Twins
Cast: Alex Karpovsky, Jaime Ray Newman, Amanda Good Hennessey, Dennis Staroselsky, Dakota Shepard
Director: Alex Karpovsky
Screenwriters-Editors: Alex Karpovsky, Garth Donovan
Producers: Garth Donovan, Michael Bowes, Adam Roffman
Executive producers: Robert Patton-Spruill, Patricia Moreno
Director of photography: Beecher Cotton
Production designer: Lindsay Degen
Music: James Lavino
Sales: XYZ Films
No rating, 83 minutes

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Francophrenia: Tribeca Review

Like an art-school reimagining of the standard making-of featurette, the Frankensteined Francophrenia culls through 40 hours of mundane backstage material to produce something that looks and sounds like experimental cinema but feels more like one big inside joke. It's an inside joke we're all invited to enjoy, though, and the oddball pic makes a diverting cult object to slot alongside other unusual side projects by actor/student/artist/et cetera James Franco.

After having assistants shoot footage on the set of his well-publicized General Hospital episode at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, Franco handed the material over to documentarian Ian Olds with a carte-blanche assignment to do something avant-garde-y with it. Olds sliced and diced, ran scenes of the finished show through video-FX filters, and manhandled the sync sound; after achieving the desired aesthetic, he added another layer of meta by writing a stream-of-consciousness voiceover for the "James Franco" onscreen and voicing it himself.

The loose narrative implied in this voiceover (where Olds' "Franco" is occasionally taunted by other imaginary voices) is of an actor on the verge of a crackup: "I'm all alone in this machine," he says early on, in between less heady complaints about needing to get something to eat before he shoots his next scene.

There's a whiff of psychological horror here, with Franco making repeated comments about "losing it," and wondering if Franco the actor is becoming infected by Franco the General Hospital villain. Olds doesn't try too hard to sell this narrative, undercutting it with weird humor, but he does construct things such that a willing viewer might find other sorts of psychodrama: Other members of the show's cast, standing with blank stares or doing warm-up rituals while waiting for the cameras to roll, begin to look like automatons in a world constructed by unseen, possibly malevolent forces.

One suspects that Olds and Franco will be happy with any interpretation of Francophrenia -- that the point isn't so much to elicit a particular response as to produce one more artifact standing against the notion that the actor's just another dude whose remarkable looks were a ticket to easy fame and fortune.

Or, as Olds' version of Franco puts it here, "I went to graduate school for a reason, people."

Production Company: Rabbit Bandini Productions
Director: Ian Olds, James Franco
Screenwriter: Paul Felten, Ian Olds
Producers: Vince Jolivette, Miles Levy
Director of photography: Doug Chamberlain
Music: Joe Denardo & Kevin Doria
Editor: Ian Olds
Sales: Vince Jolivette, Rabbit Bandini Productions
No rating, 68 minutes

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Struck by Lightning: Tribeca Review

Chris Colfer of "Glee" stays in familiar territory with his screenwriting debut, which basically plays like an extended episode of that hit show minus the musical interludes. The tale of a high school misfit whos clearly smarter than everyone else in the room and is sure to let everyone know it, Struck by Lightning strains hard for quirky social satire but proves mostly wearisome. It will take smart marketing and a big turnout by Colfers die-hard fans to lift this film directed by Brian Dannelly (Saved), now receiving its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, above niche status.

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Its no spoiler to reveal that Colfers character winds up dead, since his fate--specified by the literal title--is revealed at the very beginning. Like William Holdens similarly ill-fated Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, he proceeds to narrate the tale, told in flashback.

Seventeen-year-old Carson Phillips (Colfer), who aspires to both a prestigious journalism career at the New Yorker and winning the Nobel Peace Prize, faces some serious obstacles. Growing up in a small town with his prescription drug and booze addicted single mom (Allison Janney), hes surrounded by shallow high school classmates and clueless adults, including a guidance counselor whos never heard of Northwestern University.

Through plot machinations to convoluted to recount, Carson becomes convinced that his only path to that prestigious school is by starting a literary magazine featuring contributions from his fellow students. To get these stereotypical figuresthe school jock, the snooty cheerleader (Sarah Hyland of "Modern Family"), the closeted gay couple, etc.to cooperate, he and his best friend (a funny Rebel Wilson) threaten to reveal their secrets.

VIDEO: Chris Colfer on Being Cast for 'Glee'

Ironically, the actor/screenwriter is on surer ground with his handling of the adult characters. The bitter mom--whose idea of nurturing is to tell her son, You make me wish I had that abortion in the 90s--is alternately hilarious and pathetic. Carsons oblivious father (Dermot Mulroney) is in a new relationship with a sweet pharmacist (Christina Hendricks) whos pregnant with his child but completely unaware of his past. And his aged, Alzheimers-afflicted grandmother (Polly Bergen) is unable to recognize him when he visits.

Unfortunately, most of the film revolves around Carson, whose condescending wisecracks and endless pop culture references make him less precocious than thoroughly obnoxious. When he dies at the end, it feels less like a tragedy of unfulfilled potential than a mercy killing.

Straining for cheap laughs with such lines as I hate you more than I hate the Holocaust, the film feels much longer than its 90 minutes.

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While Colfer displays far less charisma here than he does on "Glee", the supporting adult actors pick up much of the slack. Janney is particularly superb, providing real depths to what could have been a stock character; Mulroney and Bergen bring a touching poignancy to their roles; and an understated Hendricks is deeply moving.

Tribeca Film Festival
Production: Permut Presentations, Camellia Entertainment, Evil Media Empire, Inphenate
Cast: Chris Colfer, Allison Janney, Christina Hendricks, Polly Bergen, Dermot Mulroney, Sarah Hyland, Carter Jenkins, Brad William hence, Rebel Wilson, Angela Kinsey.
Director: Brian Dannelly
Screenwriter: Chris Colfer
Producers: David Permut, Roberto Aguire, Mia Chang
Executive producers: Jason Michael Berman, Chris Colfer, Glenn Rigberg, Lawrence Kopeikin
Director of photography: Bobby Bukowski
Editor: Tia Nolan
Production designer: Linda Burton
Costume designer: Wendy Chuck
Music: Jake Monaco
No rating, 90 minutes

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Mansome: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK Pointless but consistently amusing, Morgan Spurlock's Mansome works best when it tacitly admits its investigation of contemporary male grooming is a just-for-laughs affair. Its superficial sociology makes a fine setting for comic riffs on the identity crisis faced by Today's Male, but doesn't necessarily justify a theatrical outing.

Without question, cultural expectations for men have been in flux for decades; some earnest documentarian may eventually offer more than pop-psych insight into what that means. Auds will realize Spurlock's not the man for that job. Even so, they may expect the filmmaker's hair-obsessed doc to offer a bit more than this haphazard tour through the follicular strategies embraced by the fringe-y beard fetishists, eyebrow obsessives, and hairless bodybuilders given the most screen time to here.

Subjects like a Sikh fashion-industry worker who confesses his metrosexuality and lets us watch as he undertakes OCD-level cosmetic procedures are compelling in their way, but the occasional interview with a sociologist or magazine editor does little to link these outliers to the mainstream in a meaningful way.

Viewers will have an easier time identifying with the celebrity interviewees, including Zach Galifianakis, who make the film watchable even as they demonstrate total indifference to the obsessions and neuroses it has set out to document. (God bless him, John Waters manages to maintain his signature look while appearing immune to the insecurities one suspects afflict many of the younger moustache-wearers here.)

Chapters are stitched together with footage from a spa day in which exec-producers Will Arnett and Jason Bateman get pampered while musing about what it means to be a man. Their banter is as funny as fans will expect, walking a fine line between taking the question seriously and mocking themselves for participating.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Spotlight

Production Companies: Electus, Warrior-Poets, DumbDumb

Director: Morgan Spurlock

Screenwriters: Jeremy Chilnick, Morgan Spurlock

Producers: Jeremy Chilnick, Meri Haitkin, Morgan Spurlock, Michael Rushton

Executive producers: Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, Ben Silverman

Directors of photography: Paul Dokuchitz, Matt Goodman, Daniel Marracino

Music: Jingle Punks

Editor: Thomas M. Vogt

Sales: Mark Urman, Paladin

No rating, 82 minutes

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Nancy, Please: Tribeca Review

You wouldnt think that a film about a graduate students attempts to retrieve his copy of the book Little Dorrit from a former roommate would make for compelling viewing. But Nancy, Please, Andrew Semans arresting feature debut receiving its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, turns out to be just that. This subtly engrossing psychological thriller plays like an intellectual version of Fatal Attraction, minus the sex and the dead bunny. And thats meant as a compliment.

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The central character is the mild-mannered Paul (Will Rogers), a Yale PhD student whose unfinished dissertation depends on the notes he wrote in his tattered, hardback edition of Dickens classic novel. The problem is that he left it in the house he formerly shared with his roommate/non-girlfriend Nancy (Eleonore Hendricks). When he contacts her to pick it up shes initially cooperative. But every attempt he makes to do so proves fruitless.

Paul, whos clearly already on shaky academic ground as evidenced by his tense interactions with his graduate advisor (Novella Nelson), becomes increasingly obsessed and desperate. At first his girlfriend Jen (Rebecca Lawrence) and best friend Charlie (Santino Fontana) try to help, but their patience with his obsession eventually wears thin. I withdraw my support, announces the disgusted Jen at one point.

Pauls attempts to reason with Nancy, who he dubs a creature of hate, fail to produce results, with their encounters becoming increasingly hostile. Things escalate even further when Paul, having found an old key to her house, lets himself in one night when he thinks shes not home and she promptly pummels him with a baseball bat.

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Although Nancy is seen only fleetingly for most of the films running time, a final confrontation scene provides some depths to her previously baffling motivations while not making her any more likeable.

But likeable is not what the director -- working from a smart, darkly funny screenplay co-written with Will Heinrich -- is going for. Indeed, the initially sympathetic Paul gradually reveals himself to be an immature screw-up who all too eagerly exploits his current predicament to avoid responsibility for his own failures.

Rogers delivers a perfectly calibrated performance as the slowly unraveling Paul; Hendricks provides just the right touch of ambiguous menace as his adversary; and Lawrence and Fontana are appealing as Pauls increasingly frustrated support system.

Tribeca Film Festival (Small Coup Films)
Cast: Will Rogers, Eleonore Hendricks, Rebecca Lawrence, Santino Fontana, Novella Nelson, Wally Dunn
Director: Andrew Semans
Screenwriters: Will Heinrich, Andrew Semans
Producers: Vinay Singh, Dave Saltzman
Executive producers: Pawan Singh, Alan Silverstein, Laura Heberton
Director of photography: Eric Lin
Editor: Ron Dulin
Music: Chris White
Production designer/costume designer: Ana Cambre
No rating, 84 min

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Fame High: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK An ordinary look at four extraordinary kids, Scott Hamilton Kennedy's Fame High sticks firmly to convention but will please viewers who can't help but want the doc's sympathetic teens to escape the heartbreak most would-be artists face. Small screens are the most appropriate venue for this look at a performing-arts high school in Los Angeles.

Following four students through a single school year at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Kennedy offers a satisfying balance of student and parent interviews with fly-on-wall looks at classes that barely resemble those in conventional schools. His subjects are remarkably driven, whether that drive comes from parents -- freshman pianist Zak seems almost forced into performing by his father, who sees jazz stardom as a means of escaping borderline poverty -- or in spite of them -- like Grace, whose Korean-American parents say they'll only keep supporting her ballet dreams if she's accepted to Juilliard after high school.

Singer/instrumentalist Brittany's parents, touchingly, believe in her talent so strongly they've temporarily split up to support her -- Mom moving from Wisconsin to live with Brittany in L.A. while the rest of the family stays behind. They keep in touch with daily phone calls while trying to figure out how the budding songwriter can go pro. Compared to this, redheaded actress Ruby -- whose parents are both performers themselves -- seems to have it made.

All four are likeable kids who demonstrate impressive gifts, and it's easy to imagine any of them succeeding. Though the year holds no major disasters for them, little challenges show how easily a budding career might flounder -- even voluntarily, as when Ruby lands a professional theater gig only to hate how it forces her to spend time away from friends.

A couple of the subjects flirt with failure, offering minor but compelling drama, but the most involving narrative strand here is Grace's longing for a romantic life her parents won't allow. The parallels with challenges she faces as a dancer, tending to be stiffly perfect instead of freely passionate, are so clear you'd think a screenwriter sketched them out.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, World Documentary Competition
Production Companies: Black Valley Films, Whitewater Films
Director-Director of Photography: Scott Hamilton Kennedy
Producers: Leilani Makuakane, Scott Hamilton Kennedy
Executive producers: Rick Rosenthal, Chip Rosenbloom, Leilani Makuakane, Scott Hamilton Kennedy
Music: Doug DeAngelis
Editors: Jillian Moul, Scott Hamilton Kennedy
Sales: David Garber, Lantern Lane Entertainment
No rating, 97 minutes

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Replicas: Tribeca Review

A violent home invasion tale is infused with psychological and social undertones in Jeremy Power Regimbals film making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. But while Replicas admirably attempts to add interesting subtext to a by now familiar genre, it ultimately pales in comparison to such truly terrifying predecessors as Funny Games. Most notable for its strong sense of atmosphere and the arresting performances by its leads, it does serve as an impressive calling card for its debuting director.

The situation is fairly basic. Upscale couple Mark and Mary Hughes (Josh Close, Selma Blair) have retreated with their nine-year-old son Brendon to their well-appointed vacation home in the woods after the recent death of their young daughter in a car accident. Theyre woken up early one morning by a neighboring couples seemingly friendly gesture of dropping off firewood.

Although Mark is initially put off by the overly welcoming Bobby (James DArcy) and his skittish wife Jane (Rachel Miner), he reluctantly agrees to host them for dinner that night. But the meeting turns awkward when Bobby persists in asking highly personal questions, and turns disastrous when their son Jared puts a knife to Brendons throat when an argument breaks out over a video game.

Mark and Mary soon find themselves under siege, with their dog apparently shot and the interloping neighbors forcing their way back into the house. As the violent games of cat and mouse ensue, it becomes apparent that the bizarre family is not quite who they say they are and that the disturbed Bobby intends to get rid of the Hughes and assume their identities.

Director Regimbal does an effective job of slowly ratcheting up the tension and handling the sometimes brutal violence in a relatively restrained manner. Josh Closes screenplay is equally nuanced, concentrating as much on the characters psychological complexities as the gothic thriller storyline.

But despite the excellent work by the actorsDArcy makes a truly creepy villain and Blair brings unexpected depths to the grieving wifethe film is neither lurid enough to work on B-movie terms nor deep enough to rise above its familiar tropes.

Technical credits are above average, especially Norm Lis gloomy, darkly tinged lensing that makes the interiors of the house feel as scary as the endless woods outside.

Tribeca Film Festival (Celluloid Dreams).

Production: Studio Movement Entertainment, Sepia Films, Telefilm Canada.

CAST: Selma Blair, Josh Close, Rachel Miner, James DArcy, Quinn Lord, Alex Ferris.

Director: Jeremy Power Regimbal.

Screenwriter: Josh Close.

Producers: Justin Tyler Close, Jeremy Power Regimbal.

Executive producer: Kim Roberts.

Director of photography: Norm Li.

Editor: Austin Andrews.

Production designer: Tink.

Costume designer: Kathi Moore.

Music: Keith Power.

No rating, 96 min.

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Safe: Film Review

LONDON -- The former athlete and model whose relatively short action-hero career has generated more than a billion dollars of box office business, Jason Statham sticks within his narrow but highly marketable range in this fast-moving New York gangland thriller. Though Safe initially seems a little darker and more thoughtful than the British stars previous comic-book escapades in Death Race, The Expendables or the Transporter trilogy, it ultimately reverts to testosterone-heavy formula. Millions of loyal, undemanding fans who have already made Statham a one-man action franchise will doubtless flock to make his latest star vehicle a solid multiplex hit, but anyone expecting him to diversify into more complex material in the tradition of Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone should sit this one out.

Writer-director Boaz Yakin has a spotty track record punctuated by the odd commercial hit, notably his 2000 sports drama Remember the Titans. Working with Tarantinos long-time producer Lawrence Bender, Yakin fills Safe with well-choreographed action set-pieces, stock characters and painfully clunky dialogue. Statham plays a variation on his usual tight-lipped tough-guy persona, barely stretching his dramatic chops beyond a half-hearted stab at a non-specific American accent, and even this he appears to forget intermittently.

Luke Wright (Statham) is a former black-ops supercop previously hired by a corrupt New York mayor (Chris Sarandon) to play Travis Bickle, unofficially wiping criminal scum off the streets. But disgust with his crooked bosses and colleagues eventually leads him to become a cage fighter instead, until a lethal accident and a proud refusal to throw a fight brings him into the vengeful orbit of a sadistic Russian mafia godfather Docheski (Sandor Tecsy). Instead of killing Wright, Docheskis henchmen murder his wife and leaves him homeless, contriving a baroque punishment that forces him to spend the rest of his life isolated from human contact. Under constant surveillance, anybody he becomes close to will be instantly targeted for execution.

Meanwhile, the Russians are also engaged in a violent feud with the Chinese Triads over access to 10-year-old Mei (Catherine Chan), a genius-level golden child abducted from China due to her superhuman math and memory skills. Both Docheski and his Chinese counterpart Hang Jiao (veteran Chinese-American stalwart James Hong, alumni of both Chinatown and Blade Runner) covet Meis beautiful mind because it contains the secret combination to a fortress-like casino safe where the Triads have stashed a vast fortune. But as she flees from a series of botched abduction attempts, Mei crosses Wrights path, pulling him back from the brink of suicide with a redemptive mission to protect her from harm.

After this preposterous but fairly compelling set-up, Safe becomes increasingly hobbled by obligatory action-movie clichs as Wright turns the tables on both his Russian and Chinese pursuers. Escaping from a spectacular hotel siege, he gathers together his former sworn enemies on the police force for a heavily armed, Oceans Eleven-style raid on the safe itself. This noisy climax feels both wildly implausible and almost incidental to the plot, as if grafted on as an afterthought to ramp up the action and reinforce the titles double meaning.

Safe initially seems to promise more than a standard Statham thriller, with its gritty aesthetic and bleak character back story. Yoakin is clearly a gifted action stylist, dispensing with the opening credits altogether to dive straight into the guts of the story via a series of jump-cut flashbacks, quickfire set-ups and percussive stunt sequences. His car crashes are especially good, making virtuoso use of mirrors and point-of-view shots to amplify their kinetic, in-your-face impact.

Film fans raised on classic 1970s New York thrillers will also enjoy Yoakins anachronistic vision of the city as a grimy, grungy, retro-sleazy gangsters paradise. While his street chases have some of visceral white-knuckle charge of primetime William Friedkin or John Frankenheimer, his depiction of Manhattan as ruled by shady officials and violent cops recalls the quasi-Shakespearean rotten kingdom that often served as Sidney Lumets territory. Inevitably, these nods to former glory lack the political subtlety and dramatic weight of their cinematic ancestors, but it is pleasing to note that pre-Guiliani NYC still maintains a gravitational pull on the collective psyche.

Safe ultimately resolves itself into a string of familiar Statham money shots leaden quips, fist fights, gun battles and a huge body count. Indeed, even action genre devotees may balk at the high number of random killings here, most of them sloppy and dramatically pointless. In the process, Wright bounces back from guilt-ridden, grief-stricken husk to one-man army of righteous revenge. His final bonding session with Mei, father and daughter style, is as corny as it is inevitable. And thus a movie which opens with teasing echoes of Unforgiven or The Bourne Identity settles for being just another cookie-cutter star vehicle with almost no moral center or emotional depth.

Of course, Statham did not become the Billion Dollar Man by pandering to arthouse ambiguity. He clearly knows his target audience and has little interest in challenging them, or himself. But where once he was tipped as a prospective successor to Willis, career choices like this one suggests he is happy to settle for being the new Chuck Norris. For all its surface grit and dark undertow, Safe plays it very safe indeed.

Production: IM Global, Automatik Entertainment, Tigger Street Productions, 87 Eleven
Cast: Jason Statham, Catherine Chan, Chris Sarandon, James Hong, Sandor Tecsy, Robert John Burke, Reggie Lee, Anson Mount, Joseph Sikora, Danny Hoch, Matt O'Toole
Director: Boaz Yakin
Screenwriter: Boaz Yakin
Producers: Lawrence Bender, Dana Brunetti
Executive producers: Stuart Ford, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Kevin Spacey, Deepak Nayar
Director of photography: Stefan Czapsky
Production designer: Joseph Nemec III
Editor: Frdric Thoraval
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh
Costume designer: Ann Roth
Rated R, 94 minutes

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Freaky Deaky: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK A goofily retro stew of Elmore Leonard double-dealing and broadcast TV-friendly sleaze, Charles Matthau's Freaky Deaky is just about diverting enough for a midday rerun slot on cable.

Set in 1974 Detroit, but looking like it was photographed last week, the pic opens in an all-green den where shag-carpet steps lead to a hot tub with a throne built into it. The crime lord sitting there is about to be blown up -- a murder bomb-squad detective Chris Mankowski (Billy Burke) won't knock himself out trying to solve.

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He'll be forced to piece it together eventually, though, when a leggy blonde (Sabina Gadecki) involves him in a dispute with wack-job heir Woody Ricks (Crispin Glover at his wack-jobbiest, which is less amusing than it may sound). Ricks is being targeted by demolitions-freaks Robin Abbot and Skip Gibbs (Breanne Racano and Christian Slater), dimwits with vaguely revolutionary pasts and vast carnal appetites that somehow always get sated off screen.

Burke's too-cool-to-care attitude is appropriate for his lazy-cop character, but odds are good the audience will share the sentiment. They'll surely identify with bright spot Michael Jai White, who as Ricks's bodyguard Donnell is just biding his time, trying to position himself to come out ahead when inevitably somebody either sends his boss up in a cloud of dynamite or yanks his fortune out from under him.

Production Companies: Matthau Media, Eyde Studios, Final Cut Productions

Cast: Crispin Glover, Billy Burke, Michael Jai White, Christian Slater, Sabina Gadecki, Breanne Racano, Andy Dick, Roger Bart, Bill Duke

Director-Screenwriter-Producer: Charles Matthau
Executive producers: George Eyde, Louis Eyde, Nathaniel Eyde, Robert Cantrell, Steven M. Berez, Donald Zuckerman, Lee Greenberg
Director of photography: John J. Connor
Production designer: Tom Southwell
Music: Joseph LoDuca
Costume designer: Ingrid Ferrin
Editor: William Steinkamp
Sales: Ben Weiss, Paradigm
No rating, 92 minutes

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Revenge for Jolly: Tribeca Review

Screenwriter Brian Pestos leads the pic as Harry, whose unspecified-but-shady actions have made someone angry enough to break into his house and kill his much-beloved Miniature Pinscher, Jolly. With cousin Cecil (Oscar Isaac), Harry goes on a beer-fueled hunt for the culprit, stalking through the night in an old burgandy Cadillac whose trunk holds a small arsenal.

Each stop on their dopey-detective path holds a celeb or two, each of whom quickly manages to rub Cecil just wrong enough that he kills him. A couple of cast members make the most of their death scenes -- David Rasche's gurgling moment of defiance hints at what the film probably hoped to be -- but just as often then simply get shot and die, in deadpan moments that are too predictable to provoke the shock-laughs the pic expects.

Pestos is a dead zone in these encounters, his sullen-desperado act never charismatic enough to hold the thing together. He and Isaac never achieve sufficient zonked chemistry to carry interludes like the break for Mexican food where cerveza is ordered by the six-pack; instead the scenes just drag. The centerpiece sequence, set at an unsettlingly seedy wedding reception, gets a glimmer of nasty energy from Kevin Corrigan and others, but is too little, too late.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Cinemania
Production Company: Atlas Independent, A Saboteur
Cast: Brian Petsos, Oscar Isaac, Elijah Wood, Kristen Wiig, Adam Brody, Ryan Phillippe, Gillian Jacobs, Bobby Moynihan, Kevin Corrigan, David Rasche
Director: Chadd Harbold
Screenwriter: Brian Petsos
Producers: William Green, Aaron Ginsburg, Brian Petsos
Executive producers: Alan G. Glazer, Chris Wilmot, Michael Wunderman, Peter Fruchtman, Dan Berk
Director of photography: Daniel Katz
Production designer: Chris Trujillo
Music: David Fleming, Justin Hori
Costume designer: Amanda Ford
Editors: Micah Scarpelli, Vito Desario
Sales: Bec Smith, UTA
No rating, 84 minutes

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The Giant Mechanical Man: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK A romance whose anodyne find-your-bliss theme is likeable but underwhelming, Lee Kirk's The Giant Mechanical Man doesn't fully exploit its premise's charms. A cast of familiar faces helps theatrical prospects, though, especially with everyone playing roles well within their comfort zones.

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Jenna Fischer (writer/director Kirk's wife) plays Janice, whose persistent inability to find a suitable job or boyfriend is never explained; we meet her just as a temp agency is firing her, sending the now-homeless lonelyheart to live with sister Jill (Malin Akerman). Across town, Chris Messina's Tim is also getting the boot, though his abandonment (by girlfriend Lucy Punch) is more easily understood: Tim's girlfriend is just tired of waiting for his "career" as a street performer to develop into something meaningful or lucrative.

Tim connects with Janice early on, but only in his performing disguise -- wearing stilts and a metallic-looking suit, painted silver, standing motionless on Detroit's streets as a mirror of the passersby whose worker-bee lives he disdains. When the two actually meet -- both reluctantly take menial jobs at the zoo -- Tim keeps his secret identity to himself and, despite the easy camaraderie between them, takes forever before asking her out.

The inevitability of the couple's relationship is never thrown into question by Jill's attempts to set Janice up with a self-help charlatan (Topher Grace). If Grace's character were genuinely charming or smooth, there'd be reason (however formulaic) to worry, but even at Jill's most insecure, she's clearly not vulnerable to the author's it-works-on-paper attempt at courtship. His continued presence onscreen is one of the most transparently artificial obstacles to love in the history of rom-coms, and viewers slog through it just like Janice selling concessions to zoo-going school kids.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, World Narrative Competition
Production companies: Stealth Media Group, Votiv Films, Taggart Productions, Andycat Production
Cast: Jenna Fischer, Chris Messina, Topher Grace, Malin Akerman, Rich Sommer, Lucy Punch, Bob Odenkirk
Director-Screenwriter: Lee Kirk
Producers: Molly Hassell, Jenna Fischer, Michael Nardelli
Executive producers: Brent Siefel, Michael Cowan, Michael Gallant, Tim Nardelli, Mike Ilitch Jr., Glenn P. Murray
Director of photography: Doug Emmett
Production designer: Paulette Georges
Music: Rich Ragsdale
Costume designer: Mona May
Editor: Robert Komatsu
Sales: Stealth Media Group
PG-13, 89 minutes

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Cheerful Weather for the Wedding: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK A sustained balancing act between dry upper-crust cynicism and pent-up passions, Donald Rice's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding maintains its uneasy stasis long enough to frustrate some romance-hungry viewers while tantalizing those for whom withheld pleasure is the whole point. Spot-on production values and a fine cast should help it win enough of the undecided to make a strong showing at arthouses.

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Buzzed about in part for the presence of Like Crazy's Felicity Jones, the film requires mostly opaque inaction from her as Dolly, an ambivalent bride-to-be hiding out upstairs while her extended family prepares for her nuptials. The screenplay holds its cards so close we're forced to guess at the reasons she's marrying Owen (James Norton) instead of Luke Treadaway's Joseph, who romanced her the previous summer before taking a job in London. (Throughout the winter-hued film, we get summery flashbacks of time the two spent together, with jumbled chronology mixing their polite initial flirtations with a fraught, rain-dappled farewell.)

Fortunately for Treadaway, Jones's silence creates lots of space for him to fill as Joseph hangs out downstairs, playing the charming family friend while angling for a way to see Dolly before she says "I do." Treadaway carries the day, charming and anxious at once, flirting in a big-brother way with Dolly's man-hungry sister Kitty (Ellie Kendrick, bubbling with impatience at her lack of prospects) and dodging the disdain of her mother (Elizabeth McGovern), whose every overly cheery gesture is intended to iron out just the kind of wrinkle a bride's ex-boyfriend presents.

The script, by Rice and Mary Henely Magill, offers plenty of mildly wicked slang (an unattractive pair of socks are "pure catsick") and subterfuge to keep the ensemble busy while Dolly frets upstairs, swigging from an unwholesomely large jug of rum and trying the patience of Millman, the all-seeing housekeeper.

Joseph grows more and more anxious as the wedding time nears and it seems clear Dolly won't see him. While some will find her behavior (and by extension, the film's) unbearably coy, Treadaway's performance of this path through hope to lovesickness gives Cheerful Weather a beating heart to balance the refined aesthetics of the storytelling.

Bottom Line: Finely crafted English period piece works best for those who like their love stories romantically doomed

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Spotlight
Production Companies: Goldcrest Films, Yellow Knife
Cast: Felicity Jones, Luke Treadaway, Elizabeth McGovern, Mackenzie Crook, Fenella Woolgar, Zo Tapper, Julian Wadham, Sophie Stanton, Olly Alexander, Ellie Kendrick
Director: Donald Rice
Screenwriters: Donald Rice, Mary Henely Magill
Based on the novel by Julia Strachey
Producer: Teun Hilte
Director of photography: John Lee
Production designer: Anna Lavelle
Music: Michael Price
Costume designer: Camille Benda
Editor: Stephen Haren
Sales: David Flynnm United Talent Agency
No rating, 92 minutes

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Let Fury Have the Hour: Tribeca Review

NEW YORK Cheerleading for a couple of generations of artists who've viewed their output as a struggle against right-wing politics, Antonino D'Ambrosio's Let Fury Have the Hour is stuffed with "right on!" moments and attractive image-making. But its fuzzy focus limits the breadth of its appeal -- while it's easy to imagine groups of Occupy activists hosting well-received screenings, the doc will be a harder sell in the broader nonfiction arena.

PHOTOS: 10 of Tribeca 2012's Films to Watch

An outgrowth of D'Ambrosio's book of the same title, the film compiles interviews with scores of musicians, artists, writers and so on who fit his definition of "creative response." Somewhat confusingly, while the book centered on The Clash's Joe Strummer, the film lets him loom large in the background -- an inspiration for many of its subjects whose own career is barely discussed.

Instead we have a quick-cutting chain of interviews with everyone from Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat to environmentalist Van Jones. Almost all say interesting things that right-minded people will agree with, but it's often unclear what the movie's trying to make of it all. The film's editing and its heavy employment of (sometimes manipulated) stock footage give the impression of continuously building to big points that never quite solidify.

Had the film stuck to The Clash and its contemporaries, its strong use of Reagan and Thatcher as counterpoint -- ideologues setting a societal agenda creative people must counter -- would make sense. But D'Ambrosio's younger subjects, like Gogol Bordello's Eugene Htz and the Fela Kuti-inspired Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, didn't start their careers until the end of the Clinton era (and Fela Kuti himself hit his political-funk prime long before the '80s).

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Perhaps all the artists here would agree that their individual takes on political art trace back to the Reagan/Thatcher phenomenon. That seems unlikely. Failing that, it's hard to understand what D'Ambrosio sees in this varied group that makes them different from, say, Sixties folkies who also envisioned a new way of living through art.

Individual reference points here -- the anyone-can-do-it punk scene, the no-gallery-required world of street art -- make clear how a specific creative current empowered people. But the notion that all these varied creative bursts constitute a single cultural movement is more implied than asserted, much less argued convincingly.

All this is not to say the film lacks engaging ideas. When a skateboarder speaks of how his hobby caused him to literally see the world differently, when a scientist discusses how great art can teach us to live with ambiguity, one can imagine other, differently focused films that might have sprung from this material. But then we careen into an invigorating sequence connecting dots between Public Enemy and punk and community activism, and we decide we wish the movie would settle on this instead.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival, Spotlight
Production Company: La Lutta NMC, Bricklayers Union
Director-Screenwriter: Antonino D'Ambrosio
Producers: Antonino D'Ambrosio, James Reid
Executive producers: Mark Urman, Rob McKay, Chaz Zelus, Jonathan Gray
Directors of photography: Karim Lopez, James Reid, Antonino D'Ambrosio
Music: Wayne Kramer
Editor: Karim Lopez
Sales: Mark Urman, Paladin Film
No rating, 96 minutes

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