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10 Must-See Movies at This Year's Tribeca Film Festival
By Jason Bailey
In the 14 years since it was founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff, the Tribeca Film Festival has gone from a neighborhood favorite to one of the East Coast’s most expansive and impressive film festivals. Beginning with April 16’s premiere of the Nas documentary Time is Illmatic, Tribeca will take over several cinemas throughout the city to present an impressive slate of narrative and documentary films (the 2014 slate, culled from over 6,000 submissions, includes 87 features from 32 countries). Your film editor was lucky enough to get an early peek at a handful of this year’s movies, so here are a few that you’ll want to seek out.
Point and Shoot
Expert documentarian Marshall Curry (Street Fight, Racing Dreams) helms this gripping portrait of Matt Vandyke, an OCD adrenaline junkie, raised on action movies and “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. After embarking on a “crash course in manhood” by taking a motorcycle journey through the Middle East and filming everything that happens, Vandyke impulsively leaves his comfortable life in Baltimore to join the Libyan rebels’ fight against Gaddafi. He takes his video camera along again, but must decide whether he is an observer or participant first — “a filmmaker or a fighter,” in his words. Yet that duality is invaluable in creating this thoughtful portrait of the true nature of war, which Curry drafts as a first-person narrative, filled with remarkable images and introspective questions.
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