Vulture
16 of the Best Films Playing at This Year’s Tribeca Film Festival
By Bilge Ebiri
Over the past 12 years, the Tribeca Film Festival has shed and tried on multiple identities. But in recent years, it seems to have found one that sticks: It's a festival where you go to see some of the most exciting documentary work around. (It shows narrative films, too, but its fiction slate is a somewhat more hit-and-miss affair.) Last year's iteration gave us such startling docs as Let the Fire Burn, Big Men, and The Kill Team.
This year's lineup (which will screen from April 16 through 27) is also very promising; there are even some potentially interesting narrative films. The topics range far and wide, but some themes are already starting to emerge: Many of these films follow offbeat, sometimes even troubled, individuals struggling to find their places in culture and society — whether it's through creating a work of art, or joining a revolution, or trying to find the right girl. In short, it's a slate that reflects the unease of our times. I haven't seen the full lineup, but of the ones I have, here are sixteen of the best.
Point and Shoot
Director Marshall Curry makes movies about seemingly small stories that turn out to be bigger stories: His 2009 documentary Racing Dreams started off about young go-kart racers and wound up being a meditation on the cosmic power of ambition; his 2005 doc Street Fight followed a heated Newark mayoral race (featuring a certain newcomer named Cory Booker) and transformed into a small epic about American politics. And now, he gives us the story of Matthew van Dyke, a young, OCD adrenaline junkie and photographer who decided to travel the Middle East on a motorcycle and found himself joining the Libyan resistance. Along the way, the story turns from one man’s unlikely journey into a look at an entire generation’s pop-culture-fueled idea of manhood and heroism. An odd bird — reserved but articulate, self-aware yet profoundly impressionable — Van Dyke makes a fascinating guide to his own adventures.
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