Five Films I Saw at Tribeca

I made it to Tribeca this year for the festival’s 25th anniversary and enjoyed a lineup that leaned hard into star-driven indie darlings, actor-turned-directors, and some genuinely unexpected discoveries. Most of the films I saw were via press and industry screenings, which brings out a different crowd and vibe that’s not always conducive to my favorite part of the communal viewing experience: long conversations in a bar somewhere after.

That is what I love about going to a festival. You leave with your head and heart fully inspired. It was great to support friends’ films, discover new ones, and frolicking around the city.

If you caught any of these, or others, I want to know what you thought. Drop a comment below or reply to this email!.

Oh, and stay tuned — our live recording with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, which was wild and so much fun, goes live next Tuesday! There will be a whole post on that.

Kudos to Zach Woods on a stunning directorial debut that pulled at my heartstrings. I know how hard these indie films are to get made. The financing, the scheduling, the sheer tenacity it takes to get a personal story off the page and onto a screen.

The story follows young Emily, whose grandfather’s dementia has gotten too severe for him to care for her, and the unlikely older woman, Sylvia, who becomes her foster mother. Susan Sarandon is wonderful, and what a tender debut for Everly Carganilla, the eleven-year-old who plays Emily. It is a performance of real depth and presence.

Zach based Sylvia on his own grandmother and you feel that love by him and all the talented collaboratos involved to bring the story to life in every single frame.

Hannah Peterson is two for two at Tribeca. Her 2023 debut, The Graduates, was very memorable, and she returns this year with an adaptation of Daniel Hornsby’s novel following a young priest named Dan who gets essentially pushed out of his parish after a crisis of faith and hits the road.

Young Mazino quietly delivers a compelling, slow-burn performance. He barely speaks. He carries this wounded, searching energy that the camera just lives inside of. The film picks up a wounded coyote along the way, which serves as a kind of mirror for Dan’s own state. The heartland landscape is gorgeous. The supporting characters he meets feel textured and real.

Shot on 35mm, this film puts audiences in a slow, meditative state. It trusts silence and stillness. I was moved by it. I truly believe Hannah Peterson is a filmmaker to watch closely. She has a specific sensibility that is uncompromising and a softness with difficult subjects that pulls me in.

This film reminded me that art and talent exist in the most unexpected corners of the planet, and that music heals.

Shot inside New Bell Prison in Douala, Cameroon — which was built to hold 800 people and currently houses nearly 6,000 — this documentary profiles three incarcerated musicians and the first recording studio inside a prison on the African continent. Directors Dione Roach and Steve Happi used their extraordinary access to capture the intimacy and kinetic energy of this rarefied space.

The three subjects, Stone, Emperor, and Transporter, are fully realized human beings. Men with complicated inner lives who happen to be making music in circumstances most of us cannot imagine. The film blends vérité with performance footage and it pulses.

This line struck a chord with me:

“The only advantage of being in prison is that you have time. That’s all you have.”

In an oversaturated world where the timeless currency of time slips through our fingers, here’s a man in one of the most overcrowded prisons on the continent nurturing the one thing no one can take from him and turning it into art. I think about how many of us complain about not having enough time to make the thing we really want to make. And then I think about that line.

The power of this story is palpable, and it’s no wonder that Taika Waititi came on as an executive producer to use his platform and help this story be seen.

As someone who has produced three documentaries, I know this power firsthand. The most recent of which, The Honorable Shyne, took me to parts of Brooklyn I never would have seen otherwise. Documentary filmmaking is the ability to teleport into a life, a place, an experience that will likely never be yours, and to meet people you would never otherwise meet.

Okay so I had to see this one. You know I had to.

This UK documentary bills itself as the definitive account of AI’s origins, told by the people who actually built it, including Geoffrey Hinton, the often-called Godfather of AI, who left Google specifically because he wanted to be able to speak freely about what he thinks is coming. The film is paced like a thriller, which is a smart choice. It keeps you engaged even when the material gets dense.

I appreciated Hinton’s framing of AI as a dual-purpose technology; as an amplifier for human input; the good and the bad. The intentional and the careless. And if superintelligence is potentially 10 to 20 years away, as he suggests, then the urgent question is not what will AI do.

The urgent question is: who are we? What does it mean to be a being? What are we actually amplifying?

He says at one point: “History belongs to the doers.”

I believe that’s the answer for people in our industry right now. Not waiting to see how this plays out. Not outsourcing the question to the tech companies. Doing. Making. Deciding what kind of storytellers we want to be and building toward that before someone else builds it for us.

Film like this either present AI as all good or all bad; but as I’ve yapped on and on, it’s no binary. This doc made me want to ask harder questions and think about what I want my own relationship to these tools to look like going forward.

Even Hinton himself, when asked if he could go back in time and press a button undoing his initial discoveries on AI, couldn’t answer that. It’s too complex, he hinted, because there is so much good intertwined with the bad.

Alex Vlack’s debut feature is a good-looking, intriguing one that I am still processing. Based on his novel of the same title, the film plays with our perception of truth in a tantalizing way. A dear producer friend is working with him on another project and shared a bit about how difficult his journey was to make this film and step into the director role — which of course made me appreciate his work that much more.

The setup is rich: Elise, a novelist with writer’s block, has her long-time friend John come back into their lives right as her husband Jacob is trying to write a biography of his aging, impossible father David, played by Dustin Hoffman. What follows is a story about writing, about whose stories belong to whom, about the ethics of transforming real people into fiction.

Dustin Hoffman is excellent — though I wish they had given him just a bit more. He plays a legendary raconteur who refuses to be pinned down and he is fully alive in every moment. André Holland is equally magnetic as John, someone who walks back into a room and recalibrates everything.

Alison Brie, who also produced this film, is given so little to work with that it borders on baffling. Her character carries the central conceit and yet the script keeps cutting away from her. Tom Sturridge is a terrific actor who is similarly underserved. I loved the film’s ambition, and while the architecture to support it is largely there, I found myself wishing for just a smidge more.

Still, I’d rather see a debut feature that swings big and doesn’t land everything than one that plays it safe. Alex Vlack’s psyche pulled me in and I am eager to see what he does next.

Keep creating, keep hustling. And as always, thanks for doing this life thing with me!

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