Piotr Szkopiak’s The Last Witness is the latest cinematic attempt to reckon with the Katyn massacre, the horrific mass execution of an estimated 22,000 Poles—mostly members of the Polish officer corps, but also large swathes of Poland’s intelligentsia, bourgeois, and…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: When She Runs
Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s When She Runs is far from an accessible film. Composed primarily of narrative negative spaces that have little if anything to do with a plot, the directors paint their cinematic canvas with lengthy static long…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: The Man Who Stole Banksy
There are enough interesting ideas in Marco Proserpio’s The Man Who Stole Banksy to fill two or three fascinating documentaries about the legality of street art, the impact of Western street artists invading minority cultural spaces, and the degradation of…
Tribeca 2018 Review Blowin’ Up and Roll Red Roll
The Tribeca Film Festival may not have the acclaim or popularity of other, more prominent United States festivals like SXSW or Sundance, but over my years covering it their documentary slates had proven to be among the most socially relevant…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: Blue Note Records – Beyond the Notes
How many music labels can honestly claim to be more than just a label, but an actual brand? Blue Note Records, that scrappy little label founded by two German immigrants in 1939, is one of the few that can—the name…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
It begins with a piano, still waterlogged and soggy long after drowning in the tsunami that washed away large swaths of Fukushima, Japan in March 2011. For years it sat forgotten in its makeshift mausoleum, a high school speedily evacuated…
Tribeca 2018 Movie Review: Smuggling Hendrix
How far would you go for your dog? To the end of the neighborhood? To the ends of the earth? Or how about to the ends of internationally recognized territory as detailed by the United Nations and the European Union?…
