Perhaps that great American poet Jim Jarmusch put it best when he said: “Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with [a] raincoat on.” No matter the effort, subtle cultural nuances are inevitably lost during translation. These go beyond…
Tribeca Review: November
Late in his career, Orson Welles once rumbled in an interview that one of the keys to making a great movie was to have a great opening scene. Excellent advice; just make sure your great opening scene isn’t also your…
Tribeca Review: The Divine Order
It’s difficult to judge Petra Biondina Volpe’s The Divine Order because its individual parts feel so drastically different from each other. The film follows a Swiss housewife named Nora (Marie Leuenberger) who experiences a political awakening and helps organize and…
Tribeca Review: The Boy Downstairs
We’ve seen this woman in a hundred movies, mostly mumblecore dramas and indie rom-coms. A mid-to-late twentysomething, she’s invariably white and thin. Her hair is usually the most disheveled part of her appearance, being just unkempt enough to give her…
Tribeca Review: House of Z
Sandy Chronopoulos’ House of Z is just about every documentary or film ever made about youthful prodigies who blow up way too big way too early. It’s subject, legendary fashion designer Zac Posen, hit the fashion world in the early…
Tribeca Review: A River Below
There are plenty of documentaries about activism. But documentaries about the consequences of activism are few and far between. Of these, Mark Grieco’s A River Below is one of the best in recent memory. At first we mistake the film…