Trishna

Written & Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Full credits at IMDb

Is modern India as repressive as Victorian England? That's what Michael Winterbottom suggests in his latest, Trishna; how else could he locate Tess of the d'Urbervilles there and make the fit between story and setting seem so natural? Freida Pinto stars as the title character, and she's great, starting off as a bashful and kind country girl who slowly opens herself up to the possibilities of the big city, only to be shut down again by circumstance—the double standards and rigid moral codes of the countryside. Winterbottom shows the timelessness of Hardy's melodramatic plots about social strictures and sexual exploitation, depicting an India of polarized classes—one inhabiting a fantasy world of luxury, the other a hardscrabble reality—where fusty traditions butt heads with modernity's looser values. The movie breathes life into Hardy's timeless themes with fresh settings.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

Watch the trailer:

Death of a Superhero

Directed by: Ian Fitzgibbon
Written by: Anthony McCarten
Full credits at IMDb

The only thing moodier than a teenager is a dying teenager. "Life is a sexually transmitted disease," says Donald (Thomas Sangster), the cancer-stricken, attitudinizing 15-year-old hero of Death of a Superhero who broods, misbehaves, and expresses himself through the Sin City-like characters that fill his sketchbooks (and which he occasionally graffitis); director Ian Fitzgibbon intersperses animations throughout the film featuring the characters Donald creates: a troubled superhero (a version of himself), a twisted villain (his disease), and a voluptuous femme (who embodies his pubescent fantasies).

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

Watch the trailer:

Rubberneck

Directed by: Alex Karpovsky
Written by: Alex Karpovsky and Garth Donovan
Full credits at IMDb

Is this a masterwork of emotional suppression, or just emotionless? Alex Karpovsky, best known as a favorite supporting player of popular young indie directors, directs this, his third film, a slow-boil character study that flirts with genre. Is it a psychological thriller? Well, until it finally (finally!) boils over, it's more like an anti-thriller, a workaday portrait of a scientist who drunkenly hooks up once with a coworker and, months later, is still secretly obsessing over her. Karpovsky stars, too, as this psychopath; usually the comically smug and shaggy friend in films by directors like Lena Dunham or Andrew Bujalski (you guys, he's in Girls!), here he casts himself against type—clean cut and bespectacled, unsmiling, his social awkwardness not a quirk but actually a symptom of severe mental illness.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

Watch the trailer:

Sleepless Night

Directed by: Frédéric Jardin
Written by: Frédéric Jardin & Olivier Douyère
Full credits at IMDb

Sleepless Night is a French action movie, which means that it follows the formula set by its American counterparts—there are plenty of speeding cars, shootouts, and injured bodies; there's lots of running, shouting, and punching—but also makes the time to let its hero (Tomer Sisley) stop running, sit down, and weep in an empty stairwell between set pieces. It's his haggard emotional credibility driving the plot—not just director Frédéric Jardin's exciting pacing and twisty storytelling—that makes the movie so effective.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

Watch the trailer: