For the second year straight your girl, that’s me, covered the Tribeca Film Festival for the Alliance of Women Film Journalists (AWFJ). What did I think? So many thoughts. Scroll for teasers and link to the fulls after each paragraph.
All That We Love
** Sherin’s Most Recommended **
Quick Quote: Directed with understated charm by Yen Tan and penned alongside Clay Liford, All That We Love is a meditative cycle of healing. Emma and her two closest loved ones have dealt with loss. For Emma and her daughter Maggie (Alice Lee), it is their ex-husband and father (Kenneth Choi) who was torn away by alcoholism. For Emma and her bestie Stan (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), it is the husband who no longer stands beside him. And just like that, a dog’s life can be a catalyst for seeking catharsis.
Impactful in its gentleness, All That We Love is recognizable for those who mourn, and relatable for those who love.
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Arzé
Quick Quote: Both a procedural and a family drama, Arzé sends mother and son onto the streets of Lebanon in search of the scooter and the new life they might still claim. As the search devolves so do the relationships and it becomes clear the family of three cannot move forward until they heal the deceits of their pasts.
Although I’ve never been to Lebanon, Arzé feels as quintessentially Beirut as films like A Thousand and One are New York. The culture is vividly alive in all its hues, making the characters feel like people you know but haven’t seen in a while.
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Aisha
Quick Quote: The film’s commentary on the harsh realities for many immigrants who seek better lives, is paralleled by a friendship bordering on love between Aisha and Conor (Josh O’Connor). Both characters carry the scars of inmates in many ways. Conor, as a formerly incarcerated man under the threat of reverting to old ways, and Aisha, who is trapped under the threat of deportation. That is the core of their connection, a loneliness that magnetizes them to one another.
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Darkest Miriam
Quick Quote: In its early minutes, Darkest Miriam shares some sensibilities with Wes Anderson. The tone is different, however, if you trade Anderson’s whimsically extraordinary characters and locations for Jaye’s peculiarly quotidian ones, the kinship is there. Miriam’s incidental relationships with the library’s patrons are a contrast to the pain of her past. Which makes her curiously prescient. Or perhaps it isn’t extrasensory perception but instead a symptom of the anxiety of loss that makes her see it in every possibility. When she crawls out of that hole, she introduces herself to a cab driver who is actually a painter. Taking action in her life makes her radar for misery more acute.
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Bad Shabbos
Quick Quote: If one person behaved rationally in Bad Shabbos the movie would end after 20 minutes with a 911 call. But that wouldn’t be a NYC story, and this most definitely is…One bad decision tumbles over into another and the central problem—which could have been solved simply—becomes insurmountable. Blood and poop splatter, roasts and potatoes fly, and tempers spark. For many, this will be a fun time. The standouts are Leathers as Abby, displaying a cool calm combined with winky jokes, and Smith’s down-for-whatever Jordan, with his alarming impersonations and heroic actions. During the chaos, these two performances—surrounded by a strong cast—kept me engaged.
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The Everything Pot
Quick Quote: The Everything Pot is a comedic exploration of the ways that matters of the heart cause “things” to fall apart. Those things being relationships. Two relationships to be more specific—a 23-year marriage and an engagement on the verge of a wedding. It’s tempting to place this movie in the “all about love” category, but The Everything Pot is truly about emptiness. How the unfulfilled spaces inside us can convert into obsessions if left ignored.
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Bikechess
Quick Quote: This second feature from writer/director Assel Aushakimova is not a comedy in the typical sense, you’re unlikely to laugh out loud. Bikechess rolls its eyes at its subject matter in the absolute certainty you will get the joke: How absurd the life of a journalist is when your job is to tell the truth, but you’d better not.
Bikechess evolves the way an everyday life spent in unhappiness does. There’s no bombast or drama. Only a slowly dawning truth that some situations are unwinnable. The range of expressions crossing Dina’s face in the closing seconds—from frustration to incredulity to laughing resignation—is proof of the fact.
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There they are, my reviews from the Tribeca Film Festival 2024
