Tribeca 2022: Last News

“Of Medicine and Miracles” could have been a podcast. It could have been a newspaper feature.

“A priest in a pinstripe suit.” That’s how Andrew Kirtzman characterizes Rudy Giuliani early in Jed Rothstein’s “Rudy! A Documusical,” his chronicling of how America’s erstwhile mayor became America’s most embarrassing punchline. Kirtzman, Giuliani’s biographer, makes a reasonable simile.

If there hadn’t been a body count, Chris and Jeff George’s escapades might have made for a divinely trashy TLC reality show. The brothers had gargantuan appetites, a habit of breaking the law without consequences, a flair for exaggeration, and a knack for spending money as fast as it came in on all the things that would keep a certain kind of viewer coming back: strip club visits, firearms, McMansions, and jacked-up trucks.

Andrew Dosunmu’s last three feature films are downbeat, visually stunning portraits of struggling people in NYC. And they’ve all been darlings at Sundance, so a new movie from him is cause for excitement.

White people have stolen music from black people for decades and then some. This is a matter of historical record.

A sibling is usually your first friend and your first enemy, someone who cares about you like your parents but will get into shenanigans with you. These relationships are complicated, especially when you go in different directions in life and potentially feel estranged from the complex trappings of family.

A standard hagiography that is far less interesting than the subjects it features, “Turn Every Page” aspires to none of the depth and complexity it champions throughout its too-long 112 minutes. A serviceable accounting of both a historian and a historically important editor, the documentary makes a strong case for the importance of both, yet in so doing, demonstrates that these men need no such help.

Artfully toggling between the ephemeral memories associated with the infamous Chelsea Hotel, and the more granular concerns of its present residents, Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s new documentary, the Martin Scorsese executive produced “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” is a concise reflection of the erasure of historical monuments in the name of gentrification. Centralizing the protracted construction process that closed down the hotel in 2011, but allowed its long-term residents to stay, the doc mainly follows the hold-outs in their ninth year of construction, many who view the hotel as one the last examples of bohemian, and affordable, living in Manhattan.

The movies have given us man-children for decades, dating back to Carl Reiner’s “The Jerk,” leading all the way to a bumper crop of “dudes stuck in arrested development” productions through the 2000s and 2010s: “Cyrus,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Adult Beginners,” “The Comedy,” “Step Brothers,” “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” Alex Heller’s feature debut, “The Year Between,” descends from this overdone tradition and leaves a new wrinkle on the formula: Bipolar disorder, a formidable condition characterized by extreme mood swings and thus a clear goldmine for slacker burnout comedy.

A minor but affecting character study about buried family trauma, Clara Stern’s feature-length narrative debut “Breaking the Ice” works well as both a sports drama — focusing on an Austrian minor-league women’s hockey team — and a romantic drama. While perhaps too contained within its protagonist’s point of view, Stern’s film is nevertheless an impressive debut.

This weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, Academy Award-winning documentarian Ross Kauffman (“Born Into Brothels”) debuts his newest documentary, “Of Medicine and Miracles,” to the world. The film tells parallel stories of an incredibly resilient child battling a rare form of leukemia and the researcher who pioneered her treatment.

“I come from a family of geniuses and criminals,” confesses inventor David Hanson. And it’s not at all apparent if Hanson is the former, or a less pernicious version of the latter.

The horrors of opioid addiction, greed, corporate interests, and the exploitation of the drug and patients are nothing new, and shows like “Dopesick” have done a great job of putting the epidemic in a great cultural, capitalistic and political context. But a new true-crime documentary, “American Pain” is showing one specific slice of the story that’s almost too unbelievable to believe.

Because it’s so drab and one-note, “Corner Office” leaves the viewer with lots of time to contemplate the Hamm Conundrum. To wit: in Jon Hamm, we have an actor who seems genetically engineered for movie stardom, a chiseled slab of masculinity who wears a suit like he was born to it, and is a magnificent actor, plus possesses an admirable refusal to take himself too seriously.

Alexandre O. Philippe is no stranger to the film festival circuit.