Here is Part Two of Recommended films from the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.
For tickets visit: TribecaFilm.com
For Part One, click HERE.
Everything’s Going to Be Great
Jon S. Baird’s Everything’s Going to Be Great is an infectious, funny, poignant look at a theatrical family trying to survive in a world that does not appreciate or support art and artists—this is set in the late ‘80s—everything old is new again!
The Smart clan run a struggling regional theater in Ohio. The family is comprised of the patriarch, Buddy (Bryan Cranston), a cockeyed optimist, his perpetually pessimistic wife Macy (Allison Janney), their 16-year-old jock son Derrick (Jack Champion) and their 14-year-old show tune singing boy, Lester (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), a massive theater lover and snob.
Macy is always worried about finances. Derrick hates theater and longs to simply fit in with his schoolmates. Lester basks in his own uniqueness.
When Buddy gets an opportunity to run a popular NJ community theater, the family heads east with collective hopes, regrets, fears and dreams. But when tragedy strikes, they must come together to survive and heal.
This loving, sometimes gritty movie, affectionally written by Steven Rogers, delves into the tensions, jealousies and rivalries found in most families—but amped up a notch since the Smarts are highly theatrical (yes, even Derrick, who would never admit it).
And the extraordinary ensemble anchors the film in authenticity beginning with Cranston in his best role in years. Janney manages to shade in many of Macy’s gray areas and allow us to empathize with her. Champion is fantastic here as the handsome misfit of the group (the irony) who doesn’t want to be seen as handsome or a misfit. Chris Cooper appears in the second half and does nice work. And newcomer Ainsworth is perfect as the budding theater queen who has no idea he might be gay and worries about being liked, but not enough to care all that much. The character has chats with Ruth Gordon, Noel Coward and Tallulah Bankhead. That should tell you a lot about Lester. And Ainsworth more than holds his own opposite titans Cranston and Janney. He’s an actor to watch.
Anyone who ever felt different and/or alienated from their peers and/or anyone who grew up with the lyrics to “One” from A Chorus Line seared into their brain, will love this film.
Tow
Rose Byrne delivers a subtle yet dynamic turn in Stephanie Laing’s often funny, penetrating film Tow, the remarkable true story of Amanda Ogle, a woman continuously screwed over by the system, yet refusing to capitulate to rules and laws made to seemingly destroy the little man (or woman, in this case).
Ogle is living out of her 1991 Toyota Camry in Seattle when her car is stolen and then unlawfully towed. She’s hit with ridiculous towing fees she cannot afford (which increase each day) and has lost a promise of employment AND her only place to sleep, so she must go to a homeless shelter. Piling on her woes, she can no longer afford to visit her teenage daughter for Christmas. Ogle decides to sue the towing company. So begins a lunatic legal battle in which she enlists help from a young attorney (a terrific Dominic Sessa). Will Olgle be able to forge through the emotional toll the fight for justice may take?
Knowing that this eye-opening story is based on fact isn’t shocking as much as it’s angering and indicative of the world we’re living in.
Byrne anchors this film, slipping into the skin of a proud woman who must eventually admit she needs help. The talented supporting cast includes Octavia Spencer, Demi Lovato and Simon Rex, in a small but key role—as is the case with his part in Everything’s Going to Be Great.
Tow is about determination and resilience. It’s also shows that our country’s laws are skewed towards those who have money to burn. Will that ever change, I wonder?
Holding Liat
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and several other Palestinian terrorist groups launched coordinated attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. They slaughtered 1195 people including 736 Israeli civilians. During this horrific onslaught they raided a kibbutz where some 250 people (including women and children) were kidnapped, including Israeli-American Liat Atzili and her husband Aviv.
Brandon Kramer’s devastating and urgent doc, Holding Liat focuses on Liat’s family and their fight for her liberation. Her father Yehuda travels to the U.S. advocating for his daughter’s release and, while trying to make sense of the senseless, he, and other family members including Liat’s son, weigh paradoxical perspectives on the conflict, which rapidly escalates.
Holding Liat is a deeply affecting story of strength, perseverance and perspicacious reflection. It personalizes an ordeal and a cruelty that should never be forgotten.
Charliebird
Director Libby Ewing’s feature debut, Charliebird, centers on Al (Samantha Smart), a music therapist at a children’s hospital where many of the patients are terminal. She tries her best not to grow too attached to these kids until 17-year-old Charlie (Gabriela Ochoa Perez) enters her life. Charlie, who has been in and out of hospitals since she was young, is initially wary of Al, but they soon grow close and truly bond. Ewing smartly keeps the film focused on this unique and touching relationship.
Smart, who resembles a young Kristin Wiig, wrote the incisive screenplay. She also manages to deliver a subtle yet quietly devastating performance. She’s a true cinematic triple-threat talent to watch, as she is also a producer.
Charliebird, shot in vertical iPhone-like flatness, is a beautiful, bittersweet film that leaves the audience both sorrowful yet strangely hopeful.
Bird in Hand
This satiric work touches on race, identity, alienation and familial strife. Wainwright is nicely nuanced but it’s Lahti who steals the pic here—as she’s often done in the past—flashback to 1984 when Goldie Hawn forced Jonathan Demme to cut some of her scenes in Swing Shift—Lahti got the last laugh as her terrific turn was the film’s lone Oscar nomination!
Dead Language
Sarah Adler’s delightfully complex and deliberately daffy performance in Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun’s exhilarating yet confounding film Dead Language, keeps the viewer intrigued throughout, even when the narrative veers into the surreal.
The filmmakers have expanded their Oscar-nominated short, Aya, and created a most fascinating feature about curiosity, longing and the deep desire for the extraordinary to trounce the ordinary.
The film opens with Aya (Adler) waiting for her husband (Ulrich Thomsen) at an airport. In an odd twist of fate, she is mistaken for a driver by an arriving stranger (Yehezkel Lazarov) and allows the deception to continue as she drives him to his hotel. He is understandably confused and annoyed, but Aya’s curious nature wins him over and the two share an odd intimacy. This doesn’t lead to an affair. That would be too conventional for these gifted filmmakers. Instead, Aya embarks on an unexpected journey, led by her desire for intimacy and excitement, that is both inspiring and mystifying.
She Dances
Rick Gomez’s first feature, She Dances, is a simple yet potent and sweet film about re-connection. Gomez collaborated with Steve Zahn on the script, based in large part on Zahn and his daughter’s experiences in the dance contest world, hence the film’s authentic settings.
The elder Zahn plays Jason, a man who is mourning the loss of his son, Jack, and on the verge of selling the distillery he runs with his bestie Brian (Ethan Hawke in a small but affecting turn). He gets a call from his ex-wife (Rosemarie Dewitt, so good and so underused) that he’s needed to chaperone his teen daughter Clair (Audrey Zahn in a smashing feature debut) and her bestie Kat (Mackenzie Ziegler, awesome) in the Southeastern Regional Dance Finals. Jason apprehensively agrees and a refreshingly unpredictable story of inspiration, healing and rediscovery unfolds.
One of the joys of She Dances is the amount of love we can feel between father and daughter. Perhaps it has something to do with the actors being real-life relations. The movie is heartwarming without being overly manipulative or pandering. And it’s quite funny without being contrived. Dad-Zahn’s perf is quite moving and Sonequa Martin-Green is a delight as a choreographer and friend to Clair.
Boy George & Culture Club
“Karma Chameleon” was one of my favorite songs growing up. Not because I fully understood the lyrics— I did not (turns out neither did most of Culture Club), but probably because I sensed something tres gay about it despite the fact that I was ostensibly straight until I was in my early 20s.
In Alison Ellwood’s incisive doc, Boy George & Culture Club, the figure of BG and his band and their phenomenal, albeit short lived impression on popular culture in the mid-to-late-‘80s is explored along with the internal jealousies and struggles of the four band members who are all interviewed, at length.
The resentments began when the media turned all their attention on the quite verbose lead singer, and barely acknowledged the rest of the band, which also included Jon Moss, Roy Hay and Mikey Craig.
One of the most interesting reveals (to me, anyway, since I had no idea) was that Boy George and Jon Moss were lovers who were truly devoted to each other—for a time. Moss is super candid about his never having been with a guy but falling for George when he first met him. And George basically states that Culture Club existed because he had a crush on a boy.
Fior Di Latte
Writer-director Charlotte Ercoli has crafted an impressive first feature that is refreshingly offbeat, a bit maddening but also entertaining. The focus is on Mark (Tim Heidecker), an idiosyncratic, and often annoying, playwright who can’t seem to write. He is living with, Francesca (Marta Pozzan), the girl of his dreams that he met in Italy. Alas, the relationship is not going well.
Mark is also a film memorabilia hoarder who has become obsessed with memories of the Italian summer vacation where he met Francesca (one where he sees the events very differently from how it actually played out). His one reminder of Italia is an old bottle of perfume he purchased in Florence: Fior Di Latte. His obsession with the scent leads him to an eccentric profumer (Kevin Kline), who bursts into song as he concocts fragrances.
Fior Di Latte is best when it focuses on the legion of wonderfully drawn and realized supporting characters, especially two terrific turns by Gina Gershon and Julia Fox as well as Kline’s hilarious portrayal. Stefano Carannante and Ivan Andrienko stand out in smaller roles.
Heidecker is the weak link. Someone like Mark or Jay Duplass would have brought something redemptive to the role. Heidecker’s Mark is simply too pathetic and revolting to spend this much time with.
