Tribeca, 5/1.

"Let's cut to the chase," writes Howard Feinstein, assessing this year's edition of the Tribeca Film Festival at indieWIRE. "Besides United 93, the knockout fiction features are Asian: Japanese filmmaker Toyoda Toshiaki's Hanging Garden and Chinese director Ying Liang's Taking Father Home." Also, Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks on the prospects for Jesus Camp, The War Tapes and The TV Set.

Anthony Kaufman blogs: "[M]ost of the hot-buzz fiction movies have turned out to be, at their worst, sloppy misfires, and at their best, mildly diverting. In contrast to the underwhelming new American indie narratives, however, documentaries have emerged as the real winners at Tribeca 2006."

David Carr in the New York Times: "Questions of truth, verisimilitude and reality are very much part of a running cultural narrative, so it is no surprise that they would show up on the Tribeca schedule, most notably in American Cannibal: The Road to Reality, ostensibly a documentary about two writers who pitch a reality television show built on a concept of cannibalism." And Anthony Kaufman on the Iranian entries: "[E]ight films have converged to portray a society populated with transsexuals and hip-hop artists, bourgeois vacationers and slapstick comedians, and nary an atomic weapon." More at his blog.

The latest at Cinematical:

• Karina Longworth on Chris Marker's The Case of the Grinning Cat.

• Martha Fischer on Blue Blood, East Broadway and Crime Novel and Cocaine Cowboys.

• Christopher Campbell on The Gravedancers.

For New York, which has its own Tribeca special up and running, Logan Hill has a quick talk with John Malkovich about Colour Me Kubrick.

Best of QT Fest has wrapped, but Cinema Strikes Back carries on covering Tribeca.

At Filmmaker, Peter Bowen recommends Black Sun.

The Reeler's been hitting the parties.

Posted by dwhudson at May 1, 2006 8:43 AM