Tribeca '07 Must-See Movies
It doesn't take a Spidey sense to find this year's cache of worthwhile films.

By Aaron Hillis

The Grand Alexis Arquette: She's My Brother The Pelican

If whirlwind media blitzes were enough to fully shape public perceptions, we might all be inclined to think the sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival was just a theme park for the two-dozen-plus events, parties, exhibits, and multi-borough premieres that make up "Spider-Man Week." But lo and behold, New York will be host to another cinematic web of intrigue beginning April 25th, as in the one created by the over-200 indies and foreign-language films in the Tribeca line-up. Spider-Man 3 opens next week, anyway, so do yourself a favor and check out some of these potential treasures, many of which won't ever have the privilege to screen in a multiplex near you...

Okay, so writer-director Zak Penn scripted a couple comic-book blockbusters of his own (including both X-Men sequels and Elektra), but he was also game to spoof his Hollywood persona alongside German wunderkind Werner Herzog in the 2004 mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness. Herzog continues their bizarrely droll collaboration with a role in Penn's next semi-improvised mock-doc, The Grand, starring Woody Harrelson as a former party animal who aims to win the Grand Championship of Poker in order to save his dead grandpa's hotel casino. Funnyman co-star David Cross can also be seen in the real-but-still-comedic documentary Heckler, in which Jamie Kennedy confronts critics, bloggers, and others who have ever publicly lobbed grenades of subjectivity at professional performers.

For those who prefer their docs about artists to be handled with more seriousness, just flip through the fest catalog to anything with a name, colon, and long-winded title. Hitting the right notes is Stephen Kijak's Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, a rock-doc (or rather, a looking-under-a-rock-doc) about the influential crooner-songwriter whose reclusivity and increasingly avant-garde output has fashioned him an enigma; Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, a zippy portrait of the high-spirited diva, finished mere weeks before her death in 2006; and Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, which places the folk legend in the social context of 20th-century America. With an LGBT slant, there's also a transgender-advocate actor (Alexis Arquette: She's My Brother), the filmmaking collaborator/lover of a pop icon (A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory) and a gay, African-American writer of sci-fi and memoirs (The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman). You won't be starved for art, or at least, films about people who are making it.

From the World Narrative Competition, French filmmaker Pascale Ferran's adaptation of the erotic literary classic Lady Chatterley (based on D. H. Lawrence's second version of the tale, John Thomas and Lady Jane) has been hotly anticipated among cinephiles since winning five César Awards and appearing at the Berlin Film Festival. Set in 1920s England, this nearly three-hour epic concerns a paralyzed aristrocrat's young wife (the acclaimed Marina Hands) who experiences her sexual awakening with their estate's gamekeeper, an affair depicted as more lyrical than sensational. The category also boasts Still Life, from sixth-generation Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures; The World). Winner of the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion award, this deceptively prosaic and deeply humane docudrama takes place in a town on the Yangtze River that will soon be submerged by the Three Gorges Dam.

French directoral mainstay Patrice Leconte (Girl on the Bridge; Man on the Train) goes for Preston Sturges-style comedy in My Best Friend, which chronicles a self-centered art dealer (Daniel Auteuil, also appearing as the titular emperor in Napoleon and Me) who befriends an extroverted cab driver (Dany Boon) in order to win a high-stakes bet. Offering a different kind of fare — pun intended — the increasingly buzzed-about Taxi to the Dark Side finds director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) taking on Bush-era torture policies in the guise of a murder mystery; that is, a doc investigation into the death of an Afghan cabbie at the hands of American soldiers. And though it's a stretch to include Taxidermia in this street-hailing connection, this critic needed somewhere to admit that Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi's surreal follow-up to Hukkle is his most anticipated film of the fest, regardless of how nauseating the sight of obese men vomiting, fire-spewing penises, and its other audacious monstrosities may be. (Hey, just be thankful there wasn't then a Taxi Driver mention in conjunction with the biographical psychodrama The Killing of John Lennon... whoops, too late.)

Rounding out the list of notables (which doesn't yet include Tribeca's countless special events, family programs and panel discussions), is Jeff Nichols' rural thriller Shotgun Stories, a '70s-style slow-burner about a brotherly feud on the verge of eruption; and Falafel, Michel Kammoun's night-in-the-life youth dramedy that has been intriguingly described as a "Lebanese After Hours." Cyrus Finch's Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan is a 70-minute sociopolitical experiment that was shot entirely through a cell phone; Gérard Blain's rarely screened The Pelican offers an austere 1973 French drama starring the director as an obsessive dad in child-custody purgatory; and watch for Razzle Dazzle, a digital-retro narrative opus from avant-garde icon Ken Jacobs (Star Spangled to Death). Just for fun, there's Jim Mickle's Mulberry Street, a home-grown horror flick that turns the zombie genre on its rotting ear by way of that Manhattan tenant's nightmare, the city rat.

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