Val Kilmer steals the show as Val Kilmer in THE FOURTH DIMENSION at the Tribeca Film Festival
Multiple locations in Manhattan
April 18-29
646-502-5296
www.tribecafilm.com
Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday morning, April 16, at 11:00, as the Tribeca Film Festival begins its second decade. Running April 18 to 29, this year’s programming was selected by Geoffrey Gilmore, Nancy Shafer, Frédéric Boyer, Genna Terranova, and a team of specialists, resulting in sixty-three feature narratives, thirty-eight full-length documentaries, and sixty shorts (grouped into such compilations as “Character Flaws,” “Escape Clause,” “Fallout,” “Help Wanted,” and “Journeys Across Cultural Landscapes”). The films range from such high-powered fare as Joss Whedon’s The Avengers and Nicholas Stoller’s The Five-Year Engagement to much smaller indie films from around the world. This year’s panels include Robert De Niro, Judd Apatow, and others discussing “100 Years of Universal”; writer-director Charles Matthau and stars Christian Slater, Crispin Glover, Michael Jai White, and Andy Dick talking about Freaky Deaky following a screening of the film based on the Elmore Leonard novel; Oscar-nominated director Jim Sheridan interviewed by his Oscar-nominated daughter, Naomi Sheridan; Michael Moore interviewed by Susan Sarandon; and director John Badham, actress Ally Sheedy, and others taking part in a postscreening talk about the 1983 classic WarGames. Among the free events at the 2012 festival are a series of talks at the Apple Store and the Union Square Barnes & Noble with such favorites as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Morgan Spurlock, Chris Colfer, Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey, and others; Soccer Day, including a celebrity match and workshops for kids; Sports Day, with a BMX stunt show, appearances by New York athletes, and family-friendly games and activities; a street fair with live performances, local food booths, kite flying, arts and crafts, and a Bubble Garden; and outdoor drive-in screenings of Jaws, The Goonies, and Knuckleball! Keep watching twi-ny for select reviews and highlights during the festival.
Learning of many of the horrible things the Third Reich was doing, Charlie Chaplin could not hold his tongue anymore, finally making his first talking picture in 1940. In The Great Dictator, writer-director-producer Chaplin unrelentingly mocks Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, albeit with a very serious edge, as WWII threatens. Chaplin plays the dual roles of a simple Jewish barber living in the ghetto (who has elements of the Little Tramp) and Adenoid Hinkle, the rather Hitler-esque Fascist leader of the country of Tomania. Just as he named the nation after a foodborne illness (ptomaine poisoning), Chaplin does not go for subtlety in the film; his right-hand man is Herr Garbitsch (Henry Daniel spoofing Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels), and his military mastermind is Field Marshal Herring (Billy Gilbert making fun of Heinrich Himmler). Chaplin plays Hinkle like a cartoon character, with pratfalls galore, and when he speaks in German, especially when he gives a major speech, he spits out fake German words with a smattering of funny English ones. When he learns that Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie as a melding of Benito Mussolini and Napoleon Bonaparte) has gathered his troops on the Osterlitz border (think Anschluss), Hinkle invites the Bacteria dictator to his Tomanian palace, where they engage in numerous hysterical bouts of one-upmanship, including a riotous battle involving barber chairs. Meanwhile, Chaplin performs another of the film’s most memorable scenes, the shave of an old man set to Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5.” But when Commander Schultz (Reginald Gardiner) leaves the Nazi regime and decides to help the Jewish people in the ghetto, Hinkle sends his stormtroopers out to find the traitor, leading to a major case of mistaken identity and a heartfelt, if overly melodramatic, finale. In addition, Chaplin’s lover at the time, Paulette Goddard, plays Hannah (named for Chaplin’s mother), a young Jewish woman living in the ghetto, and Bowery Boys fans will recognize Bernard Gorcey, who played sweet-shop owner Louie Dombrowski in the goofy film series, as Mr. Mann.The Great Dictator is filled with marvelous moments, from Hinkle dancing with a balloon globe to several of the Jews in the ghetto trying to hide in the same chest, but the film does suffer from pedagoguery in making its political points, and some of the slapstick is too lowbrow. Nominated for five Oscars, it falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) and the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (1940) while also referencing the 1921 silent film King, Queen, Joker, in which Chaplin’s older half-brother, Sidney (who also directed), played the dual role of a modest barber and the king of the fictional Coronia. A seminal achievement that was supposedly seen by Hitler twice, The Great Dictator is screening April 13 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “You Must Remember This,” focusing on memory in conjunction with its current 
The first half of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective is as dreadfully boring as Detective Cristi’s (Dragos Bucur) assignment, tailing a student, Victor (Radu Costin), who enjoys a joint with two of his friends every day after school. While Cristi wants to nail the kid’s supplier, the cop’s boss has him on a tight deadline, insisting he arrest Victor if the investigation continues to go nowhere, but Cristi strongly disagrees with putting the teenager away for up to seven years for a crime he believes will soon be abolished by the government. However, the film picks up considerably as Cristi seeks help from various contacts, getting caught up in red tape and public servants who would really rather not be bothered. And when he get called in by the chief (Vlad Ivanov from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) and gets a long lecture in linguistics, well, you won’t be able to control yourself from laughing out loud. Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) keeps the pace very slow and very steady, but hang in there, because the end is a riot. Police, Adjective, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, screened at the New York Film Festival and at MoMA as part of the “Contenders, 2009,” series, and was Romania’s official entry for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, is being shown April 13 at the Bohemian National Hall as part of “Disappearing Act IV,” a festival of recent European films that also includes such works as Miguel Gomes’s Our Beloved Month of August (Aquele Querido Mes de Agosto) from Portugal and France, Vaclav Kadrnka’s Eighty Letters (Osmdesat dopisu) from the Czech Republic, Jaroslav Vojtek’s The Border (Hranice) from Slovakia, Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel’s Wasted Youth from Greece, and Marc Bauder’s The System (Das System ― alles verstehen heisst alles verzeihen) from Germany, with many screenings followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and/or crew. The series is curated and produced by Irena Kovarova and presented in association with the Czech Center, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and the Group of European Cultural Institutes and Diplomatic Representations in New York.
Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s production company is called Hypnotic Pictures, and for good reason; the Chicago-born, New York-based auteur makes mesmerizing, visually arresting works using archival found footage and eclectic soundtracks that are a treat for the eyes and ears. Several of his films were recently shown at a retrospective at the World Financial Center (including 