Editor’s note: We’re re-running Scott’s review from last year’s Berlinale Film Festival as Shadow Dancer opens this weekend in limited theatrical release. The image of the bomb is an apt one for Shadow Dancer. As a hunk of parts with a timer, there’s nothing naturally threatening about a bomb; it’s the explosion that matters. Hitchcock was right, and in this IRA thriller from James Marsh, incendiary devices are all over the place. Some are literal, most are figurative, and Bomb Theory abounds. It opens with the shocking death of a young boy, surrounded by his family as blood pours from a bullet hole in his chest. It’s a direct insight into the fight the members of the IRA hold as sacrosanct and the guilt that the boy’s sister feels over sending him out into the streets on a simple errand. That sister, all grown up, is Collete McVeigh (achingly performed by Andrea Riseborough). After dropping off a suspicious bag in a tube station, she’s picked up by the authorities and taken to see Mac (Clive Owen) who dangles the promise of hard jail time in front of her until she turns reluctant informant for the MI5. The people she’s betraying forced her into a war, but they’re also her family.

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our Tribeca coverage, and as of today, the film is in limited release. In The English Teacher, star Julianne Moore plays an English teacher; I point that out, redundantly, because the character type is almost redundant. Everything that you would expect from a stereotypical high school purveyor of Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne is true about Moore’s Ms. Linda Sinclair. She’s introduced as the obvious loner, a shy woman in love with the classics. She goes on blind dates with terrible men, who she imaginatively grades in her head like a student’s paper. The script even goes so far as to make sure she’s buffeted by voiceover narration, in an inevitably British accent. Yet Moore, and to an extent director Craig Zisk, do an excellent job at keeping Ms. Sinclair away from the frustrating blandness of the stock character, at least for the first act of the film. There isn’t necessarily more to her than meets the eye, but the people around her allow her to grow into something more interesting. The English Teacher has quite the admirable start, winning the audience over in spite of all of our preconceived notions about this sort of self-consciously charming indie movie. That’s how it begins, anyway. Ms. Sinclair is a bored English teacher in a small Pennsylvania town, somewhere in the vicinity of Scranton. She bumps into a former student at the bank. Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano) is a playwright, or at least he went

The first incarnation of any big event is bound to experience a few hiccups, but having recently returned from the inaugural Stanley Film Fest in Estes Park, Colorado, I feel confident in reporting that the biggest issue I encountered was slow service at the Sunday morning horror-themed brunch. It wouldn’t have been a problem, but these were Carrie pancakes I was waiting on complete with a bucket of red berry syrup! I ultimately had to leave before my food arrived, but the reason why was the same reason I was at the fest in the first place. I was there to see movies. This first year saw 24 feature films play, and while that may not sound like a lot, it was more than enough to fill up a single-weekend festival. I only managed to see eleven over the three days, and the titles available ranged from well-regarded horror films from years past, including All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Cabin Fever and even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari accompanied by live music to new releases like Maniac, Beneath and The Purge. But this fest had another ace up its sleeve in addition to the films. Location, location, location!

It seems like the appetite for widely-loved trans/glam/camp musical/rock operas can take a new one about once every two decades. Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in the late ‘70s, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the end of the 90s (even if it wasn’t made into a film until 2001). With Peaches Does Herself, electroclash musician and performance artist Peaches is gunning for an early next spot. The career retrospective/genesis story of the “electro-artist persona Peaches,” Peaches Does Herself is told with the help of trans porn star Danni Daniels, veteran stripper Sandy Kane, and the Fatherfucker dance troupe. It’s a high-energy, transgressive, genial revue with barely a word of dialogue. As the title’s double-entendre suggests, it does risk being a little too self-regarding, solipsistic, or — excuse me — masturbatory to transcend its subject and resonate with a new generation of genderqueer kids looking for a new musical soundtrack to sing along to. But who knows? Peaches and company create an appealing vision of a world where people ardently give zero fucks about gender in order to sing, dance, and dry-hump with abandon, which might be just what it takes to join the trans/glam musical/rock opera pantheon.

Now that the Tribeca Film Festival has been effectively put to bed for the year (rest up, sweet festival), it’s time to reflect on what we loved best about New York City’s spring fling, from zombies to visual effects to more Sam Rockwell than might be advisable by most doctors. For a festival like Tribeca, which lately seems to being striving (and hard) to be more unique and more fresh than it might have been in the past, a traditional “best-of” list just didn’t seem right. After all, where in such a list would we write about geodesic domes and solid fashion choices made by pre-teen characters and, again, just like a lot of Sam Rockwell? The answer – nowhere – made this year’s listing wrap-up style obvious. We just wrote about what we liked best. So what were the twelve best things at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival? Let us tell you.

Yesterday, indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg (who’s truly pulled himself up from his bootstraps) tweeted out, ”Soderbergh’s own output over the last few years proves, to me at least, how open the system is and how possible it is to make great stuff.” That felt a little odd. Steven Soderbergh‘s latest bout of prolificness is genuinely impressive, but after struggling with the studio process and ultimately, for one example, taking his Liberace biopic to HBO, would Soderbergh himself agree with Swanberg’s optimistic sentiment? That’s difficult to say, especially given how Soderbergh rose to prominence, but he’s at least given us an idea about how he feels about the studio system as it currently stands in 2013. It isn’t pretty. It’s eloquent. His full State of Cinema Address from the San Francisco International Film Festival is a must-listen (see below), but here are the 10 things wrong with Hollywood extracted from his amazing, fist-pumpingly laudable speech.

Director Kat Coiro‘s (L!fe Happens) latest feature,  A Case of You will undoubtedly enter the pantheon of “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” movies. You know the kind – movies that glorify the precious nature of spritely, eccentric leading ladies who make their “normal” suitor’s heart got pitter-patter. Our MPG here is named Birdie Hazel (Evan Rachel Wood), a barista at a Brooklyn coffee shop – she wears fedoras, draws caricatures in Prospect Park, and takes ballroom dancing with a pack of admiring senior citizens. She also has an unparalleled taste in music literature, as she appreciates the likes of both Joni Mitchell and Walt Whitman. When struggling writer Sam (Justin Long, who co-wrote the film with his brother Christian Long and co-star Keir O’Donnell) falls for her, he looks to her Facebook page as inspiration and makes all of her quirky interests his so that she will fall for him.When Birdie does fall for Sam, will he need to keep up the façade forever so that he remains interesting in her eyes? A Case of You rests on this game of Sam’s, which is somewhat of a flimsy premise. This and other problems aside, Long and Wood are delightful to watch and have great chemistry, and on the whole, the film is, despite my better judgement, quite enjoyable.

When a movie as magnificent as The Expedition to the End of the World comes along, it’s hard to find the right words to describe it. Awesome comes to mind, but that sounds so broad. It’s a word that has had its meaning diluted through generations of it being used to merely mean “cool.” For most people, it’s not even a good enough word by itself anymore. First it was unnecessarily given more oomph with phrases like “totally awesome,” and now it’s part of the utterly ridiculous slang expression “awesome sauce.” But the true, original definition of the word is the most fit for a documentary that delivers us to the wonder of our planet’s destruction with such amazing and daunting splendor. And in a way, it’s probably appropriate to use a word that’s lost something in its evolution. The title of the film refers to both the edge of the earth as well as its demise, and yet the journey in question is hardly one of alarm. Just as the physical end of the world is an illusion, given that it’s not flat, the temporal terminus is just a point somewhere amidst the infinity. The Expedition to the End of the World follows a group of explorers sailing toward the North Pole along the Northeast coast of Greenland, a trip made possible only recently thanks to global warming, in order to study the newly exposed environment on every level. Scientists aboard the schooner Activ include a geologist, a geochemist, a marine

As usual, Tribeca presented quite the diverse batch of shorts this year. There are plenty of new voices from New York City, a whole slew of international filmmakers, and a wide variety of documentary and experimental films. In the mix is some outrageous humor, heartrending human stories and a few uncompromising works of cinematic vision. Yet out of this wide selection, a handful inevitably rose right to the top. Here are the best ten short films from this year’s edition of the Tribeca Film Festival – in alphabetical order.

Daniel Algrant’s Greetings from Tim Buckley is supposed to be Penn Badgley’s revelatory moment as an actor. Playing singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, Badgley sings live on set and sounds eerily similar to Buckley as he goes into his upper register and harmonizes in abstract ways. Unfortunately, Badgley’s performance ultimately feels empty, as does the film as a whole. Despite being focused on real, complicated people with tragic lives (both at the height of their fame, Jeff’s father Tim died at 28 from an accidental overdose and Jeff drowned at 30), the film never allows the two Buckleys to come across as fully realized characters. It’s 1991 and Jeff Buckley is living in California, a struggling musician. Out of the blue, he gets a call asking him to come to Brooklyn to perform in a tribute concert for his father, who he only met twice in his lifetime. Jeff is bitter about the whole situation – celebrating the man who abandoned him – but he agrees to play nonetheless. While he is there, he is guided musically by his two of his father’s former bandmates, played by William Sadler and Frank Wood. He also forms an immediate connection with the venue’s intern, Allie (Imogen Poots, playing a fictionalized character) and she helps him come to terms with being his father’s son. Jeff’s story of prepping for the tribute concert is intercut with Tim’s (Ben Rosenfield) trip from California to New York at the start of his career in the 1960s.

A gun. A dead woman. A box of money. A (sort of) innocent man. A hunt. While David M. Rosenthal’s A Single Shot doesn’t shy away from some conventional-to-the-point-of-cliché plot points for his latest feature, the crime drama packs a punch thanks to its stellar cast, stunning cinematography, and a horror-tinged score that continually leaves its audience on edge. Oh, and the violence. Did we forget the violence? There’s violence. Penned by Matthew F. Jones (who adapted his own novel for the script), A Single Shot is a suitably intense showcase for star Sam Rockwell’s dramatic chops. As lonely loser John Moon, the film rests on the actor’s ability to engage and excite his audience, a feat that he mostly pulls off with ease. A near-wordless opening sequence plunges us deep into both John’s day-to-day life and the shocking event that will turn everything upside down for him, as John sets off to illegally hunt deer in the quiet woods near his home. It should be a day like any other, but a tired and emotionally drained John gets turned around while pursuing a deer, and one of his shots makes contact with something other than his intended prey.

While introducing Austin Peck and Anneliese Vandenberg’s Tough Bond at Hot Docs this weekend, a programmer called it “powerful.” That’s an adjective we tend to take for granted, especially at a film festival devoted to documentaries, and I accepted the claim for whatever my mind tends to associate with the word. Which might be nothing. Halfway through the film, I wondered what we really mean when we call a film powerful. There are actually a few different possibilities. An orange glue bottle hanging from the mouths of Kenyan street kids like its an extension of their face. That’s an image I’ll never get out of my head, which means its an image with power. And its an image recurring throughout Tough Bond, which focuses on a national problem of huffing and the societal changes leading youths to turn to the intoxicating adhesive. But that doesn’t make the film itself powerful, does it? It’s not as if the filmmakers created this picture of modern Africa. They just recorded it.

Sofia’s Last Ambulance opens with the camera advancing toward an open door. Men in work clothes stare through the fourth wall and step aside as the screen moves past them. It takes a second to realize that the steady camerawork is not there to be ignored, as is normally the case in a well-produced feature film; instead, the camera’s point of view is the premise of the whole movie. With lenses affixed to the titular ambulance, we roll ahead on four wheels — we see what the mechanical infrastructure sees. The film is all about infrastructure. In particular, it follows the bumpy circuits of a troika of EMS workers in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. It’s a formally dispassionate but loving portrait of three admirable people, tired to the bone, who over the course of two years go about their impossible task of tending to the sick and the injured with an equally broken emergency response system.

What makes for a great midnight movie? It’s sort of hard to pin down, one of those “you know it when you see it” sorts of things. Yet looking at the best of this year’s Tribeca Midnight slate, a few commonalities emerge. Honestly, I think it boils down to one thing – a midnight movie needs to keep you awake. It’s got to be effortlessly entertaining, able to keep you energized well after your bedtime. Many of the best of them are hilarious, sending you into peals of raucous laughter almost nonstop. Others are frightful, using fear and the thrill of the cheap scare to keep you on edge.

Films like Wadjda do not come around very often. Haifaa al-Mansour’s debut feature is not only the first shot entirely in Saudi Arabia by a woman director, but also the first feature film ever shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. On the one hand, this means its place in history is secured no matter what. Yet al-Mansour’s work didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere in the Arabian Desert. An almost superhuman dedication was necessary to make this film, both due to the nation’s lack of cinematic infrastructure and the logistical problems caused by the obstacles to mobility for Saudi women. More than that, however, Wadjda simply does not feel as if it popped out of the sand. al-Mansour’s work rests on shoulders of greatness, building from a century of international cinema. That’s a loaded point, obviously, but it’s impossible to watch Wadjda without thinking of everything from Italian Neorealism to Jafar Panahi’s films around the role of women in contemporary Iran. This combination of classic styles and a surge forward into a totally new national landscape is what keeps al-Mansour’s film exhilarating from beginning to end.

Lenny Cooke, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie (Daddy Longlegs), is an astonishing documentary centering around promising basketball star, Lenny Cooke, who in 2001 was the highest ranked high school basketball in the nation, ranked above even Amar’e Stoudemaire, LeBron James or Carmelo Anthony. Through happenstance and perhaps Cooke’s lack of motivation, Cooke was never drafted into the NBA, and now lives in obscurity in Virginia, overweight and struggling to get by financially. The impetus of Lenny Cooke came with the film’s producer, Adam Shopkorn, who was followed the headlines about Cooke in 2001 and convinced the rising star to be the focus of his documentary. When Cooke didn’t make it to the NBA, the project was temporarily shelved, but then Shopkorn approached the Safdies to help finish the film. The Safdies and Shopkorn then went to Virginia to film Cooke in the present time, and they bridged the older footage with the new to create a meditation on Cooke’s life trajectory. Per my review, I loved the film and was excited to sit down with the Safdies and Shopkorn to discuss bridging Shopkorn’s footage to the Safdies’ new footage, and the Safdies’ transition from narrative to documentary. They also go into great detail over one of the film’s standout scenes: Cooke celebrating his 30th birthday party at home in Virginia, during which time he drunkenly and tenderly serenades his fiancée with a Mario song. That scene is devastatingly powerful, for you almost forget that a camera is even present. It’s

For his 13th birthday, Shawney Cohen received a lap dance. Gifted to him by his father. It didn’t seem that abnormal for a kid who grew up around strippers. His family owns and operates a gentleman’s club outside of Toronto, and as a kid Cohen often stayed at its adjoining hotel. If he awoke in the middle of the night and needed a glass of water, he would head to the bar like it was no big deal. Decades later, he has now made an irresistible film about the family business, where he also works part time. Named after the club, The Manor presents the place like any of us might share our own childhood backdrop. In a way it’s merely a common setting in the context of Cohen’s life, yet it’s also quite significant to the story of his parents, both of whom have an eating disorder. Over the course of multiple years of coverage, as his obese father has bariatric surgery and his mother is pushed to get help for anorexia, this dynamic is where the documentary maintains its focus.

If there was any doubt that this year’s Tribeca Film Festival featured one heck of a varied slate, last night’s awards ceremony put that question to rest. The festival’s many winners included films about rockets, Flemish bluegrass music, an Internet-popular dwarf cat, Oxycontin, Hurricane Sandy, and Thomas Haden Church (well, sort of). The night’s big winner was Kim Mordaunt‘s feature, The Rocket, an Aussie entry that picked up both The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature and Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film for young star Sitthiphon Disamoe. Other standout winners include The Broken Circle Breakdown, Whitewash, Oxyana, and The Kill Team. You want variety? Tribeca has got variety in spades. After the break, check out all the winners of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Editor’s note: Allison’s review originally ran during Sundance earlier this year, but we’re re-posting it as Jeff Nichols’ film hits theaters in limited release this weekend. What would be most exciting to two young boys living a slightly boring life along a river bank in Arkansas? An adventure, of course. And that is exactly what Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) think they have found when they come across a peculiar sight — a boat trapped high up in the tree tops thanks to a recent flood. But what the two boys end up finding in that boat is a much bigger adventure because they are not alone, and are not the only ones looking to get it down. Enter Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a charming drifter living on the boat who, unlike the boys, is not looking for adventure, he is looking for a way off the island that the boat (and Mud himself) is trapped on. Ellis is quickly drawn to Mud with his cross-heeled boots and endless stories, but Neckbone is more wary, especially when Mud asks the boys for a favor. Ellis remains intrigued, and it becomes clear that it is not simply the prospect of adventure that has his attention, it is Mud’s story explaining why he is stranded on that island — the pursuit of true love.

Most women who become pregnant with the man they’re deeply in love with would see it as a joyous experience. In Laurie Collyer’s (Sherrybaby) Sunlight Jr., Melissa (Naomi Watts) certainly is deeply in love with her boyfriend Richie (Matt Dillon) when she discovers that she is expecting a baby, and is initially excited about the entire prospect of being a mother. Though when the reality sets in that she and Richie barely make enough money to get by living in a dank motel room, in addition to a bevy of other problems, a dark cloud rolls in over the otherwise happy news of pregnancy. Collyer’s film features great performances from Watts and Dillon, and the film’s cinematography is a standout, though it suffers somewhat from perhaps an overly literal depiction of the lower class.