On Film

Tribeca fest surges with review choices

Mohamed (Reda Kateb) and Daru (Viggo Mortensen) wait for the bad guys to show up in Far From Men, a French film set in Algeria in 1954.
Mohamed (Reda Kateb) and Daru (Viggo Mortensen) wait for the bad guys to show up in Far From Men, a French film set in Algeria in 1954.

NEW YORK -- One of the things I have to remind myself of whenever I'm at a film festival is that I'm there to work.

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Tom (Garrett Hedlund), a spoiled movie brat who has been famous since he was 19, and the diabolical Jack (Oscar Isaac) face off in the desert in Mojave.

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Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis) are old friends who — after years of serial infidelity and self-sabotage — try to maintain a platonic relationship in Sleeping With Other People.

And as a film critic for a general interest newspaper, I feel an obligation to pay particular attention to those festival films that have the greatest chance of making an impression on a mass audience. As much as I might like to bury myself in the obscure and esoteric, I try to see as many films with an eye to reviewing them later as I can.

Sometimes it takes a while for a movie to make it from a festival screen to a local theater -- I saw An Honest Liar, which opened in Little Rock last month, nearly a year earlier here at last year's Tribeca Film Festival. I saw a cut of The Wrecking Crew at South by Southwest Film Festival in 2008. (I saw it again before I reviewed it last week.) My first chance to see Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories was here at Tribeca.

On the other hand, some movies never get any sort of theatrical distribution. But if you really want to see a particular movie, it'll be available. To cite a high-profile example, Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January and had its New York premiere at this year's Tribeca festival, will air Monday on HBO and will undoubtedly be available on DVD within a few months. Still, when I'm making out my festival screening schedule, I am mindful of what's likely to actually come to Arkansas.

A movie like Leslye Headland's bawdy romantic comedy Sleeping With Other People -- which was acquired by IFC after it premiered at Sundance -- seems destined to find a reasonably large audience, probably a bigger one than her debut feature, the underrated Bachelorette. It has a strong cast, with Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie in the lead roles and Adam Scott, Nastasha Lyonne, Parks and Recreation's Jason Mantzoukas and Amanda Peet in supporting roles. It's more sharply written than other recent hard R comedies, and while Headland has pulled back a bit from the psychological darkness that informed Bachelorette (both understandable and a shame), there's an almost naturalistic quality in the film's depiction of the key relationship between two "just friends" determined not to disrupt their relationship by taking it to the next level. (This despite a surrealist opening sequence that has Sudeikis and Brie playing their much younger college-age selves.)

Similarly, William Monahan's Mojave, which is being distributed by white-hot A24 (Under the Skin, Locke, The Obvious Child, A Most Violent Year, While We're Young, Ex Machina), will make it to area theaters before too long. I thoroughly enjoyed the film even as I realized it's a little overheated and defaults to thriller conventions in the third act. Basically, it's part over-the-top philosophical treatise, part bloody crime film and part Hollywood satire with Oscar Isaac channeling Dennis Hopper as a sociopathic desert rat who may or may not be the devil himself and Garrett Hedlund as a spoiled Hollywood type who might be even worse. Grace notes are supplied by Mark Wahlberg as a cocaine dealer turned producer and Walton Goggins, who recalls Jack Nicholson as a laconic entertainment lawyer. Monahan, best know for writing the screenplays for Martin Scorsese's The Departed and the recent remake of The Gambler, has made a flawed but enjoyable movie that might bring Isaac some Best Supporting Actor Oscar buzz.

I was less impressed with Pamela Romanowsky's The Adderall Diaries, though the film's tonal problems have little to do with the lead performance by James Franco as Stephen Elliott, the real-life author of the book Romanowsky has adapted for the screen. While I haven't read that book, the character Franco portrays comes off as a pathetic, self-pitying fabulist whose hyper-masculine affectations obscure his essential cowardice. While I'm not sure this was completely intended, Franco's performance is a lot more convincing than the rest of this confused movie, which casts Amber Heard as a New York Times reporter who used to play bass in a punk band and has the wardrobe to prove it. Ed Harris, Christian Slater and True Blood's Jim Parrack round out the cast.

Weirdly enough, Jude, the pink-haired character Heard plays in Robert Edwards' When I Live My Life Over Again, is also an ex-punk rock bassist; she's the daughter of a pre-rock crooner Paul Lombard (Christopher Walken), now in semi-retirement in the Hamptons, where he spends his days pretending to play golf, editing his Wikipedia page and plotting his comeback. With Jude's musical career going nowhere and her rent due, she retreats to Paul's place to try to figure out her next step. What ensues is a gentle family comedy with a few true moments (and a few groaners), though what you're most likely to remember is how well Walken acquits himself as a vocalist.

Nick Sandow's The Wannabe is a visually impressive gangster film that plays like a hybrid of Scorsese's King of Comedy and Goodfellas as it traces the predictable (and fact-based) story of low-life Thomas (Vincent Piazza), who aspires to become part of John Gotti's inner circle by fixing the jury in the Teflon Don's 1992 murder trial. Things don't exactly work out for Thomas, especially after he hooks up with Rose (Patricia Arquette), an older woman who has her own fantasies. Sandow -- better known as an actor; he's had significant roles in Boardwalk Empire and Orange Is the New Black -- has a great touch with textures and details, but the middle segment of the film, when Rose and Thomas give themselves over to hedonistic thrills, is overlong.

One of the more impressive narrative features at this year's festival, French director David Oelhoffen's Far From Men ( Loin des Hommes) stars Viggo Mortensen in a French and Arabic-speaking role as Daru, an Algerian-born teacher and former French soldier living in the Algerian mountains in 1954. The film, based on Albert Camus' 1957 short story "The Guest," plays like an existential Western. Tribeca Film is distributing the movie in the U.S., so there's a very good chance it will make it to Arkansas.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 05/01/2015

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