2019 Tribeca Film Festival

Sometimes I wonder if New York is worth it - expensive, crowded, crumbling infrastructure (although our whole country is like that), and I've grown to hate the winters.

But it does have some things going for it, like endless restaurant variety, along with cultural events that are scarcer in most other places. An example was getting to see Hannah Gadsby (and soon I'll be seeing her again) before she had broken through on Netflix. One of my faves, however, is the Tribeca Film Festival, held each year around lower Manhattan in late April and the beginning of May (just at the right time for one to wish the weather was better, although that's almost always true here).

You can get an 8-ticket package and go with partner to 4 movies that you choose before they're otherwise on sale, but this year we doubled down and got a 16-ticket package, with the end result of seeing 8 films in 9 days.

Best news: none of them were superhero movies or anything like it. Indeed, it was a common joke on the lines where you wait for admission to your event: "Are you here for The Avengers?"

If you play your cards right you can try for a varied slate by genre, site, time of day, etc., reducing the monotony of having to get somewhere (half an hour early) each day, and turning it into more of a staycation. You also generally get to see and hear a short Q&A with the director, stars, etc., after each show, which adds human context.

This year's slate for us was as follows:

1) Lost Bayou - small film about a troubled young woman who has to go see her faith-healer dad on a houseboat in the Louisiana swamp. Beautifully photographed, a bit slow, unlikely to go far commercially, but it felt worth seeing.

2) Good Posture - excellent indie growing-up film with Angelika-style potential, young woman in a beautifully shot Brooklyn meets (fictional) famous writer, great cameos by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, and Jonathan Ames.

3) Plus One - rom com that also has breakout potential, very enjoyable to watch, and with a charming performance by the female lead, but a bit cliched despite efforts to address the genre's familiarity, and seemingly aimed more at commercial success than, say, artistic exploration.

4) Inna de Yard - documentary about founding musicians from the Jamaican reggae scene who are still performing today.  Great music and a nice cultural document.

5) Woodstock - new documentary about the famous 1969 concert, based on previously unused archival footage and interviews. Rather than being a concert movie like the original 1970 release about this epochal event, it focuses on how the organizers put the concert together, why people went there and what they felt they got out of it, and how everyone got through the challenging circumstances of a prolonged mass concert experience with inadequate facilities, drenching rain, etcetera.

6) The Quiet One - documentary about former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, featuring a dip into his massive archives that go back to before the group's beginning. Interesting and had some nice footage, but mainly stayed on the opaque surface and also steered clear of controversy.

7) Buffaloed - Zoey Deutch stars in a somewhat Wolf of Wall Street-ish comedy-drama about a young woman in Buffalo who is desperate to rise from poverty. Enjoyable and lively, although at times straining dramatic credibility.

8) See You Yesterday - This was one of my three favorites (along with Good Posture and Woodstock). Like Get Out, it takes a familiar genre, here sci-fi, and imbues it with observation and commentary on where the United States is today racially. A young black woman and man who are completing their junior years at Bronx Science have a science project that they hope will get them scholarships to the likes of MIT and Stanford. To wit, they've invented a time machine, although they can only go back a day (raised gradually to a week) due to its energy and system demands. The sci fi premise would not by itself make the film worthwhile, but it enables the sociological exploration that is the film's real topic. While, at first, the two of them just want to time-travel to show themselves that they can, police violence leads to a tragedy that makes them want to go back and fix things. But that proves not so easy. Great performances, great ending, very moving, and it does not make one happy(nor should it) about the society we live in.