This just in: there are actually some great movies in Tribeca this year. As a festival programmer, I sympathize with Tribeca’s plight of being the third US premiere festival in the calendar year, and I wish I didn’t continuous hear complaints from other journalists about their programming. However, in an unfortunate turn of events for both the filmmakers and their publicists, I can’t really tell you about all the great movies, due to Tribeca’s embargo on reviews of all world premieres before the films screen publicly for the first time. Perhaps the embargo was a reaction to all the negative criticism, a move made in an effort to help ticket sales for movies that could possibly get bad press, but vicious cycles are the worst thing in the world and they make me sad for all the parties involved.
So, here we are now with nothing to cover but the program itself (and the embargo, of course). And instead of reviewing the quality of the films in the midnight program, I’m just gonna review the section as its own entity.
Surprisingly, this is an activity that isn’t without merit. Traditionally, the midnight program in a festival is reserved for genre titles – horror, action, science fiction. However, recently (and it should be noted that this is much more the case with Sundance than it is with Tribeca), an increasing number of other types of films that might play well at the witching hour have crept in to midnight schedules. Graphically sexual movies like James Westby’s porn comedy The Auteur, which is premiering in this year’s Tribeca Midnight program, are horrific in concept only.
Meanwhile, strict genre films have been placed in non-Midnight sections of the festival. Placing an exceptionally artful piece of genre cinema in competition is a welcome curatorial statement, as this is a completely valid form of filmmaking that does not be deserve to be ghettoized into just its own section. Such is the case with Tomas Alfredson’s Scandinavian child vampire tale Let the Right One In (trailer embedded above), which has generated so much positive buzz both out of its premiere in Rotterdam and following Magnet’s purchase of the film in Berlin that it’s sure to become one of the foreign genre hits of the year. Reviewing the film at the European Film Market, Todd Brown from Twitch called it “An exceptional piece of work…not shy in indulging in graphic imagery and laying on the blood.”
When films like Justin Meeks and Duane Graves’ 70’s horror homage The Wild Man of Navidad are placed in Discovery while Steve Saporito and Zach Saffer’s rock and roll drag queen documentary SqueezeBox! are placed in Midnight, things may get a little confusing. Seriously, though, it’s not such a bad thing. I, for one am excited for all that genre films like Let the Right One In have to offer. Let the complaints cease and let’s praise Tribeca for elevating Midnight-style fare to a higher status.
