by Megan Robinson, Staff Writer

As the Tribeca Film Festival continues, highly anticipated films find comfort in discomfort, solace in anxiety, and healing from trauma. Across the board, movies at the festival are happy to make you laugh one minute and squirm the next. It’s a delicate balancing act, but do they all stick the landing?

Sacramento
Written and directed by Michael Angarano
Runtime 84 minutes

You might think you have Sacramento figured out from reading the synopsis and looking at its small but star-studded cast. It is a buddy road trip comedy, yes, but at its heart lies a unique examination of sensitive and anxious men. Rickey, played by writer-director Michael Angarano, is still depressed a year after his father’s passing and encouraged to find comfort in friends. He reunites with the hesitant Glenn (Michael Cera), anxious himself to begin the newest journey in his life — fatherhood. What Rickey plans for him and Glenn? A road trip to Sacramento to spread his father’s ashes. What Rickey doesn’t tell Glenn? His father died a year ago, and all he really wants to do is spend time with Glenn during their tumultuous journeys.

Sacramento is always funny. It never misses a beat, always finding humor in the mundane or the turbulent. All of our leads are approachable as honest, real people, and real people are often funny in the most casual ways. Kristen Stewart as Rosie, Glenn’s wife, makes the most of her deadpan delivery as she comforts Glenn, calming him down from panic attacks about the incoming baby even though she really doesn’t want to. Glenn and Rickey’s character arcs are a refreshing look at men’s inner lives and emotions, particularly Glenn’s journey with anticipating fatherhood. It’s not often that these emotions are explored in such a vulnerable and grounded way, but Sacramento makes honest men out of both its leads. The biggest mistake in doing so, however, is that Stewart and Maya Erskine as Tallie end up sidelined; they’re important to the men’s plot, but not their own. It’s surprising that two incredibly talented and funny actresses do so little. Nevertheless, Sacramento is still an engaging comedy that dares men to be a bit more open with each other. 

Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.
Directed by Jeremy O. Harris
Runtime 79 minutes

Controversy has always followed Slave Play, the hit play written by Jeremy O. Harris that has become a defining work of his career. When you sit down to read or see Slave Play for the first time, you have no idea what you’ll be getting into. When you sit down to watch Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. you have no idea what you’re about to see. Personally, I had avoided all spoilers or in-depth discussions about the play, eager to go in “blind,” should I ever be able to experience the play at all. But I broke my promise to myself this year at Tribeca because this documentary, helmed by Harris, has the most intriguing title I’ve seen in a while. What could it possibly mean? I won’t spoil it here, but Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. is everything but what you might expect: not exactly a filmed version of the play, not quite a look at Harris’ journey to writing the divisive work, and not a traditional documentary.

Slave Play was out to challenge audiences’ sensibilities, with archived audience member interviews sprinkled in the documentary putting on display just how divided reactions were. Harris’ documentary is out to challenge the people making it, as he gathers a group of actors who have never performed the piece to experiment and explore its inner workings, but most importantly to “fail,” as he puts it. The audience is given a glimpse into the artistic process that goes into putting on a play, the actors given room to interrogate the work, their own interpretations of it, and what Harris truly wants to say. This is a tricky work, mostly in that Harris knows exactly what he’s aiming for with Slave Play, but not so much for Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. Even the original cast from Yale that performed his play for the first time tell Harris that even though they don’t know what the documentary is about, they suspect Harris doesn’t either. What Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. adds up to will be up for debate, but so is the source material it’s discussing — and isn’t debating with each other the real fun of uncomfortable art?

The Wasp
Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm
Directed by Guillem Morales
Runtime 96 minutes

For many, “trauma” has started to feel like more of a pop culture buzzword than a legitimate source of concern in our daily lives. It’s more than a bit sad to think about the commodification of something so universally experienced in some way, shape, or form. With the ways in which communication and art have evolved so quickly, how can we effectively tell stories about that which has become increasingly trivialized by those who refuse to take it seriously? This is where The Wasp comes in, its buzzing in your ear getting louder and louder until you can no longer ignore the uncomfortable and devastating truths of life for vulnerable people. What starts with housewife Heather (Naomie Harris) reaching out to old friend Carla (Natalie Dormer) to carry out a dangerous request twists into something much more painful and hard to watch.

There aren’t enough words to describe what Harris does as Heather. Her performance as Paula in Moonlight has always stuck out to me as one of the finest performances I’d seen, where anger and love mix into a poisonous concoction injected right into the veins. It had been reported that she shot everything for the role in only three days; with her at The Wasp’s center, I had to know what she could do as the lead with much more time on her hands to refine her performance. While Dormer is able to ground the film with her steady and stoic delivery, Harris eats up the role of Heather like she was born to play her. Even when she revels in the scary persona Heather puts on, Harris keeps you engaged and always sympathetic. The camera is unflinching, which is both a blessing and a curse; we cannot look away from the pain inflicted on Heather, but this often makes for an unsteady pace of peaks and valleys. It would be a disservice to reveal too much, but though The Wasp is anchored by engaging performances and a profound understanding of trauma, its ending is bound to leave everyone a bit conflicted as to whether anything was truly achieved.

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
Directed by David Hinton
Runtime 131 minutes

Martin Scorsese knows cinema. You don’t have to agree with him, or even like him, to know that he is a learned person with an intimate knowledge of the cinematic form. For him, it’s deeply personal; he opens Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger with discussing his asthma diagnosis as a small child, which kept him inside and glued to the television, offering him a rich world of cinematic reruns. From there, he goes through the works of the powerhouse directing duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, British directors known for their surrealist, romantic, and obsessive Technicolor masterpieces. For Scorsese, it’s not just about the brilliance of the film’s looks and the spectacles Powell and Pressburger created, but the often terrifying worlds and emotions they explore within. That mix of beauty and horror has impacted every inch of Scorsese’s filmography.

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger plays a bit more like a video essay at times than a documentary. The lens is singularly Scorsese’s, working to explain the brilliance of these films, define his own personal connections to them, and look at his own films through the lens of Powell and Pressburger. This approach is a bit loose but at the same time meticulous; Scorsese goes through as many images as possible, and director David Hinton pieces them all together to create a new image of cinematic obsession. Powell in particular became obsessed with choreographing cinema to achieve a purely emotional experience that combined all art forms into one. It’s hard to fathom such visionaries going unrecognized for as long as they had, especially when their artistic vision was so singular. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger wants to show you what makes these films tick, and why exactly it’s not such a bad thing to be so compelled to make art that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that dream.