Tribeca Film Festival 2013: what to watch out for in the year ahead – The Verge

Watch the Tribeca Film Festival ‘Future of Film Live’ series with Joshua Topolsky

2013-05-07T15:00:43-04:00

2013 Tribeca Film Festival (STOCK)

Over a period of four days at the end of April, our very own Joshua Topolsky moderated the "Future of Film Live" series at the Tribeca Film Festival. The collection of panels with filmmakers, critics, video game developers, and other industry experts explored how big changes in technology and distribution are changing what we watch on the silver screen and in our homes. In case you weren't able to make it to New York, the Tribeca Film Festival has put most of the conversations up in full on YouTube, and you can watch below.

The Death of Film?

In a wide-ranging conversation, The New Yorker's David Denby and New York Times' A.O. Scott talk abo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

‘Byzantium’ review: do we really need another vampire movie?

2013-04-29T14:00:03-04:00

byzantium lead

As a concept, vampires are wearing thin. Twilight and its attendant social phenomenon all but destroyed the creature's mysterious charm - whatever you think of the books, it's become impossible to avoid jokes about sparkling vampires playing baseball. But 20 years after his seminal Interview with the Vampire, filmmaker Neil Jordan has returned with the quieter Byzantium, based on a play by Moira Buffini. It's hardly a retread of Interview or a by-the-numbers horror film, but it fails to answer the basic and required question: why do we need another vampire movie?

While Interview swept across centuries and continents with a cast of forceful …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Watch 35 minutes of Ellen Page in ‘Beyond: Two Souls’

2013-04-28T16:03:06-04:00

Beyond: Two Souls lead

If you just can't wait until October to see Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe star in the PS3 game Beyond: Two Souls, there's some good news, as 35 minutes of game video has been released. The footage was revealed as part of a two hour-long panel at the Tribeca Film Festival, which featured both Page and game director David Cage. According to the PlayStation blog, the scene was chosen carefully "to avoid many of the major, major spoilers" in the game, though if you want to go into the experience completely fresh you should probably avoid clicking play (if you're wary of spoilers you can check out the brand new cinematic trailer instead). For the r …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Running with scissors: the director of ‘RoboCop’ and ‘Showgirls’ bets on his fans and loses

2013-04-27T15:00:05-04:00

tricked verhoeven

Debuting his latest film at Tribeca, director Paul Verhoeven took the stage on an almost apologetic note. "I hope that you enjoy it, and will accept the moral choices I made while making the movie." Coming from a man best known for the supercharged sex and violence of RoboCop, Total Recall, and Showgirls, it's downright bewildering.

If he's cautious, it's because he just took a big risk and got burned. His latest movie, Tricked, was conceived as "the first user-generated film," in the words of his producer. It would be a story guided entirely by the audience. Verhoeven began by filming a five-minute script (the first episode), put it online …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Tribeca Film Festival Vine competition winners are stop-motion masterpieces

2013-04-26T19:30:54-04:00

Vine Contest Winner

The Tribeca Film Festival has announced the winners of its #6SECFILMS Vine competition. With 400 submissions in several categories, the winners were chosen by a small panel that included the "King of Vines," Adam Goldberg. The winners for most of the categories were Vines insofar as they used the app and were six seconds long, but beyond that most of the winners were essentially stop-motion pieces. Vines of tiny soldiers blasting eggs, magically moving a car with by waving your hand, and tiny paper bugs were all animated in short little films that are compelling and well-produced, but didn't necessarily break new narrative ground.

The same …

Read the full story at The Verge.

‘Lil Bub & Friendz’ review: internet cat culture doesn’t need rock stars

2013-04-25T14:15:04-04:00

bub 2

As much as I love the vague category that is "internet culture," most of it was born to die. The memes get stale, the blogs taper off, the videos that were once hypnotic become insufferable. But Lil Bub, the permanent kitten who has attracted a massive internet following over the past year, will live forever in a documentary. Lil Bub & Friendz is a definitive take on internet cat fandom, a love letter to anyone who's stayed up late browsing YouTube for kittens falling down slides or riding Roombas. Maybe, though, a love letter is the last thing we really need.

Lil Bub is so cute as to be mildly unsettling - a tiny cat with a protruding tong …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The next decade in television: rooting for Aereo and burying DVDs at Tribeca Film Festival

2013-04-25T13:45:03-04:00

Verizon FiOS TV DVR Remote (STOCK)

How will people watch TV or movies in ten years? It's a question that can be played off or massively inflated, as people forecast a long life for cable and theaters or a complete shift to Netflix and YouTube. At a Tribeca Film Festival panel with our own Josh Topolsky, telecom executives met with entrepreneurs who have successfully made the jump to web - it included Boxee's Avner Ronen, AT&T's Richard Wellerstein, Comcast's Mike Imbesi, and Vuguru's Kristen Jones. Together, they plotted the future of television in a wide-ranging discussion about Aereo, streaming, and the death of DVDs.

The panelists acknowledged that there's a gap between w …

Read the full story at The Verge.

‘The Kill Team’ review: a modern military atrocity gets put under the microscope

2013-04-23T13:34:54-04:00

kill team 2

You may have heard about it on the news: a rogue group of US soldiers killing civilians "for sport" in Afghanistan. For weeks, it was a staple on 24-hour cable channels, inspiring long newspaper and magazine pieces and sending dozens of soldiers to jail. Debuting at Tribeca, a new documentary called The Kill Team by Dan Krauss finds a new angle on the nightmarish story, following Private Adam Winfield as he navigates the military courts and tries to salvage some sense of humanity along the way.

The killings themselves are depressingly familiar, recalling the infamous My Lai massacre. Led by the the imposing Staff Sgt. Gibbs, the group began …

Read the full story at The Verge.

‘Mr. Jones’ review: the cabin-in-the-woods horror flick takes a mindtrip detour

2013-04-22T13:30:04-04:00

jones2

Movies like the Paranormal Activity series have helped cement found footage films as a horror subgenre in their own right, though the technique is usually used as a shortcut: putting cameras into characters' hands offers an immediate sense of danger while jettisoning any visual ambitions. Mr. Jones, which premiered here at the Tribeca Film Festival, tries to subvert that expectation. An indie horror flick with a twist of David Lynch's Lost Highway, it tweaks the formula to explore the blurred line between nightmares and reality - even though it doesn't quite stick the landing.

The story is told through footage captured by Scott's dual-camera …

Read the full story at The Verge.

‘The Machine’ review: a stylish indie sci-fi thriller about humanity’s obsolescence

2013-04-21T13:05:12-04:00

We live in an age where smartphones can tell us when we need to leave for the airport and Turing test competitors inch ever closer to a passing grade, but true artificial intelligence remains out there on the horizon, frustratingly out of reach. At the Tribeca Film Festival a new sci-fi action film imagines one way we might finally achieve that goal - and some of the moral and ethical problems we might not see coming. It's called The Machine, and you're going to want to see it.

The second feature from writer and director Caradog James, the film tells the story of Dr. Vincent McCarthy (Toby Stephens). It's the near-future. A cold war with Ch …

Read the full story at The Verge.