In the romantic comedy, Cha Cha Real Smooth, a charismatic-ish slacker (played by writer/director Cooper Raiff) falls for an older woman (Dakota Johnson) while sort of trying to get his post-graduate life together.
Cha Cha Real Smooth has been playing some festivals and will be available on Apple TV this Friday. My review from the Tribeca Film Festival ran at PopMatters and dealt with, in part, the movie’s “bullying need to be liked.”
Here’s the trailer:
Andrea Koefoed’s new documentary The Lost Leonardo, which just screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a fascinating look at the mania surrounding a (possibly) rediscovered painting by da Vinci.
My review is at Slant:
While the intersection of hype, art, and money is fertile territory and Koefoed makes the most of it, he misses the opportunity to look more deeply at the somewhat mediocre painting itself and whether it deserved the fairly laughable billing as the “male Mona Lisa.” Aside from a couple very justifiable questions about whether Modestini went too far in her five-year restoration—possibly making it more a Modestini than da Vinci—aesthetic matters are mostly put to the side, with Koefoed more engaged with the business surrounding the art…
Here’s the trailer:
The 2018 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival just wrapped up over the weekend. I covered some of the fest’s varied documentary offerings for The Playlist, reviews here:
The Tribeca Film Festival, which has long been one of the country’s premier venues for new documentaries, ran into controversy recently when they pulled one of their films from the schedule. Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe is a documentary by Andrew Wakefield, one of the top pushers of the vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy theory. Not surprisingly, some people had a problem with this.
My article “Why the Tribeca Film Festival was Right to Pull Vaxxed‘ ran in the online edition of Little White Lies:
The argument to screen Vaxxed regardless of its relationship to the truth feels similar to that pushed by creationists who cloak their school agendas under the cloak of “teaching the controversy,” when in fact no actual controversy exists…
The 2013 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs through this weekend, is starting off well. The planners are continuing their trend of paring down the offerings and focusing more on their strengths (on-point documentaries, the occasional high-profile indie drama or comedy) than trying to appeal to everybody with a scattershot program overly reliant on marquee names and red-carpet events. The result is many stories about grim things, from Oxycontin abuse in Appalachia to the 1985 Philadelphia police’s fatal bombing of a radical group’s rowhouse.
I’ve been covering some of the first weekend’s films for PopMatters, here’s some of what was on offer:
More to come.
Chris Barsanti 
You must be logged in to post a comment.