By Harlan Jacobson
Cannes---May 18, 2022
Festivals are organized fantasy markets, every so often featuring great fantasies and great actors who “play” and sometimes move or even inspire us.
Top Gun: Maverick brings Tom Cruise back to the screen, flying faster than a speeding bullet, doing his own stunts in jet planes, blowing stuff up, reclaiming the pretty girl he left behind and burning a hole through the screen with his white, hot teeth as usual.
Lisa Hurwitz’ The AUTOMAT, which came out of the Telluride Film Festival and opens this week at the Film Forum in Manhattan, is a seductive dive back through time into the art deco origins of the Horn & Hardart Automats.
The 94th Academy Awards, which concluded last Sunday night, confounded just about everyone who watched it—whether they were in the elite crowd inside the Academy’s return to the Dolby Theatre or like the rest of us, flopped out on the couch.
Whatever else it was, Oscar night this year will be known forevermore as Not the Triumph of the Will.
Having closed down in 2020, along with the rest of the world, the Tribeca Film Festival is the first American festival to come back, or most of the way back from all virtual to mostly theatrical. And come back it did, with 192 features, including 90 narrative and 102 documentaries, plus sections devoted to episodic TV, games and new media, sit-down chats, and a special mixed program selection of Juneteenth programming.
With the insanely popular and priced Hamilton, show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda built a Broadway bridge to the American Revolution for minority audiences to cross over and inhabit the story. His new film, In the Heights, after a year’s delay due to the pandemic, is both streaming on HBO Max and opened the Tribeca Film Festival that began June 9th, 2021.
Actress turned director Regina King’s One Night in Miami is a ‘what if’ fictional story about the night of Feb. 25, 1964 when 22-year-old Cassius Clay whups Sonny Liston for the Heavyweight championship of the world at the Convention Center in Miami.
