Screw the big-budget blockbusters, you say? (Don't listen to them, Iron Man!) Well then, check out the latest indie films, and which ones you should Netflix/stand in line for, should they ever hit the wide-release screens. Screengrab reports from Tribeca with the latest and greatest:
Baghead, which “opens with a fairly vicious parody of a half-assed “mumblecore’-style independent film that looks as if the print had been delivered to the projection room in a cinnamon roll box with the icing still stuck to the insides.” (Mmm, cinnamon rolls…)
From Within, “a good, nasty little horror picture about a mysterious rash of apparent suicides in a small town setting.”
Bill Plympton’s latest animated offering, Idiots & Angels.
Playing, “Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho's documentary that sounds like a dumb stunt but plays as a fascinating study in the nature of acting and storytelling.”
Theater of War, of which the “prime attraction is supposed to be the chance to see the Public Theater production coming together and to see a glimpse of the ‘process’ of its star, Meryl Streep.”
My Winnipeg, in which director Guy Maddin, “eager to get at the roots of his unresolved childhood issues, decides to move back in with Mom and use some of the film budget to hire actors and a dog to ‘play’ his siblings and his ‘long, long, long-dead Chihuahua.’”
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, “a thrilling, one-of-a-kind picture, [that] by all rights ought to be the election-year movie of 2008. What's frustrating about it is simply the possibility that it may not be widely seen.”
The Zen of Bobby V, which “stars Bobby Valentine, a former player and manager in major league baseball” as well as “professional baseball's meaning to the Japanese fans and the evolution of the game in that country, where it's in danger of having already evolved as far as it's going to.”
Elite Squad, “the latest post-City of God potboiler that depicts Rio de Janeiro as being just like Miami Vice except with fewer washed-up rock stars.”
Sita Sings the Blues, a film that is “funny and eye-popping and never bogs down. It might also double as a great introduction for kids to the Eastern canon, assuming you don't mind your kids asking you to explain the joke about the mile-high club.”
Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, filmed five years before Hurricane Katrina, is ”partly a history of Treme and partly a tribute to its enduring charm and the people who lived there, and on both those levels, it's a fine piece of work. But it's most memorable as a requiem, one made all the more affecting because the filmmakers shot most of it without having any way of knowing that they were recording a community that was on the verge of being hammered out of existence.”
The Auteur, which covers one week in the life of “the most artistically creative filmmaker working in hardcore pornography.”
Lioness, an “eye-opening documentary [which] deals with one of the least-covered aspects of the Iraq war: the role of American women in combat.”
Trucker, “a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in summertime.”
David Mamet’s latest, Redbelt.
…and many, many more! Find ’em all at The Screengrab. Absolutely no waiting in line, whatsoever.