NEW YORK — The thumb prints of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival were visible throughout Manhattan on billboards, subway ads, TV screens and tote bags. The fest, which wrapped its seventh year Sunday, is on pace to set speed records for becoming a New York City cultural institution. Still, if you asked insiders, the event was something of a programmatic mess in past years.
So this year Tribeca went lean, cutting 40 feature films from its platter. It’s still a something-for-everyone smorgasbord — a festival with room for a doc about Lyme Disease, a number of international genre films and for the premiere of Speed Racer — but you could at least read through the catalog in a single sitting. Here’s a scan of some of the films we saw.
Fermat’s Room The first thriller to start with a math disclaimer — if you don’t know what a prime number is, please leave now — this Spanish film doesn’t go especially deep into theory.
Instead, it tosses brain twisters at four smarty-pants who are lured into a trap. Correct answers buy them more time. Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña’s tense, high-concept movie, already a huge hit in Spain, follows in the footsteps of other brainy thrillers like Pi and Cube. And it seems ripe for a Hollywood remake.
Fighter Girls kick ass in this charming, not-completely-implausible story of a young Turk in a Danish city who overcomes sexism, racism and Muslim tradition to reign as a kung fu master. Natasha Arthy’s film features choreography by Xian Gao, who helped train the fighters for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. IFC Films picked Fighter up for distribution, one of the few industry moves at this year’s Tribeca fest.
War, Inc. This train wreck of a satire is tone-deaf, cartoonish and insulting. With real-life foreign affairs completely absurd, this film felt especially unfunny. Still, something in my lizard brain admired its outsize ambitions: I couldn’t stop watching.
In War, Inc., John Cusack’s a calloused hit man for a Halliburton-esque contractor; Marisa Tomei plays a left-wing reporter; Hillary Duff portrays a sex-crazed pop-star. The setting is Turaqistan, a country much like Iraq. There are horny natives, inept assassins, a villainous CEO (played by Ben Kingsley). You get the picture.
Guest of Cindy Sherman Art-world star Cindy Sherman, best known for her haunting, sometimes creepy self-portraits, is a famed recluse, turning down all interviews.
Then, she decides to talk to the host of a public access show. Soon, the two seem to be falling in love.
Far too outlandish to be believable — except it’s all true, and captured on grainy tape! — this smart, funny film also provides a lively scan of the NYC art scene, with all of its hypocrisy and posing.
The film provided the festival with some controversy, after Sherman disassociated herself from the project.
Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha 
At 75, Melvin Van Peebles, whose 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song helped launch the glorious era of blaxploitation film, still has more creative juice in him than a class full of NYU students. And he’s clearly not afraid of new technologies.
His new and gloriously oddball ramble is a picaresque, at times haunting, tale of a man who flees home, falls in love and travels the world, living a life of danger. Peebles plays the character as a boy, a teenager and into his middle-age years, giving the proceedings a bit of both absurdity and poignancy. And the wall-to-wall lo-fi effects use every iMovie trick in the book to disarming effect.
Lou Reed’s Berlin 
Reed’s 1973 album Berlin was a commercial failure, but more than 30 years later, he brings it back to life with the help of award-winning director Julian Schnabel.
An uncommonly poignant concert film, Berlin shows an aging star, decades of rock ‘n’ roll etched on his face, as he reclaims highly personal songs of distress and unexpected redemption — gritty poems that retain their power decades after they were written.
A President to Remember: In the Company of John F. Kennedy 
It was an essential moment in media history: Robert Drew’s creation of a lightweight, quiet camera — the grandfather of today’s palm-size DV shooter — allowed him and his team of documentarians to slip into the background in any situation, filming unobtrusively.
Today, we take that kind of filmmaking for granted. It’s the coin of the realm. But back then, the up-close, flexible, dynamic filmmaking looked revolutionary.
Drew’s footage still seems visionary today, largely because of his choice of subject matter. His first big adventure was following JFK on the campaign trail and beyond. More than 45 years later, his footage, reconstituted here with voiceover from Alec Baldwin, shows an American hero struggling with belligerent foes inside and outside of the country.
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