New York's Finest

The Tribeca Film Festival has grown quite a bit since 2002, when Jane Rosenethal and Robert De Niro launched it in the wake of 9/11. It seems to have come more into focus: There are fewer movies; it's not as chaotic; there are no more red carpet premieres of Olsen twin movies to scare off serious film lovers; and the mix of films selected seem more inviting and less likely to circle in film festival limbo this time around. Here are some of the films I've seen so far that I've found intriguing...

WHATEVER WORKS

Woody Allen triumphantly returns to New York with familiar storylines, but with a wry new maturity. Larry David plays an irascible self-proclaimed genius, now living a bohemian lifestyle in the Village teaching (mostly berating) small children how to play chess. A vagrant girl (Evan Rachel Wood) asks him for a place to stay and something to eat and he reluctantly brings her home filling her head with his misanthropic, neurotic view of the universe. They surprisingly fall for each other and marry, and then the mother (Patricia Clarkson) shows up. Evan Rachel Wood is just a delight regurgitating (mostly mangling) her husband's rancid philosophies, and Larry David is a perfect foil for Woody's rants and raves. But despite the outrageous plot twists in this furiously funny new film, it ends surprisingly on a ruefully witty note of grace.

MOON

In this brainy yet modest sci-fi film directed by Duncan Jones (son of The Man Who Fell To Earth, David Bowie), Sam Rockwell stars as an astronaut working on the moon for the past three years mining Earth's new energy source, helium-3. He is close to the end of his tour of duty and is eager to return to his wife and daughter -- his only form of communication with them is delayed tapes -- but after an accident, he wakes to be confronted with an identical copy of himself, albeit angrier and more paranoid. Like a neat Twilight Zone episode, there is a thoughtful, intelligent design to this tale, and Rockwell, as usual, leaves a scruffy, offbeat, individual stamp on this troubled space dude.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

This demonic tale by the talented director Ti West (Trigger Man), set in the 1980s, is about a pretty college girl named Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) who unwisely accepts a "babysitting" job at a spooky house in the country harboring many satanic secrets. The two weirdos who hire her are the skull-faced and looming Tom Noonan and the sardonically menacing Mary Woranov. West playfully subverts the horror film genre by insidiously setting up the mood and letting it eerily and slowly play out before slamming home with a fiendish finale. Tracking shots of Samantha wandering through this weird house with strange noises coming from behind closed doors keeps you marvelously unnerved and unsettled.

OUTRAGE

Outrage is Kirby Dick's incendiary documentary about closeted gay politicians who hypocritically hide their own identities while actively voting against gay rights. Interviewed are openly gay Barney Frank, outspoken activists like Michelangelo Signorile and Larry Kramer and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, among others. But the inside look at Washington where "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a gay staffer" and some of the insidious voting practices of closeted congressmen will seriously piss you off. It's a smartly assembled, sobering and sometimes scary film.

TELL TALE

Studly Josh Lucas plays a heart transplant recipient and single dad of a daughter with a degenerative disease who begins having visions of the people responsible for his organ doner's murder. It's hard to imagine what Edgar Allen Poe would make of this twisty, rather preposterous thriller by talented Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.) that could easily be re-titled The Heart Is a Vigilante Above All Things. But it is seasoned with a fine cast: Brian Cox as a crafty detective; the lovely Lena Heady as a sympathetic love interest; Pablo Schreiber as a unsavory hospital orderly; and a fiendish Dallas Roberts as an unscrupulous surgeon with a fondness for scalpels. They all propel this to its logical if outlandish conclusion.

RUDO & CURSI

There's a rambunctious ruffian energy to Carlos Cuaron's film about two brothers Tato (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Beto (Diego Luna) who were toiling at a banana plantation in Mexico until they were spotted by a football talent scout and thrust into soccer superstardom. Tato also dreams of becoming a singer and soon dates a TV hottie and Beto is driven by his gambling compulsion to huge insurmountable debts. It all builds to a big game with brother literally against brother. Luckily none of this plays out accordingly. And Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna have such dizzying skill at creating magic on screen out of this hapless pairing that you find yourself sharing their cockeyed dreams.

BLANK CITY

Director Celine Danhier does a great job of rounding up many of the players in her fascinating and inspiring documentary about the New York underground movie scene of the 1970s. Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Scott B and Beth B, Bette Gordon, Lizzie Bordon etc. all are included. And using footage from their gritty No Wave films paints a portrait of the scary city of that time, especially the bombed out East Village where many of these misfits picked up Super 8 cameras and using their friends, set out to create a new form of cinema. The drugged out rock and roll scene helped fuel the anarchic spirit and the film documents this movement right up to the Transgressive cinema of Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch and Nick Zedd. Particularly funny and illuminating are Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie, Steve Buscemi, Lydia Lunch and Nick Zedd in describing the loony lengths they went to make their films.

CROPSEY

This intriguing, creepy documentary by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio explores their Staten Island childhood boogeyman "Cropsey," a hook-armed killer of children that parents scared kids with to keep them away from the deserted Willowbrook Mental Institution. But in 1987 a mentally challenged 13-year-old girl named Jennifer Schweiger disappeared and a weird-looking drifter who lived in the woods near the abandoned hospital, Andre Rand, was arrested and the boogeyman became all too real. Zeman and Bancaccio hunt down clues as a new trial looms for Rand for another girl's disappearance, and a darker portrait of the underbelly of Staten Island and the mysterious Rand emerge.