By Eric Kohn

For every complaint hurled at the massive two-and-a-half-week Tribeca Film Festival—the pricey tickets, screenings outside the titular downtown neighborhood, an overabundance of glitzy red-carpet affairs—the typically overlooked regions of the program offer swift counterpoints. The big leaguers have a place this year like any other, with Baby Mama and the Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer holding opening and closing night slots, respectively. However, by blending obscure titles with the work of proven talent, Tribeca provides a resolutely solid collage of the film community’s modern state. 

Programmer Peter Scarlet has wisely included several hits from the festival circuit, which few New York City gatherings provide. Riding a year’s worth of buzz, Mister Lonely arrives just a few weeks shy of its May 2 release. Among the best movies yet-to-be-released this year, the third feature from former radical Harmony Korine asks whether you’d rather see Diego Luna as an alienated Michael Jackson impersonator or Werner Herzog as a high-minded priest—and provides both options. Korine once expressed interest in writing “the great American choose-your-own adventure novel,” and has sort of done it with this marvelously bizarre look at different versions of self-fulfillment.

On the more literal side of personal woes, Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness offers an offbeat coming-of-age narrative set in 1994 Manhattan with enough Giuliani references to fuel another White House run. Thuggish teenage pot dealer Luke (Josh Peck) shuns college plans while offering dope to his therapist (Ben Kingsley) in exchange for life lessons. Goofy one-liners carry the conventional plot, but Kingsley’s oddly uneven Bronx accent defines the experience. Look for a certain racially audacious one-liner late in the third act from Gandhi himself.

The survey of incoming hits extends to the documentaries as well. In Bigger, Stronger, Faster, filmmaker Chris Bell offers a stunningly comprehensive survey of the steroids controversy in every aspect of American culture, contrasting the national dialoging with his bodybuilder family’s personal struggles. On a local scale, look no further than Man on Wire, James Marsh’s account of the 1974 incident where Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center buildings. Both comically exciting and unexpectedly tragic, Man on Wire almost feels like a genre film. 

Among the lower profile docs, international turmoil is a chief concern: Fire Under the Snow explores the horrific account of Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan monk subjected to three decades of torture in Chinese captivity. Hitting the road in a frenzied bout of activism, his efforts culminate in a protest against the 2008 Beijing Olympics—and that pretty much brings us up to speed. Often unsettling, Gyatso’s story follows a twisted path to victory. In another corner of activism, Chevolution surveys the life and times of Ernesto “Che” Guevara chiefly through the proliferation of a certain iconic photograph. Sources ranging from academics to Antonio Banderas evaluate the “survivability” of the image, paving the way for Steven Soderbergh’s two Guevara films hitting theaters later this year.

But back to the festival: The real find of the docs is undoubtedly Donkey in Lahore, the unlikely verité account of spirited puppeteer Brian, an Australian goth kid whose love for a Pakistani woman convinces him to convert to Islam. Director Faramarz K-Rahber captures the intimate moments when Brian’s playful demeanor melts into desperation as visa problems and cultural dissimilarities block his journey to Pakistan. An original take on the insularity of the Middle East, Lahore has a leg up on My Marlon and Brando, a well-made but dispiritingly prosaic fictionalized account of a Turkish actress intent on finding her lover in Baghdad during the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Hüseyin Karabey directs the story as if it was a documentary, recalling Nick Broomfield’s imitation verité techniques, but the story grows redundant before the resolution.

In general, Tribeca offers a mixed bag of narratives. Festival successes like the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead and Guy Maddin’s cosmic diary film My Winnipeg shouldn’t be missed, but most audiences can catch them during their theatrical runs.

Instead, a few of the international thrillers provide some decent conceits: The Spanish drama Fermat’s Room stuffs a bunch of kooky mathematicians into a room and forces them to solve several problems to avoid sudden death (imagine Clue in a head-on collision with Saw). From Germany, Seven Days Sunday revisits the true story of two rogue teenagers inexplicably drawn to committing random murders throughout one booze-charged evening. Accounts of teen murderers now exist in a discrete genre and generally involve high school shootings—Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, the Estonian drama The Class and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes come to mind—but Sunday ventures slightly outside that criteria to find something chilling in the pressures of camaraderie. Unapologetically exploitative and decently performed, it’s a cut above the standards of the form.  

At the same time, it’s a trite exercise in film form compared to The Aquarium, a fascinating assessment of urban discomfort directed by Egyptian filmmaker Yousry Nasrallah and set in the lavish metropolitan streets of Cairo. The opening, a gorgeous big- screen spectacle that explores the city’s nuanced aura, suggests the poetic works of Chris Marker. A stylized drama focused on the plights of a hopelessly unhappy doctor and his radio-host wife, The Aquarium works as a stylized drama by trafficking in analogy. A single fantasy sequence designed using the language of silent film is worth the price of admission—which tells you something when tickets cost 15 bucks.