The 10 Best Movies Complex Saw at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival

The best thing about attending a film festival? No, it's not the chances of casually bumping into famous actors, actresses, and/or directors—it's the thrill of discovery. Aside from the one-to-two-paragraph plot summaries found in a festival's pocket guide, the new independent movies that populate a festival's lineup are largely mysteries; for the most part, the filmmakers are first-timers or relative unknowns, the casts are largely comprised of no-names with the potential to become household names, and the either vague or generic-sounding synopses do little to distinguish one character drama from the next quirky comedy or oddball midnight movie.

This year's Tribeca Film Festival—save for a few inclusions whose New York City screenings were prefaced by Sundance and/or SXSW showings—was no exception. By the fest's end, Complex saw a total of 24 films, many of which were middling, a few reasonably impressive, and a dime's worth that rocked the house. These are the 10 best movies Complex saw at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, and, as you'll see, Lower Manhattan's annual celebration of indie cinema introduced us to some promising newcomers from all around the world.

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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone) and Tara Aquino (@t_akino)

Director: David M. Rosenthal

A lesser actor would have inadvertently exposed director David M. Rosenthal's A Single Shot for what it actually is: a solid but altogether inferior No Country for Old Men knockoff. Sam Rockwell, however, is one of Hollywood's greatest working actors, and, being that he's front and center throughout A Single Shot, Rosenthal's film is a cut above most countrified crime thrillers of its type.

Like Josh Brolin's character in No Country, Rockwell's finds a large sum of unclaimed cash alongside a murder scene—the difference here, though, is that Rockwell is the murderer, albeit an accidental one. With a dead body to his credit and tons of somebody else's money, he quickly becomes a target for that somebody else, a bloodthirsty and scorned man who's lover is now dead. Bullets and pulses soon drop. Rockwell, meanwhile, soars as a desperate, lonely guy who can't stop his already desolate world from crumbling.

Director: Lenny Abrahamson

See that guy in the middle of the photo above? That's Irish actor Jack Reynor, the next leading man in Michael Bay's Transformers movie franchise. You'll be seeing a lot of him over the next couple years. After seeing Reynor's tremendous performance in the bleak and quietly devastating drama What Richard Did, though, you'll no doubt say to yourself, "Yeah, this kid is too good for Michael Bay."

Per reports, Bay was convinced that Reynor was his new Shia LaBeouf after watching What Richard Did, which, if nothing else, proves that the much-reviled blockbuster filmmaker is a shrewd judge of acting ability. Reynor plays the eponymous Richard, the popular kid in class who's life is going terrifically until a freak accident during a drunken brawl changes everything for him.

Following Richard's tragic mistake, director Lenny Abrahamson's film turns starkly dour, examining how one's guilt and uncontrollable mourning can overtake their world but also not entirely change their motivations, and it's all carried with enormous skill by young Reynor. Optimus Prime better enroll in some acting classes, pronto.

Director: Adam Bhala Lough

This fast-paced documentary focuses on the top eight street skaters in the game right now —Chris Cole, Bastien Salabanzi, Paul Rodriguez, Sean Malto, Luan Oliveira, Ryan Sheckler, Chaz Ortiz and Nyjah Huston—as they train, bail and mentally psych themselves up for the ultimate street skating competition, the Rob Dyrdek-hosted Street League Championship. Not only is $200K on the line, but so is the reputation of each athlete.

Thanks to the film, you'll see that the life of a pro skater isn't entirely riddled with cop chases, trespassing, and "destruction of private property." It's a lot more lucrative than a person with no experience with the sport would ever assume. Endorsement deals, fame, and a chunk of prize money for contest wins can make the youngest of skaters even more successful than their own parents.

But, of course, that's easier said than done, and The Motivation chronicles the obstacles—everything from broken bones to broken homes—to get there.

Director: Lance Edmands

Prior to Bluebird's Tribeca premiere, writer-director Lance Edmands' biggest credit was his editing work on Lena Dunham's pre-Girls calling card feature, Tiny Furniture. Knowing that, it would've been easy for critics to anticipate a similar kind of lo-fi comedy from Edmands' directorial debut—they certainly couldn't have expected a film as powerfully and subtly dark as Bluebird.

Tony Award winner Amy Morton (whom you might remember as the mother in 1993's baseball flick Rookie of the Year) stars as a bus driver who, distracted by the titular bird, neglects to see a little boy sleeping onboard as she leaves the bus parked in her snow-covered and frigid Maine logging community.

Without spoiling anything here, let's just say that her honest mistake has heavy consequences, effects that slowly but surely rip apart her marriage (Mad Men's John Slattery is superb as Morton's beleaguered husband), the life of a young and troubled waitress (the impressive Louisa Krause), and others living in her frosty hometown.

Bluebird transpires with a well-calculated sense of escalation, unraveling the lives of people who wouldn't have been able to connect with one another if not for the film's opening events. Emotionally, they've all been as cold as the weather outside—Edmands, however, is on fire throughout, directing with his self-written script with the confidence of a 20-year veteran.

Director: Rob Meyer

There are numerous charms in Rob Meyer's earnest and vibrant A Birder's Guide to Everything, yet the biggest one of all is how the film handles its less-than-cool subject: bird watching. Warm and lean, Meyer's coming-of-age story concerns a high school kid (the excellent Kodi Smit-McPhee) who's dealing with his mother's death, his father's second marriage, and the search for an extinct rare Labrador Duck; slightly awkward and withdrawn, Smit-McPhee's character finds his life's joys in studying birds, and there's no point during A Birder's Guide to Everything where he's treated like a nerd or a social outcast due to his preferred extracurricular activity.

It's all the more impressive that he and his friends (played with great chemistry and likeablity by co-stars Alex Wolff, Katie Chang, and Michael Chen) are so endearing despite the fact that they're all generic teen-comedy stock characters: the uptight Asian kid, the girl-crazy jokester, and the cute love interest who doesn't look down upon her insecure, romantically challenged suitor. A Birder's Guide to Everything, as a whole, is routine, but Meyer's clear affection for his characters and his uniformly strong cast elevate this run-of-the-mill, small-scale teen comedy into a real crowd-pleaser.

Directors: Aharon Keshales, Navot Papsuahdo

If you haven't been paying attention to the Israeli film industry, you're screwing up. Given that the country is two-for-two at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, it'd be foolish to overlook the country's cinematic output, which is beaming with intelligence, fearlessness, and genre know-how. First came Jonathan Gurfinkel's disturbing teen-girl-lost character study Six Acts, a mesmerizing, hard-to-forget look at underage sexual self-exploitation that's still the best film we've seen at the festival thus far. And now there's the extremely promising duo of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, back at Tribeca after premiering their subversive slasher debut, the slept-on Rabies, in 2010.

For their follow-up, Big Bad Wolves, Keshales and Papushado have once again taken a familiar genre construct—here, the brutal revenge thriller, a la Korean flicks like Sympathy for Lady Vengeance—and defied all of the expectations. With a Coen Brothers-esque sense of pitch-black, often sick humor, a tightly written script, and the stones to deliver a copious number of hard-to-watch images, the filmmakers' second effort bests the already excellent Rabies and establishes the names Keshales and Papushado as ones to keep firm, attentive eyes on within the genre community.

Big Bad Wolves opens with a beautifully staged, slow-motion sequence in which two little girls and their boy pal play a game of hide-and-seek in and around a cabin in the woods—ending with one of the girl's disappearance and only a shiny red shoe in her place. It's a clear indicator that Keshales and Papushado have fairy tales on their minds, albeit one incredibly grim tale. A police investigation leads to the discovery of the little girl's body in an empty field, tied to a chair. The lead detective, Miki (Lior Ashkenazi) has his sights on a schoolteacher suspect, Dror (Rotem Keinan), a nebbish, lonely guy who lives in his dead parents' house and only finds companionship in his snippy pet dog.

Also ready to pin the girl's death on Dror is her father, Gidi (Tzahi Grad), a former member of Lebanon's armed forces who buys an isolated cabin, redecorates the basement into a torture chamber, and, soon enough, sees both Miki and Dror down there with them. Along with a rusty pair of pliers, a hammer, a blow torch, and other weapons of bodily destruction that Gidi's not about to let sit idly by.

The dark beauty of Big Bad Wolves is that, considering how familiar that plot synopsis no doubt sounds, nothing happens predictably, or even safely. Keshales and Papushado cleverly blur the lines between good and evil, treating the prime suspect as more of a victim than his sadistic, law-breaking abusers, though they don't spell out whether Dror is innocent or if he's indeed a serial child murderer. The closer Big Bad Wolves gets to its downbeat yet fully earned conclusion, the more difficult it is to form an allegiance to any one character. And that's exactly what the filmmakers want the viewer to do, too, giving all three of the main protagonists unique, fleshed-out personalities. The torturers can't bash a single finger in without fielding annoying phone calls from their pesky wives; an unexpected guest, related to one of the men, who stops by and gets his own bloodthirsty jollies off is proficient in both maiming and comedic timing.

Keshales and Papushado pull off a difficult tightrope act here, teetering back and forth tonally from comedy to thriller and psychological horror. Big Bad Wolves is all of those without ever tipping its scale toward any particular style—it's the slickest and most entertaining serial killer film since Kim Jee-woon's 2011 gem I Saw the Devil, and a film that deserves to be seen on wide scale.

Directors: Benny Safdie, Joshua Safdie

It's crazy to think that, back in the early 2000s, neither LeBron James or Carmelo Anthony—two of the NBA's best players and unquestionably both future hall-of-famers—were considered the best hoops player of their generation. That honor went to Lenny Cooke, the top-ranked high school basketball player in the nation who battled those guys, as well as eventual NBA stars like Joakim Noah and Raymond Felton, on the court during invitational camps like Adidas ABCD and Five-Star.

The difference between Cooke—a hulking physical specimen from Brooklyn's Bushwick projects with natural, scarily dominant roundball ability—and his peers, however, was work ethics: Whereas they busted their asses at all times to make themselves elite players, Cooke, young and misguided, thought his raw skills would carry him along. He showed up late for morning drills, talked back to counselors and coaches, and generally miscalculated his own stock. Once the 2002 NBA Draft came along, Cooke watched everyone else in his class get selected, and by the end, he was stuck with the realization that his NBA dreams weren't going to happen. He'd, no pun intended, dropped the ball; now a 30-year-old man living in Virginia with three kids and a fiancee, Cooke can only look back on his life with regret and sadness.

Up until now, Cooke's post-draft existence has mostly been the stuff of uninformed speculation. He's become a cautionary tale for young ballers who think the leap from high school straight to the pros is an easy one. Through Benny Safdie and Joshua Safdie's engrossing and deeply sorrowful documentary, simply titled Lenny Cooke, his side of the story finally comes out, and it's a heartbreaker. Opting away from rampant talking heads and invasive narration, the filmmakers chart Cooke's rise and fall with home video footage capturing the aforementioned b-ball camps, his time spent with friends watching the 2001 NBA Draft and debating whether Kobe Bryant is better than Tracy McGrady, and the disappointment and shock of shooting a proverbial air-ball at the 2002 draft.

Lenny Cooke's contextual first half should be intriguing for basketball historians and enthusiasts. The sight of Cooke guarding LeBron James during an invitational camp game provides the kind of access that's not easy to track down, but those moments aren't what gives the film its real power. On that end, Lenny Cooke's modern-day section—its crowning achievement—is a shattering exhibition of a man's struggle to accept his failures. No longer lean and chiseled, the older Cooke is heavier both physically and mentally. His birthday party ends with a drunken Cooke lying along on a couch, just he and his mournful thoughts, a far cry from the days when he was a golden prospect adorned by beautiful girls and flashing lights. The closest he gets to an NBA court is to sit in the stands and watch old rivals Carmelo Anthony and Joakim Noah play the game that he used to love.

Even as the directors pull a bit of special effects wizardry to show the older Cooke giving his younger self some wisdom and this-will-be-you warnings, Lenny Cooke doesn't present a man who feels sorry for himself inasmuch as it displays a has-been who's been positively humbled by the follies of his youth. Hopefully wide distribution is in the film's immediate future, because Cooke's story is one that needs to be shown to any promising teenage athlete who thinks that he or she has it made. One day you're the next LeBron James; the next, you're the new Lenny Cooke.

Director: Daniel Patrick Carbone

Death hovers all around first-time director Daniel Patrick Carbone's Hide Your Smiling Faces, a subdued and brooding coming-of-age film that strikes an impressive balance between darkness and tenderness.

The opening scene appropriately introduces what's at stake: Pre-teen Tommy (Ryan Jones) and a few of his buddies find a dead bird inside a rundown shed located within the woods that encircle their rural New Jersey homes. Rather than be repulsed by it, the kids move the bird's mouth in playful karaoke-styled singing and pretend that it's flying. To them, the concept of death isn't upsetting yet—they haven't experienced its destructive power in their own lives. In a different part of town, Tommy's older brother, Eric (Nathan Varnson), kills time with his own friends by aggressively wrestling each other in a sort of backwoods fight club. To them, pain is a rush and a rite of passage.

Hide Your Smiling Faces progresses with a worrying sense of dread. As the film grows more somber by the minute, one gets the feeling that Tommy and Eric could confront mortality firsthand at any given moment, and it's much to Carbone's credit that the film avoids any obvious narrative turns. Death starts to consume the two siblings, but not morbidly—it makes them grow up faster than they'd ever expected. For Tommy, Ian's angry father's constant threats towards the boy's dog compound with a pit of dead animals that he comes across in the forest; Eric, on the other hand, begrudgingly entertains Tristan's conversations about suicide and, since he's at that age, lashes out against his parents who, in his eyes, aren't trying to understand everything that he's going through.

With an acute sense of location conveyed by hauntingly still shots of landscape (props go to cinematographer Nick Bentgen), Carbone places viewers smack-dab into the kids' scenic yet isolated and one-dimensional world. There's seemingly little to do other than explore the woods, play-fight, and toy with birds' corpses; there's no reprieve from the unpleasantries surrounding them. Hide Your Smiling Faces isn't exactly a welcoming experience, but once you settle into its intentional bleakness, it's tough to shake off.

Director: Sean Dunne

Early into Sean Dunne's profoundly upsetting documentary Oxyana, a middle-aged woman, living in the drug-riddled town of Oceana, West Virginia, says, with pain in her eyes, "People are scared to let their kids walk down the street." It's a statement that's both easily believed and tragic, two points that Dunne conveys masterfully in this all-access, no-editorializing look into the shattered and sad lives of those living in a town that's seemingly beyond saving.

Ten or so years ago, Oceana was a pleasant community thriving on its profitable coal mining business, but once that started to go belly up, legal prescriptions of Oxycontin and other painkillers quickly became the go-to means of commerce. Average folks began selling pills, and before long Oceana's once-happy residents turned into junkies, criminals, hookers, and, at an alarming rate, corpses.

Throughout Oxyana, Dunne allows his camera to do the work, letting the townsfolk dictate their own personal Oxy-related nightmares, and their words hit like sledgehammers. A 23-year-old talks about how "half of my graduating class is dead" because of the drug. A doctor working inside the regional command center says that upwards of 150 people check into his place of employment per day seeking assistance, with at least one of them dying from an overdose daily. Someone gives an estimation that 70% of Oceana's inhabitants have been inflicted with Hepatitis C from needle injections. A homeless man who lives under a bridge points to a nearby gutter, calls that his wife's toilet, and mournfully says, "Drugs led me right here."

And Dunne isn't afraid to put the film's viewers right there alongside that man and his neighbors. Largely focusing on a handful of Oceana's citizens, the filmmaker doesn't pull back from showing his subjects in all of their addiction-triggered darkness. Numerous shots of folks sticking needles into their arms, followed by the equally calming and damning reactions on their faces once the drugs work into the bloodstreams, are startling at first but soon become like watching someone sink into quicksand.

Dunne's also able to elicit sympathy for people who, by their own self-aware statements, don't immediately seem empathetic. The town's biggest dealer, for instance, matter-of-factly discusses how he pays doctors $1,000 per month to obtain his product, but then, just when you're ready to consider him a villain, recounts a harrowing and horrific memory of when a loved one murdered his family over Oxycontin. Another, more inherently likable subject, meanwhile, uses the injections to fight against his brain cancer and speaks with a skipping-record stutter. Analyzing his difficult life, he rationalizes that "there's nobody who can take me except for God."

That anticipation of meeting the Man Upstairs is Oxyana's rare moment of optimism, albeit of the desperate kind. By the end of Dunne's eye-opening film, there's nary a positive tick with which the viewer can exit back into his or her own world—you're left angry, rattled, and wishing you could inject some hope into these people's bodies instead of the junk they're so dependent on. One interviewee says, "Nobody's gonna care—they think we're inbred pieces of shit." Only a heartless monster would feel that way about Oceana's lost souls after watching Oxyana.

Director: Jonathan Gurfinkel

To emphasize the impact of Israeli filmmaker Jonathan Gurfinkel's exceptional and decidedly adult teen drama Six Acts, a little context is necessary here. It's been three weeks since Complex was able to see the film—it screened early as one of the Tribeca Film Festival's helpful and generous pre-fest showings for press. Fourteen days after the fact, the final moment of Six Acts lingers still. There's nothing supernatural or visually jolting about it, yet the closing shot of Gurfinkel's film is the stuff of overwhelming psychological horror, and a perfect capper for what is, on the whole, a bold, devastating look at the psyche of a 16-year-old who's just trying to be accepted, albeit in the most self-destructive ways possible.

In a bravura performance, Sivan Levy plays Gilly, the new girl in her Tel Aviv high school. Smitten by the class hunk, Tomer (Roy Nik), she takes selfies with a web cam and sends them to Tomer, hoping that he'll find them attractive and want to get to know her better. Once Tomer receives the innocent-enough pics, he shares them with his outgoing, crass, unknowingly misogynistic best friend, Omri (Eviatar Mor), and together they gradually exploit Gilly's uncontrollable willingness to win them over, even as both guys, though mostly the abhorrent Omri, use her for sexual favors. Before long, Gilly has a damning reputation, one that she's pathetically unaware of until it's too late. As a teenager yearning for acceptance, it's nearly impossible to pull one's self out of Gilly's moral and emotional abyss.

Six Acts benefits from a unique structure, the description of which is right there in the title. Screenwriter Rona Segan breaks Gilly's crescendo of one-sided degradation up into sections of varying length, each one more discomforting and darkly compelling than the last. With jarring close-ups, sinister facial evocations from his male leads, and Levy's superb ability to convey a painful vulnerability, Gurfinkel establishes a subtle feeling of dread early on and slowly but surely tightens the grip as Six Acts gets more vulgar and humiliating by the frame.

Save for its Hebrew-speaking characters (the film is subtitled), there's a real universality to Gurfinkel's film's themes. Who hasn't wished that he or she could be part of the cool crowd? Or have the most popular kid in school pining for their affections? In that, Six Acts is more disturbing than most horror movies, in the same ways that Larry Clark's similarly observational, assaulting, and fearless Kids left you in a shell-shocked state and made you think twice about procreating. As much as you want to jump through the screen to attack Omri and help Gilly, there's nothing you can do but watch a young girl get helplessly lost in the reality of insecurity.