Tribeca Film Festival 2012: Dramas

Any Day Now

• Rated as: 3/5

It’s a tough gig, playing a blatant tearjerker’s over-the-top character without turning it into a camp-ing trip; even the grande dames of Hollywood’s Golden Age couldn’t always find the right middle

As Luck Would Have It

A freak accident provides an opportunity for a jobless man to sell his story to the highest bidder.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

An ambivalent bride hides while her family awaits her wedding ceremony.

Chicken With Plums

• Rated as: 3/5

An adaptation of the second volume of comic-artist-turned-filmmaker Marjane Satrapi’s graphic-novel trilogy, this fablelike fantasy tells the story of Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), a master

Consuming Spirits

• Rated as: 3/5

If you were to fall asleep reading Raymond Carver stories while Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska played in the background, your nightmares might look a lot like Chris Sullivan’s animated tale of three

Deadfall

• Rated as: 1/5

Familial dysfunctional lurks around every snowy corner in Stefan Ruzowitzky’s recipe for an overdetermined, undercooked thriller. Start with siblings Addison (Eric Bana) and Liza (Olivia Wilde),

Elles

• Rated as: 3/5

Anne (Juliette Binoche), a married middle-class journalist, is writing a hard-hitting exposé on prostitution. (Her outlet is, no joke, the French edition of Elle. Synergy, people!) The

The Girl

• Rated as: 4/5

Filmgoers with abandonment issues should steer clear of Fredrik Edfeldt's drama about a ten-year-old (Engstrm) left all by her lonesome; the film's sense of being deserted is so keenly drawn that

Headshot

• Rated as: 4/5

Noir has long been a go-to for fashionable filmmakers who dig insouciant posing, high-contrast cinematography and ever-stylish cynicism. But rare is the movie that successfully grows these elements

Jack and Diane

• Rated as: 2/5

The story of a young woman (Juno Temple) discovering that she is both a lesbian and a werewolf, Bradley Rust Gray’s oddball horror parable starts with an irresistibly trashy premise and proceeds to

Keep the Lights On

• Rated as: 4/5

‘Keep the Lights On’ opens with a guy-on-guy phone-sex hook-up in 1998 Manhattan, and its direct, intimate attitude to examining couplings continues from there as it studies a troubled, eight-year,

Knife Fight

• Rated as: 1/5

Thanks to his pitch-perfect portrayal of Parks and Recreation’s Type A–personality-run-amuck boss, we’re willing to forgive Rob Lowe for virtually anything. This pitiful excuse for a political

The Playroom

• Rated as: 3/5

Not so subtly set on the Friday after Patty Hearst’s 1975 arrest, this suburban kids-aren’t-all-right drama shows a quartet of intense siblings sharing horror stories by candlelight, the eldest

Polisse

• Rated as: 3/5

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one: Consider the flatfoots assigned to Paris’s Child Protection Unit, where the daily grind consists of processing a steady stream of child molesters and abusive

Take This Waltz

• Rated as: 3/5

Freelance writer Margot (Michelle Williams) meets bewitching artist Daniel (Luke Kirby) at a Nova Scotia living museum, where he eggs her on to whip the town “adulterer.” (She is not amused.) Then

Trishna

• Rated as: 3/5

The speediness that often leads Michael Winterbottom to forge a quicksilver cinema that no one else can touch (perfect example: last year’s dazzling The Trip) also has a way of leeching depth from

Yossi

• Rated as: 4/5

In 2002, Eytan Fox made ‘Yossi and Jagger’, a slight but powerful story about the love affair between two male Israeli conscripts out in the field. A decade on, Fox and actor Ohad Knoller return to