‘Of Medicine and Miracles’ Is A Documentary Too Little And Too Late [Tribeca Review]

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticTaron Egerton is at the center of Apple’s new drama “Black Bird,” a show that asks him, foremost, to be a reactive force. Tangled in the prison system after his plan to plead out for a short narcotics-charge sentence blows up, Egerton’s Jimmy Keene is offered the opportunity to get out.

Wilson Chapman editorHilary Swank (“Million Dollar Baby”), Jack Reynor (“Midsommar”) and Olivia Cooke (“House of the Dragon”) are set to star in the upcoming opioid-themed thriller “Mother’s Milk.”The film, which recently wrapped production in New York, comes from director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, who co-wrote the script with Madison Harrison. Prior credits from the director include Sundance Special Jury Prize winner “As You Are,” and the Margot Robbie-starring “Dreamland.” Aside from the three leads, additional cast includes Dilone, Hopper Penn, Norm Lewis and Karen Aldridge.“Mother’s Milk” follows a journalist who, after the murder of her estranged son, forms an unlikely alliance with his pregnant girlfriend to track down those responsible for his death.

“A priest in a pinstripe suit.” That’s how Andrew Kirtzman characterizes Rudy Giuliani early in Jed Rothstein’s “Rudy! A Documusical,” his chronicling of how America’s erstwhile mayor became America’s most embarrassing punchline. Kirtzman, Giuliani’s biographer, makes a reasonable simile.

If there hadn’t been a body count, Chris and Jeff George’s escapades might have made for a divinely trashy TLC reality show. The brothers had gargantuan appetites, a habit of breaking the law without consequences, a flair for exaggeration, and a knack for spending money as fast as it came in on all the things that would keep a certain kind of viewer coming back: strip club visits, firearms, McMansions, and jacked-up trucks.

White people have stolen music from black people for decades and then some. This is a matter of historical record.

A sibling is usually your first friend and your first enemy, someone who cares about you like your parents but will get into shenanigans with you. These relationships are complicated, especially when you go in different directions in life and potentially feel estranged from the complex trappings of family.

BJ Novak is looking for American truth in his directorial debut dark comedy film, Vengeance. He’s amassed an all-star cast of actors including Issa Rae, Dove Cameron, and Boyd Holbrook, for the movie about a city-slicking mid-thirties man travels to Texas and got more than he bargained for in a comedy of errors created by his own hubris. The story is told in a way that only Novak knows how: with biting wit, and fiery sarcasm. 

A standard hagiography that is far less interesting than the subjects it features, “Turn Every Page” aspires to none of the depth and complexity it champions throughout its too-long 112 minutes. A serviceable accounting of both a historian and a historically important editor, the documentary makes a strong case for the importance of both, yet in so doing, demonstrates that these men need no such help.

Artfully toggling between the ephemeral memories associated with the infamous Chelsea Hotel, and the more granular concerns of its present residents, Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s new documentary, the Martin Scorsese executive produced “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” is a concise reflection of the erasure of historical monuments in the name of gentrification. Centralizing the protracted construction process that closed down the hotel in 2011, but allowed its long-term residents to stay, the doc mainly follows the hold-outs in their ninth year of construction, many who view the hotel as one the last examples of bohemian, and affordable, living in Manhattan.

The movies have given us man-children for decades, dating back to Carl Reiner’s “The Jerk,” leading all the way to a bumper crop of “dudes stuck in arrested development” productions through the 2000s and 2010s: “Cyrus,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Adult Beginners,” “The Comedy,” “Step Brothers,” “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” Alex Heller’s feature debut, “The Year Between,” descends from this overdone tradition and leaves a new wrinkle on the formula: Bipolar disorder, a formidable condition characterized by extreme mood swings and thus a clear goldmine for slacker burnout comedy.

Blasting off Sunday evening at the Tribeca Festival, Space Oddity is a small, character-driven dramedy of one young man’s odd life-altering plan to take a one-way ticket to Mars just as love and family intervene on his plans. If that premise sounds improbable, it actually is the kind of thing that seems to be popping up lately as fodder for various indie-centric film festivals. Earlier this year at SXSW, we saw comedian Jim Gaffigan in Linoleum, where he plays a father and husband whose lifelong dream of being an astronaut takes flight when he builds a rocket ship in his garage to do just that. Like Space Oddity, which comes from Kyra Sedgwick directing a Black List script by Rebecca Banner, that film focused on the rather offbeat behavior of its central character, much to the chagrin of his family.

A minor but affecting character study about buried family trauma, Clara Stern’s feature-length narrative debut “Breaking the Ice” works well as both a sports drama — focusing on an Austrian minor-league women’s hockey team — and a romantic drama. While perhaps too contained within its protagonist’s point of view, Stern’s film is nevertheless an impressive debut.

Set in the Fall of 2005, Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s piercing feature debut, “Good Girl Jane,” tracks the grooming of the title character (Rain Spencer), Jane, a young outcast teenage skater enduring an endless summer that nearly undoes her. Jane and her older sister Izzie (Eloisa Huggins) have recently transferred to a new school.

Aisha Osagie wakes up early. She bathes and prays.

Although set in the Republic of Ireland, this slight but surprisingly powerful film will hit a raw nerve in countries all over Europe in the wake of the Ukrainian refugee crisis. More specifically, it will likely have an impact on the U.K. arthouse circuit, after the British government’s recent, controversial decision to launder asylum-seekers via a scheme deporting them to Rwanda for processing.

The past, present and future of women in China’s oppressively patriarchal society is a big topic to address in under 90 minutes, but Violet Du Feng’s unassuming but very moving documentary Hidden Letters covers a lot of ground.

This weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, Academy Award-winning documentarian Ross Kauffman (“Born Into Brothels”) debuts his newest documentary, “Of Medicine and Miracles,” to the world. The film tells parallel stories of an incredibly resilient child battling a rare form of leukemia and the researcher who pioneered her treatment.

Andrew Bujalski’s “There There” opens with a mellow, melancholy saxophone solo, the first of several musical interludes by The War on Drugs’ Jon Natchez that serves as bridges between the series of primarily two-person scenes that will follow. The first of them is probably the best – it makes a promise the movie can’t quite keep – as a doctor (Lili Taylor) and a restaurateur (Lennie James) wake up the morning after their first date and first sexual encounter.

Although Ray Romano has dabbled in writing quite a bit, including a series he created called Men of a Certain Age, the star (best known for the Emmy winning sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which certainly contained lots of material drawn from his own life and family experiences) is now moving to the big screen with perhaps his most ambitious project yet. The film, Somewhere In Queens, draws its comedy and drama from a very somewhat overbearing but likeable and recognizable Italian American family.