Early in the animated film “Boys Go to Jupiter,” premiering at this year’s Tribeca Festival, an indie electronic beat kicks in. Like a music video rendered on Kid Pix, the sequence that follows finds the mulleted Rozebud (voiced by the singer Miya Folick) tending to neon citrus trees while crooning a melody as catchy as it is ethereal. The film, from the artist Julian Glander, belongs to a subset of Tribeca movies that use music in startling and adventurous ways. Their soundscapes conjure vision and feeling, as well as that ineffable thing sometimes called vibe.
Running from Wednesday through June 16, the Tribeca Festival — it dropped “film” from its name in 2021 — is big on vibe, for better and for worse. This is an event that embraces virtual reality, artificial intelligence and immersive installations, that pairs its screenings with concerts and its concerts with visuals, that touts buzzword-friendly panels about brands, innovation or brand innovation. Spilling across downtown Manhattan and a little into Williamsburg, Tribeca favors multimedia abundance, which can make it easy for cinema fans (and critics) to miss the loveliest trees for the sheer breadth of forest.
My favorite Tribeca selection also ranks in my top films of the year so far: Nathan Silver’s fidgety and finely tuned “Between the Temples,” a sensational Jewish love comedy about a dispirited cantor (Jason Schwartzman) and his adult bat mitzvah student (Carol Kane). I caught it at Sundance, and feel a sacred duty to spread the word. But I primarily dedicate my Tribeca time to sampling world premieres — movies that haven’t played at other festivals and need a nudge to break out.
In my hunt for gems, I often have luck in the Viewpoints section, designed to house films that push the boundaries of form and perspective. It was there that I made contact with the otherworldly “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a memorable standout, and not only because of Rozebud’s earworm. Following a cast of slackers and crackpots in suburban Florida, the video game-like musical comedy marries gummy 3-D graphics and stoned-guy humor with sly commentary on hustle culture and the gig economy. The ensemble of avatars is voiced by a corps d’elite of quirky comedians like Cole Escola and Julio Torres.
Glander’s film would pair nicely with “Eternal Playground,” a Parisian drama that follows Gaspard (Andranic Manet), a middle school music teacher. Shot in sumptuous 16 mm, this labor of love from the filmmakers Pablo Cotten and Joseph Rozé opens just before the bell rings for summer break, although Gaspard won’t be leaving the premises: He and five childhood pals have resolved to secretly camp out in the vacant school while classes are out for summer. A French New Wave-inflected love letter to the schoolyard, “Eternal Playground” accompanies the crew as they sing, romp, reminisce and memorialize a late friend.
Among this year’s Tribeca documentaries, music and its industry dominate, which isn’t a surprise given that glossy musician biographies have (alongside true crime) been clogging up the nonfiction landscape for some time. My favorite Tribeca music documentary was a homespun affair: Elizabeth Ai’s “New Wave,” a soft scream of a film about ’80s Vietnamese diaspora culture and style. Framed as an address to Ai’s baby daughter, the movie uses the Eurodisco music phenomenon — known as New Wave — to explore Ai’s upbringing by Vietnamese refugees and her longtime estrangement from her mother, who ran nail salons to provide for relatives.
Which brings me to another theme at Tribeca this year: parenting. That thread runs just beneath the topsoil of “The Freshly Cut Grass,” a naturalistic drama that tracks the parallel stories of Natalia (Marina de Tavira) and Pablo (Joaquín Furriel), middle-aged academics seeking respite from their family lives through affairs with their students. By mirroring the tales, sometimes with even the same lines of dialogue, the Argentine director Celina Murga underscores the points at which Natalia and Pablo’s cases diverge because of subtle differences in gender roles and age gap dynamics.
“Sacramento,” directed by the actor Michael Angarano, takes the anxieties of first-time fatherhood as the premise for a dopey buddy comedy. The movie follows Rickey (Angarano), who persuades his friend Glenn (Michael Cera), a soon-to-be dad, to go on a road trip. Be aware: there’s an extended M.M.A. wrestling sequence packed with kicks to the groin. What makes the movie interesting, though, is not its male clowning but the credit it pays to the women acting as their emotional custodians, like Glenn’s pregnant wife, Rosie (Kristen Stewart), and Rickey’s droll ex, Tallie (Maya Erskine, Angarano’s real-life partner with whom he shares a child).
Movies about maternity and its discontents have been surging in the wake of pandemic seclusion, especially ones that take aim at the perfect mom mythos by showing how childbearing and rearing — once considered sacred cows — can actually feel like torture. Too often, that torture is conveyed through concrete horror scenarios, wringing gore from gynecology or jump scares from postpartum insomnia. Despite its nondescript title, Elizabeth Sankey’s incisive “Witches” not only eschews that trend, it actually reverses it: Rather than sublimate mothering’s dark side into genre tropes, the film uncovers how one of horror’s most reliable figures — the witch — arose from a centuries-old mistrust in troubled mothers.
Using movie clips and narration, Sankey begins with a survey of the witch as a symbol in modern fiction. She then focuses the portrait by recounting her experience of postpartum depression and anxiety, which culminated in a stay at a psychiatric facility for new mothers and infants. Sankey calls on peers and professionals to add their stories of pain and internalized stigma, and finally binds the picture together by drawing a line between her struggles and those of female victims — “witches” — who were once burned at the stake.
An intimate testimony with a strong pedagogic streak, “Witches” serves as a useful reminder that dissecting everyday images can expose startling truths. At the end of the documentary, Sankey pulls back the camera to reveal the soundstage where she conducted her interviews. Dramatic sets that previously served only as blurry backdrops — a decaying nursery, an overgrown witch’s atelier — are shown in intricate detail. It’s then that you realize that, even while out of focus, the moody scenery was stirring up something important: a vibe.
