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Since the Tribeca Film Festival's 11,918 things to 2002 debut, naysayers have voice e-mail sign up do: eats, grumbled that the last thing New shopping, music, York's crowded movie calendar email zip code film, comedy, and needs is an event this large and send me the weekly villagevoice.com newsletter more. unwieldy. But the fourth annual send me weekly freebies and special offers day: edition, squeezing 158 features - any - and 96 shorts plus workshops and category: panels into 14 venues and 13 all photo: Sony Pictures Classics keyword: days (April 19-May 1), should advertise with us prove that Tribeca is no longer just a corporate-powered celebrity pep rally for Lower Manhattan. The city's biggest and by default most eclectic film festival, Tribeca has also significantly upped the quality control in the last couple of years. Under executive director Peter Scarlet, the fest's big-tent programming has skewed increasingly political and cinephilic. There are perhaps still too keyword: many films in too many sections with too few distinctions among them. (What's the difference between Spotlight and Showcase? Are Special Events more special than Special Screenings?) But this year's muscular lineup snares a few high-profile coups—most notably the North American premiere of Wong Kar-wai's keenly anticipated 2046 (re- voice columns: edited since last year's Cannes) and the first New York screenings of -- select -- the much-blogged-about political documentary The Power of Nightmares. There's also a healthy crop of discoveries freshly harvested more in from Sundance, Rotterdam, and Berlin; many topical and/or New York- centric docs; a nifty sidebar of restorations; a complementary pair of Albert Brooks's First bleak post-Soviet visions; a James Toback remake and a James Toback and Funniest Feature doc; and sneak previews of upcoming releases from indie marquee Real Life names like Michael Winterbottom, Gregg Araki, and Claire Denis. To Barely Screwball, help navigate the sprawling program (full lineup at Let Alone a Spitball tribecafilmfestival.org), the Voice's film critics assembled this survival Fever Pitch guide: a handpicked selection of the 40 best (or at leastmost Solondz's Universe noteworthy) films that we previewed. (Unless indicated, all titles are Remains Static and without U.S. distribution at press time.) Schematic Palindromes 13 Lakes Old-school minimalist James Benning continues to push the Reviews of House of D; Perlasca; Raging boundaries in a non-spectacular manner. A film that Robert Smithson Dove; and more. might have made, 13 Lakes sees Benning finding a new, political way to

Aimless represent nature. An installation piece designed for the screen (or per Singaporean Rebels Benning, "found paintings"), it's precisely, mathematically, what its title in Directionless promises: 13 lakes across the U.S., each shot in a 10-minute take and Youth Flick 15 jam-packed with action. Number 12, Oregon's Crater Lake, a glorious mirror image of land and sky, could pass for a Rorschach test turned on Double-Jointed Narratives in First its side. MARK PERANSON U.S. Retro 'In the Company of 2046 One of the most eagerly awaited movies of recent years, Wong Arnaud Desplechin' Kar-wai's mazelike reverie is itself a film about waiting—a sequel to In The Top 40 Picks the Mood for Love, with the Tony Leung character's pensive melancholy From the Tribeca shading into bitter regret as he makes his way through a revolving door Film Festival of lovelies (Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Gong Li). The title refers to a hotel Rex Reed: Culinary room and to Leung's sci-fi novel, dramatized in a few scenes that Cineaste achieve a vertiginous sense of nostalgia for the future. While the great Treasure Hunt Saga director's images are more ravishing than ever, his habitual fetishism Ignores Rules of Space-Time flirts with solipsism (there are allusions aplenty to his other films). 2046 Sahara perhaps conjures its hero's prison of repetitive stasis all too well, but it A Tame Look at dares the viewer to look away from its kaleidoscope swirl—it's a holding Spanish Sex Films pattern for Wong, but of course, a stunningly beautiful one. Sony Torremolinos 73 Classics, opens August. DENNIS LIM

4 This precociously nuts debut by 30-year-old Muscovite Ilya News From Afar Starting out in the kind of crushingly impoverished Mexican highland town that Y Tu Mamá También only glimpsed from the roadside, this meditative debut follows a boy as he leaves home and looks for work in the urban grind of Mexico City. Ricardo Benet's first film provides a laconic document of the kind of rural life that globalization has condemned to anachronism. Its wide-angle shots of peaks and ochre skies contrast with images of open country defiled into tire-strewn junkyard wastelands. SINAGRA

Night Watch A box-office smash in Russia last summer, this metaphysical horror thriller stages a battle between Light and Dark forces in present-day Moscow— complementing the struggle over a young boy's destiny with simplistic but convoluted mythology and a ton of Slavic brooding. Director Timur Bekmambetov is a Roger Corman protégé, and there's an endearing Night Watch photo: Twentieth Century Fox B-movie spirit to the enterprise, copious digi-effects notwithstanding. Amusingly crammed with blatant steals from the Matrix, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings movies (not to mention Buffy, the David Fincher playbook, and even Jonathan Glazer's iconic UNKLE video), it's itself the first in a trilogy—still to come: Day Watch and Dusk Watch. A Fox Searchlight release, opens July. LIM

The Ninth Day Volker Schlöndorff imagines what happened during the nine-day gap in Luxembourgian priest Jean Bernard's famous Dachau diary, when he was given leave to attend his mother's funeral. Thoroughly fictionalized, this incident is read as a Nazi scheme, in which the clergyman is encouraged to dissuade his bishop from passive resistance, providing Schlöndorff with a chance to see the Nazis' attempt at balancing genocidal philosophy with hearts-and-minds politicking. The church's collaborationism is a looming, sordid secondary target. As the traumatized hero, Ulrich Matthes (Goebbels in Downfall) is nearly mute, a stunned observer of social absurdity. Kino, opens May 27. ATKINSON

Off to War Unlike Gunner Palace and other you-are-there soldier docs, Brent and Craig Renaud's video vérité item focuses on the transition from civilian to military life, following members of the Arkansas National Guard from their rural family enclaves through preparation for deployment to their early days in Iraq. Ranging from naive teens to pudgy middle-agers (including one father and son who serve together), these former turkey farmers and sales reps are hardly the stuff of recruitment posters. The long goodbyes given by wives, siblings, and others add a poignant note to this portrait of small-town folks caught up in a global war. HALTER

The Outsider "He's attracted to the sins of the flesh," says an admiring Roger Ebert of auteur d'excess James Toback—and the critic doesn't seem to be talking just about the work. Indeed, 's obscenely charming profile of the man behind Fingers nearly matches the guilty pleasures of its subject's own oeuvre on account of a central character—Toback—who appears quite the pickup artist himself. Vices are amply indulged during the 12-day(!) shoot of the director's comic noir ditty When Will I Be Loved—aptly named for a film whose desperate search for distribution gives the doc its oddly moving climax. NELSON

Play A depressive architect loses his girlfriend, his job, his will to live, and his briefcase. A friendless nurse finds the latter and starts stalking him all over Santiago. As the lives of the two loners almost intersect, symbols and coincidences pile up—it could be fate, if only the characters could see the signs. With Almodóvarian art direction and dry, Pliny-quoting wit, Alicia Scherson's feature debut documents modern urban alienation using the language of its everyday tools—video games, cell phones, and an iPod whose shuffle mode repeats the same familiar torch song. JORGE MORALES

The Power of NightmaresThe most essential documentary in years (unlikely ever to reach a wide American public—see it and you'll know why), Adam Curtis's gripping BBC docu-essay on the politics of fear parallels the rise of radical Islamists and American