First Time’s the Charm: 3 Dazzling Debuts
Stream these under-seen gems that happen to be first films
by Adam Kempenaar
Ed. note: This month, Tribeca Shortlist is proud to sponsor the Filmspotting podcast, as well as sister podcasts Filmspotting SVU and The Next Picture Show. For listeners of all three who might be new to Tribeca Shortlist, Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar has picked a few of his favorite movies available to stream or download during your free trial.
July’s list features three of the funniest and most quotable movies of all-time: This Is Spinal Tap, A Fish Called Wanda and Glengarry Glen Ross. (Glengarry isn’t a comedy, you say? Will you go to lunch? Go to lunch. WILL you GO to LUNCH?) Throw in titles such as The Third Man, In the Heat of the Night and Escape From New York, and you’ve got plenty of bonafide classics to select. But you’ve already seen those movies — or know that you need to — so here are three lesser-known gems that also happen to be first films.
AMORES PERROS
Before all the overwrought emotional moralizing (Babel, Biutiful) and overwhelming visual pyrotechnics (Birdman, The Revenant), Alejandro González Iñárritu displayed his prodigious talent in this intense Mexico City-set triptych. Each story is connected by a car crash, dogs and a solid dose of human suffering, but it’s not the violence and brutality that lingers, it’s the longing — for love, for life.
ROGER DODGER
Campbell Scott delivers one of my favorite hyper-verbal performances ever as a New York ad exec in Dylan Kidd’s (P.S.) debut feature, which also marked Jesse Eisenberg’s first film role. Scott’s Roger, on a mission to get his teenage nephew from the country (well, Ohio) some action on a night out in the big city, is a cynical, insecure slimeball. He’s also so skillfully loquacious — in the way maybe only movie characters can be — and disarmingly perceptive when it comes to sizing people up that he makes the fragility of the male ego great fun.
WEEKEND
OK, this is a bit of a cheat… Greek Pete was actually Andrew Haigh’s (Looking) first feature, but it seems to have played the festival circuit in 2009 without a U.S. theatrical rollout. His breakout movie was this 2011 romantic drama about a brief encounter between two twentysomething British men. As Alison Willmore eloquently put it in her A.V. Club review, Weekend is: “Bittersweet, achingly authentic, and so intimate it almost feels invasive.” The same can be said for Haigh’s wonderful follow-up, 45 Years.
Find more of Adam’s favorite films on Letterboxd, and listen to the July 14th and 28th episode of Filmspotting for a special 30-day free trial of Tribeca Shortlist.
