The Tribeca Film Festival kicks off tonight—with Shrek Forever After—and continues through May 2nd with screenings of high- and low-profile international films. We'll be reviewing many more titles on The Measure during the run of the fest; for now, here's a sampling of the goods.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed
Directed by J Blakeson
This darkly comic abduction-thriller is so matter-of-fact in its details it could function as a how-to: buy this much sound-proofing, this many cell phones, and these kinds of locks if you want to collect the ransom on a rich man's grown daughter. You've seen kidnapping movies before, yeah? But this one, so tightly contained it could be a play, mixes its cliches with upending twists: exploitation turns into empowerment, machismo into homosexuality. It's at times hilariously surprising, but the narrative zags amount to little more than stunt plotting, hustling to sucker-punch a been-there audience. Would that Blakeson had worked as hard to overcome the film's pervasive nastiness or cool misogyny: just because a movie leaves the last girl standing doesn't mean it has undone the beatings and humiliations that led up to it. Co-starring Eddie Marsan, who played the driving instructor in Happy-Go-Lucky. Henry Stewart

Get Low
Directed by Aaron Schneider
Robert Duvall begins Get Low as the textbook definition of an old coot: hermit beard, mumbly, shotgun in hand. His Felix Bush decides to throw himself a "living funeral"—a neat idea, but not much to sustain a feature. Soon the story becomes the textbook definition of an old-coot movie: low-key humor and protracted buried-secret melodrama. Bill Murray, though, as the town undertaker, offers customarily hilarious dry line readings and reaction shots, breaking the tedium and threatening to make the whole movie work. Jesse Hassenger

The Killer Inside Me
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
UK auteur Winterbottom (Jude, 24 Hour Party People, Code 46) delivers a highly faithful but oddly wooden adaptation of Big Jim Thompson's 1952 novel about a Texas deputy sheriff with bloodlust. Casey Affleck is chilling as the beguiling lawman murderer, the ironic score is just right, and the period details are finely rendered—the anachronistic Jessica Alba, aside. But for all the rough sex and graphic violence, Winterbottom can't quite nail Thompson's unique milieu of free-floating dissolution. Benjamin Strong

Metropia
Directed by Tarik Saleh
This dystopic, animated technonoir traces the development of an ordinarily unhappy everyman into system-smashing revolutionary in a post-peak oil future: Europe—portrayed as smog-shrouded industrial ruins—has been united by a pan-continental super-subway; bicycle riding is illegal. Also, corporations are using shampoo to control minds and the Metro can read your thoughts. Cast in subterranean grey, the animation is very PlayStation, blending hyperreal design with the skittery motion of a South Park episode. And it's appropriate: the herky-jerky, gloomy-futurist aesthetic is as disquieting as the movie's advertising age conspiracy and surveillance state nightmare. Stewart

Micmacs
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Jeunet, of Amelie renown/infamy, delivers another entry in his career-long series of grating Live-Action Cartoons For 11-Year-Olds. This one concerns a gang of junkyard irregulars, consciously modeled on Toy Story's chestful of oddballs, righteously warring with weapons manufacturers. Its in-your-face whimsy, Luhrmann-esque tone, and goofy ethic and aesthetic make it triply hard to take seriously its political message about the cruel indifference of arms dealers, their implicit culpability in murder. Jeunet is not without virtues—the film is wordless when it can be, and uses an old Max Steiner score to great effect—but Micmacs still comes off like Paul Blart trying to pass as Art. Stewart

Ondine
Directed by Neil Jordan
Jordan is a master in eclecticism, but not subtlety, and he proves such once again with this revisionist fairytale about a fisherman (Colin Farrell) who catches a coy woman in his net. More precious than charming, this exercise in atonality and style is undoubtedly the work of Jordan: a director who knows better than to buy into the misogynistic myth of sea undines, but not cunning enough to salvage his risible screenplay. Nick McCarthy

Please Give
Directed by Nicole Holofcener
Opening with a mammogram montage—disembodied tits plopping down onto radiology equipment one after another, to perky music—Holofcener's latest considers youth and beauty, and its looming opposite. Catherine Keener stars as a midlife grave-robber: with her husband (Oliver Platt, whose giggles over Howard Stern highlight a telegraphed, vaguely drawn portrait of maleness), she buys up the furniture of the recently deceased to stock her chichi design store; residents of lower Fifth by Washington Square, they've also prepurchased the adjoining apartment from inappropriate henna-rinsed Ann Guilbert, whose granddaughters are thin-skinned Rebecca Hall and tan, brittle Amanda Peet. Like a female Noah Baumbach, Holofcener addresses the gender-specific problems of privileged, often unpleasant white people in rip-the-band-aid-off dialogue (in one already semi-infamous scene, Keener's teen daughter thwarts her attempts to give a homeless man a twenty: "You don't give me twenty dollars!"), resonant to the extent that the anxieties feel universal. That resonance—which wafts through the movie in autumnal currents—is dampened somewhat by canned devices—a guilt-ridden Keener breaks down while volunteering with buck-up retarded kids—and a tone-deaf fashion-porn ending. Mark Asch

Possessed
Directed by Lee Yong-ju
Lee cut his teeth as an assistant director on Bong Joon-Ho's Memories of Murder, but his directorial debut shows he learned little from the Korean master: rather than reinvent a genre, Lee cranks out a formulaic blend of two—K-Horror and police procedural—that's efficient in its jolts but less than convincing in its assault on religious devotions, from superstitious shamanist rituals to Christian fanaticism. (The Korean title transliterates as Hell of the Non-Believers.) Be sure to bring the outrage towards Organized Religion that you cultivated as an adolescent; you'll be rolling your eyes without it. Stewart

Sentimental Engine Slayer
Directed by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez
"El Paso" is credited alongside the actors during the end credits, because this aggressively artsy fever dream is as much a portrait of a place as it is of a person. As unstable as its baby-faced hero (34-year-old Mars Volta guitarist Lopez), the movie is a hallucinatory, logic-less tour through desert roads and houseparties that charts the insecure and frequently violent fantasies of the possibly homosexual virgin: sex, sex, humiliation, retributive violence, and sex. Though essentially about (maybe?) getting a kid laid, it's less Superbad than a Mexican-American variation of Loren Cass, with sex replacing race-violence; or, it's like Donnie Darko without wormholes or rabbitmen. Stewart

Soul Kitchen
Directed by Fatih Akin
The latest feature from Turko-German director Akin (Head On) is an over-the-top but ultimately charming postmodern farce about a struggling restaurant owner, his cook, his girlfriend, and his jailbird brother (the always welcome Moritz Bleibtreu). Shedding the self-seriousness of his previous films, but retaining his focus on immigrant life in Germany, Akin gives us the kind of intelligent but unpretentious comedy about adults the Hollywood of Hot Tub Time Machine no longer seems capable of. Strong

The Trotsky
Directed by Jacob Tierney
Initially awkward, as teen agitator Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel) baits his beleaguered factory-owning daddy into sending him to—gasp!—public school. But despite a superfluous hook—Leon believes himself the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky (nee Bronstein), and courts/stalks an older coed accordingly—cheeky Montrealer writer-director Tierney is genuinely, cornily enthused about youthful optimism and civil disobedience. As Leon organizes the student body against the breakfast-clubby draconian contempt of Principal Berkhoff (Colm Feore, whose resemblance to Lenin does not go unremarked-upon, though the framed photo of a Doberman he keeps on his desk does), class walkouts are staged as slo-mo power-walks, scored to righteous music. Detonating F-bombs left and right, and almost completely Che-free, this teen movie has an uncommon respect for the intelligence of its audience, dropping inside references for inside references for Canadians and intellectuals—Terry Eagleton, Phil Gourevitch. Hanoi Jane and Ken Loach and Battleship Potemkin, twice—alongside snappy teens musing "Is that a better band name or album name?", while being surprisingly practical-minded about processes and principles of social action.
Asch