A festival revival

This year’s Tribeca Film Festival kicked off recently with a full schedule for the first time since Covid. This week we take a look at some of Tribeca’s top events this year from documentaries to directorial debuts.

The opening feature of the festival is Netflix’s ‘Halftime,’ which explores the career of the Grammy-nominated pop queen Jennifer Lopez. Directed by Amanda Micheli, the story has a heavy focus on Lopez’s performance at the Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show.

Taylor Swift is going to be sitting down for a talk after the screening of 2021’s “All Too Well: The Short Film,” which Swift directed, wrote, produced and starred in. Swift is very selective about the events she goes to so this will, no doubt, be a very big deal for her fans.

Making its US premiere will be “The Forgiven,” a drama movie starring Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes. The film is set over a weekend in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco and explores the impact of a random accident on the lives of both the locals and western visitors to a house party in a grand villa.

Spanish-Argentine comedy “Official Competition” will also be making its US premiere. The movie stars Penelope Cruz with Antonia Banderas in the tale of a wealthy businessman who hires a famous filmmaker to help him make a smash hit film. Cruz and Banderas have previously acted together and the result is always really good.

In other news this week, if anyone is planning a Californian getaway then turn to our Travel pages. We look at some of the best places to visit in the sunny state from Emerald Bay State Park at Lake Tahoe to Yosemite Valley.