Possibly in answer to complaints last year about rising ticket prices and the lack of actual venues in the Tribeca area, this year's Tribeca Film Festival just announced that they would be offering nearly half-price tickets for films playing during weekdays and late night screenings, which is a great start at getting people to the lesser-attended screenings and non-premieres in the festival. They also are offering a couple six-ticket packages for $75.00 or $12.50 a ticket, specifically for docs, foreign language films and films in competition, which should help those movies get bigger audiences. For $1,100, you can go to any movie you want and pretty much go and do whatever you want. Might be the best way to go for independently wealthy unemployed filmlovers.

More good news is that they're basing a lot of the screenings and the press lounge in Union Square, which will hopefully make it easier for press to get around and see more movies.

The complete press release is below and check back for more developments for this year's festival as they develop.

This past weekend Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 took previous box office records and punched them right in the stomach, then spun webbing around their head till they couldn't breathe anymore, then threw them out a glass window on the 50th floor of a New York office building. In other words, it made a lot of money. According to this studio estimates, $148 million domestic, $375 million worldwide. So what is the magic formula that makes this series of films the unstoppable juggernaut they are?

Taking part in the Tribeca ESPN Film Festival--a subdivision of the festival done in conjunction with (you guessed it) ESPN--are two very different documentaries about competitive sports, Seth Gordon's The King of Kong about the battle between two arcade game competitors and Michael Apted's football (soccer) doc The Power of the Game, which tries to show how the sport has affected people in different countries.

Every once in a while, the Tribeca Film Festival surprises with something that's far better than it looks in the preview, and that's certainly the case with Charlie Bartlett, a high school dramedy starring Anton Yelchin, who played the kidnapped teen in Alpha Dog and whose debut in David Duchovny's "House of D" premiered at the festival a few years ago. Yelchin plays the title character, a wealthy teen who finds popularity by becoming the pill-prescribing therapist for his high school classmates, in a movie that's a clever throwback to the movies of John Hughes, most notably "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

Continuing our coverage of the movies premiering at the 6th Annual Tribeca Film Festival with two "boy-meets-girl" comedies of sorts, both directorial debuts, one quite good and the other, well not so great. Paul Soter, one-fifth of Broken Lizard, wrote and directed Watching the Detectives, a comedy starring Cillian Murphy and Lucy Liu, while Marc Klein adapted Melissa Bank's "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing" into the dramedy Suburban Girl, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin.

Unfortunately, we've fallen way behind on our coverage of movies playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, but hopefully, we'll be catching up in the next few days, as we have a lot of ground to cover and a lot of movies to review. As part of our first Tribeca Review Extravaganza, we have three comedies and a drama, as we look at Zak Penn's poker mockumentary The Grand, Jamie Kennedy's comedy doc Heckler, Adam Carolla's The Hammer and Descent, a revenge drama starring Rosario Dawson.

Being from New Zealand, filmmaker Jonathan King was probably intimately familiar with the wooly terrors hinted at in the title of his comedic horror film Black Sheep-- and if that very expression makes you snicker, than you're probably well-prepared for the type of humor that saturates this Kiwi gorefest.

The story revolves around Nathan Meister's Henry Oldfield, a young man returning to the family sheep farm after fifteen years, deadly afraid of sheep due to a childhood incident. His older brother Angus (Peter Feeney), responsible for that sadistic event (which might be traced back to his parent's choice in name) is going to sell the farm in favor of a new plant where his scientists have created a new genetically superior sheep that provides more wool. Henry is ready to leave the farm with a nice size check when the sheep start giving him a reason to be afraid of them, after a couple animal lovers unwittingly unleash a genetic experiment meant to be destroyed, but instead begins turning the local sheep into infested man-eating creatures that immediately go on the attack.

Every once in a while, a movie comes along where the chemistry between the lead actor and actress is so strong that it's hard to believe that they're not a couple in real life. That's certainly the case with Marshall Lewy's Blue State, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival. In the romantic political comedy, Breckin Meyer plays John Logue, a left-wing political blogger and John Kerry supporter, who leaves the country in protest of the Bush reelection, while Anna (X-Men) Paquin plays his beautiful and boisterous travel partner who has her own reasons for going to Canada.

Blue State is very much in line with other movies that have played at past Tribeca Film Festivals, including political films like The F Word and the Al Franken doc God Spoke, as well as road movies like Transamerica.

One quickly realizes why it's rarely a good idea to do a phone interview with two people at once, as Breckin and Anna spent a bit of time catching up before ComingSoon.net jumped in with a few questions about the movie they made together. (And if it feels like there's any sort of sexual tension in this interview, than it certainly wasn't coming from us!)

Anyone who's seen any of the four Broken Lizard movies might immediately assume they're all about drinking, smoking pot, sex jokes, yet founding member Paul Soter always seemed like the more level-headed member of the group, maybe because you wouldn't find him, say, lying naked next to a dead deer for the sake of a gag. It makes some degree of sense that he's also the first of the comedy group to break away and make his own film.

Watching the Detectives, which will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday May 1, may be seen as a departure from his Broken Lizard work because it's set more in the real world with Cillian Murphy playing a video store clerk who dreams of living an exciting life like the ones he sees in the movies, and he gets his wish when a femme fatale played by Lucy Liu enters his life.

Soter told ComingSoon.net about how the movie came together in this exclusive interview.

Zak Penn is best known as the guy that has written or been involved with over a half dozen movies and games based on Marvel Comics' characters, but in 2004, he made a little-seen documentary called Incident at Loch Ness, an investigation into the mysteries of the Scottish loch's famous resident along with none other than filmmaker Werner Herzog. Anyone who walked into the theatre off the street might have immediately thought it was a real documentary--except that very few people even saw it.

For his follow-up, Penn has taken on a subject that has the potential for a wider audience, that being the world of Tournament Poker in Vegas, and The Grand, is very likely to do for poker what Christopher Guest's Best in Show did for dog shows… make them really, really funny.

The Grand premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, April 27, and it's already one of the festival's hottest tickets, having sold out advance tickets, but it's probably going to be worth standing in line to try to see it.

As you'll read in ComingSoon.net's exclusive interview with Penn, it was a fairly ambitious project that was mainly improvised, leading to a final poker tournament that was played for real so that Penn went into the movie not really knowing how it would end.

Since the Tribeca Film Festival starts in a few days, I thought I'd try to watch a few of the screeners I've received before the festival begins, and one of the movies I really enjoyed was this documentary about break-dancing and the global phenom that has B-Boys from all over the world converging on Germany for the biggest competition of the year. Somehow, I inadvertantly omitted this from my Tribeca Film Festival preview, but it's an impressive documentary that continues Tribeca's tradition of dance docs after screening Mad Hot Ballroom at the festival a few years ago. Similarly, Planet B-Boy will be screening as part of their FREE "Tribeca Drive-In" program on April 28 at the World Financial Center, just a few days after they screen that '80s classic Dirty Dancing.

I'm not sure if Planet B-Boy is more impressive because of the crazy mad styling of the international B-Boy crews converging on Germany for "The Battle of the Year", the World Cup of break-dance, or the way that New York based filmmaker Benson Lee cut together all of their routines to hip hop music in a way that's amazing to watch. Sure, the movie follows the same structure of similar competition docs that we've seen before like Spellbound and even Mad Hot Ballroom, as it follows various teams on their journey to the big battle. It's not too difficult to figure out which teams will make it to the finals based on the focus of the interviews in the movie either, but it's doubtful that you've seen dance moves as wild and crazy as the ones done by the two Korean teams in competition. It's really a spectacular visual film that is likely to blow anyone away who hasn't experiend any sort of break-dancing since the '80s. While it's still an expressive danceform, in the hands of these innovative global B-Boys, it's truly a competitive sport that shows off an immense amount of athleticism and creativity.

This will be the fifth year in a row that ComingSoon.net covers the annual Tribeca Film Festival and aside from the fact that the festival has changed a lot over the years, not necessarily being solely in Tribeca anymore, it once again offers a pretty varied selection of dramas, comedies, docs, movies without distributors, and movies scheduled to come out over the summer.

Like with any other film festival, it's hard to see and write about everything, so I've put together a list of movies I've seen or that look like they might be worth trying to catch, starting with the two movies I'm most looking forward to seeing, Zak Penn's The Grand and Paul Soter's Watching the Detectives.