Tribeca 2026 Review: THE REVISIONIST Sets Out to Explore the Process of Creating Plots, but Loses Its Own

There seems to be this type of film in almost every festival program: a character study, verging on satire, about a set of highly educated, intellectual, usually well-off characters who have creative jobs and own expensive real estate, and are engaged in some complicated relationship with each other.

There is often an idolized, yet imposing and vexing, parent figure. A character who insists on bringing their childhood traumas along for the ride. An ex-lover from the past, who also happens to be a good friend of the current partner. Everyone is brilliant, and no one is ever happy.

In the beginning, Alex Vlack’s feature narrative debut, The Revisionist, seems to be precisely this kind of story, kicking off with Jacob (Tom Sturridge) telling anyone who would listen that his midlife crisis made him quit his cushy advertising job to try to make it as a writer. He’s looking for material in an obvious well of inspiration: his father, David (Dustin Hoffman), a cultural icon who is skeptical of his son’s abilities (he does appreciate his jingles, though) and refuses to share. 

Jacob’s wife, Elise (Alison Brie), a successful writer herself, encourages him not to give up and maybe do an unauthorized biography. Enter the perfect vehicle to make it possible in the shape of John (André Holland), Jacob’s and Elise’s brilliant old chum, who literally runs into their lives after many years of absence. He’s conveniently broke and creatively stagnant, so he easily agrees to become a proxy researcher, who hangs out with David and tapes his stories, handing them over to Jacob afterwards.

There is a shift in perspective of sorts in the film, even though it remains unclear whether it was intended as a twist, since the shift is heavily telegraphed from the very first scene and throughout the film, not to mention the telling title. Nevertheless, Vlack’s movie isn’t really about the complexity or possibly hypocrisy of the modern art scene, or even all these particular characters; at its core, The Revisionist is about the process of creating something tangible.

Therein lies the film’s greatest challenge, which it doesn’t fully overcome. Since this is a story about actually creating a story, the plot here is shaping itself in real time, making it difficult to truly relate to or even care about anything that’s happening. And since the story within the story in The Revisionist is the one we’ve definitely seen before – the affair you can see a mile away, the daddy issues, the painful but not at all shocking revelations about the past, and so forth – it makes it harder to perceive anything that happens here as anything other than a placeholder.

Ironically, for a film about not one, not two, but four writers, The Revisionist comes off as a mostly actors’ vehicle, specifically when it comes to Dustin Hoffman and André Holland, who are given the material to work with and shine through it. At the same time, the film criminally wastes Tom Sturridge, and only gives scraps to Alison Brie, often leaving her to do the scenes where she types away at her laptop, frequently getting wide-eyed the moment an idea or inspiration strikes.

Those scenes also represent the film’s greatest vulnerability: for all its meta, self-reflective aspirations, it doesn’t seem to have anything particularly new to say about the writing process. Alex Vlack, who also wrote the script, is mostly interested in the ethics of using and “revising” real people’s lives and emotions in fiction, but doesn’t go beyond the idea of making one’s characters behave a certain way as a form of the author's wish fulfillment.

The Revisionist sets off to explore a complicated process (which, to be fair, is hard to dramatize on screen, without fully going the Charlie Kaufman or David Cronenberg route), but ends up simplifying it instead. Perhaps this draft could’ve been revised a few more times.

The film enjoys its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. It screens again on June 11. Visit the film's page at the festival's official site for more information.