Tribeca Film Festival will feature Billie Joe Armstrong's acting and Katie Holmes' directing - Los Angeles Times
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Tribeca Film Festival will feature Billie Joe Armstrong’s acting and Katie Holmes’ directing

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An eclectic collection of features will make their world premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival next month, including movies in which Kevin Spacey stars as Richard Nixon, Eddie Murphy plays a skilled cook and Billie Joe Armstrong is cast as a former punk singer.

Also, Katie Holmes will make her directorial debut.

A total of 43 world premieres were announced on Monday by Tribeca, which begins April 13 in New York. Among them is “Elvis & Nixon.” Spacey, on the circuit now for “House of Cards,” stars in the film, Liza Johnson’s dramatization of the real-life meeting between the two title personalities. Michael Shannon plays the King; the film will get a release from Amazon and Bleecker Street later in April.

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In Lee Kirk’s scripted “Geezer,” Armstrong, the Green Day band member who has mostly done just cameo work as himself, stars as a suburban dad who revisits his punk past. Co-starring are Fred Armisen, Selma Blair and, because it’s a film festival, Chris Messina.

Murphy, meanwhile, appears as a cook who helps a dying woman take care of her daughter in Bruce Beresford’s “Mr. Church.” Murphy, who once starred in several films per year, has not had a new movie appear in theaters since the long-delayed “A Thousand Words” came out four years ago (this week, if you’re into celebrating anniversaries).

Holmes, herself looking for a career kick-start, has directed “All We Had,” a coming-of-age mother-daughter story based on Annie Weatherwax’s well-regarded novel of the same name. Holmes, who gave a strong turn as a bipolar woman in the recent “Touched With Fire,” stars in the film as well.

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Among the other narrative world premieres at Tribeca is “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” Bill Purple’s New Orleans tale starring Jason Sudeikis in a rare dramatic role. In the film, his character and wife, Penny (Jessica Biel), are forced to deal with a tragedy, with Maisie Williams entering their lives as a hardscrabble street teen.

And in the witches-brew-of-unlikely-substances department, the festival will pull the wraps off “A Hologram for the King,” in which Tom Tykwer directs Tom Hanks in an adaptation of the Dave Eggers novel.

The festival also announced a number of other sections Monday, including documentaries, typically a Tribeca strong suit.

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Among the world premieres in that category are “Check It,” Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer’s look at a group of LGBTQ teens in Washington, D.C., who band together to fight back against harassment.

Robert Kenner, the Oscar-nominated director of “Food, Inc.” returns with “Command and Control,” about the explosion of the Titan II nuclear site at the end of the Cold War.

And the real-life John du Pont story is explored in Jon Greenhalgh’s “Team Foxcatcher,” about the mental deterioration of the man Steve Carell gave life to in a 2014 Oscar-nominated film.

Also making its global debut is another Banksy movie “The Banksy Job,” in which Ian Roderick Gray and Dylan Harvey offer a post-”Exit to the Gift Shop” look at the elusive artist, this time focusing on his relationship with AK47. (S)he is not expected to be there, though festgoers seeing two Katie Holmes are advised to write in.

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT

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