Spurlock, Delpy, Hysteria and More to Make Their Way to Tribeca

With today’s announcement of the Tribeca Film Festival’s Spotlight, Cinemania and Special Screenings lineups, cinephiles now have 44 more films to look forward to at this year’s festival, taking place from April 18-29, 2012. Of those films, 24 will be having their world premiere at the festival, among them the documentary Knuckleball!, directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work); Morgan Spurlock’s Mansome, about changing ides of what constitutes “manliness” in modern society; director Daryl Wein’s Lola Versus, starring Greta Gerwig (Damsels in Distress, Hannah Takes the Stairs) as a late-20s New Yorker who gets dumped by her fiancé weeks before her wedding; and The Playroom, directed by Julia Dyer and co-starring indie superstar John Hawkes.

Other films to screen at this year’s festival are Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York; Persepolis directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Chicken with Plums; Hysteria, a historical rom-com about the invention of the vibrator, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy; Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman; and Struck By Lightning, a teen comedy written by and starring “Glee”‘s Chris Colfer.

In addition, Tribeca has announced the five films that will comprise its Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival, which will kick off with the world premiere of the documentary Benji, about the life and death of high school basketball phenom Ben Wilson, whose murder one day before the start of his senior season in 1984 shocked his home city of Chicago and the nation.

Tribeca’s short film lineup will be announced next week; to find out more about the features to screen at the festival, visit www.tribecafilm.com/festival.