Six months have passed since this year’s iteration of Sundance kicked off the 2025 festival calendar, and though Cannes is only a few weeks behind cinephiles (and souls aplenty have still yet to enjoy a proper night’s sleep), it’s Tribeca time. For New Yorkers and those making the trip to the East Coast, the arrival of the Tribeca Festival means roughly two weeks of trekking across, over, and between a few blocks in and around Lower Manhattan to catch a few of the too-many-documentaries about, starring, and produced by varyingly-famous musicians… as well as a nice selection of independent gems that the Big Apple’s premiere of the live-action How To Train Your Dragon might have distracted prospective audiences from. It reads as though I’m being harsh – and I am – but this is simply the reality of the festival circuit. There will be great films, good ones, movies that work for some yet not others, and a solid heap of stuff that makes us wonder whether or not this whole staring at a screen in the dark for one-to-three hours is really worth it after all.
Yet however cognizant I am of my severity in this context, I’m far more aware of the fact than any film festival program is an embarrassment of riches for the folks who love sitting in jet-black screening rooms for hours at a time, myself and thousands of others included. And, in a way, the Tribeca Film Festival’s programming team has the dauntingest duty of all: Catering to audiences who are interested in a vast array of topics that spread far beyond the works of Hong Sang-soo, the late/great Jean-Luc Godard, and other members of the New York Film Festival Faithful™. Tribeca, which was co-founded by Robert De Niro in 2002, is known for its bevy of musical documentaries, yes, but also its bold inclusion of visual albums, its partiality to broad international and non-fiction offerings, the prioritization of smaller independent pictures that get the short-shrift at larger fests, and a retrospective section that includes traditional crowd-pleasing fare. In 2024, de Niro and Martin Scorsese took part in a 50th anniversary screening of the duo’s first collaboration, Mean Streets; this year’s choices include American Psycho, Best in Show, Casino, and Requiem for a Dream.
Those are certainly worth your time and money – time spent watching Christian Bale take an axe to Jared Leto’s torso on a big-screen is unequivocally time well spent – but we’d be remiss not to direct you toward a small selection of new films, new names, and new viewpoints on display from June 4 to 15. For your sake, we’ve avoided listing any duds here, though that’s also because there are precious few. The don’t-misses are what really count. And yes, some of them are music documentaries.
An Eye For An Eye (dir. Tanaz Eshaghian and Farzad Jafari) | World Premiere, Documentary Competition
The 4,730th hadith in Imam Ahmad an-Nasa’i’s “Sunan an-Nasa’i” compilation reads as follows:
“A Man came to the Messenger of Allah, and said: ‘This man killed my brother…’ The Prophet said: ‘Pardon him.’ But the man refused. The Prophet said: ‘Take the blood money.’ But the man refused. The Prophet said: ‘Then go and kill him, for you are just like him.’ So the man pardoned the criminal.”
What happens when the one on trial is your mother and the dead man in question is your father? Tanaz Eshaghian and Farzad Jafari’s profound, unsettlingly thrilling documentary An Eye for an Eye examines exactly that by blending two genre staples, the courtroom chronicles and the domestic family drama, that theoretically coexist in more harmony on paper than they do here. Yet the impossible choice facing two sons – whose mother, Tahereh killed their father in an act of self-defense and, having served her sentence for the crime, faces execution unless she can pay the aforementioned blood money her abuser’s family expects as retribution – fits tragically with the events unfolding in front of a judge tasked with upholding Sharia law. At times impossible to empathize yet never not resonant, Eshaghian and Jafari’s film doesn’t deserve the modern “true crime” label because it hardly fetishizes the idea of its central case for the value of entertainment and mass intrigue. Instead, it asks if the cost of a life, of multiple lives, can ever (or should ever) be properly calculated, especially when the person under scrutiny, as Tahereh’s son Mohsen says, “ruined her own life to set us free.”
An Eye for an Eye premieres on June 6 and additionally screens on June 7, 8, and 9.
Bird in Hand (dir. Melody C. Roscher) | World Premiere, U.S. Narrative Competition
In 2024, James Le Gros gave one of the year’s more understated, underrated supporting performances as an obtuse and creepy dad in India Donaldson’s excellent debut, Good One. His daughter in the film, Lily Collias, stole the show with a breakout turn that immediately garnered awards consideration and a should-be vault to the top of every casting director’s “next big thing” lists. One hopes that the same will be true for the new neighbor of a vaguely creepy, obtuse, and fairly racist Le Gros in Melody C. Roscher’s debut, Bird in Hand, Alisha Wainwright. Though the latter (playing the titular Bird) has a more seasoned CV than Collias – Wainwright starred in 2023’s There’s Something Wrong With The Children and 2021’s Palmer, regrettably opposite Justin Timberlake – it’s only just, and the evidence she offers in Roscher’s film should make a strong case for similar treatment to Collias. Wainwright is grounded yet flighty all at once as a bride-to-be on the hunt for a perfect venue and some other, unspoilable stuff, and her faulty relationship with mom (Christine Lahti) is one that breathes life into the film, which would otherwise be too standard for its status as a potentially-hidden gem.
Bird in Hand premieres on June 6 and additionally screens on June 7, 8, and 11.
Esta Isla (dir. Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carretero) | World Premiere, U.S. Narrative Competition
Economic insecurity comes for us all in one way or another. (At least, that’s what they’ve tried to tell me over at Capital One… I won’t answer their calls.) In Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carretero’s Puerto Rican offering, Esta Isla (“This Island”), a broad-ish idea looms: What if you could flee those monetary worries with the help of a stupefyingly-rich local gal who also happens to be itching to escape her troubled home life? It’s a good plan, but one that comes with complications for Bebo (Zion Ortiz) and Lola (Fabiola Brown), two lovers who fret the realities of modern life on their commercialized island and ditch said tribulations for the mountains lingering off in the distance, only for Bebo’s brother Charlie Xavier Morales) to saddle the paramours with his illegal doings, threatening to eff it all up. I love tales of young couples on the run (see: Badlands, Pierrot le fou, Wild at Heart, etc.), and I really dug this iteration on a genre that threatens to get old, yet rarely does. My bet is that you will, too.
Esta Isla premieres on June 7 and additionally screens on June 8 and 14.
I Was Born This Way (dir. Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard) | World Premiere, Spotlight Documentary
Early on in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, a downstairs neighbor named Ollie tells Sebastian Stan’s Guy that “all unhappiness in life comes from not accepting what is.” You know who told him that? “LADY GAGA,” he triumphantly announces before anyone can answer the question. It’s a bit tougher for Guy, whose face is disfigured by tumors due to an aggressive form of neurofibromatosis, to take that advice at… well, face value. But in I Was Born This Way, co-directors Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard’s portrait of the gay gospel trailblazer Archbishop Carl Bean, filmmakers and subject unite in an at-times too sentimental but wholly inventive portrait of what it means to be true to who you are. Including interviews with Gaga, whose own hit “Born This Way” was inspired by Bean’s breakout disco anthem that shares its title with the documentary, as well as executive producers Questlove and Billy Porter, I Was Born This Way takes multiple forms – docudrama in some flashbacks, animated musical in others – en route to detailing Bean’s path from up-and-coming singer to founding the Minority AIDS Project, as well as the first LGBTQ+ church for people of color, the Unity Fellowship Church. It’s more basic than it is truly groundbreaking, making for a far cry from Pollard’s excellent 2020 doc, MLK/FBI, but its subject and constant stylistic swings more than make up for what it lacks in terms of revelatory storytelling.
I Was Born This Way premieres on June 5 and additionally screens on June 6 and 14.
Inside (dir. Charles Williams) | North American Premiere, Spotlight Narrative
Imagine if Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley’s approach to Sing Sing was turning the theater-prison drama into a psychological thriller, one that still keeps the concept of mentorship at its heart, and you’d be almost too close for comfort to Charles Williams’ Inside, a debut that feels like the perfect next step for a director who won the Palme D’or for his short film, All These Creatures, in 2018. Brutal, moving, and contemplative, Inside unfolds primarily in an Australian prison, where Warren Murfett (Guy Pearce) is tasked with keeping the young Mel Blight (17-year-old Vincent Miller, performing far beyond his years) out of trouble. It proves especially difficult, not just because Mel is a ticking time bomb personified, but because of Mark Shephard (Cosmo Jarvis, outstanding), a prisoner whose life sentence gives him more than enough time to take up a vested, peculiar interest in the newcomer. If there was ever the need post-Brutalist to be reminded that Guy Pearce is one of the best actors working today, Inside is it, and somehow Williams still manages to showcase each of his actors, many of them nonprofessional and incarcerated. The writer-director spent four years interviewing inmates in Australia, where the film takes place, and depicts his setting and its dwellers with an authentic, confident touch, one that is constantly threatening to boil over yet persists at a perilous simmer.
Inside premieres on June 7 and additionally screens on June 8, 12, and 13.
Paradise Records (dir. Logic) | World Premiere, Spotlight Narrative
I’m a big Logic guy. Sue me. He’s a fast-talker (er, rapper), one who litters his tracks with pop culture callbacks and bold ideas that only feel bold when read, not after you’ve listened to him wax poetically on why “Spider-Man should be Black.” (One has to assume he’s a big fan of Into and Across the Spider-Verse, both masterpieces.) And while his filmmaking debut Paradise Records, the tale of a record store owner whose jig is about to be up as foreclosure looms, is hardly an animated Marvel about webslinging and skipping school in favor of educational means in an alternate dimension, Logic’s movie maintains its crowdpleasing vibe for just long enough that by the time its wildest twists enter the foreground, you’ve completely invested your own heart and energy into whether or not this music mart can stay afloat. You know, especially once the guns (and lyrical barbs) come out.
Paradise Records premieres on June 6 and additionally screens on June 7, 13, and 15.
Widow Champion (dir. Zippy Kimundu) | World Premiere, Viewpoints
These days, a good deal of documentaries tend to take the easy way out by offering up a slew of facts and figures in their prologues in order to immediately inform the audience of the film’s stakes. They don’t trust that viewers will pick up on details as they go; they don’t have faith that ticketholders and streaming savants will pay a lick of attention. It’s not a bad strategy, but it’s refreshing to see Zippy Kimundu do the bare minimum of handholding in her sophomore feature, Widow Champion, while maintaining the comprehensive edge that follow-docs must have in order to maintain accountability. Kimundu’s 2023 co-directorial effort, Our Land, Our Freedom, took eight years to make and catalogued over 300 hours of interviews in its effort to pin down the history of Kenya’s fight against colonialist control. And though it would have been impossible for Kimundu to speak with each of the eight million widows currently living amongst Kenya’s population of 53 million people, the picture’s aim to chart the titular Widow Champion Rodah Nafula’s goal to help repair the broken hearts of her fellow matriarchs – not to mention the struggle that is helping these women maintain the deeds to their husbands’ land that are being taken from them in the male’s absences – results in a triumphant and uniquely human character study that is as much a machine of empathy as it is one of justice.
Widow Champion premieres on June 9 and additionally screens on June 10, 12, and 15.
The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard (dir. David Verbeek) | World Premiere, International Narrative Competition
A cross between Julia Ducornau’s Raw and the misbegotten George MacKay-Lily-Rose Depp vehicle Wolf (2021), David Verbeek’s most audacious (and, likely, expensive) film to date centers on an unlikely makeshift family that seem as though, by the conclusion of The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard, will regret ever considering adoption. This wolf, played by a startling Jessica Reynolds (Outlander, Kneecap), takes on the canine’s mannerisms and behaviors more than she ever aesthetically resembles the furry creature, but her actions are enough for two climate-focused doomsday preppers (Marie Jung’s Fox and Nicholas Pinnock’s Leopard, as it were) to take her in and raise her as a human. Bad idea! But not necessarily for a movie, one where the writer-director Verbeek seeks to probe the idea made colloquially famous by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park: Being too focused on whether one could do something dangerous and deceitful rather than considering if they should. Pinnock is excellent and existential, continuing his run of memorable film performances (get my guy off of the small screen, dammit!), but it’s Reynolds’ feral energy that runs wild and serves the film’s core tenant well. That being, whether or not it’s better to integrate one’s self into an unfamiliar society, or to escape the evils of an alternative route by returning to menacing roots. My principal nitpick is wishing the title had used an Oxford comma.
The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard premieres on June 7 and additionally screens on June 8, 10, and 14.
