Tribeca Film Festival’s 25th Anniversary run opened with the world premiere of Questlove’s documentary Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World). In his third iteration of the documentary biopic, Questlove surely has honed in a wonderfully even formulaic dispenser of inoffensive nostalgia. Essentially a victim of the podcast-ification of documentary films launched by Netflix and like Forensic Files, where one famous expert or another is talking to camera about the significance of one song or another, interspersed with beautiful and perfectly selected archival footage. A fine film probably, one that will especially resonate with you if you love and care about Earth Wind and Fire or experimental genre blending. But also another reminder that often nostalgia comes across to onlookers like neurotic self soothing. This likely also happens to be true about the two other gala films that I skipped, also documentaries about musicians, Alicia Keys: Girl from Hell’s Kitchen and Sara Bareilles: Good Grief. I’m happy for you, or sad that happened. But I’m not reading all that. 

The nostalgia drudgery continues on in the Spotlight+ section of the festival that boasts talks and live performances after each screening. Doc Meets World, a literal podcast-ification of documentary, is about the run and conclusion of a national tour of the Boy Meets World re-watch show Pod Meets World, sans the titular boy. A career retrospective documentary of Peter Frampton promises to mix “archival footage with interviews and performance from Frampton’s latest tour” to create “a testament to some of the perils that come with fame.” Groundbreaking! The rest of the program was littered with strangely anachronistic projects; a Katy Perry concert film live from Paris, a filmed West End performance of Hadestown, a sequel documentary about women’s place in digital culture followed by a conversation with Hilary Clinton. Then, a Mumford and Sons tour diary with seemingly so little narrative it probably could have been a live album or maybe just gone on their YouTube. Also, an injury recovery documentary about a Dancing with the Stars touring show. Playing POTUS had comedians breaking down the psyche of some of the most toothless satire that’s ever existed. Noga chronicles the effects of the ongoing genocide in Gaza on its most unsung victim, an Isreali pop star. Amanda Kramaer lends her kitchy eye to what often plays out like Lynch/Brakhage pastiche in Magdalen Bay’s visual album.

I mostly skipped the Spotlight narrative program, on account of my lack of interest in any film described as buzzworthy. Of the ones I did see, I already had words for Haifaa Al Mansour’s Unidentified. As for the Spotlight documentaries, many confounding subjects were about! From Travis Barker’s deepest fears to the first all black Everest ascend. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy for them, getting up there seems really hard. I just do not understand why that’s an achievement that would even occur to them. Also included was Nick Holt’s AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, which the festival brilliantly programmed along with many films made at least partially by AI scattered about the entire roster. You’re always on the right side of history if you just pick both sides. I could not get to most of the Escape from Tribeca and Viewpoints screenings, I am only one woman after all. I did catch Matt Eames’ Deepfake, a satire about social media that was played too straight to have any bite. I also caught Crocodile which is hard to point to as a standout; its scope is hopelessly scattered and leans into the theatrics of big emotional moments a bit too readily. Yet it is impossible not to be moved by the kids at the heart of the narrative. 

Three of the competition narrative features caught my attention. Lindsay Calleran’s Caity, an undeniably personal if not overly familiar coming of age story that paints addiction as a genetic inheritance with many many social triggers. Carlos Key and Kalijah Rowe’s Kingston was mostly fun but starts to fall apart when you spend too much time on the optics of its narrative. Making the angry black woman character the only person who faces real consequences for her misguided adolescent selfishness in a film that posits her as the only intellectually curious person in the school feels needlessly fatalistic. Even if you wrap it up nicely with a shot of a statue on campus with blood on its hands. The standout was Tori Lancaster’s Mother Future Self in which two women whose friendship has hung in limbo for almost a decade reunite at an experimental dance camp. Equal parts Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline and Mary Bronstein’s Yeast, the film thoughtfully examines the performance of self as an inherent fallacy. And whether or not the diction between performance and self even matters in the long run.

Of the competition documentaries, Khoroldorj Choijoovanchig’s Colors of White Rock works best when it is operating in abstractions; when clouds of black coal dust turn white after an explosion, or the camera sits at the edge of the dashboard as a woman commands a freight truck through darkness. The use of a somewhat disembodied voiceover, which calls to mind Mati Diop’s Dahomey or Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias’s Pepe, quickly gives way to direct to camera address that flattens the entire formal experiment. The big prize winner, Eddie Sánchez’ Mexicanamerican, similarly abandons the found footage formal exercise it sets out on for the sake of melodrama. 

The international competition films did not fare significantly better. There was Ruthy Pribar’s What Is To Come, an Israeli romantic drama about a traumatized widow whose kindness to the immigrant squatters she finds in her apartment is the extent of the presence of any sort of hovering political crisis. Dina Duma’s Skateboarding Is Not For Girls, another paint by the numbers coming of age film, was more nihilistic than its American counterpart in that it strangely denotes chance as the only thing that can save a young girl from a lifetime of dehumanization. My penchant for French Canadian cinema rears its head again, Rodrigue Jean’s Labrador –Autopsy of Silence left me giddy despite its dark existentialist ethos. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the “doing gay stuff with a ghost” trope. The film takes slightly too long to turn into a procedural, and it doesn’t stay there for long enough, but the performances and the pacing bolster an unimaginable amount of tension considering nothing really happens for the entire film. The crime initially happens off screen and isn’t revealed until the very end, we never get to the actual trial, just a brief arraignment. Yet Christopher Angatookalook’s stoicism, penetrated only by his chemistry with Alex Landry, sustains one’s attention so thoroughly that the non-events of the runtime seem entirely inconsequential. Basically if Anatomy of a Fall was an adaptation of Camus’ The Stranger. 

I am always drawn to shorts programs, which are often treated like bastard children, because I like to get a sense of the cinematic priorities emerging filmmakers find themselves drawn to. Almost 100 shorts played at Tribeca across various programs. From the Animated Shorts curated by Whoopi Goldberg, Juan Carlos Mostaza’s Under the Lake and Alice Eça Guimarães’ Because Today is Saturday were standouts, while Pola Maneli’s Apart was filled with so many cliches it was almost impossible to watch. The Care Package program featured a very strange short musical about a flashback of a hate crime starring Alan Cumming along with other coming of age narrative shorts, where the unaffected sentimentality of Ingrid Runde Saxegaard Sandy Fannies’ stood out like a sore thumb. She manages to convey the depth of the film’s drama without ever being heavy handed with her formal choices. Competitive Edge gathered feats of performance, all in the same tone of saccharine redemption and helmed by cartoonishly evil coaches. La Lucha de Lucía, about a young Lucha Libre wrestler, at least has a specificity in its characterizations, sets, and costumes that prevents the film from looking like a stock photo that comes up when you look up “intense athleticism.” Jean-Luc Mwepu and Desirée Mwepu’s Ultimatum also makes interesting formal decisions that prevent their exploration of identity in exclusionary institutions from reading as self satisfied autofiction. Complete with two very strong lead performances.

In the Helpline program, only Dian Weys’ Vultures stood out with its flashy fourteen minute long take showing the aftermath of a car crash. Not even Isabella Rossellini could get me to sit through the Fierce Fashion program. Love Fictionally at the very least offers the Bob Odernik produced She’s Nonbinary, in which star and director Jess McLeod gives a wildly entertaining performance. The oddly named and stylized NY Making it Here program plays like a gritty government funded tourism campaign. The Power to the People program, strangely segregated stories of “passion and rebellion” featured Ben Proudfoot and Steph Curry’s Sundance darling about Martin Luther King Jr’s speechwriter. As well as The Second Life of Freddie Nole, which is noble yet manipulative streaming slop vérité about a man who lost half a century to the American carceral system. When the Revolution Doesn’t Come was a great segway into the work of Aurora Brachman. 

The Dark Web program might as well have been named Little Black Mirror, with the exception of Justine Klaiber’s stunningly animated Lost Touch. There were a few standouts in the Think Fast program. Aidan Weaver’s Benning-esque A Crime Across Four Landscapes, which moves with a dizzying stillness between four frames that tell an admittedly predictable story with incredibly measured tension. Lean and stunningly composed, you’ve never seen shadows dancing on the trees of a dark forest like this. Sneha Mehta’s Getar Hero, a genre parody that somehow also manages unironic earnestness thanks in part to an anchored performance by Shashank Arora. Finally, I almost stood up and clapped when Zoe Ziegler, of Janet Planet fame, walked into the warm cluttered world of Rare Birds. Lily Weisberg’s dark comedy is quite evenly both hilarious and moving while unfolding like the cold open of a really good Columbo episode with its gorgeous sensible interiors.

Whatever It Takes shaped resilience into stories about American emigrants opening Parisian bakeries and a Polish supermodel turned Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competitor. Branislav Jankic’s White Belt tells a recognizable story in a familiar form, one of attempting to regain agency over your body when the images of yourself contradict your actual self. Also featured was Fatma Al-Gahnim’s Theatre of Dreams, an experimental fictionalization of the brief period when Qatar had a national women’s soccer team. The film beautifully presents the looming presence of the men’s team as Qatar prepares to host the World Cup in contrast with the arduous implication of televising a single women’s game. In a similar vein, Ashley Brandon’s Panther Pat ironically uses dolls and miniatures to whimsically animate the story of Pat Palinkas, the first women to play American football professionally. Both solid portraits of the small victories that make the horrors of womanhood seem less impenetrable. 

A special events program called Fueled by the Future contained two shorts made in collaboration with OpenAI, both of which heavily gestured at more depth than any film made in collaboration with OpenAI could possibly possess. In the Restorations and Reunions programs, The Wachowski’s Bound and Malcolm Ingram’s Small Town Gay Bar were the only worthwhile screenings. I like Taxi Driver as much as the next girl but it happens to be a pretty ubiquitous repertory favorite, anniversary or not. The festival hosted free outdoor screenings of several films including a fashion documentary about Dior, Sabrina Carpenter’s independent film debut, and Damien Chazelle’s first short among others. 

Beyond the uninspired selections and red carpet jokes trivializing an ongoing genocide, there were so many panels and discussions you could have spent the whole two weeks attending those and not have seen a single film. In addition to the shorts and features, because that apparently is no longer enough for a film festival, there was an entirely separate television program, a games program, a program highlighting content creators, a podcast program, a networking program “where brands and entertainment” met, and something called the Storytelling Summit that was opened by “luminary” Zach Braff. Overall a very weird, very long party; where greediness is masked with self seriousness and a very thin veneer of authenticity.