Tribeca 2025: “Cuerpo Celeste”

Summer is a dream rendered in warm and hazy tones by writer and director Narya Ilic Garcia in her sophomore feature Cuerpo Celeste. It’s Chile circa 1990, and Celeste (Helen Mrugalski) is 15 years old. In a collage of scenes that deftly convey the slippery nature of that lazy, in-between time, Celeste spends the holidays […]

Tribeca 2025: “Runa Simi”

The image on the screen is familiar: two lions, one big, one small, sitting side-by-side on a hill, gazing out over the land below them. The language, however, is different. When we first meet Fernando Valencia, an Indigenous voice artist from the Peruvian Andes, he’s working on dubbing a scene from the classic 1994 Disney […]

Tribeca Dispatch: “Checkpoint Zoo,” “Driver”

I often find observational documentaries the most fascinating, and several made their world premieres at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Below, I reviewed two documentaries that took vérité approaches or made extensive use of first-hand, on-the-ground footage, Checkpoint Zoo and DRIVER. You can also read my review of another terrific vérité doc that premiered at […]

Tribeca Review: “Griffin in Summer”

In the days since the world premiere of Griffin in Summer at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, I’ve seen adjectives like “annoying” and “sociopath” hurled at its 14-year-old protagonist, Griffin Naffly (played by Everett Blunck). And maybe they’re true— at least, the annoying part certainly is. But isn’t it a core trait of a teenager […]

Tribeca Review: “Satisfied”

If you were alive of a reasonable age between 2015 and 2016, you’ve heard of Hamilton. More likely than not, you, along with much of the rest of the world, were a little obsessed with it, Broadway fan or no. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop interpretation of the life of America’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander […]

Tribeca Review: “Following Harry”

When we meet Harry Belafonte at the start of Following Harry— Susanne Rostock’s documentary culled from footage from the final 12 years of his life— he’s well into his 80s, and wearing a gray hoodie emblazoned with the name “Trayvon.” It’s an image that Rostock doesn’t linger on, but it’s nevertheless striking: that this man, […]

Tribeca Review: “1-800-ON-HER-OWN”

It’s difficult to condense a whole life into one feature-length film. Dana Flor’s 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, a documentary centering on 90s folk music icon Ani DiFranco, wisely chooses to focus primarily on just one segment of her subject’s very full life and career. The issue, however, is that Flor concentrates on arguably the most banal period of […]

Tribeca Dispatch: “Don’t You Let Me Go,” “Color Book”, “Bitterroot”

Stories of family, both of the blood and found variety, have populated many of the programmed features at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Below are three of them representing familial tales from different cultures and various parts of the world making their world premieres at the festival: Don’t You Let Me Go, Color Book, and […]

Tribeca Review: “Arzé”

In the opening shots of Arzé, director Mira Shaib and cinematographer Heyjin Jun track their title character (played by Diamond Abou Abboud) through the streets of Beirut as she runs errands, capturing the bustling energy of the city in a way that points toward the kinetic pace that will fast pervade the rest of the […]

Tribeca Review: “New Wave”

When Elizabeth Ai set out to make her documentary New Wave, it was to strictly be a film about the music phenomenon that originated in Orange County, California in the 1980s. The city’s Little Saigon area saw a large influx of Vietnamese immigrants relocating due to the Vietnam War, and the trend capitalized on that […]