It's Wednesday, you deserve a treat, like an episode of the Hell Gate Podcast! Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been a long time since the Tribeca Film Festival—whoops, the Tribeca Festival—felt scrappy and fresh, and less like an inevitable cultural season that New York City experiences. (Hey, at least it's not Fashion Week.) A quarter century beyond its origin story as a post-9/11 tribute to Lower Manhattan, its founders don't have a ton of interesting things to say about where the festival is now—sorry to De Niro, but hyping up your own AI commercial mid-New York Times interview is depressing as fuck. But nonetheless, skim its offerings and you'll find that movie magic is still in plentiful supply, especially as the festival's programmers have made successful efforts at equity: Almost 50 percent of the movies being screened this year are directed by women, and 50 percent are directed by non-white filmmakers.
We're planning to do plenty of individual coverage with directors, actors, our own stabs at film criticism, et cetera, but before all of that, we wanted to give the people what they want: a list of films that you can play phone tag with your friends about seeing as we get into that annoying time of the summer when everyone is in Europe or at a musical festival (or, gulp, both!).
Here, in alphabetical order, are a few of the movies we're most excited about—so excited, we might even write about them again, if we can peel ourselves away from covering the Knicks from every conceivable angle…