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When it comes to the festival calendar, movie lovers and awards experts know that autumn in New York belongs to the storied New York Film Festival on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But the action shifts downtown during the warm weather months as the Tribeca Festival marks the Big Apple’s shift from spring to summer.
This year, the brainchild of Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal celebrates its 25th anniversary, and its grown by leaps and bounds in the quarter century since it launched in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that forever changed the map of lower Manhattan. Debuting as a film festival, Tribeca has since expanded its lineup to include television, virtual reality, live events, and industry-specific gatherings, not to mention nostalgic reunions of the casts and makers behind certain classics that loom large in pop culture.
Gold Derby will be covering select events from this year’s festival as it unfolds on the ground. Here’s our overview of five things we’ll be watching for at the 25th Tribeca Festival.
It always helps when a film festival can occupy a specific lane. Sundance has the indie thing, Cannes has the global prestige thing, and Telluride has the Rocky Mountain mountain air thing. In recent years, Tribeca has honed the rock doc thing, and this year’s edition is packed with music-associated documentaries that can (and often will) be followed by a live performance by the artist(s) profiled in the film. Case in point: the 25th edition kicks off with Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World), a profile of the iconic band behind “Shining Star” and “Boogie Wonderland.” This is Questlove’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Summer of Soul, and it’ll be followed by Earth, Wind & Fire getting funky on the Beacon Theatre stage. Tribeca’s centerpiece and closing night selections are also in the music space, with Sara Bareilles: Good Grief occupying the former spot, while Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen takes the latter.
The jams continue beyond those marquee events as well. Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour — Live from Paris will have its world premiere at Tribeca, which means you can expect to see the pop star and her new beau, Justin Trudeau, bopping around New York. And classic rock devotees will show up in force for Frampton, which documents the final tour from the singer/songwriter behind “Baby I Love Your Way” and so many more bangers. And since Tribeca overlaps with the Tony Awards, there’s even some Broadway representation with the debut of Hadestown: The Musical, a filmed version of the West End production of the Tony-winning musical featuring signature members of the original Broadway cast, including Reeve Carney, André De Shields, and Amber Gray.
Podcast pioneer Marc Maron talked to many, many, many folks over the 16-year run of his signature chat show, WTF with Marc Maron, but he never got around to chatting with any of the Dawson’s Creek cast. But thanks to Tribeca, he’s to the opportunity to schedule a coffee date with Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson ahead of the respective premieres of their latest movies. The former Joey Potter and Pacey Witter are reuniting for Happy Hours, a new New York City-set romance helmed by Holmes, whose previous directorial efforts — 2016’s All We Had and 2022’s Alone Together — also bowed at Tribeca. Maron, meanwhile, scores his most high-profile acting gig yet as the leading man of In Memoriam, the story of a prickly Hollywood star whose terminal cancer diagnosis spurs him to try and land a coveted spot in the Oscar night In Memoriam tribute reel.
Other star-powered vehicles making a hard launch at Tribeca are led by The Leader, which stars Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga as the founders of the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult that executed one of the largest mass suicides in American history in the late ’90s. Elsewhere, André Holland and Wendell Pierce headline They Fight, a teen boxing movie that throws some Rocky-style punches; Emilia Clarke strikes sparks with Édgar Ramírez in the Sliding Doors-esque romance, Next Life; and Oscar winner Alicia Vikander shares the screen with Oscar nominee Wagner Moura in the Virginia Woolf-inspired, The Last Day.
The most recent Oscar cycle wasn’t one red carpet after another for Sean Penn, who picked up a third career Oscar statuette for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another without doing any campaigning. Maybe that will come up in his first major post-Oscars interview at Tribeca where the Milk star will share the stage with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins as part of the festival’s all-star Storytellers panel series. Other pairings you can look for during Tribeca’s run include Bruce Springsteen and Bono, Keke Palmer and Whoopi Goldberg, Teyana Taylor and Janicza Bravo, and Paul Rudd and Seth Meyers — two guys who know how to slap the bass.
But the hottest ticket in Tribeca town is the sit-down between Jimmy Fallon and Madonna that follows the premiere of the music icon’s Confessions II, a short “visual work” that’s scored to the first six songs off her latest album. It’ll be Madonna’s first time gracing a Tribeca stage, and you can bet that her devoted audience will be desperately seeking words of wisdom… and maybe a tune or two.
10 years ago, the entire Taxi Driver crew were talking to all of us at Tribeca’s 40th anniversary screening of the Martin Scorsese classic. Flash-forward to 2026, and Scorsese and De Niro are the only ones repping the 50th anniversary reunion, but that dynamic duo should still have some insightful things to say about one of the defining movies of their decades-long collaboration.
Taxi Driver is one of six reunion screenings that will grace Tribeca, ranging from big hits to cult fare. The former is represented by a 25th anniversary celebration of Bridget Jones’s Diary with star Renée Zellweger and director Sharon Maguire chatting about the franchise-launching rom-com. The latter group, meanwhile, begins with the 30th anniversary of Bound, the Lana and Lilly Wachowski-directed thriller that launched the duo on the road to making The Matrix. Lilly Wachowski will be joined by the movie’s stars, Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, and Joe Pantoliano. And in a late addition, Ben Stiller and Matthew Broderick will explain what they were thinking when they unleashed The Cable Guy upon unsuspecting moviegoers three decades ago.
It’s not TV — it’s Tribeca. The festival’s small screen offerings lead off with the series premiere of the Hulu “wrong-com,” Alice and Steve, starring Jermaine Clement and Nicola Walker as the titular pals, whose decades-long friendship hits a major speed bump after Steve starts dating Alice’s twentysomething daughter. Tribeca is also debuting the Season 2 returns of FX’s Adults and the hit Marvel cartoon series, X-Men ’97, and getting in on that still-lingering excitement surrounding Survivor 50 with a panel that brings together alums like Cirie Fields, Rob Cesternino, and Kyle Fraser.
On the TV doc side, investigative journalist Ronan Farrow offers sneak peeks at two new HBO true crime yarns Not a Very Good Murderer and The Palladino Files, while the prestige cable network’s docu-series The Man Will Burn chronicles the life and (high) times of Burning Man. Other strong non-fiction stories include the chess-themed Grandmasters; the football-themed Dear England; and the cult-themed The Little Cult that Could.
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