Everything Jezebel Loved (and Really Didn’t Love) at Tribeca 2025
I attended as much of the festival as I could. Here's what stood out—for better and for worse.
Photos: Sony Pictures Classic/ Getty Images EntertainmentMovies
From June 4-15, the 24th annual Tribeca Film festival played host to a catalogue of some of the year’s most anticipated cinematic offerings for your friend who’s either a sucker for self-congratulatory celebrity circle jerks or has an insatiable appetite for documentaries (me).
These include Miley Cyrus’ pop-opera, Something Beautiful (terrific!), the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced “Yanuni,” (timely!) HBO’s latest examination of a systemic sex scandal, Surviving Ohio State (terribly enraging!), and the Julia Fox-helmed double feature, Fior Di Latte and The Trainer (not totally terrible!). As I have for the last two years, I attended as much of the festival as I could. Here’s what stood out—for better and for worse.
The Hits
Boy George & Culture Club
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Plenty of artists can make a good pop song, but very few can make a perfect one. In the early eighties, Boy George and Culture Club burst onto the scene with multiple under their hats—these ones, specifically—and a unique understanding of their purpose. “The perfect pop song is a lullaby for adults,” Roy Hay, the band’s guitarist, says in Alison Ellwood’s Boy George & Culture Clash. That may be true, but the British new wave band’s platinum-selling debut album, Kissing to Be Clever, which boasted multiple international number ones like “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” and “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” wasn’t putting anyone to sleep. It was waking the world up.
One year later, the band’s sophomore album, Color By Numbers, did the same in multiple countries thanks to “Karma Chameleon” and “Church of the Poison Mind.” In just two years, Culture Clash cemented themselves not just as experimental artists of promise but pop icons. Then, the hits stopped coming. By the end of the decade, Boy George was publicly battling a heroin addiction and the band had—temporarily—broken up (as had its frontman and drummer). Boy George & Culture Clash starts from the beginning as it charts the band’s highs and lows, but make no mistake, it’s not a paint-by-numbers rise-and-fall story. Instead, it’s a warm, wistful retelling of Culture Clash’s decade-spanning relationship. Riddled by fame and remedied by genuine friendship, the band’s dynamic—even today, after a lawsuit and a lot of lost time—is fascinatingly complex, even if it’s frustrating.
Whether Ellwood intended it or not, the film also manages to say a lot about the political moment of Culture Club’s peak fame (and, coincidentally, that of today). In one laugh-out-loud recollection, Jon Moss, the band’s ex-drummer and Boy George’s former lover, remembered brazen bigots attending their concerts and lingering after the shows. They spoke plainly about hating “f-slurs.” And yet, there they were, singing along with an openly queer man. “That’s America,” Moss deadpans. Indeed, it is.
Surviving Ohio State
It’s been five years since Sports Illustrated asked, “Why Aren’t More People Talking About the Ohio State University Sex Abuse Scandal?” The staggering cover story examined the university’s systemic sex abuse perpetrated by Dr. Richard Strauss, which several high-ranking and well-known university officials—including the current chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (R)—failed to report. The magazine called it “the most sweeping sex abuse scandal in the history of American higher education.” Now, the question SI posed is more pertinent than ever.
Some of Strauss’ survivors—who are currently suing the university—speak for the first time on the big screen in a new documentary, Surviving Ohio State. Between 1978 and 1998, Strauss, a physician within the university’s athletic department, sexually assaulted hundreds of male athletes under the guise of medical treatment. According to a report commissioned by Ohio State and made public in 2019, Strauss—who died by suicide in 2005—was accused of at least 2,800 instances of alleged sexual misconduct which included more than 170 allegations rape during his tenure. The breadth of his predation, however, is immeasurable. The university was aware of complaints about Strauss’s conduct as early as 1979, but failed to investigate or hold him accountable.
The film, produced by HBO and Ohio-native George Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures and directed by Emmy- and Academy Award-winning actor Eva Orner, premiered on HBO this week. As an Ohio-native and Ohio State alum who began reporting on this story in 2021, I found the film admirable for allowing journalists who covered the story from the start—including SI‘s Jon Wertheim—to steer the narrative, while also restoring agency to where it belongs: the survivors themselves.
Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print
Photo: Getty Images
You’ll notice that Dear Ms.: A Revolution In Print appears as both a hit and a miss. This is no coincidence. The documentary is told in three parts by three different directors, Salima Koroma, Alice Gu, and Cecilia Aldarondo. That said, it’s stylistically inconsistent and retreads some of the same territory. Still, these aren’t the film’s worst sins. The irony is that at least one of its strengths is also its weakness.
Since 1971, Ms. magazine has sought to be a publishing rarity—a magazine created by and for women that both defied advertisers and corporate media’s expectations of what women wanted to read. To its credit, a wealth of beautiful writers and thinkers have graced its pages, and for its time, Ms. was radical in some ways. But that’s just the thing, all a revolution has is time. And if those at the helm aren’t mindful of it, all progress is lost in their pursuit of power. In that, the legacy of Ms. is complex. For many years, with every step forward, its stewardship left many women behind—Black, Latina, Indigenous, sex workers; the list is as long as the average issue.
When the film admits to this instead of issuing pithy apologies for it, it plays like a timely reminder that when movements aren’t led by the most impacted, they’re ultimately ineffectual. Dear Ms. is buttressed by features from a number of powerhouse Black journalists, activists, and politicians, as well as sex workers who had a role in the magazine’s legacy. Each and every single one, it seems, is there to make you wonder where Ms. would be now if they had been calling the shots.
For Venida, For Kalief
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In 2010, Kalief Browder, a 22-year-old man from the Bronx, was arrested on his way home from a party. He was accused of stealing a backpack and was charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. Without trial, Browder was held on Rikers Island until 2013, during which he suffered multiple beatings by guards and fellow inmates and an 800-day stay in solitary confinement. Eventually, the charges were dropped, and he was released, but the cruelty inflicted upon him while in jail remained. By 2015, Browder died by suicide. One year later, his mother, Venida, passed away following a heart attack.
Filmmaker Sisa Bueno, who had been spending time with Venida for a project, was there as a witness. Now, that project, For Venida, For Kalief, has arrived as a film that pairs Venida’s grief-saturated, gut-wrenching poetry with archival footage. Those close to Venida believe her death was a result of witnessing the brutal and inhumane treatment of her son. Bueno skillfully contextualizes the staggering dehumanization of the carceral system in New York City via powerful documentation of the Citywide Jail Rebellion in 1970, in which prisoners and protestors across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Rikers Island fought the inhumane living conditions. In doing so, Venida is made emblematic not just of a mother whose heart was broken by the system, but of the many traumatized loved ones who’ve railed against it in their own ways for decades.
Bueno’s determination to ensure Venida has a voice—even, and especially, in death—is obvious without being self-congratulatory. More storytellers would do well to take note.
The Misses
Oh, Hi!
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A romcom where a new couple goes away for the weekend that culminates with the man being held captive after they find themselves at odds with what they want out of their relationship sounds—at the very least—intriguing, no? Unfortunately, the idea is only good on paper.
Writer-director Sophie Brooks’ third film starts out promising as the cheerful Iris (Molly Gordon) and her charming new boyfriend Isaac (Logan Lerman) embark on their first romantic trip together. They shop, steal several intimate moments, and share what turns out to be very revelatory confessions. Then, things take an abrupt turn post-sex when Iris realizes she’s the only one who’s actually serious about a relationship beyond the honeymoon stage. Thus, Iris commits herself to a strategy that a sad population of women do all the time: convincing Isaac that she’s worthy of a relationship. By any means necessary (read: keeping chained to the bed).
Frankly, I wish someone had told Brooks that the asymmetrical expectations between men and women in modern dating offer more than enough comedic fodder on their own. There’s no need for even half of the slapstick hijinks that ensue in the film’s final forty-five minutes. Nor the bizarre dream montage. A more compelling ending might’ve been that Iris realized she doesn’t need to convince anyone of anything at all. Imagine if she simply left Isaac there, shackled to the only thing he really wanted…supposedly shackle-less sex.
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything
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It was only a matter of time before Barbara Walters got the girl boss treatment in a documentary. Nearly three years after her death, Jackie Jesko’s Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything enlists all of media’s familiar faces to help, from Andy Cohen to Katie Couric rto Oprah Winfrey. Did Walters break ground for women in broadcasting? Maybe! But the longer I watched, the less I was convinced that was, in fact, her purpose.
Who could forget her 1981 interview with Brooke Shields, in which she asked the then-15-year-old about her measurements? Or the 1977 sit-down with Dolly Parton, where Walter spent half the interview patronizing the icon about how she chooses to present herself? And what about the little chats she had with Ricky Martin or Monica Lewinsky, in which she asked them invasive questions about their sex lives?
Some might think it’s unfair or anti-feminist, but it’s difficult to celebrate a supposed trailblazer when so many toxic exchanges are littered in her wake—no matter how many years have passed.
Dear Ms:
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I’ll make this as succinct as possible: for a film that spends two hours allowing its least-deserving subjects to pat themselves on the back for all they contributed to modern-day feminism, it’s telling that only white women are seen in the final, celebratory shot.
Mrs. America
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Every year since 1938, married women have competed for the title of Mrs. America. If that sounds regressive and bordering on dystopian in this particular moment, well, you’re onto something. Regardless of how much humanity filmmaker Penny Lane allows these very smart, terribly sequinned contestants in this frustrating docuseries, the bottom line is that they’re still measuring their womanhood against each other.
It’s helpful to approach Mrs. America as part of a newer wave of documentaries that examine how women are supposedly empowered by systems that, in reality, actively disempower them (see: America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders). Are they worth a watch? Sometimes. Can they surprise the viewer? Sure. But when it comes to this particular one, I wasn’t captivated enough to find out if I could be.
“I think of beauty pageants as being for girls or young women. And there was something so immediately captivating to me about the different age demographic,” Lane told Variety of the inspiration behind Mrs. America in a recent interview. “They’re adults. Like life has happened to them. Sometimes they have aging parents. Many of them have children and careers and just complex lives.” All of that is obvious. But what’s less clear is why they’re actually devoting so much of their complex lives to doing…this.
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