Nia DaCosta has known she’s wanted to be a director since she was 16 years old, because, as she put it in our interview, “I realized they’re the ones doing all the ‘stuff.’”

It’s easy to remember the late designer Alexander McQueen as a stunning visionary, a fashion designer who seemed to build entirely new worlds on his runway. They were collections inspired by violence and blood, surgery and mental hospitals, robots and aliens, and were an indelible influence on so many designers that…

The last thing I wanted to do at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon was see Jonathan, which premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival. Jonathan has been labeled a “thriller,” which is my least favorite genre, and stars Ansel Elgort, who is my least favorite actor. In fact, it technically stars two Ansel Elgorts,…

Duck Butter’s Naima (Alia Shawkat) and Sergio (Laia Costa) fuck like the world is ending. They do it at Sergio’s house, they do it at Naima’s house, they do it outside within potential view of strangers. They finger bang on a piano bench and kiss in between slurps of mango. They recreate Sergio’s experience of…

The act of watching a documentary in the same room as the subject’s family and friends is a harrowing experience, especially when the subject isn’t there to witness it. For the past two years, co-directors Kate Davis and David Heilbroner have closely followed the case of Sandra Bland, and Wednesday night was the first…

Mary Shelley has all the makings of a classic teen girl coming-of-age film. There’s a passionate, star-crossed romance, spats with pseudo-intellectual sexist bros who undermine our heroine’s intelligence, drunken parties, and nights filled with scribbling in a notebook instead of sleeping. The themes are so familiar,…

“That was fucked up... in an artistic way,” said a frank member of the audience at the end of the first Tribeca screening of La Enfermedad del Domingo, better known as Sunday’s Illness here in the US. You could hear every breath and movement at Cinépolis Chelsea Theatre as the closing credits ran. Director Ramón…

In this clip for the film Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland—an HBO documentary about the ambiguous, unsettling details surrounding Bland’s death—family members recall all the doubts they had in the days and months after she died.

In this clip from A Suitable Girl, a documentary about the divisive tradition of arranged marriages in India, a woman named Amrita explains the burden of being seen as a man’s property. “You lose your identity when you get married, and that’s one thing I never wanted to do,” she says. “More than eighty precent of…

When director and photojournalist Kate Brooks began filming The Last Animals, which premiered last month at the Tribeca Film Festival, there were seven Northern White Rhinos left on the planet. Now there are only three, all living under 24-hour armed protection at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Sudan, the last…

On Saturday, Barbra Streisand sat down with Robert Rodriguez in front of a rapturous audience at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center for a discussion about her career. Their talk focused mainly on her film work (the hourlong event was part the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca Talk series) and was moderated by…

Before the Wednesday evening premiere of Whitney. “Can I Be Me” at the Tribeca Film Festival, its co-director (and documentary legend) Nick Broomfield announced that his film had been in jeopardy of being yanked from the festival slate—he’d been given final the go-head to screen less than three hours before. Since…

The filmmakers involved in the biopic Tom of Finland, which is playing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, didn’t necessarily set out to be political, but the subject’s inherent politics nonetheless surfaced in the six or so years since they began making it. Tom of Finland tells the life story of Touko Laaksonen,…

How do we begin to fill in the holes of our undervalued, under-documented LGBT cultural history? What do we do with the stories that gnaw at us for what they leave unanswered as much as they uplift us for what they declare? How do you tell a story that doesn’t have an ending? With his new movie, David France (How To…

At the premiere of A Hologram for the King Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival, Dascha Polanco was feeling herself. (More photos after the jump of her killer eye makeup, all-black ensemble, and general joie de vivre.)

Despite our fascination with the lives of people who have been deemed societally “important” because of accomplishments, fame and riches, the nitty-gritty of how and why we know what we know about them often gets swept under the rug. Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit, which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival,…

To get to the premiere of All This Panic, husband-and-wife team Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton’s documentary about young women coming of age in New York City, I had to walk through my own childhood and the beginning of my teen years.

On Saturday, Tribeca Film Festival co-founder and hapless creator of a media shitstorm Robert De Niro announced that an anti-vaccination film would no longer be shown at the festival. The film’s creators have since issued a statement saying they’re being censored by De Niro and “corporate interests.”

This year’s Tribeca Film Festival will include a screening of a film by Andrew Wakefield, the former doctor who was stripped of his medical license after authoring a discredited study that implied a link between vaccines and autism. A spokesperson for the film tells Jezebel that there will be “celebrity support” for…