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The 2025 Tribeca Festival marked my fifth year at the annual celebration of cinema and everything linked to it. While the film line-up and overall energy were as electric as ever, I took a backseat this time and tweaked my festival coverage strategy. I focused on watching as many films as possible without pausing to write reviews. It did test my eidetic memory a little, but proved to be a rewarding exercise in hindsight. As I now compile the list, I know exactly which films left a mark on me, complete with my order of preference.
Below is my Top 10 from the 2025 Tribeca Festival, ranked in reverse order:
10. A Tree Fell in the Woods
Nora Kirkpatrick’s debut feature dissects marital tensions after two best friends discover that their respective partners are cheating on them, with each other. Set in a snowstorm-struck vacation cabin, the film makes for an arresting watch, propelled by its manic energy. Yet, it occasionally buries its complex emotional undercurrents beneath vintage liquor and a volley of generic exchanges.
9. Natchez
In this curiosity-piquing documentary, Suzannah Herbert transports us to Natchez, Mississippi – a city with a troubling legacy of slave markets. Later, a peculiar tourist tradition known as the Pilgrimage emerged, where wealthy white women led tours of their antebellum estates. With a range of fascinating individuals contributing to its narrative, the film remains consistently engaging, clear-eyed, and quietly revelatory.
8. A Second Life
French filmmaker Laurent Slama’s A Second Life must have been either a dream project or a waking nightmare for sound designers. The film follows Elisabeth (Agathe Rousselle), who is grappling with hearing loss while trying to stay afloat in a client-facing job under a stern and unsympathetic boss, Elijah (Alex Lawther). Tense and contemplative, the film explores perception, silence, and survival. While powerful in mood and atmosphere, the narrative occasionally circles back on itself, risking a sense of repetition.
Yang Jong-Hyun’s film from South Korea is an ode to quiet, belated rebellion, aging without dignity, and the human need for warmth, even if it comes in the form of stolen soup. In a world where tech flourishes but empathy shrinks, the film follows three impoverished elders, U-sik, Hyeon-jung, and Hwa-jin, who forge an unlikely bond with one another and with premium restaurants across Seoul. Veterans Park Keun Hyong, Jang Yong, and Ye Su Jeong deliver finely tuned performances. You find yourself rooting for them, quietly wishing they never get caught in their dine-and-dash escapades.
An Eye for an Eye is as gripping as any thriller at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The documentary keeps you in suspense, withholding its outcome until the very end. With charged camerawork, raw emotion, and brisk editing, the filmmakers inject urgency into a story that could have easily drowned in despair. In a country where both women and minorities are systemically silenced, one wonders if the time has finally come for a reckoning.
5. Leads
At first glance, Bryan Poyser’s film treads familiar ground. An eccentric character disrupting a relative’s (typically more grounded) life, only to ultimately help turn it around. The early reels had me thinking of A Real Pain. But soon enough, Leads reveals itself to be more than the sum of its tropes. Beneath its conventional rhythm lies a thoughtfully crafted story – one that goes beyond sibling bonds to explore cinema, parenting, career choices, sexuality, and more. Heather Kafka and Justin Arnold (the best male performance from the 2025 Tribeca Festival) are phenomenal in their respective roles, making us smile, laugh, reflect, and even shed a tear or two in this small-scale yet endearing crowd-pleaser.
4. Honeyjoon
An Iranian mother and her young daughter escape to the postcard-perfect Azores for a holiday that doubles as a quiet reckoning of their bond. Briefly political and, at times, unexpectedly saucy (those swoon-worthy strangers don’t go unnoticed), the film is a lyrical mosaic of ideas under the sure hand of director Lilian T. Mehrel. With capable leads Amira Casar and Ayden Mayeri, Honeyjoon poignantly captures the opposites-attract dynamic that keeps this unalike mother-daughter duo tethered together.
3. Runa Simi
The world adores The Lion King. Studios go to great lengths to make sure it reaches audiences in the languages they call home. But what happens when the film is never released in your language? Just ask the Quechua-speaking community, or Fernando Valencia, a passionate dubbing artist.
Augusto Zegarra’s documentary chronicles Valencia’s tireless quest from his small Peruvian town to bring the beloved Disney classic to life in his native tongue. Inspiring yet slightly overlong, the film follows a man willing to move mountains for the love of his language. His unshakable devotion and relentless pursuit of doing it right are sure to warm the cockles of your heart.
2. A Bright Future
Set in an imaginative yet chilling dystopia, A Bright Future explores a community obsessed with reaching a place they call “the North.” No one who’s gone there has ever returned, yet the desire to leave is overpowering, especially among the youth. So when young Elisa is chosen, just like her sister before her, it’s a moment of pride for her family and neighborhood. The stakes rise further when her mother also wins a lottery to go. But as departure looms, Elisa begins to question the allure of the unknown and finds herself drawn back to the comforts of her current life.
Uruguayan filmmaker Lucía Garibaldi crafts a world as absurd as it is quietly unsettling – a pointed parable about blind faith in promises we cannot see.
Sarah Goher’s Cairo-set film is a statement that the real fences of class, opportunity, and social hierarchy are far harder to scale. The film’s devastatingly poignant climax will move you to tears and force you to rethink the very idea of celebration. Behind a child’s innocent wish lies a barren landscape of unspoken despair, where dreams die quietly, unnoticed by a world blinded by privilege, comfort, and power. An instant heart-warmer that is incredibly well-written, directed, and performed, Happy Birthday, by a huge margin, is the 2025 Tribeca Festival’s finest film.
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