“Getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated,” said Billy Joel in a statement read by Susan Lacy, the codirector with Jessica Levin of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, on a bittersweet opening night at this year’s Tribeca Festival. Two weeks ago, Joel announced that he had been diagnosed with a brain disorder known as normal pressure hydrocephalus, forcing him to cancel all upcoming concerts as well as a major tour planned for next year.
As Hilary Lewis notes in the Hollywood Reporter, the team behind And So It Goes was eager to assure Wednesday night’s audience that the prognosis is good: “He’s going to be fine.” Tribeca cofounders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal were on hand to quote from a few of Joel’s hits (“Only the Good Die Young,” “New York State of Mind”) and reaffirm the statement they issued when Joel broke the news of his diagnosis: “This is the perfect moment to recognize a creative force whose work reflects the very soul of our city—and the heart of Tribeca.”
And So It Goes is one of several music docs in the Tribeca 2025 lineup, including films about Depeche Mode, Metallica, Boy George and Culture Club, Counting Crows, Rebbeca, Billy Idol, and Yello, as well as Something Beautiful, a fifty-five-minute music video Miley Cyrus has codirected with Jacob Bixenman and Brendan Walter. “Tribeca is hosting more than twenty music events this year—the highest number yet—including documentaries, music videos and podcasts,” notes Shivani Vora in the New York Times.
Along with live performances, the festival will also host “video games, audio storytelling, and an immersive program stamped with a catalog of acronyms: AR, VR, AI,” writes Natalia Winkelman in the NYT. Tribeca is “eager to be seen as a celebration of transformation, a festival of the future. The zeal with which Tribeca pushes forward can feel exciting, but like an overactive online shopper, it also generates clutter. It’s hard to find the gems,” but Winkelman seems to have found a good handful. And Filmmaker’s Natalia Keogan, the A.V. Club’s Jacob Oller,Variety’s Brent Lang and Rebecca Rubin, and the staffs at Hammer to Nail,IndieWire, and ScreenAnarchy have more recommendations.
Festivals should be an adventure, an opportunity to give a fair shake to an as-yet-unknown filmmaker, but occasionally, perhaps after a string of duds, the time is right for something tried and true. Several likely sure bets are gathered in the strand Tribeca calls Reunions & Retrospectives. De Niro has taken part in a few of these events in past, perhaps most memorably when he reunited with Francis Ford Coppola and the casts of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1972) and with Michael Mann and Al Pacino for a collective look back at Heat (1995).
De Niro will be joined this evening by Martin Scorsese to discuss Casino, the 1995 film that probed organized crime’s hold on Las Vegas. Goodfellas (1990) “is like Scorsese’s Rocco and His Brothers, Casino his The Leopard,” suggested Reverse Shot’s Jeff Reichert in 2014. “All four films are epic-length studies of moments of historical transition, but the former pairing immerses viewers in the lives being lived in those moments, while the latter two are more detached, concerned with the crumbling of larger institutional forces.”
Tomorrow evening, Scorsese will introduce a screening of Kundun (1997), his spiritual coming-of-age portrait of the fourteenth Dalai Lama. “Kundun is filled with beautifully filmed depictions of elaborate Tibetan ceremonies, dream sequences, and apparitions, all set to Philip Glass’s ethereal, pointedly repetitive score,” wrote Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice in 2017. “It might be Scorsese’s most stylized work.”
On June 14, Tribeca and the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival will cohost an evening with David Cronenberg. The occasion is the fiftieth anniversary of Cronenberg’s third feature, Shivers, in which a high-rise apartment building is infested with parasites that turn residents into fierce nymphomaniacs. “True to the iconoclastic genre cinema of the 1970s,” wrote Budd Wilkins at Slant in 2020, “Shivers ends not with the restoration of moral order, but with the newly converted setting out to inaugurate an entirely new order, one that unabashedly embraces the ‘other’ in all its manifestations.”
The festival will salute four films on their twenty-fifth anniversaries. De Niro will join Ben Stiller and director Jay Roach to reminisce about the making of Meet the Parents, the comedy that launched a series—a fourth installment is slated for next year. Mary Harron will chat about American Psycho, her adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel that, as Vulture’s Alison Willmore recently noted, is being hilariously misread to this day.
Stephen Colbert will moderate a discussion with Christopher Guest, John Michael Higgins, Michael McKean, and Parker Posey about their mockumentary Best in Show. And Darren Aronofsky and Ellen Burstyn will be on hand for a screening of Requiem for a Dream, which A. O. Scott, when he was still reviewing movies for the New York Times, called “a downer, and a knockout.”
Two films in the lineup turn twenty this year. The festival will host the world premiere of a new 4K remaster of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Linda Linda Linda, starring Bae Doona (The Host, Air Doll), Aki Maeda (Battle Royale), Yu Kashii (Death Note), and Shiori Sekine, the bassist who plays with Base Ball Bear. “If the Beatles were teen girls starring in a John Hughes picture made with a distinctly Japanese attention to the comedy of everyday life, the movie showcasing it all would go something like this,” wrote Wesley Morris when he was still on staff at the Boston Globe.
With Street Fight, Marshall Curry focused on a young activist’s campaign to unseat a sixteen-year incumbent mayor of Newark. Cory Booker won, and the senator and the director will reunite for a conversation that, just as surely as it will revisit the past, will also look ahead to the immediate and uncertain future.
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