{"id":486967,"date":"2026-06-07T02:20:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T02:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/486967\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T02:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T02:20:13","slug":"madonna-premieres-confessions-ii-at-tribeca-fest-opens-up-about-lp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/486967\/","title":{"rendered":"Madonna Premieres ‘Confessions II’ at Tribeca Fest, Opens Up About LP"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHere\u2019s what the Tribeca Film Fest organizers told Madonna fans to expect<\/a> at the Friday night premiere of her Confessions II: It\u2019s \u201can ambitious visual work exceeding 10 minutes, built around the first six tracks of Madonna<\/a>\u2018s forthcoming album.\u201d This is what they ended up seeing: a surrealistic polyptych of women with lasers shooting out of their private parts, Benedict Cumberbatch voguing in a bathroom, and Madonna in all her various personae, from vulnerable, lonely songwriter to you-can-dance-on-a-moving-table contortionist.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd in addition to Madonna, the short featured 16 celebrity cameos, including Sabrina Carpenter, Feid, Debi Mazar, Kate Moss, Julia Garner, Odessa A\u2019zion, Richard E. Grant, Honey Dijon, and Madonna\u2019s daughter Lourdes Leon, among others, in its 13-minute runtime. With so much stunning imagery and samples of songs from Madonna\u2019s upcoming Confessions II<\/a>, a sequel of sorts to 2005\u2019s Confessions on a Dance Floor due July 3, including \u201cI Feel So Free\u201d<\/a> and \u201cBring Your Love,\u201d<\/a> the film made the long wait to see it that evening, since attendees\u2019 phones locked in Yondr cases for up to two-and-a-half hours from when doors opened, worth it. (The rest of the world still has to wait until Monday to see the film on YouTube<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tBut then of course there was Madonna herself. Twenty-six or so hours removed from a Times Square performance<\/a> that literally stopped traffic, the artist, 67, entered New York\u2019s Beacon Theatre from doors stage right wearing a big white, feathery coat, a sparkly dress, and dark sunglasses and followed by photographers\u2019 flashbulbs until she found her seat. After the film ended with Lourdes Leon saying, \u201cCut, bitch,\u201d and the credits rolled, Madonna wended her way to the stage for a Q&A alongside the film\u2019s directors, David Toro and Solomon Chase, aka TORSO, that Anderson Cooper moderated since the original host, Jimmy Fallon, was inexplicably unavailable. Now this was what people paid to see.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor 45 minutes, Madonna spoke candidly and volubly about a wide variety of subjects: her disdain for cell phones, which, she says, keep folks from connecting with one another (\u201ceverybody [at Coachella] had their phones up [and] I didn\u2019t know what anyone looked like\u201d); her memories of discovering gay clubs around Detroit (\u201ceveryone was free\u201d); feeling out-of-place in New York, so she\u2019d read F. Scott Fitzgerald (\u201cnot The Great Gatsby\u201c) at clubs; recollections of making out with Mazar \u201cjust to attract boys\u201d; the physical demands of performing live and any number of deflections of Cooper\u2019s questions about an upcoming tour (\u201cThere might be [one]\u201d); and, of course, the film, which she assured everyone wasn\u2019t a music video.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI like the idea of film, because I\u2019m a \u2018film-phile,\u2019 a cinephile, and film has inspired a good part of my life,\u201d she said, before channeling her inner Norma Desmond<\/a>: \u201cSomehow [the word] video seems cheap. It was good when it was just MTV and me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd while the film bore all the hallmarks of a big splashy Madonna music video, right down to highly sexual imagery that the prudes at MTV would\u2019ve banned<\/a>, it also felt like something unique, neither a clip nor a short film, but a let\u2019s-get-unconscious freaky bedtime story. The previously unreleased songs (\u201cGood for the Soul,\u201d \u201cOne Step Away,\u201d \u201cDanceteria,\u201d and \u201cRead My Lips\u201d) throbbed with the same easily danceable rhythms as the singles, and everything blended together into a fever dream. \u201cI\u2019m a storyteller, so, emotion journey, storytelling, and [TORSO are] from another planet and they think [about] environment and visual dopamine-firing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt opens with Madonna alone in a room as lingerie-clad women chase her with cameras, until suddenly she\u2019s in a forest and a white light is shining out of her crotch \u2026 which then cut to green lasers peering out of spinning spread-eagled women\u2019s vaginas and the butts of doggystyle people. \u201cI really have to give credit to these guys in terms of visuals for each environment,\u201d Madonna said, nodding to the TORSO directors. \u201cSpecifically, I never would have imagined lasers coming out of girls\u2019 pussies. Honestly, I really wanted to try it, but apparently, you get quite hot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a gay club in the film where Madonna and Carpenter sing, and Garner dances, the bathroom where she makes out with men she plucks from urinals (and Mazar and Cumberbatch dance), Feid in a mirror, black latex-wrapped BDSM women eating bananas, and Lourdes Leon, who received the biggest cheers of all the cameos from the Beacon audience, closing things out.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI did think about asking her in the beginning [to do the film] but she really turns everything down that has to do with me,\u201d Madonna said. \u201cWe wrote a song together that\u2019s on my record. It\u2019s called \u2018The Test.\u2019 It\u2019s beautiful. We wrote it in the studio at the same time, and it was sort of a healing moment between us.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m really proud of her,\u201d she continued. \u201cShe\u2019s so immensely talented, way more talented than I am. I\u2019m not saying that because I\u2019m her mom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film took six months to make, since they filmed it in London, L.A. and New York, and it was part of the year-and-a-half Madonna spent on the Confessions II album. The artist said she decided to make a dance album as a distraction from waiting for films and series projects she was working on to materialize. All of the songs on the LP, she said, blend together. \u201cThe record itself is one long-playing story,\u201d she said. \u201cWe wanted to make the record something you could put on to dance with from start to end, something that would take you on a journey. Towards the end it gets a little bit more thoughtful, emotional, and intimate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tUltimately, though, it\u2019s about how the music moves you, physically and metaphysically. \u201cI don\u2019t want to make mindless music,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to make music that\u2019s about something. Dance music makes you move your body, and you feel the pulse. It\u2019s, like, you\u2019re connecting to the universe, you\u2019re connecting to other humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd connection is what Madonna is all about right now. \u201cThe movie\u2019s really about connection,\u201d she said. \u201cI emerge from my solitude of this apartment and go right into a forest with people with lasers coming out of their asses. You just really go through life, take risks, be curious, be observant. \u2026 And put your fucking phones down and connect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s what the Tribeca Film Fest organizers told Madonna fans to expect at the Friday night premiere of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,664,278,201118],"class_list":["post-486967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-madonna","tag-music","tag-tribeca-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}