The Tribeca Festival
June 3\u201314, 2026
New York<\/p>\n
Risen from post-9\/11 ashes and founded in 2001 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff with an ethos of hope, the Tribeca Festival turned twenty-five this past June. This year\u2019s slate feels more comprehensive than ever\u2014film, TV, games, branded storytelling\u2014paired with high ticket prices and more star-studded events. Yet beneath it all, Tribeca’s original ethos endures.<\/p>\n
Most of this year\u2019s highlights, fittingly, are David-and-Goliath stories. Does the zeitgeist shape the program, or does the program shape the zeitgeist? Tribeca 2026 showcased storytellers and New Yorkers\u2013\u2013big and small\u2014who once again cling to hope in the face of despair.<\/p>\n
Julian Schnabel\u2019s In the Hand of Dante, now streaming on Netflix, is a standout: an experimental drama that puzzles, challenges, and inspires. Adapted by Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg from Nick Tosches\u2019s novel, the film juxtaposes parallel timelines: in the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri (Oscar Isaac) is conceiving the Divine Comedy; in the twenty-first century, Nick (also Isaac) is enmeshed in a mob scheme authenticating a Dante manuscript. The threads contrast more than they coalesce, intentionally trapping Dante in a purgatory between authenticity and commerce, poetry and vulgarity. (Spoiler alert: poetry wins.)<\/p>\n
Viewers who surrender are galvanized. The fourteenth-century thread unspools in rich color, archaic verse, and abstract musings; the twenty-first\u2013century thread, shot in tenebrous black and white, plays like a bleakly funny Martin Scorsese film. Lyrical meets pulp. The most poignant moments belong to Scorsese himself as Dante\u2019s bristly-bearded mentor, murmuring \u201cTempus fugit\u201d as a primordial sky shifts from monochrome to color: a reminder of our connectedness across time. Schnabel\u2019s twin stories become a stand-in for a fraught present, longing for lost humanity.<\/p>\n
At the film\u2019s Paris Theater premiere (concurrent with, but separate from Tribeca), Scorsese introduced Schnabel\u2019s film alongside the director: mentorship\u2026 plus marketing. Yet, even as a Goliath in Tribeca\u2019s slate, the film leverages provocation over commerciality\u2014more an appeal for change than fodder for streaming.<\/p>\n
This duality pulsed throughout the festival. Liza Mandelup\u2019s Grandmasters, a propulsive doc series blending The Queen\u2019s Gambit with Safdie energy, frames chess as an extreme sport and its players as rock stars. Instead of virtuosos Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann, Mandelup centers our emotions on Wesley So\u2014a gentle Filipino-American whose immigrant story shapes his identity as much as his game. Even as he shies from the spotlight, So becomes our protagonist: an institutional outlier who succeeds on his own terms, speaking to our need for quiet perseverance over spectacle.<\/p>\n
On the opposite end of the spectrum\u2014in both scale and seniority\u2014shoestring indies by young filmmakers burst with commercial bite. Kingston, an incendiary satire of education-gone-corporate, was filmed on Columbia University\u2019s campus\u2014written, produced, and directed by recent graduates. The film takes big swings: a bombastic score, one too many ideas, and a predictable dating-app subplot. But as a deconstruction of college comedy, it succeeds. Campus statues are juxtaposed with student faces\u2014plaintive, judgmental, resigned. Then comes real footage from campus protest encampments\u2013\u2013fictional indignation turned into tangible action. Powerful stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tribeca FestivalJune 3\u201314, 2026New York Risen from post-9\/11 ashes and founded in 2001 by Robert De Niro,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-335929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}