TRIBECA 2026 PREVIEW
Our Most Anticipated Films of the 25th Anniversary of Tribeca Film Festival
By MIGUEL MATEO | JUNE 3, 2026
We make our first trip for the festival's 25th edition, running June 3 to 14 across New York, and the anniversary slate is almost unfairly stacked: a record 103 world premieres, Quentin Tarantino acting for the first time in three decades, two Al Pacino pictures, and a deep bench of first-time directors with real money behind them.
But the number that stops me is the one on the banner. Twenty-five years. Tribeca was born in the wreckage of 9/11, dreamed up to coax life back into a Lower Manhattan that had gone silent, and this edition lands on the 25th anniversary of the day that made it necessary. I grew up in New Jersey, a teenager in a high school classroom the morning the towers came down, just across the river from a skyline that changed before lunch. Walking into the festival that rose out of that day, a quarter century later, is not a small thing for me. It is most of the reason this trip finally stopped being "next year."
So call it fitting, or call it a little on the nose, that we landed on 25 films for the 25th year. Some made the cut for the names, some for the premise, and a handful for reasons that are entirely our own. We've laid them out in the order they premiere, so consider this our rough game plan too. If you spot two cinephiiles power-walking between theaters with lanyards swinging, that's us.
The Accompanist
World premiere: June 4
When a panicked rookie caseworker (Aubrey Plaza) pulls nine-year-old Emily from her ailing grandfather's care, the girl lands with Sylvia, a funny, witchy, gloriously unpredictable older woman played by Susan Sarandon, and the two of them set about building a family nobody planned. This is Zach Woods stepping behind the camera for the first time after years of stealing scenes on Silicon Valley and The Office, reportedly bringing a soft surreality that lets past and present bleed together. Full disclosure: the New Jersey setting gave this Jersey kid a little jolt. Newcomer Everly Carganilla and Sarandon are the hook, but Woods as a director is the real question mark, and a tantalizing one.
RECLUSE
World premiere: June 4
Henry Chaisson, who wrote Antlers, makes his directing debut with a gothic horror piece that sounds genuinely nasty in the best way. Joan comes home to nurse her bedridden father and finds the house itself working against her, a malevolent thing that is mostly unseen until, to her horror, it isn't. Sasha Frolova, Xander Berkeley, and Toby Poser star. It lands in the Escape from Tribeca strand, and the premise sits right where we like our horror: in the gap where family grief and actual dread become impossible to tell apart.
IX XI
World premiere: June 4
Sean Wilsey's documentary gathers twelve ordinary New Yorkers and lets them walk us through their lives before and during 9/11, the individual standing in for the millions. There is no festival on earth where this film carries more weight than the one founded in direct response to that day, now marking its 25th year. We expect a hard sit. But festivals exist in part to hold space for exactly this kind of collective memory, and watching it in Lower Manhattan, steps from where it happened, will be its own quiet act of remembrance.
KINGSTON
Kingston
World premiere: June 4
On the gilded grounds of Kingston College, prestige drips off the students, the faculty, and the architecture itself, right up until campus unrest sends three interlocking stories of disaffected misfits crashing into each other, all of it quietly stage-managed by an all-seeing institution. Carlos Key and Kalijah Rowe direct, plugging into the campus-pressure-cooker tradition while reaching for something stranger and more pointed about power and who gets to belong. Ensemble films built on intersecting outsiders are a high-wire act, and when they connect they can define a festival's discovery section. This is the kind of debut we love putting an early chip on.
Cotton Fever
World premiere: June 5
Daniel Blake Schwartz pulls from his own history for this debut, and you can feel it. The film moves through several braided lives caught in the loop of addiction and recovery in Chelsea, Massachusetts, with a texture that reads as lived rather than researched. Sosie Bacon and Kyle Gallner, two performers who have quietly become shorthand for "this indie is worth your time," carry it. Recovery stories collapse the second they start lecturing, and everything about this one suggests Schwartz knows better than to do that.
The Leader
World premiere: June 5
Heaven's Gate is the kind of story that invites cheap mockery, so the casting of Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga as the people inside it gives us hope someone wanted the harder version. Director Michael Gallagher digs into the cult that talked dozens of people into leaving their lives behind to wait for a ride off the planet. Jim Parsons and Simon Rex round things out. Nelson in particular has the unsettling tenderness a part like this demands, and the films that sit with believers instead of pointing at them tend to be the ones that haunt you.
The Revisionist
World premiere: June 5
A novelist named Elise starts treating the people closest to her as raw material, nudging and rewriting them like figures in a draft, until an old friend's return forces the question of how much she'll sacrifice for the work. Director Alex Vlack hands that premise to a frighteningly good cast: Alison Brie (who also produces), André Holland, Tom Sturridge, and Dustin Hoffman. Anyone who makes things for a living knows the quiet ethical rot of using the people around you as content, which is what makes this one cut close. It screens as one of the festival's KLM-presented premieres, and it's near the top of our list.
Airport BLVD
World premiere: June 5
This is the personal one. Alejandro Hendricks sets his jazz-soaked musical in East Austin, my own stretch of the world, following Xavier as his neighborhood, his friendships, and his sense of belonging get priced out from under him. It's playing in the U.S. Narrative Competition and is pitched as a bittersweet love letter to a city that's both vanishing and becoming something new. Anyone who has watched their block change into someone else's block will feel that ache in the logline. Watching Austin's reckoning with itself play out on a New York screen is a strange kind of homecoming, and I suspect I'll be more wrecked by it than anyone sitting near me.
The Haunting of Pennhurst
World premiere: June 5
Nothing on this list hits me where I live like this one. Pennhurst, the infamous Pennsylvania institution for people with disabilities that finally shut down in 1987 after decades of documented abuse, was the off-limits ruin my New Jersey classmates dared each other to sneak into back when it sat empty. Directors Nathan R. Stenberg, Mike Attie, and Katarina Poljak reopen those doors with a startling turn: the site now runs as a haunted attraction staffed largely by disabled performers who seize the building's grim history and rewrite it on their own terms. Cutting archival horror against present-day catharsis, it puts America's treatment of disabled people under a hard light while letting the performers convert shame into something defiant and even joyful. Walking back into Pennhurst through a movie screen is going to undo me a little, and I can't wait. Catch it in the Escape from Tribeca lineup.
Next Life
World premiere: June 5
Drake Doremus has spent his career making romances that ache, and this one splits the timeline down the middle. Ivy meets a handsome jazz musician on the train one morning, and the film forks: one path where she falls for the stranger, one where she circles back to her ex-fiancé, and no clean way to know which love is the truer one. Emilia Clarke leads and produces, with Jack Farthing and Édgar Ramírez. Doremus shoots loose and raw, which is the right instrument for a story about the lives we don't choose, so we're going in braced to come out quietly leveled.
Via Negativa
World premiere: June 5
After an estranged friend dies, a young priest named Dan walks away from his conservative diocese with his faith in pieces and points himself west. Hannah Peterson, back at Tribeca after 2023's The Graduates, adapts Daniel Hornsby's novel into a road movie where the search for closure means circling the older clergyman tied to his friend's abuse, with a wounded coyote and a string of enigmatic strangers picked up along the way. Young Mazino, the breakout heart of Beef, leads, surrounded by Tony Hale, Zoë Winters, Mamoudou Athie, and Carl Clemons-Hopkins, with Anora's Oscar-winning producer Samantha Quan among the executive producers. It's in the U.S. Narrative Competition, and a bruised, searching character study riding on a face as expressive as Mazino's is exactly our kind of festival gamble.
Rain Reign
World premiere: June 6
Adapted from Ann M. Martin's novel, this one centers on Rose, a twelve-year-old neurodivergent girl whose entire world orbits her dog, and the frantic search that follows when the dog vanishes during a superstorm. Paul Rudd anchors it, with Jeremy Sisto and Gretchen Mol alongside him and Erika Burke Rossa directing her first feature. Rudd in a straight dramatic register is always worth the ticket. Told from a neurodivergent kid's point of view, this has real room to be tender without ever tipping into a lecture, and that's exactly the version I'm hoping for.
Happy Hours
World premiere: June 6
Two former lovers cross paths years after an ending neither of them ever really closed, and the rest of the city does what New York does in these movies. Katie Holmes writes, directs, and stars in her fourth feature, opposite Joshua Jackson, in a Dawson's Creek reunion engineered to short-circuit a very specific generation (hi, it's us). The supporting bench is loaded with Mary-Louise Parker and Constance Wu, with a Norah Jones score reportedly threading underneath. Holmes has been quietly building a real directing career, and a grown-up, slightly melancholy story about second chances rewards exactly the restraint she tends to bring.
The Last Day
World premiere: June 6
Artist Rachel Rose reworks Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway for a contemporary New York, compressing it into a single Fourth of July. Julia, a writer and mother played by Alicia Vikander, drifts through the city colliding with figures from her past and a troubled young mother (Victoria Pedretti), the day pushing her to confront a life that's slipped its creative purpose. Wagner Moura co-stars, with Killer Films producing, which is about as strong an indie pedigree as a project can carry. Vikander and Moura can both hold a film's worth of feeling in a single look, which is precisely the muscle Woolf's interior drama needs.
Only What We Carry
World premiere: June 6
Old secrets and new attractions detonate among a dancer, her sister, her former choreographer, and his visiting friend, in a film Jamie Adams reportedly improvised across just six days on the Normandy coast. The cast is almost a prank in how loaded it is: Sofia Boutella, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lizzy McAlpine, Simon Pegg, and, yes, Quentin Tarantino, acting for the first time in roughly thirty years. Six days of improvisation could come out electric or shaggy, but the charge between those people on screen will be one of a kind either way. Tarantino in front of the camera again is a "tell people you were there" event, and we plan to be there.
Ponderosa
World premiere: June 6
When the buffet where Zeke's mom works shutters, he gets cornered into humoring a wealthy regular who has developed a fixed, frankly alarming obsession with becoming his father. Rob Rice directs Jack Dylan Grazer as Zeke, with Alexis Bledel and Bill Camp, in something that's been described as comedy and drama with a low hum of horror underneath. That tonal slipperiness, funny and sad and faintly threatening all at once, is catnip when a filmmaker can actually keep it balanced. And Bill Camp doing obsessive and unsettling is reason enough on its own.
Labrador (Autopsy of Silence)
World premiere: June 6
A killing aboard a freighter wrecks the quiet of an ordinary crossing, and Inuk mechanic Alupa Tulugak, a friend of the dead man, finds himself the suspect, drawn into the cold machinery of settler justice. Acadian filmmaker Rodrigue Jean builds it like a murder mystery but reaches for something more elliptical, tracing how power and sexuality tangle with race and class against a country that loves to call itself tolerant. The pitch is stillness deployed as tension, the kind of patient formal nerve you mostly only find at festivals. This Canadian entry looks like one of the slate's genuine art-house finds.
Something You Should Know About Me
World premiere: June 6
A sweet and proudly raunchy trans rom-com, this one follows Al, an insecure cartoonist staring down the most terrifying assignment of his life: tell his best friend how he actually feels, or watch a handsome rival walk off with him. EJ Marcus features. It's the kind of voice-forward comedy that makes the festival's discovery sections such a reliable pleasure. Romances told from a vantage the mainstream still mostly ignores tend to feel familiar and brand new at the same time, which is the genre operating at its best. We're betting on big laughs with real ache underneath.
In Memoriam
World premiere: June 7
Rob Burnett's first feature in a decade runs on a beautifully grim joke: what's the one thing a dying man decides will prove his life mattered? A slot, naturally, in the Academy Awards' annual In Memoriam reel. Marc Maron plays a version of himself, surrounded by an absurd embarrassment of talent including Lily Gladstone, Sharon Stone, Talia Ryder, Justin Long, Judy Greer, Michael McKean, and Alan Ruck. Maron's specific cocktail of neurosis and hard-won warmth is perfect fuel for a story about waking up to your own life with the clock running. This has the shape of the festival's most quotable crowd-pleaser.
The Long Haul
World premiere: June 7
Margo Martindale finally gets the wheel. She plays CJ, a long-haul trucker who has spent decades outrunning something, until a letter from the parole board lands and the road can't keep her past at a distance any longer. David Drake directs his first feature, with a sneaky-good supporting cast in Cole Sprouse, Stephen Root, Yalitza Aparicio, and Wes Studi. Martindale as a lead rather than the scene-thief she's so often relegated to is an event by itself, because almost nobody can suggest a buried lifetime in so few words. We'd watch her read a delivery manifest, so a whole film carved out around her feels like a gift.
Ephemera
World premiere: June 7
In post-pandemic Shanghai, two women, one about to leave and one staying behind, spend a single charged night wandering the city together. Shan Jiang's tender, breezy queer love story trades on the particular voltage of a connection that already has an expiration date stamped on it, where every hour glows precisely because it's running out. This US and Singapore co-production is exactly the sort of small, finely observed international film you'd never bump into outside a festival. One-night-in-the-city romances are a fragile thing, and the ones that work tend to follow you home for years. We have a feeling about this one.
That Friend
World premiere: June 8
A restorative Palm Springs weekend for Henry and his girlfriend Penny curdles fast when Henry's bombastic friend Paul invites himself along, armed with laced cigarettes and a bottomless appetite for taking the bit too far. Alex Wall and Will Sterling direct, with Harvey Guillén as the chaos agent Paul, Billie Lourd as Penny, and Josh Brener as Henry. Everyone has survived a trip hijacked by that friend, which is the whole reason the premise lands. Pulled off right, this is a tight little pressure cooker about loyalty, jealousy, and figuring out when to finally cut someone loose.
Iconoclast
World premiere: June 9
Gabriel Basso, the human stone wall at the center of The Night Agent, takes the wheel completely here: he writes, directs, and stars. He plays a shut-in whose fixation on a livestreaming influencer curdles into something far worse, one quiet bad decision after another. Noah Centineo (also producing), Rain Spencer, and Courtney Eaton fill out the orbit around him. Parasocial obsession is everywhere in the culture right now and almost nowhere done well on screen, so a young actor betting his directorial debut on exactly that subject is the kind of swing we want to be in the room for.
Killing Castro
World premiere: June 9
New York, 1960, and the CIA, the FBI, and the Mafia are all converging on Fidel Castro after his arrival to address the United Nations. Al Pacino plays the CIA operative orchestrating the plot to take him out, until Castro (Diego Boneta) blows up everyone's plans by decamping to Harlem's Hotel Theresa at the invitation of Malcolm X (Kendrick Sampson), with a young translator yanked into the tightening net. Eif Rivera makes his feature debut steering a sprawling ensemble that includes Xolo Maridueña and KiKi Layne. As a Jersey kid I get a bonus kick knowing much of it shot in New Jersey. A starry Cold War thriller this dense with history is built for a packed festival house.
Never Change!
World premiere: June 9
A glorious legal loophole forces the entire Class of 2008 back into high school, now in their mid-thirties and hauling every ounce of midlife baggage and leftover teenage angst with them. Marty Schousboe directs from a John Reynolds script, with Reynolds starring alongside a murderers' row of alt-comedy royalty: Sofia Black-D'Elia, Topher Grace, Ana Gasteyer, Patti Harrison, Zach Cherry, Jo Firestone, and Rudy Pankow. Cheerfully ridiculous and fully committed to its own nonsense, it reads like the festival's purest hit of fun. With a cast this stacked, expect the whole theater wheezing in unison.
Spenser and I will be filing dispatches all festival long. If we skip your favorite, blame the cruel arithmetic of overlapping screenings, and then tell us what we missed.