As usual, among the dozens of films premiering at Robert DeNiro’s annual Tribeca Festival (“Film” was dropped from the title last year to mark the fact that it’s encompassing much more than just cinema) are an interesting mix of documentaries that touch on subjects as varied as movies, music, theater, and the never-ending business of war, corporate welfare and—yes, still—even UFOs. 

In this engaging if slight documentary, Andrew McCarthy visits the other members of the so-called “Brat Pack”—a group of 20something actors who 40 years ago starred in movies like The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink—to discuss whether that moniker was helpful, hurtful or somewhere in between. McCarthy chats with Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Jon Cryer, Demi Moore, Lea Thompson, Tim Hutton and Ally Sheedy about their thoughts on the 1985 magazine article that gave them the label. (Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald did not participate, unfortunately—their thoughts would have been welcome.) The conversations are chatty, amusing, even occasionally insightful—as McCarthy also talks with others like writer Bret Easton Ellis and director Howard Deutch (who is Thompson’s husband)—and the result is an entertaining trek back to the mid-80s for some of us.

 

For three decades and 20 films, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the most enduring works in British cinema, which include many indelible images, from those of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947) to The Small Back Room (1948), The Red Shoes (1949) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). David Hinton’s informative documentary dissects their partnership and why it ended (Powell made films himself, including the overrated cult item Peeping Tom, in 1960). Then there’s Martin Scorsese, an unabashed Powell and Pressburger fan, who not only narrates but acts as our on-camera host, even comparing what he did in some of his films with what they did in their pictures (a word he loves). Scorsese is always a terrific raconteur and knowledgeable commentator on film history, but Made in England needs a little less Marty and a little more Powell and Pressburger.

 

 

Broadway performer Renee Elise Goldsberry, who won a Tony for playing Angelica Schuyler in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, is the focus of Chris Bolan and Melissa Haizlip’s personal portrait. Balancing home and work isn’t the most original subject for a documentary, but like the Ani DiFranco doc (below), this makes for often riveting viewing as Goldsberry, who has a young son and adopted daughter, tries keeping her professional and personal lives afloat while dealing with setbacks and triumphs, at times simultaneously—as during her final, filmed performance of Rent on Broadway—and she is the perfect doc subject: endlessly personable and confessional. 

 

The same could be said for alternative music pioneer Ani DiFranco, the Buffalo-born musician turned entrepreneur (she has her own record label, Righteous Babe) who’s released dozens of albums in the past three decades. In Dana Flor’s intimate fly-on-the-wall portrait, DiFranco—now in her early 50s—must navigate how to remain relevant in a business that’s very different from when she began and keep her artistic integrity while raising her two daughters. The film’s title refers to the toll-free phone number for her Buffalo office in the early days; it also describes DiFranco’s fierce independence that’s marked her career.

 

How right-wing racists and fascists on social media get their hateful messaging across is the focus of Simon Klose’s forceful documentary, which follows muck-raking Swedish journalist My Vingren as she tracks down online offenders, often by creating fake profiles to interact with, and catch, them. The heroic Vingren—well aware of the social media giants’ history of appeasing and even monetizing hate on their platforms—also talks with Twitter whistleblower Anika Collier Navaroli, who emotionally recounts the blowback from her decision to ban Trump from the site after the January 6 riot.

 

Russia’s illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine not only put people and property at great risk but also countless animals; Joshua Zeman’s wrenching documentary homes in on Feldman Ecopark, an animal refuge near Ukraine’s second-largest city where those in residence there need to be removed from their dangerous location to safer spaces. Zeman also introduces the many brave people, from zoo workers to volunteers, who risk their very lives to try and get the animals to safety, all while a deadly war rages around them. In fact, the most memorable moments of the documentary are the raw footage from the front lines that these same people record for posterity.

 

 

A long-disused area in Brooklyn called Industry City is the center of a plan by developers to have it rezoned for commercial use, while local politicians and ordinary people line up to oppose it. But Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s documentary, which follows many of the principals over several years of back and forth in community meetings and other settings, allows everyone to tell their side of the story—and the result is a complex mosaic of how the 21st century city can exist for all, even those with diametrically opposing viewpoints.  

They're Here

Directors Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez talk to several people in New York State—several in the Rochester area and others in Scarsdale and Orange County—who believe they have either seen or been visited by aliens. (The title, of course, comes from the famous line spoken by the young daughter Carol Ann in Poltergeist.) Although the film takes their claims seriously, and they definitely seem affected by something inexplicable, there’s also a welcome lightheartedness to this study of people who are looking for any sort of connection, and so those who are skeptical can also appreciate and even sympathize with their wide-eyed wonder.