ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Female Film Critics 24/375

Tribeca 2025

Festivals Reviews 

STATE OF FIRSTS (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , , , , ,

The documentary State of Firsts, following Sarah McBride’s historic run in 2024 to become the first transgender member of Congress, takes a deliberate and delicate approach, much like McBride herself. She’s smiling and gracious everywhere she appears in public, feeling the responsibility to not be too emotional or give others a viral moment. “It is an unbelievable challenge of figuring out how to ensure that I am seen as a whole human being rather than just a walking trans flag,” she says. A Democrat representing Delaware, McBride won her seat during the same election cycle that brought President Donald Trump back to the White House. The film, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, accompanies McBride as she knocks doors and talks to constituents, spends time with family, and settles in on Capitol Hill.

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Festivals Reviews 

SUN RA: DO THE IMPOSSIBLE (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Leslie Combemale

Leslie Combemale , , , , , ,

Sun Ra: Do the Impossible presents lots of archival footage, but also features interviews with scholars, writers, music critics, and members of Sun Ra’s band Arkestra talking about Sun Ra as a person and a musician. They, presented along with Sun Ra’s own prose and poetry, put his work and experience into context in terms of the Black experience. His presentation as an alien from another planet considered Blackness outside the construct of subjugation. For folks curious about one man or maybe one alien from Venus’s genius, the artistry he wove into every aspect of his life, and the lives he touched, Sun Ra: Do the Impossible is a total trip, so take it.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE SHADOW SCHOLARS (Tribeca 2025) _ Review by Beth Accomando

Beth Accomando , , , , , , , ,

The Shadow Scholars is a riveting documentary that examines Kenya’s hidden essay mills where tens of thousands of highly educated yet underemployed Kenyans by writing academic papers for wealthy Western students. A Kenyan student can churn out thousands of words overnight so that some more privileged student can graduate and secure a job that the Kenyan students are not even considered for. But crackdowns from the United Kingdom and Australia on the industry plus the increasing presence of AI threaten to take away this revenue stream from the Kenyan writers.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE WOLF, THE FOX AND THE LEOPARD (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Sherin Nicole

Sherin Nicole , , , , , , , ,

I’m not going to start this review in the usual way but with something akin to a recap of its opening moments and part of the first act. I know you’re likely wondering why, and it’s because those scenes, literally, hit me in the head: Making its world premiere at Tribeca this year, The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard begins with a radio scan, scrolling through the news of several natural disasters caused by climate change. A woman begins to narrate over a black screen in Japanese: “In the beginning, there was no story…” We see the tops of green trees: “The forest was breathing in and out peacefully. But a fever was taking hold of the world. An era was ending…” We drop to the forest floor, where brown and green ferns reach upward, searching for the light: “And it was precisely at this crucial time that she would enter our world.”

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Festivals Reviews 

TITAN: THE OCEANGATE DISASTER (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , , , , , ,

Primetime Emmy-winning director Mark Monroe (Jim Henson: Idea Man) builds decent suspense around this doomed endeavor through footage aboard the craft on previous dives, interviews with former employees and experts, and eerie sound design. Titan had an “audible warning system” that broadcast pops and creaks in the hull, including during a trip to the wreckage of the Andrea Doria where Rush foolishly jammed the craft under the bow. Submersible pilot and whistleblower David Lochridge maneuvered it back to the surface.

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Festivals Reviews 

TOW (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A 1991 Toyota Camry is easy to dismiss, much like its owner in Tow, a star-studded David and Goliath story about homelessness that unfortunately spins its wheels in spots. Based on a true story, the film sees Amanda (Rose Byrne, Physical) living out of the car in Seattle while she hunts for a job as a veterinary technician. During one of her job interviews, someone steals the Toyota, which winds up on a private towing lot.

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Festivals Reviews 

UNDERLAND (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , , , ,

Shadows and flashlight beams dance around handprints on a cave wall. Heaps of rusted cars, broken refrigerators, and tires lay entombed, long unused. An orb of hexagons sits in a watery cavern like an alien bathysphere, calculating the unseen.
The haunting and hypnotic documentary Underland, debuting at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, takes viewers to these underground sights, following three groups of people compelled to probe what’s below the surface. While it might sound like hyperbole, the effect is an eye-opening and thoughtful appreciation of our time on Earth and what future generations might make of what we leave behind.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE END OF QUIET (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , , , , ,

A place in the world where people live without cell phones and Wi-Fi might sound quaint (or maddening, depending on your generation). The documentary The End of Quiet visits such an area frozen circa the 1990s: a town with a federally ordered quiet zone. Since the 1950s, Green Bank, West Virginia, has been home to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and a “zone of quiet” that inspires the film’s name: an area of 35,000 square kilometers around the observatory.

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Festivals Reviews 

HOLDING LIAT (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Holding Liat focuses a compassionate and introspective lens on the ongoing conflict in Gaza through the conflicting feelings of one Israel-American family whose loved ones were taken hostage by Hamas. Roughly two weeks after the terrorist organization abducted civics teacher Liat Beinin Atzili and her artist husband, Aviv Atzili, during its incursion on Oct. 7, 2023, filmmakers related to her began documenting her family’s experience, the film notes. Although largely focusing on the Atzili family, the film illuminates the sympathetic and varied views of people caught in up in history as it unfolds.

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Festivals Reviews 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Beth Accomando

Beth Accomando , , , ,

Egypt’s Happy Birthday opens with two eight-year-old girls waking up in the middle of the night to prepare for a birthday party. Their giddy, giggly excitement and sense of shared purpose reveal a close bond. But when morning comes we realize Toha is working as a maid for a wealthy Cairo family and Nelly is the daughter she has grown close to. But Nelly’s birthday party is in jeopardy because her parents are going through a divorce and her mom has just packed up the house for a move to a cheaper place. Toha, who does not even know when her own birthday is, becomes determined to make sure Nelly’s birthday party happens and is perfect. In exchange for all her efforts, she asks Nelly to set aside one birthday candle so she can make her first wish on.

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