5 under-the-radar films to see at Tribeca 2025

What Marielle Knows is a high-concept German family dramedy right out of Black Mirror: A family’s young daughter (Laeni Geiseler) gets slapped by her friend at school and suddenly knows everything her parents get up to during the day. The film then goes to silly, horny places as these parents—Julia (Julia Jentsch) and Tobias (Felix Kramer), both great—navigate all their private moments with the threat of an omniscient child watching over them. If your kid is lording their judgment over what you get up to in your spare time, behind closed doors or at the office, you’d probably change your behavior, right? The sophomore film from writer-director Frédéric Hambalek becomes a funny metaphor for how parents change for their children, how they’re encouraged to be their best selves for the sake of someone else. Here, the constant surveillance of a child watching your every move (and then confronting you with it over dinner in front of your spouse) literalizes this, and Hambalek’s script comes up with clever, painful, and committedly realistic ways for this tense, oddball idea to play out. This film already played at Berlin, so its appearance in the Tribeca 2025 lineup is just good luck for stateside attendees.

Bird In Hand

The coming-of-age debut from writer-director Melody C. Roscher, Bird In Hand is an enjoyably prickly showdown between estranged daughter (Alisha Wainwright), woo-woo mom (Christine Lahti), and plantation-gentrifying neighbors (James Le Gros, Annabelle Dexter-Jones). Grounded by Wainwright’s perfectly grumpy turn and a script that makes its selfish adults and messy almost-adults into realistic assholes, Bird In Hand is small in scope and narrative in a way that works wonders for its story. Though there are certainly a few indie film conventions the movie leans on from time to time, some of its specific details (specifically around the mother-daughter relationship and the protagonist’s biracial identity) lend Bird In Hand a sharpness often missing from these lighter family stories.

Inside

A pseudo-parental triangle forms in the prison cells of the Aussie crime story Inside, between young killer Mel (Vincent Miller) and two older inmates: The parole-adjacent Warren (Guy Pearce) and the unhinged child murderer Mark (Cosmo Jarvis, going full Tom Hardy mode not just in appearance but in odd, near-indecipherable accent work). Charles Williams’ feature debut (he won the Short Film Palme d’Or in 2018), Inside paints a pair of memorable older characters as they slowly battle it out for an incarcerated kid’s soul. Bleak and brutal, lodged in the cycles of the carceral state, the film treats murder-for-hire with the same gravity as someone visiting their child for the first time in years—but it isn’t afraid either to get weird when dealing with the kinds of complex relationships that form behind bars.

Ride Or Die

In Ride Or Die, a chance meeting between two former high school classmates turns into a lesbian B-movie road trip, filled with sex, violence, and whirlwind romance. The strength of the performances—Briana Middleton as the serious-minded wannabe filmmaker Paula and Stella Everett as the free-spirited burnout Sloane—bolster a narrative that sometimes gets into more intense scraps than the sweeter moments in the film can handle. The pair have electric chemistry, their small flirtations exploding into the kind of hot and heavy connection that comes from this kind of head-over-heels fling. It’s this simmering energy that drives Ride Or Die as Paula runs into racism and the increasingly broke duo confront some of the inevitable relationship issues that crop up when you run off across the country with a hookup. Full of lovely western landscape shots and close-framed moments between the couple, Ride Or Die is chewy pulp bound to attract its cult.