Documentary selections from Tribeca 2026: ‘A.I.: Probably Nothing to Worry About,’ ’How to Feed a Dictactor,’ ‘American Zoo,’ ‘Hollywood Does Abortion,’ ‘Stealing Magic,’ and ‘Humpty Dumpty X’

More documentary reviews from Tribeca this year

The 2026 Tribeca festival wrapped up on Sunday, and while I once again didn’t make it up to New York to see anything in person, I watched a large number of films remotely, especially documentaries. I reviewed seven docs from the festival last week, and here are six more. I am not aware of any release plans for any of them.

AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About

There have already been quite a few documentaries about the modern questions and conundrums of artificial intelligence, and this is probably the best I’ve seen. It’s much better than “How I became an Apocaloptimist” nonsense of a few months ago.

Directed by Nick Holt, the doc follows the entire history of the technology and its development, leading up to recent years, including the Sam Altman/Elon Musk war, and later that episode when Altman was briefly fired by OpenAI, which is going to be the subject of a Hollywood film, Artificial, later this year.’

We hear from Geoffrey Hinton, a key figure behind the development of the tech who is now sounding the alarm about it. But one great thing about this doc is the refreshing lack of hectoring or lecturing- and I can’t imagine it will end up aging instantly, like so many of the other A.I. docs so far.

How to Feed a Dictator

Based on a book of the same name by Witold Szablowski, Andrew Neel’s doc follows five men who served as personal chefs to bloodthirsty dictators of the 20th century: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il.

It might be difficult to find the right tone for this sort of thing, and the film is sufficiently respectful towards these dictators having killed massive numbers of people. However, it never quite hits the same gear as Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, which is the gold standard for this sort of documentary.

And yes, it gets into rumors of whether Idi Amin really committed cannibalism. I’m not sure, though, that ending the film with each dictator’s casualty figures, over pictures of their food, was really the best choice.

American Zoo

Most documentaries about the Catskills deal mostly in comedians, Jews, Jewish comedians, and those resorts that dotted that particular landscape in upstate New York for much of the 20th century. There was a fine documentary earlier this year, We Met at Grossinger’s, which told the story of the old Catskills resorts, and their central place in the Jewish culture and comedy of the 20th century.

American Zoo is, let’s just say, a very different Catskills documentary, and a much more chilling and disturbing one. It tells the story of The Catskill Game Farm, the country's first private zoo, which operated for more than 70 years before closing in 2006. But it turned out it was also the site of horrible experiments with connections to the Nazis.

Directed by Tim Travers Hawkins, American Zoo appears to have uncovered much of this material for the first time. It’s certainly one of the most eye-opening documentaries I’ve seen this year.

Stealing Magic

The stakes aren’t quite as high with this one, but it’s another of my favorites of the Tribeca docs.

Matthew Testa’s film looks at the world of magic piracy. It turns out, today’s magicians make a living not just from performing magic shows, but also coming up with new tricks and selling them online. But some malign figure out there is stealing the tricks and selling them at a massive discount, in the tradition of the old Napster, and threatening the magicians’ livelihoods.

So the magicians decide to turn into private investigators/spies and go on a global hunt to solve the mystery and shut down the pirates.

One of my favorite things about this documentary was that it turns out every capital in Europe and the Middle East has its own network of magicians, willing to help out with the piracy hunt- but they’re not quite sure who they can trust.

Also, talking heads include both Penn and Teller, the latter of whom, it turns out, can talk after all.

Hollywood Does Abortion

The title of this one is somewhat self-explanatory: it follows the treatment of abortion in movies and TV shows over the last 60 or so years, ever since the famous Maude episode in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade.

Directed by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Mike Attie, and executive produced by Rachel Bloom, the film follows a frequent dynamic: The people producing movies and shows tend to be liberals who likely favor abortion rights, but have often found themselves squeamish about including abortion plotlines in their shows, for fear of alienating audiences. There’s certainly a “Republicans buy sneakers too” factor at play here, in which people making entertainment are aware that there are people in the world who are opposed to abortion, and those people watch movies and TV shows. This leads to the “miscarriage ex machina” trope and similar ones.

The filmmakers make great use of archival clips, ranging from The Godfather, Part II to Juno to Knocked Up to Dirty Dancing. But interspersed with that is commentary from various talking heads, all of whom agree that abortion should be legal — I’m with them on that — and also that abortion should never be controversial, nor should it be depicted as such.

And that’s just not the world as it is- not every cop on Law & Order: SVU is going to speak about abortion in NARAL-approved language. The reason Katherine Heigl doesn’t have an abortion in Knocked Up is that it’s a movie about a mismatched couple that has a baby. If she’d had an abortion, the movie would have ended after 30 minutes.

There is also some confusion between depiction and endorsement in some of the commentary here. There were lots of movies and Law & Order episodes that put certain monologues in the mouths of anti-abortion characters, and that’s just how storytelling works. And one montage of men complaining about their partners having abortions includes several villains, including Michael Corleone and Dr. Michael Mancini from Melrose Place.

Humpty Dumpty X

Tony Kaye’s Wikipedia page, under his directing credits, lists five movies that are “released” and six more that are “unreleased.” That’s the filmography of a man who does not play well with others.

Of those movies, the film Kaye is best known for is American History X, the acclaimed 1998 movie in which Edward Norton played a neo-Nazi who ultimately gets a redemption. It’s a movie with a positive reputation — to the point where media-illiterate online Nazis sometimes post Norton’s racist monologues approvingly — but the film had a famously rough production, which led to Kaye having it taken from him.

Now, more than 25 years later, we have a documentary directed by Kaye himself that tells his side of the story, using his own footage from that time period. This includes a series of conversations with a late-in-life Marlon Brando, in which they film themselves with ‘90s-era camcorders, in the form of a Zoom call.

I almost always root for directors when they’re fighting for their artistic vision against studio bosses, especially when it’s the 1990s (because back then, the studio boss was almost always Harvey Weinstein). But with Kaye, it’s hard to sympathize, mostly because he never comes close to making an affirmative case for why his version of American History X was better.

If he wasn’t given the chance to give his unalloyed vision for American History X, he certainly was for this, up to and including himself singing over the closing credits.