Five features from Tribeca 2026: 'Killing Castro,' 'Finnegan’s Foursome,' 'Crooks,' 'Deepfake,' and 'Never Change'

Reviewing five feature films from this year's Tribeca Festival

As you likely gleaned from the roundups I published last week and on Tuesday, most of the movies from the 2026 Tribeca festival that I watched were documentaries. But I did catch some fiction features, and I thought I’d post reviews of those as well. Most of them do not have release dates set yet, unless otherwise noted.

Killing Castro

This film, the debut by director Elf Rivera, dramatizes a real episode: When Fidel Castro, shortly after the Cuban Revolution, visited New York City in 1960 to address the United Nations, at which point he met with Malcolm X and was met with an assassination attempt.

It didn’t succeed, of course, and Castro lived another 56 years.

The film is a very stylish recreation of real events, though I can’t imagine they were really this exciting. Or, for that matter, quite this busy.

Castro (Diego Boneta) is depicted as a charismatic young leader and something of a ladies' man; it's his brother Raúl who’s portrayed as both more committed to communism and a hothead. Kicked out of a midtown hotel, Castro’s party moves to the desegregated Hotel Theresa in Harlem.

The plot mostly involves all the players that would converge in Oliver Stone’s JFK three years later: The FBI, the CIA, Cuba, and the Mafia. Al Pacino — previously seen at the dawn of the Cuban Revolution in The Godfather, Part II — plays a CIA adjutant who plots the assassination, and we get actors playing Eisenhower (John Rubinstein), John Foster Dulles (Titus Welliver), an FBI man (Rob Livingston), mobster Sam Giancana (Paul Ben-Victor) the hotel’s owner, the wonderfully named Love B. Woods (Frankie Faison) and Malcolm X (Kendrick Sampson.)

I was interested in the history, the period detail, and especially Boneta’s performance as Castro. But the plot gets a little busy and cartoonish, especially in the third act.

Finnegan’s Foursome

Edward Burns has gotten super-prolific all of a sudden, as this is the third movie he’s directed and starred in in the last two years, including last year’s mostly successful sequel to The Brothers McMullen. And yes, this one is once again about Irish family shenanigans.

The setup this time is that Burns and Brian D’Arcy James are brothers, each with one child. Their dad was a golf pro who wasn’t around much, so when he dies, the two brothers each take their kids (Brian Muller and Erica Hernández) to Ireland for a golf trip in his honor.

There’s some sweet stuff here, mostly involving the two brothers solving their relationship. I bet the cast and crew had a great time filming in Ireland. But I don’t know; I just don’t think it’s that fun to watch other people go on a golf trip. Especially when the running time is a full two hours.

Finnegan’s Foursome comes out in theaters on June 19.

Crooks

This latest film from director Mickey Keating, a crime noir, is slight in many ways.

It’s just 75 minutes long, it doesn’t have much in terms of plot, and it lifts many tropes from the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino’s work, starting with a scary hitman with a funny nickname.

But the film, which is mostly in black and white, has style to burn, while also featuring dynamite performances from Angela Trimbur and the Magnolia actress Melora Walters. By the end, I was absolutely won over.

Deepfake

Here’s one with a decent conceit that ultimately just doesn’t work at all.

Directed by Matt Eames, this is a social media satire in which a struggling young woman (Jessica DiGiovanni) hires a team to essentially execute a social media influence campaign on her own life, aimed at getting her ex-boyfriend to get back together with her.

It’s ultimately a monkey’s-paw story, but not as good as Obsession, and a parody of modern social media, but not nearly as effective at it as Maddie’s Secret.

Never Change!

To put it bluntly, this movie really, really sucks.

A Tribeca premiere that lands on Hulu June 17, this comes from American High, the production outfit that’s made a lot of movies I’ve enjoyed in the past, while its cast consists of a lot of people who have been very funny before, including Ana Gasteyer, Sofia Black-D'Elia, Topher Grace, and Zach Cherry.

But it starts with a breathtakingly unfunny premise and never recovers.

Directed by Marty Schousboe, Never Change! is another riff on Billy Madison: Due to a “loophole” in a new law, a group of people who graduated from high school in 2008 is required to return to high school, in their mid-30s, for a two-week period. Why this nonsense is necessary, rather than just making it a regular high school reunion, is known only to the filmmakers.

They’re mostly a collection of losers, nerds, and outcasts, mostly unhappy with their adult lives, and they’re essentially asked to speed-run high school, whether it’s going to class, dances, or graduation. Also, for some reason, there’s a serial killer subplot.

There’s the odd laugh here and there, but this is one of those comedies where there’s a large cast of funny people, everyone’s riffing, and it doesn’t ever really add up to a coherent whole. Absurdism either really works or it really doesn’t; this is a clear case of the latter.