More documentary selections from Tribeca 2025: 'My Mom Jayne,' 'Holding Liat,' 'BLUE SCUTI: Tetris Crasher,' 'The Inquisitor,' Bodyguard of Lies'
Reviewing five documentaries from the 2025 Tribeca Festival
The 2025 Tribeca festival is in the books, and while I didn’t make it up to New York for this year’s festival, I caught quite a few films, via screeners and online library. I reviewed five documentaries in the first week of the festival, and here are five more. Unless otherwise noted, no release date has been announced.
My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay
You probably knew that Mariska Hargitay, the actress who plays Det. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield, the model and screen bombshell of the 1950s and ‘60s, and that Mansfield died in an accident when Mariska was just three years old.
In this documentary, which she directed herself, Hargitay delves deep into that family history, going through archival footage, old letters, and interviews with her siblings. She also exposes a long-buried family secret, one that made some headlines ahead of the film’s premiere.
The film is most fascinating for painting a picture of Jayne Mansfield, as someone who had a certain public persona and sometimes chafed against the constraints of it.
My Mom Jayne lands on HBO and HBO Max on June 27. Jayne Mansfield also allegedly inspired this great hair metal ballad:
Holding Liat
Ever since the events of October 7, there have been nearly endless documentaries about different aspects of the tragedy, and this one might be the best one I’ve seen to date.
The film follows the family of the Israeli-American Liat Atzili, who was taken hostage on the 7th along with her husband, over those first months, and shows something that feels very true: Different members of the family have very different views, about the situation, the way forward, and Israeli politics in general, leading to lots of arguments.
Yehuda Beinin, Liat’s father, emerges as one of the year’s most compelling documentary subjects: He’s an older Kibbutznik who loves Israel, loathes Benjamin Netanyahu, and can’t stand having to grovel before American politicians on a visit to Washington (“Do you think I wanted to meet Mitch McConnell? That asshole?,” another relative says.)
Liat’s son, on the other hand, is more about crushing Hamas into submission — reflecting Israel’s unique divide, in which it’s the younger generation that’s more reactionary than their grandparents — while we also meet Yehuda’s brother, who’s even further to his left and rejects Zionism altogether.
In the second half, it becomes about the excruciating wait to see if Liat is on a list of hostages to be released, as well as dribbles of information about the fate of her husband.
The film was directed by Brandon Kramer, who is a distant relative of the family, which is something that can be risky, although this doc doesn’t cross any ethical red lines.
It’s a nuanced, multifaceted look at the situation, something worth keeping in mind when, at some point in the next few months, there’s an effort to cancel a public screening of it, because it’s either too Zionist or not Zionist enough.
BLUE SCUTI: Tetris Crasher
Can a documentary about watching other people do video games be interesting? That depends.
This one is the story of Willis Gibson, known as Blue Scuti, who a couple of years ago became the first person ever to beat Tetris.
Blue Scuti was directed by Chris Moukarbel, who previously made movies about Lady Gaga, Banksy, and the “Leave Britney Alone!” Person, as well as Cypher, last year’s mockumentary about Tierra Whack.
It’s no The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which is the gold standard of documentaries about subcultures in gaming. There’s also been a recent subgenre, like The Secret Life of Ibelin, Breaking the Game, and Grand Theft Hamlet, that have been set entirely within the world of the video game.
This one isn’t quite up there, although if you were expecting Tetris to be used as a metaphor for life, you will have guessed right.
The Inquisitor
This is a wonderful archival documentary about Barbara Jordan, the Texas Congresswoman who was both a trailblazer — as the first Southern Black woman in Congress and the first Black person or woman to deliver a keynote address at a political convention — and one of the great orators in American political history.
Directed by Angela Lynn Tucker, The Inquisitor tells the private and public stories of Jordan, including a narration by Alfre Woodard reading Jordan’s words.
In addition to the public, which includes an amazing Congressional hearing in which Jordan is questioned by the likes of Strom Thurmond and Joe Biden, and learn more about Jordan’s prviate life: The Congresswoman, who died in 1996, had a longtime female life partner, but was never publicly out in her lifetime.
Jordan also mostly kept mum about her deteriorating health, although to her credit, unlike a lot of people – including, yes, both Strom Thurmond and Joe Biden — she didn’t insist on staying in office while in obviously failing health.
The film ends with a homage to the ending of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X that’s very corny, but I’ll let that slide.
Bodyguard of Lies
This one may have a terrible title, but it’s a very good documentary.
Directed by Dan Krauss, produced by Alex Gibney, and very much in the Gibney style, Bodyguard of Lies tells the story of America’s long entanglement in Afghanistan, and the rank dishonesty of multiple presidential administrations about how it was going.
“No military in history has taken so much care as to avoid killing civilians,” we see one Pentagon spokesman asserting, which is one of those things that governments claim a lot, even though it’s never, ever true.
And considering headlines this week about another imminent attack by the U.S. in a similar part of the world, this documentary arrives with impeccable timing.
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