The 2025 Tribeca Festival is in full swing, and while I’m not able to make it up to New York to see any films in person this year, I’ve gotten hold of plenty of screeners of films that have already shown there. Here are reviews of five documentaries from the first week; I’ll be back next week with more doc reviews, as well as a look at Tribeca features.

Unless stated otherwise, there’s no release date or distribution set yet.

This documentary, directed by Ro Haber, is the latest full-length doc that interrogates the popular culture of the fairly recent past, in the tradition of Chasing Chasing Amy and The Problem With Apu.

This time, it’s an examination of “It’s Pat,” the recurring Saturday Night Live sketch from the early 1990s in which Julia Sweeney played a shy, androgynonous oddball, and the sketch’s single-joke premise — which dragged on for four years and even spawned a feature film — was that no one could tell if Pat was a man or a woman.

Three decades and a revolution in understanding of gender later, we have a group of trans and nonbinary actors and comedians get together to make their own version of sketches about Pat, and also share their thoughts on what the character meant to them.

No, this isn’t an exercise in cancel culture, nor is it a full-on jeremiad against the character, like the Apu documentary was. The interviewees have a lot of different thoughts about Pat, from affection to embarrassment, and sometimes even a combination of both.

Julia Sweeney appears, both as an interviewee and in meeting with the performers, and it’s strange the position that this puts her in: Pat was the most successful and popular character Sweeney created in her career, leading to her lone movie starring role, but years later people started reacting very differently.

I personally never thought the “Pat” character was all that funny- it was just the same joke, over and over. But I appreciate that it spawned something this thought-provoking. I’d just wish I could be in the room when Lorne Michaels watches at.

And speaking of landmark moments in gender expression, this documentary is the story of Sarah McBride, the first trans member of Congress. McBride was elected in 2024, against the backdrop of both a huge backlash against trans rights and the fall from grace of Joe Biden, her fellow Delaware Democrat.

We see McBride on the campaign trail — it’s the only documentary of the year that includes a visit to Wawa — before she wins the election and ends up in Washington.

And upon taking office, McBride ended up at the center of the post-2024 anti-trans backlash, when Congressional mean girls like Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene successfully banned her from using the women’s bathroom at the Capitol. Meanwhile, McBride’s choice not to fight the band earned her some flak from the trans community.

Directed by Chase Joynt, who earlier made 2020’s No Ordinary Man, about Billy Tipton, State of Firsts is a worthwhile examination of a compelling subject. I just wish the film had gotten McBride, who accepts a congratulatory phone call from Biden, to say a bit more about the former president’s decline and departure from the race.

In her new two-part documentary, which premiered at Tribeca and then debuted on Hulu earlier this week, Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper reveals that she was sexually harassed by her college soccer coach at Boston University, Nancy Feldman. When New York magazine sent a social media post about this, they accidentally referred to Nancy Feldman as “Nancy Mace,” leading to anger from Mace herself. Considering how horrifically evil Mace’s behavior was in the documentary above, I can’t say I feel too bad for her.

Directed by Ry Russo-Young, Call Her Alex is a two-part doc, lasting less than two hours — back in the day, they used to just call that “a movie” — which tells Cooper’s entire story, as she prepares for her first-ever live tour. We learn about her childhood, the BU harassment episode, the rise of the podcast, her split with former cohost Sofia Franklyn, her marriage, and her 2024 interview with Kamala Harris.

There’s some compelling stuff here, as it’s a great story that Cooper built such a successful podcast, based on frank sex talk, for a generation which is allegedly overly celibate. Plus, I sort of wish her interview with Harris had been more along the lines of a normal Call Her Daddy interview (I felt the same way when Howard Stern sat down with Kamala.)

That said, this film at times feels a lot more like a commercial for Cooper than a documentary.

While we’re on the subject of college sexual harassment scandals…

This doc, directed by Eva Orner and headed to HBO later this month, takes a very damning look at the Ohio State athletic department scandal, in which a physician who was also a professor had molested numerous athletes, mostly on the wrestling team. And for many years, this was covered up by many at the university, including Jim Jordan, then a wrestling coach, who is now a top Republican in Congress.

We all remember the Penn State scandal, but it turns out there were similar ones, sometimes at the same time, at multiple other schools, just in the Big Ten.

Not especially different, structurally, than most streaming documentaries about sexual abuse that have the word “Surviving” in the title, with the exception that it’s a story about male victims.

Directed by Suzannah Herbert, this film is set in Natchez, Mississippi, where there’s a “Garden Club,” and residents Black and white are grapping with the past, and how to tell its stories.

A veritae doc in the tradition of Frederick Weisman’s work, although much shorter than most of Weisman’s films, the film gives everyone their say. My favorite subject was a guy named “Rev’ who gives tours of the town, complete with unvarnished truth.

There’s no word yet about distribution for Natchez, but it feels a lot like something that would be on PBS. There was another PBS doc called American Reckoning, a couple of years ago.