New York City is defined by weird, fleeting encounters between strangers, judging by “Human Theories,” one of the New York films at this year’s Tribeca Festival. But if one thing is clear from the various New York films I’ve screened so far at the festival, it’s that there is no single way to define New York or New Yorkers. 

There are forty vignettes in the seventy-one-minutes of “Human Theories”: Two kids ask a woman for the time, and she has to rummage through her bag for her phone; the vignette cuts off before she finds it. A man on a subway platform looks at a couple across the tracks getting amorous with one another; he turns away, and sees another amorous couple right next to him. A woman passes by a neighbor sitting on a stoop, and asks her how she’s doing. Not good, the neighbor replies; “I found my tenant dead in his apartment this morning,” to which the passerby replies “I hope he’s ok.”   
Only a handful of the scenes have any apparent connection to one another, except that they  all occur in New York. Only a few are long enough to offer much insight.  A woman whose roommate is moving out asks if she needs any help; “this is the last box,” the roommate replies, and then says the U-Haul is waiting – which lets us know that the woman waited until the last minute to offer to help – a strong clue as to why the roommate is moving out.

“Human Theories” is both too little and too much: After maybe ten minutes, I realized that these minute-long vignettes were not a prelude to a plot; this was all I was going to get. With no explicit focus, I didn’t grasp the point, and had trouble paying attention straight through to the end.

I had much the same reaction  to “Mario,” for an opposite reason. The documentary spends its 88 minutes focused exclusively on the political career of Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York who died in 2015. I spent the whole movie wondering: Why Mario; why now? His greatest moment of political glory, according to the film, was four decades ago, when he gave the keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention; his biggest political decision was not running for president. We learn a little about his background as a quintessential ambitious New Yorker – the son of Italian immigrants who owned a grocery store in Queens, he didn’t speak English until the age of eight – and about his political philosophy – he is positioned as the anti-Reagan, or at least the Reagan alternative, believing that government can and should make a difference in people’s lives. But we learn nothing about  his actual accomplishments during his twelve years as governor. (We see, for example, that he opposed the death penalty during his campaign, even though this was an unpopular position. We do not learn that he used his gubernatorial veto power to block bills reinstating capital punishment each and every year he was in office.)

Many New Yorkers now know Mario Cuomo mostly, for better or for worse – and it’s for worse – as the father of Andrew Cuomo, who also became governor and whose reputation shines far less brightly than that of his father – his troubles going completely unmentioned in this documentary. Cuomo the younger, along with his siblings, is among the talking heads interviewed in the documentary about Mario Cuomo. And near the end, there is a brief mention of Andrew’s own electoral success, and how Mario was still alive to cherish it, followed by a scene of Andrew giving the eulogy for his father.  A cynic might wonder whether these scenes associating Andrew with Mario are the point of the movie.

Born to Kill, a 17-minute film that’s part of the series “Shorts: Where We Belong,”  tells the story of the New York City street gang which was formed in the 1980s by teenagers who had fled Vietnam after its fall to the Communists; some of them were beneficiaries of “Operation Babylift,” brought to the U.S. after being ostracized in their home country for being “war babies,” half-Caucasian. Through old videos and current interviews with a Vietnam historian, a NYPD detective and former gang members,  some of them still incarcerated, a picture emerges of the violence and criminality of Born to Kill, but also the reason it appealed to these New York newcomers; it made them feel safer.

There are seven separate films in “Shorts: NY Making It Here,” my favorite of which is the shortest, Insufficient Fare, a five-minute ode to the Metrocard (1994-2025), narrated from its point of view. (“I always thought I’d go out with a little more dignity….Everyone wanted to run with MC.”)  It captures New Yorkers’ funny, frenetic, in-your-face energy.

Stand Clear ‘ the Closing Doors. 7 minutes. an anecdote about two women in a subway car, one at first refusing to take her bag off the seat so that the other can sit down.

So, Boom, 14 minutes. A previously incarcerated woman offers tutorials on prison life to her younger sister who is about to go to jail (we never learn why.)

I’m Not Home 12 minutes Two men listen to a lot of old answering-machine tapes. I can’t say I get it, but the two actors are hot, and one of them is Robert De Niro’s 30-year-old son Julian.

Homesick 13 minutes A refugee from Russia, shellshocked by New York, tries to win over her Americanized cousin.

Daddy’s Little Meatball 14 minutes An Australian businessman takes his teenage daughter on a trip to New York. Before a dramatic confrontation, it offers a droll take on tourist energy, with the teenager rolling her eyes every time somebody says: When I was your age, I would have killed to be taken on a trip to New York.