Madonna Screens ‘Confessions II’ at Tribeca, a Film That Defies the Label “Music Video”

Madonna brought the first full look at Confessions II to a Tribeca Film Festival audience Friday night, screening a 13-minute film that pushes beyond any simple categorization. Built from the opening six tracks of the album — a sequel to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, out July 3 — the short stacks surreal vignettes: women firing lasers from between their legs, Benedict Cumberbatch voguing in a bathroom, and the singer shifting through personas from lonely songwriter to table-top contortionist. Sixteen cameos fill the frame, including Sabrina Carpenter, Feid, Kate Moss, Julia Garner, Honey Dijon, and Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon, who closes the piece with “Cut, bitch.”

The screening, held at the Beacon Theatre with phones locked in Yondr cases for over two hours, made the wait for the film feel deliberate. After the credits, Madonna sat down with directors David Toro and Solomon Chase (TORSO) and moderator Anderson Cooper, filling in for an unavailable Jimmy Fallon. Over 45 minutes she spoke with a frankness that rarely makes it into press cycles — ripping into the phone-waving crowds at Coachella (“everybody had their phones up, I didn’t know what anyone looked like”), recalling the freedom of Detroit’s gay clubs, and admitting she used to read Fitzgerald in New York nightspots not to look intellectual but because she felt out of place.

She made a point of distancing the project from the term “music video.” “Somehow [the word] video seems cheap,” she said. “It was good when it was just MTV and me.” The film carries the high-gloss, sexually explicit imagery that would have been banned from the channel’s rotation years ago, but its scope and runtime mark it as a genuine short film, not a promo clip. With tracks like “I Feel So Free” and “Bring Your Love” threading through, the work functions as an audio-visual announcement. But the Q&A revealed an artist less interested in format talk than in connection — the kind that, she argues, gets severed by a screen held between people.