Nyff 2016

[Chris Knipp]

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For Filmleaf NYFF 2016 Festival Coverage thread click here. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

Links to reviews:

13th, The (Ava DuVernay 2016) - Opening Night Film (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35031#post35031)
20th Century Women (Mike Mills 2016) - Centerpiece Film (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35223#post35223)
Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35022#post35022)
B-Side, The: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (Errol Morris 2016) - Documentary Series (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35041#post35041)
Billy Lynn's Halftime Walk (Ang Lee 2016) - Special Presentation (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35127#post35127)
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35064#post35064)
Death of Louis XIV, The/La mort de Louis XIV (Albert Serra 2016) - Explorations Series (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35102#post35102)
Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35055#post35055)
Fire at Sea/Fuocoammare (Gianfranco Rosi 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35036#post35036)
Gimmie Danger (Jim Jarmusch 2016) - Special Event (http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/=9hjg.jpg
[URL="http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4229-NEW-YORK-MOVIE-JOURNAL-(Oct-Nov-2016)&p=35101#post35101)
Graduation/Bacalaureat (Cristian Mungiu 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35045#post35045)
Hermia and Helena (Matías Piñeiro 2016)
I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35082#post35082)
Jackie (Pablo Larrain 2016) - Special Premiere Presentation (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35160#post35160)
Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35226#post35226)
Lost City of Z, The (James Gray 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35553#post35553) - Closing Night Film
Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35136#post35136)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35044#post35044)
My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (Dash Shaw 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35537#post35537)
Neruda (Pablo Larraín 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35048#post35048)
Paterson (Jim Jarmusch 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35214#post35214)
Personal Shopper (Oliver Assayas 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35357#post35357)
Quiet Passion, A (Terence Davies 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35518#post35518)
Rehearsal, The (Alison Maclean 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35217#post35217)
Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4297-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2017&p=35416#post35416)
Son of Joseph/Le fils de Joseph (Eugène Green 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=36131#post36131)
Staying Vertical/Rester vertical Alain Guiraudie 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35050#post35050)
Things to Come/L’Avenir (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35054#post35054)
Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35076#post35076)
Unknown Girl, The/La fille inconnue (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35075#post35075)
Yourself and Yours (Hong Sangsoo 2016)


Opening night film a documentary about mass incarceration and slavery by Ava DuVernay.

Tues., July 19, 2016. The festival committee has announced the 54th New York Film Festival's opening night film. For the first time in 54 years it will be a non-fiction film, Ava DuVernay's The 13th, an indictment of the American prison system as a continuation of slavery. The title refers to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States of America. The movie will appear on Netflix and in theaters October 7. Read more details in The New York Times here (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/movies/ava-duvernay-new-york-film-festival-the-13th.html?_r=0).


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In my early coverage of the festival staring in 2005 it was clearly weak in the documentary area but that has changed.Last year they had The Witness (on the Kitty Genovese case) and as a sidebar item Don't blink (on photographer-filmmaker Robert Frank). 2014 ended dramatically with the surprise addition of a premiere of Laura Poitras' Citizenfour (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32837#post32837)(about Edward Snowden). And 2013's NYFF had Noujaim's thrilling The Square, about the Egyptian revolution, and Wiseman's At Berkeley. Several other Wildman films have played in earlier years. But still, choosing a doc to open the festival is an odd move, for any big festival. Most of the fest's openers have been fun things. One about prisons isn't likely to play well with the glitzy first night crowd, is it? The other year I see non-fiction was picked to open was Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers in 1967 - a powerful choice and a year of upheaval. Is this as turbulent a time? (A semi-non-fiction starter was 2008's The Class, (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2339-New-York-Film-Festival-2008)Laurent Cantet's film using actual Paris middle school students playing themselves in a story scripted by a teacher.)

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[Chris Knipp]

Centerpiece film Mike Mills' 20th Century Women.

A publicity release from the FSLC today (Jul. 27, 2016) announces that Mike MIlls' 20th Century Women will be the NYFF 2016 Centerpeace Film. I can't give an informed opinion; this is a world premiere. I found Thumbsucker (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=464&view=next) interesting but was not so charmed by Beginners (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3088-BEGINNERS-%28Mike-Mills-2010%29&p=26326#post26326) (SFIFF 2011 Filmleaf Festival Coverage). The new cast looks promising.

20th Century Women will be released by A24 in December.


New York, NY (July 27, 2016) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces the selection of 20th Century Women, written and directed by Mike Mills (Beginners), as the Centerpiece of the 54th New York Film Festival (September 30 – October 16). The gala screening on Saturday, October 8, will be the film’s World Premiere.

Mills’s texturally and behaviorally rich new comedy keeps redefining itself as it goes along, creating a moving group portrait of particular people in a particular place (Santa Barbara) at a particular moment in the 20th century (1979), one lovingly attended detail at a time. The great Annette Bening, in one of her very best performances, is a single mother raising her teenage son (newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann) in a sprawling bohemian house, shared by an itinerant carpenter (Billy Crudup) and a punk artist with a Bowie haircut (Greta Gerwig), and frequented by her son’s rebellious friend (Elle Fanning). 20th Century Women is warm, funny, and a work of passionate artistry.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, "I was taken aback by 20th Century Women. It’s made with an extraordinary level of craft and attention to detail, human and visual, which is now all but extinct. As someone who actually lived through 1979 in middle-class America, I will testify to the fact that Mike Mills and his remarkable cast approach the level of the uncanny. I felt like I was back there, with all the shared behaviors and worries, the divisions, the look and feel and smell of the world as it was".


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[Chris Knipp]

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Image: Lorey Sebastian

NYFF2016 Closing Night Film: James Gray's The Lost City of Z - starring Charlie Hunnam.


[FROM A PRESS RELEASE OF THE FSLC]

New York, NY (August 3, 2016) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces The Lost City of Z, written and directed by James Gray (The Immigrant, Two Lovers), as the Closing Night selection of the 54th New York Film Festival. The film, based on journalist David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, will make its World Premiere at the festival’s final gala screening on Saturday, October 15.

James Gray’s emotionally and visually resplendent epic tells the story of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett (a remarkable Charlie Hunnam), the British military-man-turned-explorer whose search for a lost city deep in the Amazon grows into an increasingly feverish, decades-long magnificent obsession that takes a toll on his reputation, his home life with his wife (Sienna Miller) and children, and his very existence. Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji cast quite a spell, exquisitely pitched between rapture and dizzying terror. Also starring Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, The Lost City of Z represents a form of epic storytelling that has all but vanished from the landscape of modern cinema, and a rare level of artistry.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, “James Gray is one of the finest filmmakers we have. Each of his movies is so beautifully wrought, visually and emotionally, but The Lost City of Z represents something new. It’s a true epic, spanning two continents and three decades, and it’s a genuine vision of the search for sublimity.”
. . .
Gray’s previous film, 2014’s The Immigrant, was an official selection of the 51st New York Film Festival.

The Lost City of Z is produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Anthony Katagas, and Dale Armin Johnson, and is executive produced by Brad Pitt and Marc Butan.

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Charlie Hunnam

Benedict Cumberbatch was considered earlier for the role that went to Charlie Hunnam. Hunnam was in the news for dropping the lead of Fifty Shades of Gray because it was too much to shoot that, Crimson Peak, and his lead in "Sons of Anarchy" in close succession and the idea gave him a "nervous breakdown."

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[Chris Knipp]

NYFF revival lineup: 10 digitally remastered classics.

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Brando in One-Eyed Jacks


Revival Lineup For 54th New York Film Festival (http://www.indiewire.com/2016/08/new-york-film-festival-2016-revival-lineup-film-society-of-lincoln-center-1201713285/).

L'Argent/Money (Robert Bresson, 1983, France).
Robert Bresson’s final film, based on Tolstoy's short story "The Forged Coupon" the story of a counterfeit bill’s passage from hand to hand and the resulting tragic consequences. A Janus Films release.

The Battle of Algiers/ La battaglia di Algeri. (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Italy/Algeria).
Gillo Pontecorvo’s tour de force of documentary realism depicting the Algerian fight for indpendence, based on Saadi Yacef's book Souvenires de la bataille d'Alger. A new 4K restoration, Rialto Pictures release.

Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976, USA).
A documentary record of the year-long Brookside, Kentucky, miners’ strike, 40th anniversary of the film's debut at the NYFF. Cabin Creek Films release.

Jacque Rivette's Aux quatre coins (1949 France)/ Le quadrille (1950, France) and Le divertissement (1952, France).
Three short films rediscovered by Véronique Rivette this year, digitally restored by the Cinémathèque française, these are experimental "practice films" showing Rivette's early development.

The Living Doll (Albert Lewin, 1957, USA).
Last film of film critic and Irving Thalberg right-hand man Lewin who became a director at age 48, based on his own novel about an archaeologist convinced a captive jaguar is the incarnation of a Mayan god. A Cohan Media Group release.

Memories of Underdevelopment/Memorias del Subdesarrollo..(Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968, Cuba).
The well-known film of the Cuban revolution is about Sergio, a wealthy man who decides to stay behind wandering Havana when his family leaves for the US. The time is 1961 and the film is placed between the exodus after the disastrous Bays of Pigs invasion and the missile crisis of the following year. A World Cinema Project release.

One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon brando, 1961, USA).
Brando's sole independent directorial effort, an unorthodox western, also the last Parmount film shot in VistaVision. A restoration by Universal carried out with support of The Film Foundation and supervision of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg.

Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1947, France).
First post-war film of the landmark director (who made 70 films) adapted from Georges Simenon's Les Fiançailles de M. Hire ("Mr. Hire's Engagement"). More famously later adapted as Monsieur Hire (1989) by Patrice Leconte. Duvivier's earlier adaptation stars Michel Simon as the reviled voyeur framed for murder by a girl he adores. Restoration. A Rialto Pictures release.

Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985, Taiwan).
Edward Yang’s second independent feature (after the 1983 That Day, on the Beach), starring script co-author Hou Hsiao-hsien as a former baseball player returned home to manage the family textile business, with Tsai Chin as his property-developer girlfriend. "The two main characters represent the past and the future of Taipei," said Yang. A World Cinema Project release.

Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953, Japan).
Adaptation of two 18th-century Japanese ghost stories blended with elements from de Maupassant. Restoration from a master positive print and a dupe negative that shows the original visual beauty achieved by Mizoguchi and dp Kazuo Miyagawa.


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[Chris Knipp]

NYFF54 Main Slate announced.

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Elle, Isabelle Huppert

There are only 25 (so far anyway), a manageable list. Including a pretty exceptional number of best-ofs from Cannes, a dozen, including Mungiu's (the Palme d'Or winner), Karen Ade's, Jarmusch's, Verhoeven's, Filho's, Almodovar's, Assayas', Lonergan's, Giraudie's, Loach's (Palme d'Or), Larraín's, and the Dardennes', if I'm not mistaken. That's more than usual even for the NYFF. In justification of this, many said that Cannes was particularly outstanding this year. Incidentally you can see a list of somebody else's faves from Cannes '16 including some other interesting ones here. (http://www.highsnobiety.com/2016/05/20/best-cannes-movies-2016/) I might like to see Diab's Clash, Poitras' doc Risk, Bruno Dumont's weird Slack Bay, even Xavier Dolan's obnoxious Only the End of the World/Just la fin du monde, Andrea Arnold's Honey - but that is coming to US theaters 30 Sept., and that is always a consideration, not to show one with a US release date coming unless it's a premiere. I always have a lot of time for Mia Hansen-Løve, Hong Sang-soo. Barry Jenkins is an African-American whose Medicine for Melancholy was a promising debut (SFIFF 2008 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2265-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2008/page2&s=&postid=20075#post20075)). Dash Shaw's animated films are new to me. Alison McLean's The Rehearsal is it's first showing outside of New Zealand. Eugène Green's Son of Joseph/Le fils de Joseph is from the Berlinale as is Rosi's immigrant crisis documentary focused on the island of Lampedusa. Piñeiro's Hermia and Helena is from Locarno (I am not a fan hitherto of either Piñeiro or Green, to be honest).

The next post will give edited and annotated versions of the longer FSLC blurbs for all the Main Slate films.


The 54th New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night
The 13th
Directed by Ava DuVernay

Centerpiece
20th Century Women
Directed by Mike Mills

Closing Night
The Lost City of Z
Directed by James Gray

Aquarius
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

Certain Women
Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Elle
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Fire at Sea / Fuocoammare
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi

Graduation / Bacalaureat
Directed by Cristian Mungiu

Hermia and Helena
Directed by Matías Piñeiro

I, Daniel Blake
Directed by Ken Loach

Julieta
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Manchester by the Sea
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins

My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
Directed by Dash Shaw

Neruda
Directed by Pablo Larraín

Paterson
Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Personal Shopper
Directed by Olivier Assayas

The Rehearsal
Directed by Alison Maclean

Sieranevada
Directed by Cristi Puiu

Son of Joseph / Le fils de Joseph
Directed by Eugène Green

Staying Vertical / Rester vertical
Directed by Alain Guiraudie

Things to Come / L’Avenir
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

Toni Erdmann
Directed by Maren Ade

The Unknown Girl
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Yourself and Yours
Directed by Hong Sangsoo

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[Chris Knipp]

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NYFF54 Films & Descriptions

Filmleaf NYFF54 Festival Coverage thread (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

(Following are the FSLC blurbs in edited and augmented form.)

Opening Night
The 13th
Directed by Ava DuVernay
USA, 2016
World Premiere
The title of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing documentary refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of mass criminalization and the sprawling American prison industry is laid out by DuVernay with bracing lucidity. With a potent mixture of archival footage and testimony from a dazzling array of activists, politicians, historians, and formerly incarcerated women and men, DuVernay creates a work of grand historical synthesis. A Netflix original documentary.

Centerpiece
20th Century Women
Directed by Mike Mills
USA, 2016
World Premiere
Mike Mills’s texturally and behaviorally rich new comedy seems to keep redefining itself as it goes along, creating a moving group portrait of particular people in a particular place (Santa Barbara) at a particular moment in the 20th century (1979), one lovingly attended detail at a time. The great Annette Bening, in one of her very best performances, is Dorothea, a single mother raising her teenage son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), in a sprawling bohemian house, which is shared by an itinerant carpenter (Billy Crudup) and a punk artist with a Bowie haircut (Greta Gerwig) and frequented by Jamie’s rebellious friend Julie (Elle Fanning). 20th Century Women is warm, funny, and a work of passionate artistry. An A24 Release.

Closing Night
The Lost City of Z
Directed by James Gray
USA, 2016
World Premiere
James Gray’s emotionally and visually resplendent epic tells the story of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett (a remarkable Charlie Hunnam), the British military-man-turned-explorer whose search for a lost city deep in the Amazon grows into an increasingly feverish, decades-long magnificent obsession that takes a toll on his reputation, his home life with his wife (Sienna Miller) and children, and his very existence. Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji cast quite a spell, exquisitely pitched between rapture and dizzying terror. Also starring Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, The Lost City of Z represents a form of epic storytelling that has all but vanished from the landscape of modern cinema, and a rare level of artistry.

Aquarius
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Brazil/France, 2016, 142m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A highlight of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s follow-up to his acclaimed Neighboring Sounds revolves around the leisurely days of a 65-year-old widow, transcendently played by the great Brazilian actress Sônia Braga. Clara is a retired music critic and the only remaining resident of the titular apartment building in Recife. Trouble starts when an ambitious real estate promoter who has bought up all of Aquarius’s other units comes knocking on Clara’s door. She has no intention of leaving, and a protracted struggle ensues. Braga’s transfixing, multilayered performance and the film’s deliberate pacing and stylistic flourishes yield a sophisticated, political, and humane work.

Certain Women
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
USA, 2016, 107m
The seventh feature by Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff), a lean triptych of subtly intersecting lives in Montana, is a work of no-nonsense eloquence. Adapting short stories by Maile Meloy, Certain Women follows a lawyer (Laura Dern) navigating an increasingly volatile relationship with a disgruntled client; a couple (Michelle Williams and James Le Gros) in a marriage laden with micro-aggression and doubt, trying to persuade an old man (Rene Auberjonois) to sell his unused sandstone; and a young ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) fixated on a new-in-town night school teacher (Kristen Stewart). Shooting on 16mm, Reichardt creates understated, uncannily intimate dramas nestled within a clear-eyed depiction of the modern American West. An IFC Films release.

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Elle
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
France/Germany/Belgium, 2016, 131m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Paul Verhoeven’s first feature in a decade—and his first in French—ranks among his most incendiary, improbable concoctions: a wry, almost-screwball comedy of manners about a woman who responds to a rape by refusing the mantle of victimhood. As the film opens, Parisian heroine Michèle (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert) is brutally violated in her kitchen by a hooded intruder. Rather than report the crime, Michèle, the CEO of a video game company and daughter of a notorious mass murderer, calmly sweeps up the mess and proceeds to engage her assailant in a dangerous game of domination and submission in which her motivations remain a constant source of mystery, humor, and tension. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Fire at Sea / Fuocoammare
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi
Italy/France, 2016, 108m
English and Italian with English subtitles
Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary observes Europe’s migrant crisis from the vantage point of a Mediterranean island where hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing war and poverty, have landed in recent decades. Rosi shows the harrowing work of rescue operations but devotes most of the film to the daily rhythms of Lampedusa, seen through the eyes of a doctor who treats casualties and performs autopsies, and a feisty but anxious pre-teen from a family of fishermen for whom it is simply a peripheral fact of life. With its emphasis on the quotidian, the film reclaims an ongoing tragedy from the abstract sensationalism of media headlines. A Kino Lorber release.

Graduation / Bacalaureat
Directed by Cristian Mungiu
Romania, 2016, 127m
Romanian with English subtitles
Cristian Mungiu’s expertly constructed drama concerns a doctor desperate for his daughter to escape corruption-plagued Romania by accepting a scholarship offer from a British university (after-the-fact layer of irony courtesy of Brexit), contingent on her high school final exams. But after she’s assaulted, perhaps for past sins of her father, the doctor must decide whether he will take advantage of his position to ensure that she receives high marks, despite her trauma. Parents anxious about their children’s education will appreciate the moral dilemma the film poses. Like Mungiu’s superb 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (NYFF ’07), Graduation resonates beyond national boundaries. A Sundance Selects release.

Hermia and Helena
Directed by Matías Piñeiro
Argentina/USA, 2016, 87m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Shooting outside his native Argentina for the first time, New York–based Matías Piñeiro fashions a bittersweet comedy of coupling and uncoupling that doubles as a love letter to his adopted city. Working on a Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on an artist residency, Camila (Agustina Muñoz) finds herself within a constellation of shifting relationships (an old flame, a new one, a long-lost relative). Mingling actors from the director’s Buenos Aires repertory with stalwarts of New York’s independent film scene (Keith Poulson, Dustin Guy Defa, Dan Sallitt), Hermia and Helena offers the precise gestures, mercurial moods, and youthful energies of all Piñeiro’s cinema, with an emotional depth and directness that make this his most mature work yet.

I, Daniel Blake
Directed by Ken Loach
UK, 2016, 100m
U.S. Premiere
Unable to work after suffering a heart attack, Daniel (Dave Johns) must apply to the government for benefits. But with the seemingly endless documentation he has to provide, his lack of familiarity with computers, and the condescending attitudes of the functionaries to whom he must repeat the same information in one soul-killing encounter after another, he is all but defeated from the beginning, as is his new comrade in misery, Katie (Hayley Squires). English director Ken Loach’s thoroughly shattering film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, will strike a chord with anyone who has ever tried to negotiate their way through the labyrinth of bureaucracy. A Sundance Selects release.

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Julieta
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Spain, 2016, 99m
Spanish with English subtitles
Pedro Almodóvar explores his favorite themes of love, sexuality, guilt, and destiny through the poignant story of Julieta, played to perfection by Emma Suárez (younger) and Adriana Ugarte (middle-aged), over the course of a 30-year time span. Just as she is about to leave Madrid forever, the seemingly content Julieta has a chance encounter that stirs up sorrowful memories of the daughter who brutally abandoned her when she turned eighteen. Drawing on numerous film historical references, from Hitchcock to the director’s own earlier Movida era work, Almodóvar’s twentieth feature, adapted from three short stories by Alice Munro ("Chance," "Soon," and "Silence"), is a haunting drama that oscillates between disenchanted darkness and visual opulence. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Manchester by the Sea
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan
USA, 2016, 137m
Casey Affleck is formidable as the volatile, deeply troubled Lee Chandler, a Boston-based handyman called back to his hometown on the Massachusetts North Shore after the sudden death of his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), who has left behind a teenage son (Lucas Hedges). This loss and the return to his old stomping grounds summon Lee’s memories of an earlier, even more devastating tragedy. In his third film as a director, following You Can Count on Me (2000) and Margaret (2011), Kenneth Lonergan, with the help of a remarkable cast, unflinchingly explores grief, hope, and love, giving us a film that is funny, sharply observed, intimately detailed yet grand in emotional scale. An Amazon Studios Release.

Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
USA, 2016, 110m
Barry Jenkins more than fulfills the promise of his 2008 romantic two-hander Medicine for Melancholy in this three-part narrative spanning the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a gay African-American man who survives Miami’s drug-plagued inner city, finding love in unexpected places and the possibility of change within himself. Moonlight offers a powerful sense of place and a wealth of unpredictable characters, featuring a fantastic ensemble cast including André Holland, Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris, and Mahershala Ali—delivering performances filled with inner conflict and aching desires that cut straight to the heart. An A24 release NYC and LA 21 Oct.

My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
Directed by Dash Shaw
USA, 2016, 75m
U.S. Premiere
No matter your age, part of you never outgrows high school, for better or worse. Dash Shaw, known for such celebrated graphic novels as Bottomless Belly Button and New School, brings his subjective, dreamlike sense of narrative; his empathy for outsiders and their desire to connect; and his rich, expressive drawing style to his first animated feature. Packed with action but seen from the inside out, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is about friends overcoming their differences and having each other’s backs in times of crisis, and its marvelously complex characters are voiced by Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Reggie Watts, Maya Rudolph, and John Cameron Mitchell.

Neruda
Directed by Pablo Larraín
Chile/Argentina/France/Spain, 2016, 107m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
Pablo Larraín’s exciting, surprising, and colorful new film is not a biopic but, as the director himself puts it, a "Nerudean" portrait of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s years of flight and exile after his 1948 denunciation of his government’s leadership. Larraín’s heady blend of fact and fancy (the latter embodied in an invented character, straight out of detective fiction, played by Gael García Bernal) is many things at once: a loving, kaleidoscopic recreation of a particular historical moment; a comical cat-and-mouse game; and a pocket epic. Featuring Luis Gnecco, a dead ringer for the poet and a formidable actor, alongside a terrific cast. A release of The Orchard coming 16 Dec.

Paterson
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
USA, 2016, 118m
U.S. Premiere
Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver who writes poetry drawn from the world around him. Paterson is also the name of the New Jersey city where he works and lives with his effervescent and energetic girlfriend (Golshifteh Farahani). And Paterson is the title of the great epic poem by William Carlos Williams, whose spirit animates Jim Jarmusch’s exquisite new film. This is a rare movie experience, set to the rhythm of an individual consciousness absorbing the beauties and mysteries and paradoxes and joys and surprises of everyday life, at home and at work, and making them into art. An Amazon Studios release (US theatrical release 28 December 2016).

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Personal Shopper
Directed by Olivier Assayas
France, 2016, 105m
French and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Kristen Stewart is the medium, in more ways than one, for this sophisticated genre exploration from director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria). As a fashion assistant whose twin brother has died, leaving her bereft and longing for messages from the other side, Stewart is fragile and enigmatic—and nearly always on-screen. From an opening sequence in a haunted house with an intricately constructed soundtrack to a high-tension, cat-and-mouse game on a trip from Paris to London and back set entirely to text messaging, Personal Shopper brings the psychological and supernatural thriller into the digital age. An IFC Films release.

The Rehearsal
Directed by Alison Maclean
New Zealand, 2016, 75m
U.S. Premiere
Alison Maclean (Jesus’ Son) returns to her New Zealand filmmaking roots with a multilayered coming-of-age story about a young actor (James Rolleston) searching for the truth of a character he’s playing onstage and the resulting moral dilemma in his personal life. Set largely in a drama school, featuring Kerry Fox as a diva-like teacher who tries to shape her student’s raw talent, The Rehearsal, adapted from the novel by Eleanor Catton, demystifies actors and acting in order to reveal the moments where craft becomes art. The same happens with Maclean’s understated but penetrating filmmaking. Her concentration on the quotidian yields a finale that borders on the sublime.

Sieranevada
Directed by Cristi Puiu
Romania, 2016, 173m
Romanian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A decade after jumpstarting the Romanian New Wave with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Cristi Puiu returns with a virtuosic chamber drama set largely within a labyrinthine Bucharest apartment where a cantankerous extended family has gathered forty days after its patriarch’s death (and three days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris). Rituals and meals are anticipated and delayed, doors open and close, and the camera hovers at thresholds and in corridors. As claustrophobia mounts, heated, humorous exchanges—about the old Communist days and the present age of terror—coalesce into a brilliantly staged and observed portrait of personal and social disquiet.

Son of Joseph / Le fils de Joseph
Directed by Eugène Green
France/Belgium, 2016, 113m
French with English Subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The American-born expatriate filmmaker Eugène Green exists in his own special artistic orbit. All Green’s films share a formal rigor and an increasingly refined modulation between the playfully comic, the urgently human, and the transcendent, and they are each as exquisitely balanced as the baroque music and architecture that he cherishes. His latest movie, Son of Joseph, is perhaps his most buoyant. A nativity story reboot that gently skewers French cultural pretensions, it features newcomer Victor Ezenfis as a discontented Parisian teenager in search of a father, Mathieu Amalric and Fabrizio Rongione as his, respectively, callous and gentle alternative paternal options, and Natacha Régnier as his single mother. A Kino Lorber Films release. (Green's La Sapienza (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32769#post32769) was included in the 2014 NYFF. Berlinale debut: Variety called it "delightful," IndieWire "adorable.")

Staying Vertical / Rester vertical
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
France, 2016, 100m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Léo (Damien Bonnard), a blocked filmmaker seeking inspiration in the French countryside for an overdue script, begins an affair with a shepherdess (India Hair), with whom he almost immediately has a child. Combining the formal control of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake with the shapeshifting fabulism of his earlier work, Alain Guiraudie’s new film is a sidelong look at the human cycle of birth, procreation, and death, as well as his boldest riff yet on his signature subjects of freedom and desire. The title has the ring of both a rallying cry and a dirty joke—fitting for a film that is, above all else, a rumination on what it means to be a human being, a vertical animal. A Strand Releasing release. (See Mike D'Angelo's enthusiastic AV Club review (http://www.avclub.com/article/some-cannes-regulars-get-weird-only-one-their-curi-236732): " Guiraudie’s latest feature (and first Competition entry), finds an ideal balance between light surrealism and formal precision, so that nearly every scene fulfills the standard criterion for a great ending: surprising plus inevitable.")

Things to Come / L’Avenir
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
France/Germany, 2016, 100m
French with English subtitles
In the new film from Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden), Isabelle Huppert is Nathalie, a Parisian professor of philosophy who comes to realize that the tectonic plates of her existence are slowly but inexorably shifting: her husband (André Marcon) leaves her, her mother (Edith Scob) comes apart, her favorite former student decides to live off the grid, and her first grandchild is born. Hansen-Løve carefully builds Things to Come around her extraordinary star: her verve and energy, her beauty, her perpetual motion. Huppert’s remarkable performance is counterpointed by the quietly accumulating force of the action, and the result is an exquisite expression of time’s passing. A Sundance Selects release. (Released 6 April 2016 in France to raves - AlloCiné press rating 3.9.) This is the second film starring Huppert.

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Toni Erdmann
Directed by Maren Ade
Germany, 2016, 162m
German with English subtitles
An audacious twist on the screwball comedy—here, the twosome is an aging-hippie prankster father and his corporate-ladder-climbing daughter—Toni Erdmann delivers art and entertainment in equal measure and charmed just about everyone who saw it at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Maren Ade's dazzling script has just enough of a classical comedic structure to support 162 minutes of surprises big and small. Meanwhile, her direction is designed to liberate the actors as much as possible while the camera rolls, resulting in sublime performances by Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek, who leave the audience suspended between laughter and tears. A Sony Pictures Classics release. (Reviewing it at Cannes for AV Club (http://www.avclub.com/article/cannes-premieres-its-first-great-film-and-spielber-236781), Mike D'Angelo called it "sublime" and a "great film." The public and press awards at Cannes. It opens in France 17 Aug.)

The Unknown Girl / La fille inconnue
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Belgium, 2016, 106m
It’s a few minutes after closing time in a medical clinic in Seraing, Belgium. The buzzer rings. Doctor Jenny (Adèle Haenel) tells her assistant (Olivier Bonnaud) to ignore it. She is later informed that the girl she turned away was soon found dead on the riverside. From that moment, Jenny becomes a different kind of doctor, diagnosing not just her dispossessed patients’ illnesses but also the greater malady afflicting her community. And this is a different kind of movie for Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, in which the urgency pulses beneath the seemingly placid surface, and it is all keyed to Haenel’s extraordinary performance. A Sundance Selects release.

Yourself and Yours
Directed by Hong Sangsoo
South Korea, 2016, 86m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Prolific NYFF favorite Hong Sangsoo boldly and wittily continues his ongoing exploration of the painful caprices of modern romance. Painter Youngsoo (Kim Joo-hyuk) hears secondhand that his girlfriend, Minjung (Lee Yoo-young), has recently had (many) drinks with an unknown man. This leads to a quarrel that seems to end their relationship. The next day, Youngsoo sets out in search of her, at the same time that Minjung—or a woman who looks exactly like her and may or may not be her twin—has a series of encounters with strange men, some of whom claim to have met her before . . . Yourself and Yours is a break-up/make-up comedy unlike any other, suffused with sophisticated modernist mystery.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

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FSLC announces NYFF54 Convergence program

The Convergence sidebar is a multimedia series with video, public lectures and audience participation. Following are the FSLC press release blurbs and schedule.
NYFF54 CONVERGENCE EVENTS AND DESCRIPTIONS

Experiences and Installations
[For the rest see HERE (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2016/daily/nyff-convergence-virtual-augmented-reality/).]

Cardboard City
Kiira Benzing, Stina Hamlin
Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality, 2016, USA, 3m
Cities are in a constant state of flux, waxing and waning along with their populations. Many consider these cycles of growth and decline part of the appeal of urban living, but change has consequences for those not able to keep up. Such is the case with the subjects of Cardboard City, a community of artists forced out of their Gowanus studios due to skyrocketing rents and runaway development. Blending virtual reality, augmented reality, and user-generated content, the piece is a hands-on interactive installation that uses these artists’ stories as a jumping-off point, before inviting viewers to become creators and add buildings, memories, and stories to an ever evolving cityscape.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2

EKO
Interlude, Sandeep Parikh, Casey Donahue, Daniel Scheinert, Billy Chew
Interactive Video Installation, 2016, USA
Interactive video projects often weigh mechanics against storytelling, creating an unbalanced final product: it’s a technical achievement or a quality story, but rarely both. EKO, a new video platform that responds to the viewer’s input, may finally have balanced the scales. Audiences are invited to experience a trio of interactive shorts built on this new platform: The Gleam, an interactive documentary about a small town paper; That Moment When, a comedy that asks the viewer to navigate a battery of awkward conversations; and Now/Then, a Rashomon-inspired story focused on the various perspectives swirling around a relationship on the rocks.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2

Giant
Milica Zec, Winslow Turner Porter III
Virtual Reality, 2016, USA, 10m
Virtual reality has been so central to recent discussions of interactive storytelling that it’s easy to forget that the form is still relatively new. With the ability to drop the viewer into an immersive environment, it’s no wonder that early conversations about VR stories focus on the empathy between audiences and subjects. This is used to startling effect in Giant. Transported to a basement shelter in an active war zone, we watch—and listen—as parents try to distract their daughter from the thunder of bombs. This is more than a film rendered in 360 degrees; it’s a testament to the power of this nascent form of storytelling.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2

Late Shift
Baptiste Planche, Tobias Weber
Audience-Directed Narrative Feature, 2016, Switzerland, 80m
Are games and films on a collision course? It’s a question asked every time emergent technologies broaden what’s possible with a little code, a story, and the will to blend the two. Yet while cinematic games are commonplace, game-like films are not. The high-octane thriller Late Shift aims to change that. A parking attendant’s world is turned upside down when he’s forced to take part in a brazen heist, and the audience makes choices to shape the story via an app. The branching narrative is flawlessly executed, creating an in-theater experience as enjoyable for the casual viewer as the hardcore “player.” U.S. Premiere
Howard Gilman Theater, Sunday October 2, 5:30pm

Lives in Transit
Global Lives Project
Video Installation, 2015/2016, USA
The San Francisco–based Global Lives Project produces long-form documentaries that capture the rich diversity of human experience and engender cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. Each 24-hour film provides a window onto a single day in the life of its subject. This latest iteration of the project, Lives in Transit, focuses on ten individuals who in their own ways are responsible for moving people and products throughout the world. Presented as a large-scale video installation, Lives in Transit is more than an exploration of ten unique people—it is a dynamic ground-level examination of our hyper-connected world. World Premiere
Walter Reade Theater’s Furman Gallery, October 1-16

Priya’s Mirror
Ram Devineni, Dan Goldman, Paromita Vohra, Shubra Prakash, Vikas Menon
Augmented Reality Installation, 2016, USA/India
Launched in 2014, Priya’s Shakti was a first-of-its-kind fusion of augmented reality, comic books, and social engagement. The story of Priya, a rape survivor and modern-day superhero, shattered taboos that exist in India on the subject of violence against women. The second volume of this ongoing series, Priya’s Mirror sees the heroine joining forces with acid attack survivors to take on the demon king Ahankar. As with its predecessor, Priya’s Mirror makes use of augmented reality to bring the 2D world of the comic to vivid life and unlock a number of interactive story elements. World Premiere
Walter Reade Theater’s Furman Gallery, October 1-16

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Cardboard City

Ricerca VR
Yo-Yo Lin, Will Cherry, Steve Dabal, Elle Callahan, Michael Matchen
Virtual Reality, 2016, USA, 15m
It’s no coincidence that we are so moved by stories about quests. The search—for love, for forgiveness, for meaning—is an essential aspect of our humanity. In Ricerca (Italian for “search”), a man scours his memories for something lost, traversing a lush world rendered with a vibrant mix of 2D and stop-motion animation. Originally presented as a large-scale video installation, the reimagined piece employs virtual reality to extend its life beyond the gallery space, raising a compelling question: what will the relationship be between VR and the world of fine art?
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2

Sherlock Holmes & The Internet of Things
Lance Weiler, Nick Fortugno
Immersive Storytelling Experience, 2016, USA
While one imagines that real criminal investigators hope for the shortest distance between crime and conviction, readers of detective fiction care more about the journey: the more twists the better. The same could be said for this ever-evolving storytelling experiment. Since its launch, participants from 20 countries have taken part in a project that uses the emergent web of connected digital devices to investigate mysteries with the world’s favorite consulting detective. For the second year, NYFF invites audiences to step into Holmes’s shoes to solve a string of crimes across Lincoln Center’s campus.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 (1:00pm, 2:30pm, 4:00pm)

Sound Hunters
François Le Gall, Nicolas Blies
Immersive Storytelling Experience, 2015, France
Long before Lawrence Lessig, Austin Kleon, and Malcolm Gladwell each dubbed this the Age of the Remix, T. S. Eliot wrote, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” With Sound Hunters, the audience makes music by recording and remixing the sounds of the world around them. Created by François Le Gall and Nicolas Blies, this multifaceted project does more than make music from the audio of everyday life; each uploaded sound is a window onto its author’s world, and every song created by the Sound Hunter community is as much a remix of distinctive life experiences as of unique audio elements.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2

SPECIAL TALKS

ILMxLAB
Hilmar Koch and Nick Rasmussen, ILMxLAB
Founded in 2015, ILMxLAB fuses the talents of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light and Magic, and Skywalker Sound to create a new, collaborative space to experiment with stories across all visual media platforms—those we know well and those just being established. The lab encourages exploration, and, yes, even failure as a means for discovering new ways to tell and experience stories. Discovery is at the very heart of the lab’s work. Hilmar Koch and Nick Rasmussen will share some of their personal discoveries from their journey so far and reflect on the promise and perils of working at the frontiers of storytelling.
Saturday, October 1, 4:00pm

The Psychology of Storytelling: Lindsay Doran
Oscar-nominated producer and studio executive Lindsay Doran brings more than 30 years of experience in the movie business to bear on this examination of what the field of Positive Psychology can teach us about the secrets of writing a satisfying movie—and how our “deep-seated fear of the saber-tooth tiger” keeps them secret. Doran has served as the President of United Artists and as the President of Sydney Pollack’s Mirage Productions. Doran’s first film credit was on the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. As a producer, her credits include Dead Again, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, and Stranger Than Fiction.
Monday October 3, 2016, 6:30pm

The State of the (Interactive) Art
StoryCode’s Mike Knowlton, interactive theater director Michael Rau, filmmaker Ram Devineni, and more
The NYC Transmedia Meetup was founded as a monthly gathering of creative professionals looking to discuss the emerging field of multi-platform storytelling. By 2011, the group had evolved from a loose confederation of storytellers into a community that would become known as StoryCode. That same year, NYFF launched its Convergence section. On the fifth anniversary of both programs, StoryCode cofounder Mike Knowlton and a panel of key players from the New York interactive scene— Convergence veterans, game designers, immersive theater directors, virtual reality producers, and interactive filmmakers—reflect on where we’ve been and imagine where we’re headed.
Saturday October 1, 2:30pm

Traveling While Black: Special Preview Event
Roger Ross Williams, Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, Lina Srivastava, Yasmin Elayat
Published in 1936, the Green Book became an essential tool for African American travelers. The book consisted of a coast-to-coast listing of bars, hotels, and other businesses that were black-friendly in the age of Jim Crow. Traveling While Black presents a contemporary exploration of the issues related to restricted movement in modern-day America with a suite of experiences including a traveling museum exhibit, virtual reality films, and live events. Academy Award–winning director Roger Ross Williams will present a sneak peek of this compelling project, including a live performance, a teaser of the project’s first VR piece, and a panel discussion.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

FSLC announces Projections, the avant-garde showcase to accompany NYFF54.

Here it is. Press may be shown a few of these. Indiewire listing. (http://www.indiewire.com/2016/08/new-york-film-festival-2016-projections-section-lineup-film-society-nyff-1201717827/)

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FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen digitally at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 W. 65th St.) unless otherwise noted.

Program 1: THE SPACES BETWEEN THE WORDS
Friday, October 7, 4:00pm
Saturday, October 8, 3:00pm
TRT: 81m

REGAL
Karissa Hahn, USA, 2015, 16mm, 2m
An old Regal Cinemas pre-show animation is further degraded as it’s run through a ringer of format transfers, each layer representing a different viewing space.

Steve Hates Fish
John Smith, UK, 2015, 5m
Recorded from a smartphone screen, its translation app running on the wrong settings and struggling to interpret North London street signs in French and convert them to English, Steve Hates Fish turns errors into unintentional poetry.

Real Italian Pizza
David Rimmer, Canada, 1971, 16mm, 13m
Scenes outside a Manhattan pizza joint, shot over eight months from a fourth-floor apartment window. Men stand eating their slices and drinking their sodas alone; groups of friends and neighborhood acquaintances, mostly black, hang out, talking and laughing; a few cops, all white, march a man away in handcuffs; summer turns to winter. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Now: End of Season
Ayman Nahle, Lebanon, 2015, 20m
U.S. Premiere
In the cosmopolitan Turkish city of Izmir, thousands of Syrians fleeing Assad, ISIS, and the proxy forces lined up behind them, bide their time, waiting to cross the Aegean Sea. On the soundtrack, voices from a previous war.

See a Dog, Hear a Dog
Jesse McLean, USA, 2016, 18m
World Premiere
This tragicomic analysis of communication between humans, animals, and machines was made with original video footage, computer animations, and internet media, including YouTube dog videos, chatbot dialogue windows, and images from iTunes visualizer.

Twixt Cup and Lip
Stephen Sutcliffe, UK, 2016, 23m
World Premiere
This sound and video collage, produced in conjunction with a museum exhibit about Yorkshire playwright and novelist David Storey, draws from BBC outtakes, Edwardian-nostalgic commercial design, and other sources of mid-century British middlebrow to consider the vagaries of class mobility.

Program 2: BEYOND LANDSCAPE
Friday, October 7, 6:30pm
Saturday, October 8, 5:15pm
TRT: 78m

Burning Mountains That Spew Flame / Montañas Ardientes Que Vomitan Fuego
Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado, Spain, 2016, 14m
U.S. Premiere
Scientific claims made by 17th-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher and political ones made by the Invisible Committee are examined in this journey into the volcanoes of Lanzarote.

Bending to Earth
Rosa Barba, USA/Germany, 2015, 35mm, 15m
Helicopter shots circle variously colored shapes carved into desert landscapes. We discover these manmade inscriptions are storage cells for radioactive material designed to eventually return to the soil.

Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon
Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2016, 16mm, 10m
U.S. Premiere
Delivering exactly what his title promises—but not necessarily in the order you’d expect—Nishikawa presents 20 sequences shot along Japan’s Yahagi River; images tautly suspended between stillness and movement, darkness and light.

Canadian Pacific I
David Rimmer, Canada, 1974, 16mm, 9m
Scenes taken from a single, second-floor view of Vancouver Harbor, recorded over three winter months, pieced together with subtle dissolves so as to resemble one ten-minute shot. “Its formalism is very unimposing,” wrote Jonas Mekas, “like in a Hudson School painting.”

Jáaji Approx.
Sky Hopinka, USA, 2015, 8m
Hopkina’s video address to his father is made of landscape images saturated with dark shadow and dreamy light, and features his father’s own words taken from recordings of Hočak language songs and chants.

Bad Mama, Who Cares
Brigid McCaffrey, USA, 2016, 35mm, 12m
World Premiere
Geologist Ren Lallatin inhabits different spaces—of brilliant snow and blazing sun, rundown towns and little-trodden deserts—in this structural-lyrical landscape film shot on richly tinted film.

Ears, Nose and Throat
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2016, 10m
Everson returns to his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, in this unblinking look at the simultaneity of the tragic and the mundane in black American life. The subject is the 2010 murder of 25-year-old DeCarrio Couley, who appeared in a number of Everson’s earlier films.

Program 3: THE ILLINOIS PARABLES
Friday, October 7, 8:45pm
TRT: 70m

The Illinois Parables
Deborah Stratman, USA, 2016, 16mm, 60m
Eleven episodes from the history of Illinois stand in for the United States at large. Working in her essayistic, political mode, Deborah Stratman synthesizes an array of materials into a rigorous yet playful consideration of the catastrophe of the state and the resilience of those who make up the nation.

Preceded by
The Horses of a Cavalry Captain / Die Pferde des Rittmeisters
Clemens von Wedemeyer, Germany, 2015, 10m
North American Premiere
During World War II, Wehrmacht captain Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch traveled in advance of the army scouting for barracks. An amateur cinematographer, he also made 16mm images behind the front. Part of a larger project, Die pferde des Rittmeisters, made by Vietinghoff-Riesch’s grandson, presents footage of the cavalry horses, the artist’s commentary never letting us forget that these attractive creatures were also Nazi machines.

Program 4: FADE OUT
Saturday, October 8, 2:00pm
Saturday, October 8, 7:30pm
TRT: 76m

Old Hat
Zach Iannazzi, USA, 2016, 16mm, 8m
A scrapbook of 16mm images made on the fly, the length of each determined by the position of the Bolex spring when the shot begins. Some shove past as quickly as slides in a carousel advanced at top speed; others—etching the explosive ascent of fireworks in high-contrast white, or the arc of the setting sun on the mirrored glass of an office tower—linger.

Flowers of the Sky
Janie Geiser, USA, 2016, 9m
U.S. Premiere
Named after a medieval term for comets, Flowers of the Sky finds a seemingly infinite number of ways of looking at and into two mid-century postcards depicting the Freemasonic Order of the Eastern Star, using a macro lens and a variety of printing and masking techniques.

Answer Print
Mónica Savirón, USA, 2016, 16mm, 5m
World Premiere
Answer Print is assembled with pieces of deteriorating 16mm color stock. Not only the images themselves but also the world that produced them and which they reproduce—here suspended in the red aspic of faded color dye—threatens to disappear.

Athyrium filix-femina (for Anna Atkins)
Kelly Egan, Canada, 2016, 35mm, 5m
World Premiere
This homage to botanist and photography pioneer Anna Atkins was made in cyanotype photograms and reanimated film stills on stock exposed in the sun. Handcrafted with historically domestic, feminine tools, it’s structured as a narrative in quilting patterns.

Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper
David Rimmer, Canada, 1970, 16mm, 9m
This classic work of Canadian structural cinema consists of an eight-second shot of a woman in a factory unrolling a spool of cellophane in sheets, which crash like waves toward the camera. Rimmer loops the image, replaying it in segments that give it different visual and aural treatments. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Ghost Children
Joao Vieira Torres, Brazil/France, 2016, 17m
North American Premiere
Ghost Children presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.

Cilaos
Camilo Restrepo, France, 2016, 13m
U.S. Premiere
A woman takes her mother’s dying wish to the father she never knew; he is dead but not gone from the Réunion Islands village of Cilaos, historically a Maroon community. With the collaboration of renowned singer Christine Salem, Restrepo develops a trans-diasporic narrative form built on the slave rhythms of Réunionese maloya and Colombian mapalé.

Luna e Santur
Joshua Gen Solondz, USA, 2016, 35mm, 11m
U.S. Premiere
Mingling sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic, this visually assaultive threnody alternates white hot light with furious streaks of cruddy black goop, pushing the eye and the ego to their breaking points.

Program 5: SITE AND SOUND
Saturday, October 8, 4:15pm
Sunday, October 9, 12:30pm
TRT: 84m

Indefinite Pitch
James N. Kienitz Wilkins, USA, 2016, 23m
A procession of black and silvery white stills of New England’s Androscoggin River unspools alongside an anxious monologue on movies, memory, and minor history.

Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition)
Lawrence Lek, UK, 2016, 14m
North American Premiere
This guided, two-part meditation on Brexit unfolds in a computer-simulated hallucination of the London district of Dalston, a place with no people but filled with drones and fires.

Strange Vision of Seeing Things
Ryan Ferko, Canada/Serbia, 2016, 14m
U.S. Premiere
Time-spaces of post-Yugoslav Serbia: the empty lobby of a defunct industrial conglomerate’s headquarters in Belgrade; an unseen man describing tripping on acid during the 1999 NATO bombings; a mother and her young son visit ruins left by that same campaign. At first they appear in crisp HD, but cracks form, revealing dimensions beneath the smooth surface.

Foyer
Ismaïl Bahri, France/Tunisia, 2016, 32m
U.S. Premiere
A white haze flutters on-screen, accompanied by street sounds in Tunis. Indistinct shapes appear as passersby engage the cameraman about his project and their lives. He tells one of them, “The wind does the editing.”

Program 6: ALL THE CITIES OF THE NORTH
Saturday, October 8, 6:45pm

All the Cities of the North / Svi severni gradovi
Dane Komljen, Serbia/Bosnia-Herzegovina/Montenegro, 2016, 100m
North American Premiere
In the darkly wooded grounds and concrete boxes of what was once a Yugoslav resort complex, two men share an enigmatic, tender life. A stranger comes to town; things change, but how, what, and why remain ambiguous. In Komljen’s richly suggestive, quietly moving elegy to lost utopias, no words are exchanged, and speech only comes in monologues, taking up questions on the architecture and administration of human sociality.

Program 7: POP CULTURE CLASH
Saturday, October 8, 9:30pm
Sunday, October 9, 3:00pm
TRT: 63m

A Boy Needs a Friend
Steve Reinke, USA, 2015, 22m
This latest installment of Final Thoughts, the series of unreliably narrated queer video essays that Reinke intends to continue until his death, takes love and friendship as its main subjects. Onto this he latches a long chain of endless digressions, which include, among much else, Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, the pleasures of needlepoint, and the design of an anal tattoo.

Spotlight on a Brick Wall
Alee Peoples and Mike Stoltz, USA, 2016, 16mm, 8m
An abstracted nightclub performance, its constituent parts—stand-up comedy, a capella, a laconic bass-and-drum rock duo, a slapstick mime—wrenched apart and recombined.

Return to Forms
Zachary Epcar, USA, 2016, 10m
World Premiere
The surfaces and shapes of typical international contempo yuppie style are defamiliarized, staged in and around a condo in an unnamed urban environment.

Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD
Mark Leckey, UK, 2015, 16mm, 23m
North American Premiere
Dream English Kid traces the cultural developments in the life of a working-class English boy, between the start of the Nuclear Test Ban and Azzido Da Bass’s first EP, as a collage of images and sounds, locating the broadly shared within the idiosyncratic and personal.

Program 8: DORSKY AND HILER
Sunday, October 9, 1:00pm
Sunday, October 9, 5:00pm
TRT: 65m

Autumn
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2016, 16mm, 26m
World Premiere
“Autumn, photographed during the last months of the drought year, 2015, is a stately, but intimate, seasonal tome, a celebration of the poignancy and mystery of our later years.” —Nathaniel Dorsky

The Dreamer
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2016, 16mm, 19m
World Premiere
“This year our midsummer’s night was adorned with a glorious full moon. The weeks and days preceding the solstice were magically alive with crisp, cool breezes, bright warm sunlight, and a general sense of heartbreaking clarity. The Dreamer is born out of this most poignant San Francisco spring.” —Nathaniel Dorsky

Bagatelle II
Jerome Hiler, USA, 2016, 16mm, 20m
World Premiere
“With Bagatelle II, I seem to have come full circle by returning to the so-called polyvalent style of my earliest film endeavors from 50 years ago. The film actually includes material from all the intervening decades. It's both up to the moment yet life-spanning, with a thread of deep affection for the special characteristics of 16mm film.” —Jerome Hiler

Program 9: EVENT HORIZONS
Sunday, October 9, 3:15pm
Sunday, October 9, 7:00pm
TRT: 81m

Há Terra!
Ana Vaz, Brazil/France, 2016, 13m
U.S. Premiere
The camera jerks quickly across a field in the Brazilian Sertão, homing in on a young Maroon woman crouching in the tall grass. A hand feels around in the brush, caressing the earth. From these two images, Ana Vaz’s film proceeds on tracks that neither fully merge nor completely diverge, expressing the incommensurability of filmmaker and subject.

Kindah
Ephraim Asili, USA/Jamaica, 2016, 12m
World Premiere
Shot between the Maroon village of Accompong, Jamaica, and Hudson, New York, the alternately sparse and exultantly polyrhythmic Kindah is part of a series of films examining the filmmaker's relationship to the African diaspora. The title alludes to the mango tree that symbolizes common kinship in the Jamaican Maroon culture.

In Titan’s Goblet
Peter Hutton, USA, 1991, 16mm, 9m
Titled after a painting by Thomas Cole, this work of Hudson River School landscape filmmaking by the late Peter Hutton is a study of ships and smoke on the water.

An Aviation Field / Um Campo de Aviação
Joana Pimenta, Portugal/USA/Brazil, 2016, 13m
U.S. Premiere
Using warm, darkly saturated 16mm images shot on the volcanic island of Fogo, Cape Verde, and in modernist Brasilia, and sounds that range between trebly crackle and aquatic gurgle, Pimenta constructs a surreal and mythical landscape from the remnants of Portuguese colonialism.

Electrical Gaza
Rosalind Nashashibi, UK, 2015, 18m
Commissioned by London’s Imperial War Museum, Electrical Gaza combines vérité documentary scenes of public life in Gaza shot by Nashashibi in 2014, portraits of her crew, and uncanny, painterly computer animations modeled from the footage, rendering it unreal—as the Israeli government would claim and Palestinians would like to make it.

Event Horizon
Guillermo Moncayo, France, 2015, 16m
A story modeled on 19th-century ethnography and colonialist travel literature unfolds in titles written in a mythological register. Lush images and sounds accrue a level of detail that refuses knowledge and courts being.

Program 10: FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF . . .
Sunday, October 9, 5:30pm
TRT: 55m

From the Notebook of…
Robert Beavers, Italy/Switzerland, 1971/1998, 35mm, 48m
North American Restoration Premiere
An essential film by one of cinema’s living masters, forged from the brilliant light of Florence streets and the shadow of an old pensionne, this astounding work of public science and private experience was inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. According to P. Adams Sitney, this is “the first film of artistic maturity.”

Preceded by
[B]For Christian
Luke Fowler, UK/USA, 2016, 16mm, 7m
Fowler’s portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff continues his investigation into the legacies of 20th-century avant-garde music. Short, handheld shots taken at Wolff’s New Hampshire farm are assembled in diagonal relation to a soundtrack that features snippets of conversation with Wolff and passages from his compositions.

Program 11: THE HUMAN SURGE
Sunday, October 9, 7:30pm
TRT: 97m

The Human Surge / El auge del humano
Eduardo Williams, Argentina/Brazil/Portugal, 2016, 97m (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4289-NEW-YORK-MOVIE-JOURNAL-(Feb-Mar-2017)&p=35316#post35316)
U.S. Premiere
A twenty-something in Argentina loses his warehouse job. Boys in Maputo, Mozambique, perform half-hearted sex acts in front of a webcam. A woman in the Philippines assembles electronics in a small factory. Williams’s inquisitive camera is in constant motion, as are his rootless characters, who wander aimlessly, make small talk, futz with their phones, and search for a working Internet connection. Unfolding within the unfree time between casual jobs, this wildly original rumination on labor and leisure in the global digital economy seems to take place in both the immediate present and the far horizon of the foreseeable future. Winner of the top prize in the 2016 Locarno Film Festival’s Filmmakers of the Present section.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/4KAng.jpg

NYFF54 Main Slate addition: Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

Key add-ons to the Main Slate continue with today's announcement (22 Aug.): a "Special Presentation" premiere of Ang Lee's Billy Lyn's Long Halftime Walk. (US theatrical release is 11 Nov. 2016.)

The movie is an adaptation of the Ben Fountain novel penned by long-time Lee team member Jean-Christophe Castelli.

Book and film present the flashbacks of 19-year-old protagonist Billy (newcomer Joe Alwyn) to the horrors that really happened in combat, while he and his Bravo Company and their exploits are being celebrated at an elaborate Thanksgiving Day halftime football show. The movie is presented in a new format that's supposed to rock our world: shot in 4K, in "native 3D," at "the ultra high rate" of 120 frames per second. (In release it will also be shown in 2D, thankfully.) It has a supporting cast of Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, and Garrett Hedlund, with Vin Diesel and Steve Martin. (US theatrical release is 11 Nov. 2016.)

I haven't read Ben Fountain's novel, but Theo Tait's review of it in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/06/billy-lynn-ben-fountain-review) makes Fountain and it sound terrific. If Lee's version lives up to the description's literary models it's going to be one of the movies of the year, for certain. Tait starts by saying it's been called "the Catch-22 of the Iraq War. He continues:
It doesn't particularly resemble Catch-22, but it recalls all sorts of good things: the delirious Playboy bunnies stadium scene in Apocalypse Now; the outrageous military banter in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket; the all-American cacophony of Tom Wolfe when he was still funny; Norman Mailer's anatomies of US celebrity; perhaps even the baseball game at the start of Don DeLillo's Underworld. Tait says the novel is "eloquent and angry, funny and poignant." Has Ang Lee got that in him? I hope so! If this description is even half true, we better find copies of this book!

The NYFF's mutually beneficial relationship with Mr. Lee goes back to 1997 when The Ice Storm (arguably his best serous dramatic feature, along with Brokeback Mountain) opened the festival; then Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which won him and his glossy popularization of Chinese wuxia films wider US and Western recognition) was the NYFF's closing night film in 2000. Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's grand adventure, Life of Pi, filmed in 3D, was the opener of 2012.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF54 special events and evenings with guests of honor.

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Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, in A Quiet Passion

On this see The Wrap (http://www.thewrap.com/kristen-stewart-adam-driver-added-to-ny-film-festival-lineup/).


Special Events include Jim Jarmusch's Gimme Danger (a doc about Iggy Pop and The Stooges first shown at Cannes); the World Premiere of Alex Horwitz's Hamilton’s America (another doc, to be aired on PBS, about the lead-up to the Broadway hit musical Hamilton); Film Comment Presents Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion (a film about the poet Emily Dickenson); Lonny Price’s Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, plus special guests Jarmusch, Davies, Iggy Pop (star of Jarumush's doc), Cynthia Nixon (star of Davies' film, in which she plays the poet), Stephen Sondheim (whose cult flop Best Worst Thing is about), and others. (Cynthia Nixon was disturbingly brilliant as the dying mother in Josh Mond's James White (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4078-NEW-YORK-MOVIE-JOURNAL-(Dec-2015-Jan-2016)&p=34174#post34174).)

Kristen Stewart and Adam Driver are this year’s
"An Evening with…" honorees

Kristen and Adam are more and more in the spotlight. Stewart has become cool since she stepped away from the completed kitsch but super-popular Twilight franchise. She is in two 2016 NYFF films, starring in the Main Slate film Assayas' Personal Shopper and part of the cast of the lately added special feature, Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk . Driver plays the titular protagonist of another Main Slate film, Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. He is a current "it" boy, having risen from a funny-looking minor character in the Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis, and being featured in Lena Dunham's cool TV series "Girls" to being an anointed member of the "Star Wars" cast; his presence in Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special this year also shows he is getting good roles. More than that, some of the best directors like to cast him these days, as they do Stewart.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

FSLC announces 'Spotlight on Documentary' series to accompany the 2016 NYFF

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Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds in Bright Lights

On this see Awards Circuit (http://www.awardscircuit.com/2016/08/24/fslc-announces-spotlight-documentary-nyff54/). Great variety from the personal to the exotic to the universal in this eclectic 14-film selection.


Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Directed by Steve James
USA, 2016, DCP, 88m
In English, Mandarin, and Cantonese with English subtitles
The only bank actually prosecuted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis was NYC Chinatown's little Abacus Federal Savings founded in 1984 by Thomas Sung and specializing inmodest loans to members of the Chinese-American community. Latest documentary from Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself) chronicles the legal battle mounted by Sung and his formidable daughters when the Manhattan DA’s office charged the bank with systemic fraud, larceny, and conspiracy. Abacus is a cautionary tale of family, community, and a way of life. (This film premieres at Toronto.)
Thursday, Oct 6, 8:45pm (WRT)
Thursday, Oct 7, 6:15pm (BWA)

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
Directed by Errol Morris
USA, 2016, DCP, 76m
Errol Morris visits the Cambridge, Massachusetts studio of his friend 20x24 Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, who specifies on her website that she likes her subjects "to wear clothes (and to bring toys, skis, books, tennis racquets, musical instruments, and particularly pets…)." She takes us through her fifty-plus years of remarkable but fragile images of paying customers, commissioned subjects, family, and close friends (including the poet Allen Ginsberg), and the sense of time passing grows more and more acute. (Premieres at Toronto.)
Sunday, Oct 9, 6pm (WRT)
Monday, Oct 10, 9:15pm (BWA)

Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
Directed by Alexis Bloom & Fisher Stevens
USA, 2016, DCP, 96m
Carrie Fisher and her mom Debbie Reynolds are now the best of friends (they live steps away from each other in their Beverly Hills compound) and the very definition of Hollywood royalty. But unlike today’s newly minted celebrities, they are both open books. After six decades of screen and stage stardom; a couple of disastrous marriages and assorted financial ups and downs for Reynolds; and, for Fisher, well-publicized drug addiction, bipolar disorder, and deity status (see: Star Wars), neither has anything left to hide. Bright Lights is an affectionate, often hilarious, and unexpectedly moving valentine to the mother-daughter act to end all mother-daughter acts. An HBO Documentary Films release.
Monday, Oct 10, 6pm (ATH)
Tuesday, Oct 11, 9:15pm (BWA)

The Cinema Travellers
Directed by Shirley Abraham & Amit Madheshiya
India, 2016, DCP, 96m
In Hindi and Marathi with English subtitles
Mohammed and Bapu are itinerant film showmen who travel through the Western Indian state of Maharashtra and show 35mm film prints on makeshift screens at village fairs. All the while, they struggle with both the growing possibility of obsolescence and the increasing fragility of their enormous rusty, clanking projectors, kept in barely working order by a repairman named Prakash (who has a beautiful invention: an "oil bath" projector). This colorful, five-years-in-the-making documentary is a real Last Picture Show, but its melancholy is leavened with joy and delight, and the wonder of still images coming to life at 24 frames per second. US Premiere. (From CAnnes; Nick Schager's Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/the-cinema-travelers-review-cannes-1201768855/) review copares it to CinemaParadiso.)
Wednesday, Oct 12, 9pm (FBT)
Thursday, Oct 13, 6:30pm (HGT)

Dawson City: Frozen Time
Directed by Bill Morrison
USA, 2016, DCP, 120m
Bill Morrison’s new film is a history in still and moving images charting the transformation of Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, a fishing camp at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers, into the epicenter of the Yukon gold rush at the turn of the last century. It is also a history of the 35mm film prints that were shipped to Dawson between the 1910s and 1920s, then hidden away and forgotten for 50 years until they were unearthed in the initial stages of a construction project, images from which are a key element in Morrison’s cinematic mosaic. Like all of Morrison’s work, Dawson City is a haunting experience that takes place in suspended, nonlinear time. North American Premiere. Actual date 2014 in MoMA collection. Premiered at Venice.
Sunday, Oct 2, 12pm (BWA)
Tuesday, Oct 4, 9pm (FBT)

Hissen Habré, A Chadian Tragedy
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
France/Chad, 2016, DCP, 82m
In French, Chadian and Arabic with English subtitles
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s quiet, stately documentary begins with a personal sketch of the tragic history of his Central African home country, starting in the mid-1970s with the emergence of a romantic revolutionary figure named Hissen Habré, who seized power in 1982 and established a regime that became renowned throughout the world for its human rights abuses. From there, Haroun follows Clément Abaïfouta, a survivor of the regime who introduces us to resilient men and women whose memories and experiences are beyond horror. Two weeks after this film premiered at Cannes, Hissen Habré became the first world leader convicted of crimes against humanity by a court outside of his own country.
Tuesday, Oct 4, 6pm (WRT)
Wednesday, Oct 5, 9pm (FBT)

I Am Not Your Negro
Directed by Raoul Peck
USA/France/Belgium/Switzerland, 2016, DCP, 93m
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has taken the 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, in which the author went about the painful task of remembering his three fallen friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and crafted an elegantly precise and bracing film essay. Peck’s film, about the unholy agglomeration of myths, institutionalized practices both legal and illegal, and displaced white terror that have long perpetuated the tragic state of race in America, is anchored by the presence of Baldwin himself in images and words, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson in hushed, burning tones.
Saturday, Oct 1, 4:15pm (WRT)
Sunday, Oct 2, 9pm (FBT)

I Called Him Morgan
Directed by Kasper Collin
Sweden, 2016, DCP, 89m
On the night of February 19, 1972, Helen Morgan walked into the East Village bar Slug’s Saloon with a gun in her handbag. She came to see her common-law husband, the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, whom she had nursed through heroin addiction. They fought, he literally threw her out; then she walked back in and shot him, handed over her gun and waited for the police to arrive. Many years later, Helen was interviewed about her life with the brilliant but erratic musician, and the tapes of that interview are the backbone of this beautifully crafted and deeply affecting film from Kasper Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler).
Sunday, Oct 2, 6pm (WRT)
Monday, Oct 3, 8:45pm (FBT)

Karl Marx City
Directed by Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker
USA/Germany, 2016, DCP, 89m
In English and German with English subtitles
Having completed their series of Iraq War–era films (starting with Gunner Palace in 2004 and concluding with 2009’s How to Fold a Flag), the filmmaking team of Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker turn their attention to the former East Germany of Epperlein’s childhood, and specifically to the possibility that her father might have been one of the many thousands of citizens recruited as informers by the Stasi. Tucker and Epperlein make some bold stylistic choices (such as shooting in crystalline black and white), all of which pay off: the strange state of living under constant surveillance is both recalled and embodied in this uniquely powerful film.
Friday, Oct 14, 8:30pm (WRT)
Saturday, Oct 15, 12:30pm (FBT)

Patria O Muerte: Cuba, Fatherland or Death
Directed by Olatz López Garmendia
Cuba/USA, 2016, DCP, 57m
In English and Spanish with English subtitles
Olatz López Garmendia’s film is a sharp, vivid portrait of Cuba as it is right now, on the verge of change, seen through the eyes of a diverse group of brave individuals. On the one hand, we experience the corroded beauty of a landscape largely free of the commercially driven zoning and building that has befouled so much of the western world; on the other, we see the crumbling infrastructure, falling buildings, and desperate circumstances of a nation that’s been economically stalled by a longtime United States embargo and stubborn and repressive dictatorship. Most of all, Patria O Muerte: Cuba, Fatherland or Death is about people struggling to live freely. An HBO Documentary Films release.
Wednesday, Oct 12, 9:15pm (BWA)
Thursday, Oct 13, 6:45pm (FBT)

The Settlers
Directed by Shimon Dotan
France/Canada/Israel, 2016, DCP, 110m
Shimon Dotan’s film takes a good, hard look at the world of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank: the way they live, the worldview that many of them share, and, most crucially, the relaxed attitude of the Israeli government toward their presence since the first settlements in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Dotan lays out the facts with extraordinary care and lucidity, and allows us to see the progression of actions and reactions that led to the current volatile situation, one small step at a time. Perhaps the greatest astonishment of this generally astonishing film is the casual zealotry and racism, and the apparently untroubled certainty, of many of the settlers themselves.
Thursday, Oct 6, 6pm (WRT)
Friday, Oct 7, 9pm (HGT)

Two Trains Runnin’
Directed by Sam Pollard
USA, 2016, DCP, 80m
In the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, hundreds of young people—including James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were drawn to the deep South to take part in the Civil Rights movement. At the same moment, two groups of young men (including guitarist John Fahey and Dick Waterman, the great champion of the Blues) made the same trip in search of Blues legends Skip James and Son House. That these two quests coincidentally ended in the volatile state of Mississippi, whose governor famously referred to integration as “genocide,” is the starting point for Sam Pollard’s inventive, musically and historically rich film.
Thursday, Oct 13, 8:45pm (WRT)
Friday, Oct 14, 9:30pm (FBT)

Uncle Howard
Directed by Aaron Brookner
USA, 2016, DCP, 96m
While Aaron Brookner was working on the restoration of Burroughs: The Movie, his uncle Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs, he discovered an archive that Howard left uncatalogued. It encompassed unused footage, and much more: film and video diaries capturing the downtown New York, post-Beat mosaic of writers, filmmakers, performers, and artists in the 1970s and 1980s and the devastation of that community by AIDS, which took Howard’s life in 1989. A work of love and scholarship, Uncle Howard weaves contemporary interviews with this rediscovered footage: of the legendary “Nova Convention”; Robert Wilson rehearsing the aborted L.A. production of The Civil Wars; a twentysomething Jim Jarmusch, Howard’s NYU classmate, recording sound on Burroughs; and Howard’s lyrical video self-portrait, made near the end of his life.
Sunday, Oct 9, 5:30pm (BWA)
Monday, Oct 10, 9pm (FBT)

Wendy Whelan: Restless Creature
Directed by Linda Saffire & Adam Schlesinger
USA, 2016, DCP, 90m
In 1984, Wendy Whelan joined the New York City Ballet as an apprentice; by 1991, she had been promoted to Principal Dancer. She quickly became a revered and beloved figure throughout the dance world. Wrote Roslyn Sulcas, “her sinewy physicality, her kinetic clarity, and her dramatic, otherworldly intensity have created a quite distinct and unusual identity.” Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger’s film follows this extraordinary artist throughout a passage of life that all dancers must face, when she must confront the limitations of her own body and adapt to a different relationship with the art form she loves so madly.
Sunday, Oct 9, 3:30pm (WRT)
Monday, Oct 10, 6:15pm (BWA)

Whose Country?
Directed by Mohamed Siam
Egypt/USA/France, 2016, DCP, 60m
A remarkable, one-of-a-kind film from Egypt, Whose Country? has a point of view that grows in complexity as it proceeds, alongside the shifting fortunes and affiliations of the Cairo policeman who is the film’s subject and guide. By his side, we witness the fall of Mubarak, the rise and fall of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The level of craft in this film is extraordinary, and so is the close attentiveness that the director pays to his difficult task: illuminating the compromised lives of the protagonist and his friends and the convulsive nation they call home. (From Karlovy Vary.)
Saturday, Oct 1, 9:30pm (WRT)
Sunday, Oct 2, 6:45pm (FBT)
.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

FSLC announces shorts programs and new section, 'Explorations'

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Jean-Pierre Léaud in The Death of Louis XIV ('Explorations')

Including works by Bertrand Bonello, Terence Nance, Jia Zhangke, Nadav Lapid, and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. Below FSLC blurbs with some alterations and showtimes. A reliance on selections from Locarno (excluded from the NYFF Main Slate this year) may be noted.

Some titles the NYFF or sidebars have not chosen to weave in, from Venice, include Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone), Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Francois Ozon’s Frantz, Nick Hamm’s The Journey and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Planetarium. (She previously made Belle Épine and Grand Central.)


FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS


EXPLORATIONS


The Death of Louis XIV
Directed by Albert Serra
France/Portugal/Spain, 2016, 115 min
U.S. Premiere
The great Jean-Pierre Léaud, synonymous with French cinema for over half a century, delivers a majestic, career-capping performance as the longest-reigning French monarch during his final days. Albert Serra’s elegant, engrossing contemplation of death and its representation finds the extravagantly wigged Sun King slowly wasting away from gangrene in his bedchamber, surrounded by devoted servants, pets and a retinue of hopeless doctors. Filled with ravishing candlelit images and painstaking details gleaned from Saint-Simon’s memoirs and other historical texts, Louis XIV is as darkly funny as it is moving, revealing the absurdity of the rule-bound royal court, but even more so of death itself. ND/NF 2014 gave us Serra's version of Casanova's dying in The Story of My Death (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31897#post31897), which Cahiers du Cinéma described as "two and a half hours of deadly (we insist, deadly) boredom." Be warned. (From Locarno.)
Thursday, Oct 6, 6pm (ATH)
Friday, Oct 7, 6pm (HGT)

Everything Else/Todo lo demás
Directed by Natalia Almada
Mexico, 2016, 90m
North American Premiere
The first fiction feature by accomplished documentarian Natalia Almada is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that bureaucratic dehumanization is the worst form of violence. Oscar nominee Adriana Barraza (Babel) gives a haunting, unsentimental performance as Dona Flor, an elderly government clerk who punishes her clients as unreasonably as life has punished her. But when she loses the last living creature she cares for, she goes into crisis. Almada reveals a cross-section of Mexico City’s population, creating an intimate portrait of one woman among the multitude who remain resilient despite oppression and corruption. (This blurb fails to mention that Natalia Almada is the great-granddaughter of Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calle, 1924-1928, one of Mexico's most controversial revolutionary figures accused of having been a "dictator.") No listing of having been shown yet.
Friday, Oct 14, 6pm (WRT)
Saturday, Oct 15, 4pm (HGT)

I Had Nowhere to Go
Directed by Douglas Gordon
Germany, 2016, 97m
U.S. Premiere
Autobiography and biography merge in this often shattering, sometimes absurdly funny collaboration between two polymath artists, Douglas Gordon and Jonas Mekas. Gordon’s unlikely project, to bring to the screen Mekas’s prose memoir of his first decade in exile from Lithuania and journey from post-WWII displaced persons camps to New York, where he finds his vocation as a filmmaker, yields an operatic experience of sound and image. The film—which features Mekas reading his own text in haunting, musical voice-over—attests to one extraordinary man’s experience of loss and desire to make a new life, yet also resonates as a tale of the diaspora in which tens of millions exist today. (Another Locarno item.)
Thursday, Oct 13, 6pm (WRT)
Friday, Oct 14, 9:15pm (BWA)

Kékszakállú
Directed by Gastón Solnicki
Argentina, 2016, 72m
U.S. Premiere
The new film from Argentinian director Gastón Solnicki (Papirosen) is a singularity: a playful portrait of spiritual lethargy. Partly inspired by Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle (vivid passages are heard throughout the film), it is comprised of moments that seem to have been drawn from memory, with an elliptical continuity that moves according to forms, colors, sounds, and states of being. There is no protagonist in Kékszakállú, but several young women blanketed under layers of sunlit lassitude and politely tamped down discomfort. Nevertheless, this is a joyful experience, moving inexorably toward liberation. (Part of the Venice lineup.)
Tuesday, Oct 4, 8:45pm (WRT)
Wednesday, Oct 5, 8:45pm (BWA)

Mimosas
Directed by Oliver Laxe
Spain/Morocco/France/Qatar, 2016, 93m
U.S. Premiere
An intense young man (the haunting Shakib Ben Omar) is tasked with escorting a caravan to safety. Taking a taxi far into the Moroccan desert, he seems to travel to another time as well, joining a band of travelers on horseback—and the dead body they are transporting—on a trek through the treacherous Atlas Mountains. Oliver Laxe’s stunningly shot, suggestively ambiguous follow-up to his acclaimed debut, You All Are Captains, is at once a quest story, a landscape study, and a Western with shades of the uncanny. With the openness of a parable, Mimosas doesn’t dramatize so much as embody the mysteries of faith. Winner of the Grand Prize (Nespresso) at the 2016 Cannes’ Critics Week. (Variety's Ben Konigsberg says this owes a debut to avangardists Ben Rivers, whose Spell to Ward Off the Darkness we waded through in ND/NF 2014 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31886#post31886), and Lisandro Alonso, whose recent slow, pretentious Jauja of NYFF 2014 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32796#post32796) lacked the punch of his earlier Los Muertos (SFIFF 2005 (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=410)) and Liverpool.)
Wednesday, Oct 5, 9pm (WRT)
Thursday, Oct 6, 6:45pm (FBT)

The Ornithologist
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues
Portugal/France/Brazil, 2016, 118 min
U.S. Premiere
In his most audacious film since his groundbreaking debut O Fantasma, João Pedro Rodrigues reimagines the myth of Saint Anthony of Padua as a modern-day parable of sexual and spiritual transcendence. On a bird-watching expedition in the remote wilderness of northern Portugal, Fernando (Paul Hamy) capsizes his canoe and loses his bearings. His ensuing odyssey, both intensely physical and wildly metaphysical, involves sadistic Chinese pilgrims, a deaf-mute shepherd named Jesus, pagan tribes, Amazons on horseback, and a glorious variety of feathered friends. Shot entirely outdoors and in magnificent ’Scope by Rui Pocas, The Ornithologist is a bracing exercise in queer hagiography. "Blasphemous fun," Jay Weissberg writes in his Locarno review in Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/the-ornithologist-review-joao-pedro-rodrigues-1201835914/). Possibly the director's "most accessible film to date," Weissberg writes, encouragingly.
Wednesday, Oct 12, 9pm (WRT)
Thursday, Oct 13, 9:15pm (BWA)


SHORTS

Shorts Program 1: Narrative
Showcasing emerging filmmakers, this narrative program features seven unique films from seven countries in six different languages. Programmed by Dilcia Barrera & Gabi Madsen TRT: 103m
Saturday, Oct 1, 4pm (BWA)
Sunday, Oct 2, 6pm (BWA)

The Girl Who Danced with the Devil / A moça que dançou com o Diabo
João Paulo Miranda Maria, Brazil, 2016, 15m
A girl from a very religious family seeks her own paradise.

Be Good for Rachel
Ed Roe, USA, 2015, 19m
World Premiere
Tonight Rachel is double-booked: a babysitting job and a nervous breakdown.

Univitellin
Terence Nance, France, 2016, 15m
A classic love story in a far-from-classic reworking.

Little Bullets / Küçük Kurşunlar
Alphan Eseli, Turkey, 2016, 14m
World Premiere
Forced to flee Syria for the border region of Southeast Anatolia, a mother and daughter struggle to accept their newly found safety.

Dobro
Marta Hernaiz Pidal, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Mexico, 2016, 15m
U.S. Premiere
Selma is determined to get rid of the Romani woman sitting on her apartment’s entrance steps.

Land of the Lost Sidekicks
Roger Ross Williams, USA, 2016, 6m
World Premiere
When his home is magically transformed into a dark forest filled with animated characters from classic Disney movies, a young boy learns to confront his fears.

And the Whole Sky Fit in a Dead Cow’s Eye / Y todo el celo cupo en el ojo de la vaca muerta
Francisca Alegria, Chile/USA, 2016, 19m
World Premiere
Emeteria is visited by a ghost she believes has come to take her to the afterlife. But he has more devastating news.

Shorts Program 2: International Auteurs
This program features new work by four of the most adventurous directors in international cinema today. Programmed by Dennis Lim TRT: 96m
Saturday, Oct 1, 6:45pm (BWA)
Sunday, Oct 2, 8:45pm (BWA)

A Brief History of Princess X
Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal/France, 2016, 7m
U.S. Premiere
Abrantes’s pseudo-doc on Constantin Brancusi’s most infamous sculpture is a short, sweet, and appropriately inappropriate look at how eroticism and scandal played roles in the history of modern art.

Sarah Winchester, Phantom Opera / Sarah Winchester, Opera Fantôme
Bertrand Bonello, France, 2016, 24m
North American Premiere
A film to stand in for an opera unmade: Bonello’s moody, baroque meditation on the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune plays like a ballet-cum-horror film, an ornate tapestry of enigmatic images, chilling synths, and traces of a tragic and eccentric life.

The Hedonists
Jia Zhangke, China, 2016, 25m
U.S. Premiere
Jia takes on an eclectic tone and tries out some bold new tricks in this comic short commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival, following three unemployed coal miners searching for work in the Shanxi region.

From the Diary of a Wedding Photographer / Myomano Shel Tzlam Hatonot
Nadav Lapid, Israel, 2016, 40m
North American Premiere
Lapid’s latest provocation delves headlong into the absurdities and neuroses of matrimonial rites as an Israeli wedding photographer repeatedly finds himself embroiled in psychodramas with the brides and grooms who hire him.

Shorts Program 3: Genre Stories
This is the second annual edition of a program focusing on the best in new horror, thriller, sci-fi, pitch-black comedy, twisted noir, and fantasy shorts from around the world. Programmed by Laura Kern TRT: 83m
Saturday, Oct 1, 9:15pm (BWA)
Monday, Oct 3, 9:30pm (BWA)

The Signalman
Daniel Augusto, Brazil, 2015, 15m
U.S. Premiere
In a story adapted from Dickens, a reclusive railway worker’s routine is mysteriously disrupted.

Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
Johannes Kizler & Nik Sentenza, Germany, 2016, 11m
North American Premiere
A single mother and her teenage daughter must contend with something far more fraught than their relationship.

New Gods
Jack Burke, UK, 2016, 15m
World Premiere
Sickness challenges the resiliency of a utopian existence.

Quenottes (Pearlies)
Pascal Thiebaux & Gil Pinheiro, Luxembourg/France, 2015, 13m
Small, furry, and ferocious, the tooth fairy will defend its enamel treasures at any cost.

What Happened to Her
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, USA, 2016, 15m
A biting, beautifully gruesome exploration of female corpses, as portrayed nude on screen.

Imposter
Adam Goldhammer, Canada, 2016, 14m
World Premiere
Since Father’s disappearance, Mother hasn’t quite seemed herself . . .

Shorts Program 4: New York Stories
This program, now in its second year, showcases work from some of the most exciting filmmakers living and working in New York today, including established names and ones to watch. Programmed by Dan Sullivan TRT: 71m
Sunday, Oct 2, 3:30pm (WRT)
Tuesday, Oct 4, 6:15pm (BWA)

Kitty
Chloë Sevigny, USA, 2016, 35mm, 15m
North American Premiere
Sevigny’s highly anticipated directorial debut is an adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story, a hypnotic and ethereal fairy tale for today about a young girl’s feline reveries.

I Turn to Jello
Andrew T. Betzer, USA, 2016, 15m
World Premiere
A metropolitan nightmare unfurls as a nervous cellist (Eleanore Pienta) cracks under pressure at an audition—and again, and again, and . . .

Dramatic Relationships
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2016, 6m
North American Premiere
Scenes from the working life of a male director: Defa sophisticatedly lampoons masculinity in filmmaking with this sly, surprising meta-movie.

This Castle Keep
Gina Telaroli, USA, 2016, 14m
World Premiere
The shapeshifting latest from the multi-hyphenate Telaroli is a moving elegy for that which gets lost over the years in a changing city.

Los Angeles Plays New York
John Wilson, USA, 2016, 18m
World Premiere
This hilarious documentary concerns the world of NYC-set courtroom reality shows filmed in L.A.

The Honeymoon
Tommy Davis, USA, 2016, 3m
World Premiere
A campy and cryptic love letter that features a new, quintessentially American take on Morse code.

Shorts Program 5: Documentaries
For its first documentary shorts program, NYFF showcases a selection of the most innovative nonfiction storytelling today, from profound personal chronicles to treatments of significant global issues. Programmed by Dilcia Barrera & Gabi Madsen TRT: 89m
Monday, Oct 3, 6:30pm (BWA)
Tuesday, Oct 4, 9:15pm (BWA)

Legal Smuggling with Christine Choy
Lewie Kloster, USA, 2016, 4m
World Premiere
Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Christine Choy undergoes a wild adventure when she illegally—and accidentally—smuggles cigarettes across the Canadian border.

El Buzo
Esteban Arrangoiz, Mexico, 2015, 16m
Chief diver of the Mexico City sewerage system, Julio César Cu Cámara must repair pumps and dislodge garbage from the gutters to maintain the circulation of sewer waters.

Jean Nouvel: Reflections
Matt Tyrnauer, USA, 2016, 15m
World Premiere
A meditative portrait of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Jean Nouvel and his creation process.

Rotatio
Ian McClerin, USA, 2015, 4m
As part of a healing process from trauma, Shannon May Mackenzie turned words into visual art, constructing a six-foot circle out of sentences and phrases.

The Vote
Mila Aung-Thwin & Van Royko, Canada, 2016, 10m
World Premiere
Strict military rule and international sanctions kept Myanmar sealed off from the world for decades. The Vote observes residents of the bustling city of Yangon as they navigate their first democratic election in over 50 years.

Brillo Box (3¢ off)
Lisanne Skyler, USA, 2016, 40m
Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box sculpture makes its way from a family’s living room to a record-breaking Christie’s auction in this exploration of how we navigate the ephemeral nature of value. An HBO Documentary Films release.
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[Chris Knipp]

The 54th New York Film Festival Main Slate: U.S. Theatrical Releases

One asterisk ("NONE YET") means no U.S. release so far, but one possibly coming; two asterisks ("NONE"), that there's a chance there may not ever be one. The latter are the obvious ones to try to see at the festival if those films interest you; it could be your only chance to see them. I'd see Maclean's The Rehearsal and Hong Sang-soo's new one, particularly. Fans of Romanian cinema will want to catch the Mungiu and Puiu (but Mungiu now has a 10 Feb. 2017 release date). in case they're hard to see here. Or the James Gray or Assayas too, you might not want to wait for.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/mclr.jpg
Still from Mclean's The Rehearsal


Opening Night
The 13th
Directed by Ava DuVernay
7 OCT. (theater & internet)

Centerpiece
20th Century Women
Directed by Mike Mills
21 DEC.

Closing Night
*The Lost City of Z
Directed by James Gray
SPRING 2017

Aquarius
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
14 OCT. (limited)

Certain Women
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
14 OCT.

Elle
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
11 NOV.

Fire at Sea / Fuocoammare
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi
21 OCT. (limited)

**Graduation / Bacalaureat
Directed by Cristian Mungiu
NONE

**Hermia and Helena
Directed by Matías Piñeiro
NONE

I, Daniel Blake
Directed by Ken Loach
23 DEC. (limited)

Julieta
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
21 DEC.

Manchester by the Sea
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan
18 NOV.

Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
21 OCT.

*My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
Directed by Dash Shaw
NONE YET

Neruda
Directed by Pablo Larraín
16 DEC.

Paterson
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
28 DEC.

*Personal Shopper
Directed by Olivier Assayas
NONE YET

**The Rehearsal
Directed by Alison Maclean
NONE

**Sieranevada
Directed by Cristi Puiu
NONE

**Son of Joseph / Le fils de Joseph
Directed by Eugène Green
NONE

*Staying Vertical / Rester vertical
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
NONE YET

Things to Come / L’Avenir
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
2 DEC. (limited)

Toni Erdmann
Directed by Maren Ade
25 DEC.

*The Unknown Girl
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
NONE YET.


**Yourself and Yours
Directed by Hong Sangsoo
NONE


http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

Another surprise NYFF54 addition: "Special Premiere" of Pablo Larraín's Jackie. (US release 2 Dec.)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/jxfxkx.jpg

This portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy around JFK's assassination, starring Natalie Portman, already got raves at Venice, where it debuted, and Toronto. (Its current Metacritic rating based on 11 reviews is 93%). We have followed Larraín assiduously here through Tony Manero (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2339-New-York-Film-Festival-2008&s=&postid=20717#post20717) (NYFF 2008), Post Mortem (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2875-New-York-Film-Festival-2010&p=25154#post25154) (NYFF 20109), No (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3455-NO-(Pablo-Larra%EDn-2012)) (NYFF 2012) and The Club (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4109-THE-CLUB-(Pablo-Larra%EDn-2015)&p=34392#post34392). Most of Larraín's work (supported by the NYFF early on) has reveled in the creepy world of the 30-year Pinochet dictatorship that began with the assassination of Salvador Allende September 11 (yes, another September 11th) 1973, the world Larraín grew up in. He was born in 1976.


New York, NY (September 27, 2016) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Pablo Larraín’s Jackie as a Special U.S. Premiere Presentation of the 54th New York Film Festival (September 30 – October 16) on Thursday, October 13 at Alice Tully Hall. Jackie is the director’s second film in this year’s festival, with Neruda, his portrait of the great Chilean poet, screening the week prior.

Pablo Larraín’s first English-language film is a bolt from the blue, a fugue-like study of Jackie Kennedy, brilliantly acted by Natalie Portman. Dramatizing events from just before, during, and after JFK’s assassination, this carefully reconstructed, beautifully visualized film is grounded in Jackie’s interactions with her children, her social secretary (Greta Gerwig), LBJ’s special assistant Jack Valenti (Max Casella), her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard), a priest (John Hurt), a journalist (Billy Crudup), and others. In this emotionally urgent film, from a script by Noah Oppenheim [who co-wrote The Maze Runner and Insurgent], we feel not only Jackie’s tragic solitude but also her precise awareness that every move she makes carries historical ramifications. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.
-FSLC press release.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

First look:

AQUARIUS (Kleber Mendoça Filho 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35022#post35022)

Sly, beautiful, and more brightly colored than Neighboring Sounds and yes, perhaps "more conventionally structured" as D'Angelo says, but rich and surprising and close to the first film in theme and idea at many points. Portrait of a stubborn, regal woman holding onto the lone occupied apartment in a Forties building developers want to tear down for a high rise. Starring the magnificent Sônia Braga in one of her greatest performances. She owns the picture, but it's much more than just her.

Click on the title for the CK review of the film in the Filmleaf Festival Coverage section.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

Fri. 30 Sept. NYFF opens with Ava DuVernay's The 13th

Ava DuVernay's documentary, which critics describe as "a film that hits hard, but it also nails its targets with precision" (Alonso Duralde, TheWrap), premieres on opening night of the NYFF. It opens on Netflix Friday. The theme in this, first documentary to open a NYFF, is mass incarceration, and how it is another form of slavery. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution said "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. . ." DuVernay develops the theme with demonstration of the burgeoning and increasingly privatized prison industry in the US. Metacritic rating of the film is 91%.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

PATERSON (Jim Jarmusch 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35027#post35027)

Some notes on this new film from Jarmusch starring Adam Driver as the titular character, who also lives in Paterson, New Jersey, drives a bus, and writes poetry - like the major American poet William Carlos Williams, who was a physician who lied in New Jersey and wrote an epic poem called Paterson. This may have most in common among Jarmusch's other films with Broken Flowers.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg

[Chris Knipp]

THE 13TH (Ava DuVernay 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35031#post35031)

Opening night film at the NYFF, first time in its history a documentary has held that position. Surprisingly, it's not an original work of investigative filmmaking, more just forceful synthesis of ideas with graphics, archival footage, and well-informed and notable talking heads. Theme: the 13th Amendment that ended slavery provides an exception: prisons. And the thesis is that incarceration has always been and still is a form of slavery that, in the US, disproportionally targets the black man. But though most of the information in itself isn't new, DuVernay's connecting of the dots is enlightening and shocking.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/pic909.jpg

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

Glenn Raucher leaving his post as Film Society of Lincoln Center Director of Theater Operations.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/rauch.jpg
Glenn Raucher [CK photo]

October 7, 2016.

For years he has managed the Film Society of Lincoln Center's increasingly complicated cinema complex with superb skill. Encountering Glenn's warmth, wit, and accomplishment has been a highlight of times spent covering Lincoln Center film events for years now. A week from today he departs his post. I am only one of many who will miss him greatly. The Hudson Valley Center, where he will be able to exercise more of his wide-ranging skills, is lucky to get him -- and happily, they seem well aware of that:

From Facebook:

Hudson Valley Writers Center (https://www.facebook.com/hudsonvalleywriterscenter/posts/690459111102069)
September 24 at 12:04am ·
Everyone at The Hudson Valley Writers' Center is thrilled to welcome the wonderful Glenn Raucher to our team. HVWC is fortunate that Glenn has decided to leave his job at Lincoln Center as director of Theatre Operations to join us. Glenn has a lot of experience in the arts but he is returning to his first love—writing. He spent many years at The Writers' Voice and he is going to be a tremendous asset to the Center. The Board, the co-editors of Slapering Hol Press, and the Program Director are all very excited to begin our fruitful collaboration. We cannot wait for all of the students, instructors, and readers to meet Glenn.
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[Chris Knipp]

FIRE AT SEA/FUOCOAMMARE (Gianfranco Rosi 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35036#post35036)

Rosi's patiently observational Italian documentary of a one-of-a-kind kid on the eight-mile-square Italian island of Lampedusa and arrivals of some of the hordes of refugees from Africa who wash up there packs a quiet wallop. And in fact it won the top prize Golden Bear at Berlin and other awards and nominations and is Italy's entry in the Best Foreign Oscar competition of 2016.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

THE B-SIDE: ELSA DORFMAN'S PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY (2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35041#post35041)

A casual, perhaps too casual, portrait of a longtime Cambridge, MA friend, who was was close to Allen Ginsberg for many years and photographed Beats, some rock stars and Harvard people and was a faithful user of Polaroid's unusual 20x40 and 40x80 giant instant view cameras. At the NYFF showing of the film there was a special feature. The FSLC owns one of these cameras now, and a stash of the now defunct film and chemistry needed to make the Polaroids. At the Q&A, the camera was rolled onto the stage and demonstrated. Across the street several photographers have been making a series of 20x40 portraits of filmmakers and artists featured in Lincoln Center series.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

MOONLIGHT (Barry Jenkins 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35044#post35044)

A powerful and beautiful black gay coming of age movie, almost a black Brokeback, and a huge leap forward from Jenkins' fine, but relatively tame, debut eight years ago.

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[Chris Knipp]

GRADUATION (Cristian Mungiu 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35045#post35045)

Cannes darling Mungiu has made another closely-plotted Romanian film about dim futures and bureaucratic corruption in the post-Soviet world. His emphasis may be less clear and less urgent than before, as he focuses on a doctor and his flailing efforts to ensure his daughter a better future.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

NERUDA (Pablo Larraín 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35048#post35048)

An elaborate metafictional phantasmagoria of the great Chilean communist poet in flight - pursued by a semi-imaginary little martinet of a police nemesis (Gael García Bernal) is gorgeous, elaborate, also overblown, uncertain in tone, and Larraín's first epic failure. Go back instead and watch his wonderfully creepy triumphs about the Pinochet dictatorship, with the great Alfredo Castro, Tony Manero and Post Mortem.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/f54lm.jpg

A view across the street to the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, which has two smaller auditoriums and a small amphitheater for open events. There is also a restaurant, Indie, and good popcorn

[Chris Knipp]

STAYING VERTICAL/RESTER VERTICAL (Alain Guiraudie 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35050#post35050)

A refreshingly nutty and unpredictable film and a great palate cleanser after more conventional festival entries like Neruda and Graduation, which seem hopelessly square by comparison. A screenwriter goes haywire, has sex, has a baby. She abandons them, he tries to raise it himself, but is on the skids, while sexual boundaries keep breaking down. But you can't summarize it easily. The value of it is its energy and its sense of freedom. Something of fable and the surreal too, and wolves become a sort of symbol, but also quite dangerous and real.

Guiraudie is the director whose Stranger by the Lake/L'inconnu du lac won the Best Director award in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2013 (and a lot of César nominations and a prize for its main actor), and this one, his fifth feature film, was in Competition there.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

A pair of Isavelle Huppert starrers that highlight her versatility and penchant for roles as women undergoing intense challenges. The two stories are so different, yet have things in common, a cat, a dying mother, becoming a grandmother, marital issues.

THINGS TO COME/L'AVENIR (Mia Hansen-Love 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35054#post35054)

A Paris philosophy prof whose mother dies, cat runs away, daughter moves out, best student abandons her to live in the country, and academic publisher fires her. She says she's experienced such freedom.

ELLE (Paul Verhoeven 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35055#post35055)

A lurid French novel adapted by an American for Hollywood, which rejected it. Isabelle Huppert took on the lead role, and it's amazing, and a revival for Verhoeven, who hadn't made a film in ten years, and enjoyed working in France so much he expects to continue directing there. A successful businesswoman with a ghoulish past is raped, and enters a cat-and-mouse game with the rapist, not seeking revenge but connection.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

CERTAIN WOMEN (Kelly Reichardt 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35064#post35064)

Three stories set in rural Montana involving women, of which only the third becomes briefly, powerfully, involving, of newcomer Lily Gladstone's lonely cowgirl who falls for a Kristen Stewart, who's driving four hours each way to teach a night class in school law. Laura Dern and Michelle Williams are both involved with James Le Gros.

That cowgirl disappointment is powerful, and there is lovely earth-colored cinematography. But Reichardt carries low-key rather far here.


http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/%20ny541.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=34868#post34868)

[Chris Knipp]

catching up on some of the Main Slate films in Paris. An arguably great one, Toni Erdmann, and one of the Dardennes' less powerful efforts, The Unknown Girl.

TONI ERDMANN (Maren Ade 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35076#post35076)

A highly competent but stressed out international corporate lady is pursued to her Bucharest HQ by her goofy schoolteacher father, who's taking a long break after the death of his beloved shaggy dog. And he's a shaggy dog himself, and an inveterate prankster, who can't help himself: he keeps invading his daughter's space at the most serious times and clowning compulsively, like some German contemporary Lord of Misrule. And it winds up humanizing her and making her realize things like, love. A meandering, unexpected masterpiece that looks messier than it really is.

THE UNKNOWN GIRL/LA FILLE INCONNUE (Luc, Jean-ierre Dardennes 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35075#post35075)

A young woman general practitioner in Liège (Adèle Haenel) doesn't answer banging on the door one night and learns that the women knocking died by the river a little later. Feeling guilty,
she doggedly pursues (Dardennes' habitual mode) details of the woman's identity, while intermittently continuing her practice, and along the way begging a young intern not to give up medicine. Haenel isn't the reason this is rather dry material. Her character does not change, and her pursuit has no personal heft for her. So reaction to the film has been lukewarm. I have to agree. I want to be disturbed by a Dardennes film as I was by La promesse, The Son, THe Child or The Kid with the Bike. Nothing less will do.

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[Chris Knipp]

I, DANIEL BLAKE (Ken Loach 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35082#post35082)

Loach's film shows how a good English carpenter is ground down by the current English welfare system when he takes a break from work after a heart attack. In his kindness, he aids a young single mom with two little kids also down on her luck. Loach, now eighty, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year for this work of touching, angry neorealism. Only the hard hearted can leave it unmoved.


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[Chris Knipp]

THINGS TO COME/L'AVENIR (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35054#post35054)

US limited theatrical release by Sundance Selects begins 2 Dec., 2016, it has been announced.

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[Chris Knipp]

Verheoven's ELLE (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35055#post35055) got US theatrical release Friday in the US. Rave reviews: Metacritic raging 90.

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[Chris Knipp]

I've added more 2016 NYFF films to the Festival Coverage thread seen not in NYC but in Paris and California. Links below. Eventually I'll see nearly all; MANCHESTER BY THE SEA is now in release and JACKIE and PERSONAL SHOPPER are coming to the Bay Area shortly.

CERTAIN WOMEN (Kelly Reichardt) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35064#post35064)
This is memorable, even if I didn't like it, and there is one of the three tales (with Kirsten Stewart, her third NYFF appearance) that is very touching.

THE UNKNOWN GIRL (Luc, Jean-Pierre Dardenne) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35075#post35075)
Strongly acted by Adèl Hanel even if not top Dardennes.

TONI ERDMANN (Maren Ade) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35076#post35076)
Highly original and thought-provoking, one of the best foreign films of the year. Some think the best; the European critics' favorite at Cannes.

I, DANIEL BLAKE (Ken Loach) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35082#post35082)
The top prize at Cannes; some thought not worthy, but really vintage Loach and very moving.

LA MORT DE LOUIS XIV/THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (Albert Serra) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35102#post35102)
Moody, beautiful, strange, and a triumph for the decrepit Jean-Pierre Léaud.

BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK (Ang Lee) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35127#post35127)
I like this film and I am very impressed by the discovery Joe Alwyn even though the technology can't be reproduced in ordinary movie theaters and doesn't seem to have mattered anyway and the depth of the book seems to have been lost.

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[Chris Knipp]

The Independent Spirit Awards. See the article in Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/news/independent-spirit-awards-snubs-and-surprises-1201925016/).

Andrea Arnold's "little seen" AMERICAN HONEY got as many nominations as MOONLIGHT, with MANCHESTER BY THE SEA COMING NEXT. This is thought to assure NYFF films MOONLIGHT and MANCHESTER BY THE SEA Oscar consideration.

Metacritic ratings rank this way:

MOONLIGHT 99
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA 96
TONI ERDMANN 94
JACKIE 93

I was sort of swept away by AMERICAN HONEY (seen in NYC at Landmark Sunshine) but couldn't seem to write about it. One thing I can say is that Shia Laboeuf is very good in it, and the images are like sunlight tinged with honey and the scruffy young people in it are scarily real. But as a "story" it is insubstantial.

[Chris Knipp]

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (Kenneth Londergan 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35136#post35136)

Searing movie about a Boston handyman called back to his Massachusetts North Shore town after his brother's death and put in charge of his 16-year-old son. A blend of dry humor and tragedy, a deep sense of place and winter season, terrific acting by Michelle Williams, Casey Affleck, and Lucas Hedges make this as they say, live up to the hype. It's not a perfect film but it's still a quite wonderful one.

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[Chris Knipp]

JACKIE (Pablo Larraîn 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35160#post35160)

Natalie Portman's spot-on (and yet inevitably off; she hasn't got the class) imitation of Jacqueline Kennedy isn't necessarily the reason for seeing this film. Watch it for the over-reaching ambition of zeroing in on one of America's sacred tragedies of the century and skillfully blending segments focused on a Life magazine interview (which is clumsy and intrusive, but essential for introducing the "Camelot" theme); a meeting of the widow with an Irish Catholic priest played by John Hurt; flashbacks to the horrible event; and the long period in which Mrs. Kennedy asserts her control over the obsequies and the legacy while periodically wigging out on dress-up, booze, and pills. It lacks respect: but reverence would have led to something even more deadly. Not a great film but an Oscar bid, it does get our attention. Not in a league with Moonlight, I, Daniel Blake, Toni Erdmann, Manchester by the Sea, and other bests of the festival.

Another NYFF Main Slate film but seen in general release in December.

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[Chris Knipp]

Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35082#post35082)

US theatrical release begins 23 Dec. 2016 at IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

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[Chris Knipp]

NERUDA (Pablo Larraín) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35048#post35048)

This NYFF Main Slate film begins US theatrical release Friday, Dec. 16tn, 2016 in NYC (at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center). His current overreaching in this and Jackie are the culmination of a steady decline that began subtly with his 2012 film No, also as here starring Gael García Bernal. Nothing has come up to his early films, Tony Manero and Post Mortem. Granted, though, this is more worthy of your attention than his other current release, Jackie.

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[Chris Knipp]

TONI ERDMANN (Maren Ade 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35076#post35076)

US theatrical release begins at Film Forum NYC 25 Dec. 2016.

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[Chris Knipp]

TONI ERDMANN (Maren Ade 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35076#post35076)

Can't wait to see Toni Erdmann again! But I'm not in New York this Christmas, and that's where it is, at Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza, ant Los Angeles at Nuart Theatre. Actually at Film Forum from Dec. 25 to Jan. 10.

You can read reviews of it in the NYTimes today.


“It’s something new under the sun, a thrilling and discomfiting document of the present moment and also, like every movie that matters, a bulletin from the future.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times


“ JUST BRILLIANT. Startlingly original, frequently HILARIOUS and completely surprising at every turn. It's a rare film that makes you think deeply about the world around you while also making you laugh hard.” – David Calhoun, Time Out New York

My reaction to it in Paris was quieter than that, but it takes you to a totally new place and definitely makes you think while bemusing you.


http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/jjuh.jpg


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[Chris Knipp]

PATERSON (Jim Jarmusch 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35214#post35214)

I didn't get to see this during the NYFF, but I've included my review of it in NYFF Filmleaf coverage, after seeing it 6 Jan. 2017 on its opening day at Landmark Embarcadero Cinemas in San Francisco. It's a quiet wonder, repetitious but enlightening, very much a Jarmusch film but more zen and philosophical than any other. A song of love for the poetry of the everyday.

Metacritic rating is 90% though it the recent inflated market of Metacritic ratings that only puts it at #12 for the year. I'd rate it higher. Mike D'Angelo puts it 7th in his personal list (https://www.panix.com/~dangelo/2016.html).


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[Chris Knipp]

THE REHEARSAL (Alison Maclean 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35217#post35217)

New Zealand writer-director Maclean co-writing with Emily Perkins has adapted Eleanor Cattan's playful, inventive debut novel about teens and scandal in Aukland. Students at an acting school are in teams that must present an original production at the year's end to show off their theatrical invention and individual acting skill. Seemingly bland Stanley (talented James Rolleston) attracts lead teacher Hannah (Kerry Fox) and also quickly finds a girlfriend from whom he gets a theme for his team's final performance. Only it builds on a sex scandal with which he's personally involved. Surprise ending. The film, following the book, is loosely experimental without being at all unclear. In NYFF, also Toronto and London. Also included in the Feb. 2017 Mostly British Festival in San Francisco.

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[Chris Knipp]

20TH CENTURY WOMEN (Mike Mills 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35223#post35223)


The Centerpiece Film of the 2016 NYFF, and the film's world premiere. It is the second half of Mills' autobiographical coming-of-age story, apparently, concerning a 15-year-old boy in Santa Barbara in 1979 living with his 55-year-old mother Dorothea (Annette Benning). It is less cute and twee than its predecessor, Beginners, which takes place with a 38-year-old (still, perhaps, coming of age) whose father comes out as gay and lives a short happy life that way before dying, as his ex-wife had earlier, of cancer. Jamie (excellent newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann), the youth, is surrounded by "women," his mother, a punk photographer and lodger in the house (Greta Gerwig), and his best friend, who's 17, Julie (Elle Fanning). Also in the house is a hippie contractor (Billy Crudup). This is a good cast, and they're enjoyable to be with even though nothing much happens. Wide release coming 20 Jan. 2017.

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[Chris Knipp]

JULIETA (Pedro Almodóvar 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35226#post35226)

An adaptation of three linked short stories by the Nobel Prizewinning Canadian writer Alice Munro. An odd combination, I'd say - and I didn't get it.

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[Chris Knipp]

PERSONAL SHOPPER (Olivier Assayas 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35357#post35357)

Kristen Stewart directed by Assayas again this time without Juliette Binoche, who was busy overacting in Bruno Dumont's Slack Bay (Rendez-Vous 2017) She buys clothes for a rich celebrity, and is also a medium seeking closure with her recently dead twin brother. If that's too much to bear, just enjoy all the cool stuff and Paris. This movie was more fun than I had been led to believe from the reports of boos at Cannes.

US release is coming in about a week from today (2 Mar. 2017).

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[Johann]

You covered Jim Jarmusch's Paterson for NYFF and I agree with your review. Not a whole lot happens and it's a little difficult to describe, even tho I think it's pretty much perfect.

Adam Driver is a city bus driver for NJ Transit: the 23 Paterson bus. His name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson. This film is a crash-course in Paterson history, and it's fascinating to me. Not a single frame is out of place here- Frederick Elmes is a Master cinematographer who's worked with the best. No one can complain about the compositions in this. There is deadpan humour, as you mentioned Chris, and I loved it. Especially the scene where the bartender tells Everett he should be an actor....Priceless.
Jarmusch can take the most mundane thing and give it oomph. He makes cupcakes, dogs, plain locales, a plain house and plain bus depot look Interesting, despite being run-of-the-mill.
Love is the story here. Paterson's love for his woman Laura and his love for poetry.
It seems a little strange that a city transit bus driver would write personal and pretty good poetry, but why not? Stranger things have happened...
I found the character of Paterson to be very compelling. Adam Driver is a very engaging actor, and here he shines. He's totally believable, and he has a great career ahead of him.
I loved all of the little details about Paterson, New Jersey: Lou Costello, William Carlos Williams, streets, the waterfalls, even Marvin the dog had charm, even if I hated him by the end. LOL Speaking of the end, if I have one complaint about this flawless movie, it was the ending. It's fine as it is, I know why Jarmusch did it that way, just for me I was left a little wanting..

All in all, stellar film by an old hand at it.

[Chris Knipp]

I agree with your review (you wrote a review!) and love this film. It's a pity that because it's so low key, people seem to have largely dismissed it. Several people I know at NY press screenings have spoken disparagingly of it, and it was not much in the conversation at the Oscars. Jarmusch remains one of our distinctive auteurs of the past fifty years.

I recently got to see another film of the NYFF that I previously hadn't - Assayas' Personal Shopper. My review (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35357#post35357) of that is in the NYFF Festival Coverage too, and I liked that much more than talk about it had led me to expect - though a colleague here had spoken with gentle favor of it; but the 'critics' at the publicist's screening were disparaging and dismissive afterwards - due mostly to the spiritualism/medium content. There is so much more there than that, and that is delicately and skillfully done.

What 'everybody' in the NY crowd seems to like now is I Am Not Your Negro (featured at the FSLC and one of Lincoln Center's biggest box office successes, I was told) - you might want to check that one out, it's very well done if a tiny bit overrated maybe - and O.J.: Made in America justifiably trumped it in the Oscars I think.

[Johann]

I know..I wrote something! It's a miracle! hahaha

Paterson was outstanding, but I could see some people being annoyed with it. I loved it, but I am biased toward Jarmusch.
That dog who played "Marvin" is actually called Nellie, and she died not long ago, and Cannes gave her the "Palm Dog"!
Marvin gets most of the laughs in this movie.
We get a nice glimpse into life in New Jersey, or at least the scenery, which is quite nice. I didn't know that New Jersey had nice scenery...everything I've been led to believe about New Jersey is bleak! LOL

As for Paterson the film, this will be a Criterion DVD release for sure. The only scene that made no sense to me was the one where the bartender's wife comes in and tells him to put the money back- completely random, and made me think the bartender wasn't who he portrays. Or maybe he is...he seems like a put-on artist...
Also, the scene with the Japanese man toward the end..."A HA!"...what was that about? Pretty coincidental that he knows William Carlos Williams AND he sits down next to Paterson right there on the bench...

[Chris Knipp]

You're a good writer. All you need is to want to and you could review movies as well as anybody. Jarmusch exercises complete control in his movies. Anthony Lane said Marvin was a mistake name: it should have been Paterson. So, you can't be surprised that a Japanese expert on William Carlos Williams sits next to Paterson in the park. A recent film of his that few, or none but me, liked was called The Limits of Control. For him, there aren't any. But of course this varies. The public may like it better when the control isn't too evident, like in Only Lovers Left Alive. Those vampires of course had little freedom, but the moves seemed pleasantly wayward.

[Johann]

I guess the Japanese expert could happen, it's a nice spot, in front of the falls...but what about the blank notebook? Was the guy psychic? He said "A Ha!"...and I agree the dog should've been named Paterson.
My favorite moment was when the young girl said "bus driver who likes Emily Dickenson.." Only in the movies...

[Chris Knipp]

Did you see how Anthony Lane describes Adam Driver? He is the actor of the moment. The NYFF had two "evenings with" and the featured ones were him and Kristen Stewart (also in with cool directors).

I am impressed by Golshifteh Farahani. She is beautiful, vivacious, and has performed in Farsi, French, and English with equal fluency.

[Johann]

Yes, she's just as great as Adam Driver in this, this is a real movie duo here...
Lane's right...Adam is A-List now. This movie is proof of his acting chops.
I agree with you that this Jarmusch is very similar to Broken Flowers, in its' wit and deadpan humour and very alive "reality".
I admire Jim very very much. I look forward to every film from him. Tilda Swinton was right. He's a Rock Star.

[Chris Knipp]

Yes. Nothing can compare to the delight of discovery of watching Jim Jarmusch's first four films (excluding his actual first, which I saw later). I can remember sitting in the theater seeing Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law and hardly believing how great they were. Like when I saw True Romance, not directed by Tarantino (by the late Tony Scott) but the scenario by him I"d seen, and thinking, "This if for me!" I liked it better than Reservoir Dogs. It is better and way funnier. The scene with Chris Walkin and Dennis Hopper!!!

Lane's droll take on Adam:
There is more to Paterson, however; there has to be, since he is played by Adam Driver. One glance at the guy, and you instantly wonder, Why the long face? So fine are those pallid features, skittering with anxiety and intent, that his agent must be constantly tempted to skip the movie offers and enter him in the Kentucky Derby. Driver has a hint of Basil Rathbone, but without the dash, and the time may come when he delivers the most highly strung Sherlock Holmes ever witnessed onscreen. Little surprise, then, that Paterson should harbor a secret—a private fixation, known only to his wife, which keeps him down in the basement, after hours. You can be forgiven for assuming that he is a serial killer, or an abductor, those being the only vocations, as far as movies and TV are concerned, that drive quiet men to their cellars, but no. Paterson does something even more inexplicable. He writes poems.

You know for Scorsese's punishing (for us and them) Silence Driver lost 50 pounds, Andrew Garfield lost 40 pounds, and Liam Neeson lost 20 pounds? Driver doesn't look good so skinny. His big ears stick out a mile. Neeson has looked better too.

[Johann]

Great points. Jarmusch's filmography inspires awe, which is what the best Iconoclasts do.
Anthony Lane is droll. He's right tho. I was wondering why he would write in the cellar. It was never explained why. I mean, he goes down there to focus on the writing, right? Yet he leaves the notebook on the couch...for Marvin.
And then didn't get emotionally upset...he internalized it. It made me wonder if he did it on purpose, to see if Laura would leave him. Because he wrote once that he would rip his heart out and never put it back if she left him. And he hesitated when she wanted him to make copies of his poems.
That sounded serial-killer-ish, no?

[Chris Knipp]

I don't see the serial killerish part - Peterson seems so calm and gentle (but I guess killers fool people that way!). He seems like a spiritual, enlightened person, at peace with the world and happy, as if he's got things figured out. And he has a perfect beautiful woman whom he loves. However, you've thought about it more than I have. I just accepted it as a finished work of art not to be questioned. Going down in the cellar had seemed right because it's a small house, so where else can he go to get away? However, he is serene in a slightly self-destructive way: not backing up his major art project, his book of poems. That goes with being monklike though.

[Johann]

Well the thing that made me think he may be a bit psycho was balking at making copies of his poems. If he loves her totally, then why the hell wouldn't he JUMP at making copies for her? He didn't. He hesitated, and it made no sense. What was he aiming for with his poetry? He didn't want to show the world...why?
We never find out. He may be spiritual, but is he really? What spiritual person would "rip their heart out"? metaphorically or otherwise? He was happier meeting that Japanese guy than he was getting out of bed everyday! LOL

[Johann]

Each shot and sequence in Paterson was sublime, truly. Some great cinema moments...like when Everett "clears out" the bar, even normal things like walking down the sidewalk, walking Marvin, Laura icing cupcakes in her "style", her "painting" and "decorating"- very adorable. She wants to be a country singer in Nashville, playing a special black and white harlequin guitar...

If you love films, then this is the kind of film you look for. Even just street-shots of the bus driving in and around Paterson...fabulous. I wish all directors had such intution.

[Chris Knipp]

Both your statements are true, I guess. . . But Paterson is meant to be mysterious; all Jarmusch's protagonists are - so assume a logic we don't understand. You did say the film was sublime.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ppl;.jpg


April 12-15 at the Metrograph Theater NYC

JAMES GRAY

Career Retrospective Includes Sneak Preview of
The Lost City of Z in 35mm This is one from the NYFF that I missed so far - coming out soon. The Metrograph, down in Chinatown in NYC, is becoming quite the destination, a gathering place for interesting movie events. I like James Gray - and appreciate his love of film (vs. digital) - and this retrospective would be great fun. I wish I were there, but, in compensation, I am doing some coverage of the San Francisco film festival (5-19 April 2017)

[Johann]

Excellent...thanks for the info!
I'm not familiar with James Gray.

[Chris Knipp]

His first films focus on a gangsterish mood in the Russian Jewish section of Queens. Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night- the latter two featured Joaquin Phoenix. Two Lovers is a beautiful intimate study. The Immigrant, I think his first in the NYFF, was a period film with Marian Cotillard (I didn't like it as well, but he has continually grown and remained original. Look him up. I have loved the charming hunky English actor Charlie Hunnam for 17 years - since "Queer As Folk". He is known for the biker series, "Sons of Anarchy" but was in Apatow's "Undeclared." He is coming in a King Arthur film directed by Guy Ritchie, as King Arthur - coming into his own perhaps on the big screen at last after living half his life in Hollywood.

[Johann]

Hmm. Interesting.

[Chris Knipp]

Worth the time in my opinion.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/pyed.jpg
Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook/The New Yorker

Gray's Lost City of Z is beginning theatrical release in NY and LA today, but I won't see it till next week. Noticed what Anthony Lane says in his New Yorker review (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-lost-city-of-z-and-aftermath)this week that "admirers of Gray" are "a select but ardent bunch." I am eager to see Charlie Hunnam, whom I've been a fan of since he got famous young in the 1999-2002 original UK "Queer As Folk" TV series (the only one that matters!) in this big role.

[Chris Knipp]

A QUIET PASSION (Terence Davies 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35518#post35518)

As roundups have noted passions are extreme on this movie about Emily Dickinson starring Cynthia Nixon. Loyal Davies fans say it's a masterpiece. Others (including me) think it's a huge mistake, really just terrible. Davies' recent films have been wildly uneven. The Deep Blue Sea was wonderful; Sunset Song which I saw in FCS but couldn't see the point of reviewing was pointless and uninvolving (and could have used subtitles). Now this - which could ruin one of America's best poets for people. It starts out well enough (though giddily and strangely) then sinks into relentless miserablism. To be avoided.


Shown as part of the New York Film Festival but now going into theatrical release. (Quad Cinema and Lincoln Plaza, NYC.)

[Chris Knipp]

THE LOST CITY OF Z (James Gray 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35553#post35553)

Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland in a movie about the life and death (or disappearance) Percy Fawcett, the soldier and explorer lost in the Amazonian jungle with his son in 1925. He is intrepid and brave. This is a patently idealized portrait and a story about moral values in the face of failure. Yet even in that James Gray eschews conventionality - by being old fashioned, as in his stubborn dedication to shooting only in 35mm. (Darius Khodji is the impeccable dp here, as he was for Gray's previous The Immigrant).

Premiered as the Closing Night Film of the New York Film Festival, 15 Oct. 2016. Also included in the San Francisco film festival shown 9th Apr. 2017, but opening the 14th limited and 21 Apr. wide.

[Chris Knipp]

STAYING VERTICAL/RESTER VERTICAL (Alain Guiraudie 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35050#post35050)

Release on DVD in the US (Strand) 20 May 2017.

[Chris Knipp]

Glenn Raucher coming back to Manhattan to manage Quad Cinema

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/rauch.jpg
Glenn Raucher [CK photo]

After eighteen months through Gavin Smith, who moved to Cohen Media Group from editing Film Comment last year, Glenn Raucher is leaving his new job managing the Hudson Valley Writers Center to become the general manager of the new Quad Cinema in the West Village at 34 W. 13th St. NYC, 10011. It was originally started in the early seventies and reportedly is the city's first multiple-auditorium cinema. See Quad's website H E R E (https://quadcinema.com/).

The Quad has been in process of restoration for several years by Cohen Media Group and will be a high quality repertory cinema, in fact it is open now. Other great new cinemas of this quality are Alamo Drafthouse and the Metrograph in Chinatown. (The Metrograph is running an impressive series of programs: today's announcement is a retrospective of the works of Robert Bresson.)

[Chris Knipp]

THE SON OF JOSEPH (Eugène Green 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=36131#post36131)

I finally get to review this 2016 NYFF Main Slate film (only two left uncovered): it's now available via Netflix streaming. Still in Green's signature stilted, Bressonian style and baroque clarity of French diction, stiff movement, head-on closeups with actors addressing the camera. But it engages with the warm tale of a Paris boy seeking his father, his adventure laced with humor and silly jokes. With newcomer Victor Ezenfis, Natacha Rénier, Fabrizio Rongione, Matthieu Amalric, and Jacques Bonnaffé.

[Chris Knipp]

More about Quad (https://quadcinema.com/) Cinema.

I have mentioned Glenn Raucher has come back to work in the city after a year at Hudson Valley Writers' Center, as Vice President and General Manager of the restored Quad Cinema at 34 W. 13th Street. I went by there last night. It is now an almost scarily impressive restored, modernized and revamped place. So many flashing screens and electronic letters and vanishing images. There are some big old classic European movie posters too. But the traditional seediness of the old art houses is studiously avoided. You can still find that rigorously preserved at the nearby Cinema Village at 22 E. 12th Street, with its steep stairways, cramped quarters, and cold, dank basement auditorium - so atmospheric! So many memories - like my first experience of Carlos Sorin's (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=405&view=next) little movies about Patagonia, 12 years ago.

The Quad is all new and gleamingly electronic, almost banishing the memories of its past, when I also experienced some cinematic discoveries, and it had many small film festivals too, such as Greek and Irish ones, I believe. It has both new films and a lively repertory program, the latter managed by Christopher Wells. It's also flexible enough to now be starting a 20-film retrospective to honor the late Harry Dean Stanton. The series is called "Also Starring Harry Dean Stanton" and runs 22 Sept.-1 Oct. 2017.

The Quad has a rival further downtown in the Metrograph on Ludlow Street in the East Village, which has been running a barrage of series lately - it has a marquee able to list six different movies showing in one da. The Metrograph was started with John Waters and Jim Jarmusch and Greta Gerwig on hand for the opening. It has an intro in GQ (https://www.gq.com/story/metrograph-wes-anderson-alexander-olch) by Wes Anderson with the tie designer Alexander Olch, the Metrograph's founder.

This of course doesn't alter the fact that all the rep cinemas that dotted around NYC and the old seedy theaters turned to art houses like the Thalia have vanished - and the same is increasingly true even in the cinematic haven of Paris. Cineplexes have wiped them all out and also an economy that makes operating marginally virtually impossible.

[Glenn's time at Hudson Valley was logical. Writing is a first love, and he directed the literary arts program of the YMCA of New York f or 8 years before joining the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He likes music too, and has had his own band for years.]

[oscar jubis]

I did not get to watch the Errol Morris documentary about Elsa Dorfman that you liked when you reviewed it as part of the 2016 NYFF, as I would expect to find very favorable reviews about every single film (or whatever) that Morris has produced/directed (or whatever). He followed this film with a magnificent 45-hour series that premiered on television in 2017 titled WORMWOOD. I found out about it recently when perusing retired Village Voice film pundit j. Doberman's Top 10s and learning this doc is his favorite "movie thing" that year. It's the same year as the David Lynch series that topped my list. Other than Godard, Lynch is the only living filmmaker whose films require me to understand only halfway in order to love them. Morris puts fiction strategies to documentary purposes and the results are exhilarating. This is about the CIA murdering one of their own back in 1953 and the coverup that kept it secret. There's nothing paranoid about this conspiracy thriller.

[Chris Knipp]

i didn't like that Morris doc about Elsa Dorfman that much. (I think I misspoke in my New York movie journal where I wrote about it: I've corrected that.) I wrote in my review that it "is too careless an effort to rank with Morris' best work." You mean Hoberman, not Doberman, I believe. Dobrerman is the dog. Hoberman's trashing of James Gray's films has not endeared me to him. I haven't seen "Wormwood." I like David Lynch too, and also find him engaging as a person. See the doc bio of his early life, David Lynch: The Art Life (http://chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3633&view=previous).

[oscar jubis]

You mean Hoberman, not Doberman, I believe. Dobrerman is the dog.
I also wrote that it's a FORTY FIVE hour series when a mere 4 hours are required to watch WORMWOOD unfold. I make more mistakes now than ever, that's a fact

The word "infotainment" is mostly understood as pejorative and intended to be critical of entertainment attempting to pass for journalism. Morris relates the concepts of information (imparting of) and entertainment in a positive way. His films use stylized dramatizations of events recounted by a documentary character (a person who exists in the world of the audience) to illuminate, define or clarify them and to amplify their emotional impact. Wormwood feels like the best conspiracy thriller and the best film-noir in recent memory. But it also makes as valid a claim to be telling the truth as any old-fashioned piece of journalism.