Nyff 2017

[Chris Knipp]

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Festival coverage thread. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36068#post36068)

NYFF number 55 has a poster already by artist/sculptor Richard Serra. It's one his powerful, striking images, a 80' sculpture photographed in Qatar. For more about the creation of the poster, go H E R E (https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/mbjyzn/richard-serra-55th-new-york-film-festival-poster).

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Links to Reviews:

BPM/120 Battements par minute (Robin Campillo 2017)
Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36281#post36281)
Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36238#post36238)
L'Enfant secret (Philippe Garrel 1979) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36213#post36213) NYFF Revivals
Faces Places/Visages, Villages (Jr, Agnès Varda 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36251#post36251)
Félicité (Alain Gomis 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36279#post36279)
Florida Project, The (Sean Baker 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36252#post36252)
Ismael's Ghosts/Les fantômes d'Ismaël (Arnaud Desplechin 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36273#post36273)
Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36313#post36313)
Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36318#post36318)
Let the Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur (Claire Denis 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36286#post36286)
Lover for a Day/L'amant d'un jour (Philippe Garrel 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York Film-Festival-2017&p=36266#post36266)
Meyerowitz Stories, The (New and Selected) (Noah Baumbach 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36299#post36299)
On the Beach Alone at Night (Hong Sang-soo 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36378#post36378)
Other Side of Hope, The (Aki Kaurismaki 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36340#post36340)
Rider, The (Chloé Zhao 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36271#post36271)
Spoor/Pokot (Agnieszka Holland, Kasla Adamik 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36222#post36222)
Square, The (Ruben Östlund 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36218#post36218)
Thelma (Joachim Trier 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36338#post36338)
Western (Valeska Grisebach 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36230#post36230)
Wonder Wheel (Woody Allen 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36354#post36354)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36235#post36235)

[Chris Knipp]

Linklater's new moive to open the NYFF

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The World Premiere of Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying will open the 55th New York Film Festival (Sept 28 – Oct 15).

FSLC blurb:
In Richard Linklater’s lyrical road movie, as funny as it is heartbreaking, three aging Vietnam-era Navy vets—soft-spoken Doc (Steve Carell), unhinged and unfiltered Sal (Bryan Cranston), and quietly measured Mueller (Laurence Fishburne)—reunite to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of Doc’s only child, who has been killed in the early days of the Iraqi Invasion. As this trio of old friends makes its way up the Eastern seaboard, Linklater gives us a rich rendering of friendship, a grand mosaic of common life in the USA during the Bush era, and a striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. To put it simply, Last Flag Flying is a great movie from one of America’s finest filmmakers.

[Chris Knipp]

Todd Haynes's new movie to be the centerpiece film.

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FSLC press release today:


New York, NY (July 6, 2017) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck as the Centerpiece selection of the 55th New York Film Festival (September 28 – October 15), making its New York Premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, October 7. The film will be released theatrically by Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions on October 20, 2017.

In 1977, following the death of his single mother, Ben (Oakes Fegley) loses his hearing in a freak accident and makes his way from Minnesota to New York, hoping to learn about the father he has never met. A half-century earlier, another deaf 12-year-old, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), flees her restrictive Hoboken home, captivated by the bustle and romance of the nearby big city. Each of these parallel adventures, unfolding largely without dialogue, is an exuberant love letter to a bygone era of New York. The mystery of how they ultimately converge, which involves Julianne Moore in a lovely dual role, provides the film’s emotional core. Adapted from a young-adult novel by The Invention of Hugo Cabret author Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck is an all-ages enchantment, entirely true to director Todd Haynes’s sensibility: an intelligent, deeply personal, and lovingly intricate tribute to the power of obsession.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, "Todd Haynes and Brian Selznick have pulled off something truly remarkable here—a powerful evocation of childhood, with all of its mysteries and terrors and flights of imagination and longings; richly textured re-creations of Manhattan in the ’20s and the ’70s; and a magical and intricately plotted quest story that builds to a beautiful climax. Wonderstruck is fun, emotionally potent, and . . . it’s a great New York movie.”

"We’re so pleased and proud that Wonderstruck has been selected for the Centerpiece slot at this year’s New York Film Festival," said Haynes. "There’s no more meaningful place or audience with which to share our film that is a tribute both to the history of New York City and to cinema."

The New York Film Festival has showcased Haynes’s work on three other occasions: Velvet Goldmine in 1998, I’m Not There in 2007, and, most recently, Carol in 2015.
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[Chris Knipp]

Woody Allen's new movie to be the closing night film.

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES WORLD PREMIERE OF WOODY ALLEN'S WONDER WHEEL AS CLOSING NIGHT OF THE 55th NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

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Courtesy of Amazon Studios


New York, NY (July 27, 2017) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel as the Closing Night selection of the 55th New York Film Festival (September 28 – October 15), making its World Premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, October 14. Amazon Studios will release Wonder Wheel on December 1, 2017, the first film the studio will distribute independently.

In a career spanning 50 years and almost as many features, Woody Allen has periodically refined, reinvented, and redefined the terms of his art, and that’s exactly what he does with his daring new film. We’re in Coney Island in the 1950s. A lifeguard (Justin Timberlake) tells us a story that just might be filtered through his vivid imagination: a middle-aged carousel operator (James Belushi) and his beleaguered wife (Kate Winslet), who eke out a living on the boardwalk, are visited by his estranged daughter (Juno Temple)—a situation from which layer upon layer of all-too-human complications develop. Allen and his cinematographer, the great Vittorio Storaro, working with a remarkable cast led by Winslet in a startlingly brave, powerhouse performance, have created a bracing and truly surprising movie experience.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, “I’m not quite sure what I expected when I sat down to watch Wonder Wheel, but when the lights came up I was speechless. There are elements in the film that will certainly be familiar to anyone who knows Woody Allen’s work, but here he holds them up to a completely new light. I mean that literally and figuratively, because Allen and Vittorio Storaro use light and color in a way that is stunning in and of itself but also integral to the mounting emotional power of the film. And at the center of it all is Kate Winslet’s absolutely remarkable performance—precious few actors are that talented, or fearless.”

The New York Film Festival has showcased Allen’s work on two other occasions: Bullets Over Broadway was Centerpiece of NYFF32 in 1994 and Celebrity was Opening Night of NYFF36 in 1998.

The 18-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

Earlier this summer, NYFF announced Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying as Opening Night and Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck as the Centerpiece selection. The retrospective section honors Robert Mitchum’s centenary.
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[Chris Knipp]

55th New York Film Festival Main Slate


Opening Night
Last Flag Flying
Dir. Richard Linklater

Centerpiece
Wonderstruck
Dir. Todd Haynes

Closing Night
Wonder Wheel
Dir. Woody Allen

Before We Vanish
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

BPM (Beats Per Minute)/120 battements par minute
Dir. Robin Campillo

Bright Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur
Dir. Claire Denis

Call Me by Your Name
Dir. Luca Guadagnino

The Day After
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

Faces Places/Visages villages
Dir. Agnès Varda & JR

Félicité
Dir. Alain Gomis

The Florida Project
Dir. Sean Baker

Ismael’s Ghosts/Les fantômes d’Ismaël
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Lady Bird
Dir. Greta Gerwig

Lover for a Day/L’Amant d’un jour
Dir. Philippe Garrel

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Dir. Noah Baumbach

Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde
Dir. Serge Bozon

Mudbound
Dir. Dee Rees

On the Beach at Night Alone
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki

The Rider
Dir. Chloé Zhao

Spoor/Pokot
Dir. Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik

The Square
Dir. Ruben Östlund

Thelma
Dir. Joachim Trier

Western
Dir. Valeska Grisebach

Zama
Dir. Lucrecia Martel


NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Revivals, Convergence, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.

The 18-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Kent Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

Tickets go on sale September 10. VIP passes and packages are on sale now. Learn more at filmlinc.org/packages.
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[Chris Knipp]

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2017 Nyff Main Slate films described

Some geniuses, some old names, some new names, promise of many great viwing experiences. The NYFF does not disappoint, but provides the best of the best new films the world has to offer this year. Two films by Hong Sang Soo!

55th NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL (September 28 – October 15, 2017
Films & Descriptions [FSLC]

Opening Night
Last Flag Flying
Dir. Richard Linklater, USA, 2017, 119m
World Premiere
In Richard Linklater’s lyrical road movie, as funny as it is heartbreaking, three aging Vietnam-era Navy vets—soft-spoken Doc (Steve Carell), unhinged and unfiltered Sal (Bryan Cranston), and quietly measured Mueller (Laurence Fishburne)—reunite to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of Doc’s only child, who has been killed in the early days of the Iraq invasion. As this trio of old friends makes its way up the Eastern seaboard, Linklater gives us a rich rendering of friendship, a grand mosaic of common life in the USA during the Bush era, and a striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. To put it simply, Last Flag Flying is a great movie from one of America’s finest filmmakers. An Amazon Studios release.

Centerpiece
Wonderstruck
Dir. Todd Haynes, USA, 2017, 117m
In 1977, following the death of his single mother, Ben (Oakes Fegley) loses his hearing in a freak accident and makes his way from Minnesota to New York, hoping to learn about the father he has never met. A half-century earlier, another deaf 12-year-old, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), flees her restrictive Hoboken home, captivated by the bustle and romance of the nearby big city. Each of these parallel adventures, unfolding largely without dialogue, is an exuberant love letter to a different bygone era of New York. The mystery of how they ultimately converge, which involves Julianne Moore in a lovely dual role, provides the film’s emotional core. Adapted from a young-adult novel by Hugo author Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck is an all-ages enchantment, entirely true to director Todd Haynes’s sensibility: an intelligent, deeply personal, and lovingly intricate tribute to the power of obsession. An Amazon Studios release.

Closing Night
Wonder Wheel
Dir. Woody Allen, USA, 2017
World Premiere
In a career spanning 50 years and almost as many features, Woody Allen has periodically refined, reinvented, and redefined the terms of his art, and that’s exactly what he does with his daring new film. We’re in Coney Island in the 1950s. A lifeguard (Justin Timberlake) tells us a story that just might be filtered through his vivid imagination: a middle-aged carousel operator (Jim Belushi) and his beleaguered wife (Kate Winslet), who eke out a living on the boardwalk, are visited by his estranged daughter (Juno Temple)—a situation from which layer upon layer of all-too-human complications develop. Allen and his cinematographer, the great Vittorio Storaro, working with a remarkable cast led by Winslet in a startlingly brave, powerhouse performance, have created a bracing and truly surprising movie experience. An Amazon Studios release.

Before We Vanish
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2017, 129m
The latest from master of art-horror Kiyoshi Kurosawa is perhaps his most mainstream film yet, a throwback to 1980s sci-fi. An advance crew of three aliens journey to Earth in preparation for a complete takeover of the planet. They snatch not only bodies but memories, beliefs, values—everything that defines their conquests as human—leaving only hollow shells, which are all but unrecognizable to their loved ones. This disturbing parable for our present moment, replete with stunning images—including a drone attack and a bit of Clockwork Orange–style murder and mayhem—is also a profoundly mystical affirmation of love as the only form of resistance and salvation. A Neon release.

BPM (Beats Per Minute)/120 battements par minute
Dir. Robin Campillo, France, 2017, 144m
U.S. Premiere
In the early 1990s, ACT UP—in France, as in the U.S.—was on the front lines of AIDS activism. Its members, mostly gay, HIV-positive men, stormed drug company and government offices in “Silence=Death” T-shirts, facing down complacent suits with the urgency of their struggle for life. Robin Campillo (Eastern Boys) depicts their comradeship and tenacity in waking up the world to the disease that was killing them and movingly dramatizes the persistence of passionate love affairs even in dire circumstances. All the actors, many of them unknown, are splendid in this film, which not only celebrates the courage of ACT UP but also tacitly provides a model of resistance to the forces of destruction running rampant today. A release of The Orchard.

Bright Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur
Dir. Claire Denis, France, 2017, 95m
North American Premiere
Juliette Binoche is both incandescent and emotionally raw in Claire Denis’s extraordinary new film as Isabelle, a middle-aged Parisian artist in search of definitive love. The film moves elliptically, as though set to some mysterious bio-rhythm, from one romantic/emotional attachment to another: from the boorish married lover (Xavier Beauvois); to the subtly histrionic actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle), also married; to the dreamboat hairdresser (Paul Blain); to the gentle man (Alex Descas) not quite ready for commitment to . . . a mysterious fortune-teller. Appropriately enough, Bright Sunshine In (very loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) feels like it’s been lit from within; it was lit from without by Denis’s longtime cinematographer Agnès Godard. It is also very funny. A Sundance Selects release.

Call Me by Your Name
Dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy/France, 2017, 132m
A story of summer love unlike any other, the sensual new film from the director of I Am Love, set in 1983, charts the slowly ripening romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet), an American teen on the verge of discovering himself, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), the handsome older grad student whom his professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) has invited to their vacation home in Northern Italy. Adapted from the wistful novel by André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name is Guadagnino’s most exquisitely rendered, visually restrained film, capturing with eloquence the confusion and longing of youth, anchored by a remarkable, star-making performance by Chalamet, always a nervy bundle of swagger and insecurity, contrasting with Hammer’s stoicism. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

The Day After
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2017, 92m
U.S. Premiere
Hong continues in the openly emotional register of his On the Beach at Night Alone, also showing in this year’s Main Slate. Shot in moody black and white, The Day After opens with book publisher Bongwan (Kwon Hae-hyo) fending off his wife’s heated accusations of infidelity. At the office, it’s the first day for his new assistant, Areum (Kim Min-hee), whose predecessor was Bongwan’s lover. Mistaken identity, repetition compulsion, and déjà vu figure into the narrative as the film entangles its characters across multiple timelines through an intricate geometry of desire, suspicion, and betrayal. The end result is one of Hong’s most plaintive and philosophical works.

Faces Places/Visages villages
Dir. Agnès Varda & JR, France, 2016, 89m
The 88-year-old Agnès Varda teamed up with the 33-year-old visual artist JR for this tour of rural France that follows in the footsteps of Varda’s groundbreaking documentary The Gleaners and I (NYFF 2000) in its celebration of artisanal production, workers’ solidarity, and the photographic arts in the face of mortality. Varda and JR wielded cameras themselves, but they were also documented in their travels by multiple image and sound recordists. Out of this often spontaneous jumble, Varda and her editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia created an unassuming masterpiece (the winner of this year’s L’Oeil d’or at Cannes) that is vivid, lyrical, and inspiringly humanistic. A Cohen Media Group release.

Félicité
Dir. Alain Gomis, France/Senegal/Belgium/Germany/Lebanon, 2017, 124m
U.S. Premiere
The new film from Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauan and Senegalese descent, is largely set in the roughest areas of the rough city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, a woman named Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) scrapes together a living as a singer in a makeshift bar (her accompanists are played by members of the Kasai Allstars band). When her son is seriously injured in an accident, she goes in search of money for his medical care and embarks on a double journey: through the punishing outer world of the city and the inner world of the soul. Félicité is tough, tender, lyrical, mysterious, funny, and terrifying, both responsive to the moment and fixed on its heroine’s spiritual progress. A Strand Releasing release.

The Florida Project
Dir. Sean Baker, USA, 2017, 105m
U.S. Premiere
A six-year-old girl (the remarkable Brooklynn Prince) and her two best friends run wild on the grounds of a week-by-week motel complex on the edge of Orlando’s Disney World. Meanwhile, her mother (talented novice Bria Vinaite) desperately tries to cajole the motel manager (an ever-surprising Willem Dafoe) to turn a blind eye to the way she pays the rent. A film about but not for kids, Baker’s depiction of childhood on the margins has fierce energy, tenderness, and great beauty. After the ingenuity of his iPhone-shot 2015 breakout Tangerine, Baker reasserts his commitment to 35mm film with sun-blasted images that evoke a young girl’s vision of adventure and endurance beyond heartbreak. An A24 release.

Ismael’s Ghosts/Les fantômes d’Ismaël
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2017, 132m
North American Premiere
Phantoms swirl around Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), a filmmaker in the throes of writing a spy thriller based on the unlikely escapades of his brother, Ivan Dedalus (Louis Garrel). His only true source of stability, his relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is upended, as is the life of his Jewish documentarian mentor and father-in-law (László Szabó), when Ismael’s wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard), who disappeared twenty years earlier, returns, and, like one of Hitchcock’s fragile, delusional femmes fatales, expects that her husband and father are still in thrall to her. A brilliant shape-shifter—part farce, part melodrama—Ismael’s Ghosts is finally about the process of creating a work of art and all the madness required. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Lady Bird
Dir. Greta Gerwig, USA, 2017, 93m
Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut is a portrait of an artistically inclined young woman (Saoirse Ronan) trying to define herself in the shadow of her mother (Laurie Metcalf) and searching for an escape route from her hometown of Sacramento. Moods are layered upon moods at the furious pace of late adolescence in this lovely and loving film, which shifts deftly from one emotional and comic register to the next. Lady Bird is rich in invention and incident, and it is powered by Ronan, one of the finest actors in movies. With Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet as the men in Lady Bird’s life, Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, and Tracy Letts as her dad. An A24 release.

Lover for a Day/L’Amant d’un jour
Dir. Philippe Garrel, France, 2017, 76m
North American Premiere
Lover for a Day is an exquisite meditation on love and fidelity that recalls Garrel's previous NYFF selections Jealousy (NYFF 2013) and In the Shadow of Women (NYFF 2015). After a painful breakup, heartbroken Jeanne (Esther Garrel) moves back in with her university professor father, Gilles (Eric Caravaca), to discover that he is living with optimistic, life-loving student Ariane (newcomer Louise Chevillotte), who is the same age as Jeanne. An unusual triangular relationship emerges as both girls seek the favor of Gilles, as daughter or lover, while developing their own friendship, finding common ground despite their differences. Gorgeously shot in grainy black and white by Renato Berta (Au revoir les enfants), Lover for a Day perfectly illustrates Garrel's poetic exploration of relationships and desire. A MUBI release.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Dir. Noah Baumbach, USA, 2017, 110m
North American Premiere
Noah Baumbach revisits the terrain of family vanities and warring attachments that he began exploring with The Squid and the Whale in this intricately plotted story of three middle-aged siblings (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel) coping with their strong-willed father (Dustin Hoffman) and the flightiness of his wife (Emma Thompson). Baumbach’s film never stops deftly changing gears, from surges of pathos to painful comedy and back again. Needless to say, this lyrical quicksilver comedy is very much a New York experience. A Netflix release.

Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde
Dir. Serge Bozon, France, 2017, 95m
North American Premiere
Serge Bozon’s eccentric comedic thriller is loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with many a twist. Mrs. Géquil (Isabelle Huppert), a timid and rather peculiar physics professor, teaches in a suburban technical high school. Apart from her quiet married life with her gentle stay-at-home husband, she is mocked and despised on a daily basis by pretty much everyone around her—headmaster, colleagues, students. During a dark, stormy night, she is struck by lightning and wakes up a decidedly different person, a newly powerful Mrs. Hyde with mysterious energy and uncontrollable powers. Highlighted by Bozon's brilliant mise en scène, Isabelle Huppert hypnotizes us again, securing her place as the ultimate queen of the screen.

Mudbound
Dir. Dee Rees, USA, 2017, 134m
Writer/director Dee Rees’s historical epic details daily life and social dynamics in the failing economy of Mississippi during the World War II era. Two families, one white (the landlords) and one black (the sharecroppers), work the same miserable piece of farmland. Out of need and empathy, the mothers of the two families bond as their younger male relatives go off to war and learn that there is a world beyond racial hatred and fear. The flawless ensemble cast includes Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Jason Clarke, Rob Morgan, and Jonathan Banks. A Netflix release.

On the Beach at Night Alone
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2017, 101m
Hong Sang-soo’s movies have always invited autobiographical readings, and his 19th feature is perhaps his most achingly personal film yet, a steel-nerved, clear-eyed response to the tabloid frenzy that erupted in South Korea over his relationship with actress Kim Min-hee. The film begins in Hamburg, where actress Young-hee (played by Kim herself, who won the Best Actress prize at Berlin for this role) is hiding out after the revelation of her affair with a married filmmaker. Back in Korea, a series of encounters shed light on Young-hee’s volatile state, as she slips in and out of melancholic reflection and dreams. Centered on Kim’s astonishingly layered performance, On the Beach at Night Alone is the work of a master mining new emotional depths. A Cinema Guild release.

The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki, Finland, 2017, 98m
Leave it to Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, NYFF 2011), peerless master of humanist tragicomedy, to make the first great fiction film about the 21st century migrant crisis. Having escaped bombed-out Aleppo, Syrian refugee Khlaed (Sherwan Haji) seeks asylum in Finland, only to get lost in a maze of functionaries and bureaucracies. Meanwhile, shirt salesman Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) leaves his wife, wins big in a poker game, and takes over a restaurant whose deadpan staff he also inherits. These parallel stories dovetail to gently comic and enormously moving effect in Kaurismäki’s politically urgent fable, an object lesson on the value of compassion and hope that remains grounded in a tangible social reality. A Janus Films release.

The Rider
Dir. Chloé Zhao, USA, 2017, 104m
The hardscrabble economy of America’s rodeo country, where, for some, riding and winning is the only source of pleasure and income, is depicted with exceptional compassion and truth by a filmmaker who is in no way an insider: Zhao was born in Beijing and educated at Mount Holyoke and NYU. Set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider is a fiction film that calls on nonprofessional actors to play characters similar to themselves, incorporating their skill sets and experiences. Brady Jandreau is extraordinary as a badly injured former champion rider and horse trainer forced to give up the life he knows and loves. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Spoor/Pokot
Dir. Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik, Poland/Germany/Czech Republic, 2017, 128m
U.S. Premiere
Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) is a vigorous former engineer, part-time teacher, and animal activist, living in a near wilderness on the Polish-Czech border, where hunting is the favored year-round sport of the corrupt men who rule the region. When a series of hunters die mysteriously, Janina wonders if the animals are taking revenge, which doesn’t stop the police from coming after her. A brilliant, passionate director, Agnieszka Holland—who like Janina comes from a generation that learned to fight authoritarianism by any means necessary—forges a sprawling, wildly beautiful, emotionally enveloping film that earns its vision of utopia. It’s at once a phantasmagorical murder mystery, a tender, late-blooming love story, and a resistance and rescue thriller.

The Square
Dir. Ruben Östlund, Sweden, 2017, 150m
A precisely observed, thoroughly modern comedy of manners, Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winner revolves around Christian (Claes Bang), a well-heeled contemporary art curator at a Stockholm museum. While preparing his new exhibit—a four-by-four-meter zone designated as a “sanctuary of trust and caring”—Christian falls prey to a pickpocketing scam, which triggers an overzealous response and then a crisis of conscience. Featuring several instant-classic scenes and a vivid supporting cast (Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, and noted motion-capture actor Terry Notary), The Square is the most ambitious film yet by one of contemporary cinema’s most incisive social satirists, the rare movie to have as many laughs as ideas. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Thelma
Dir. Joachim Trier, Norway/Sweden/France, 2017, 116m
In the new film from Joachim Trier (Reprise), an adolescent country girl (Eili Harboe) has just moved to the city to begin her university studies, with the internalized religious severity of her quietly domineering mother and father (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Henrik Rafaelsen) always in mind. When she realizes that she is developing an attraction to her new friend Anja (Okay Kaya), she begins to manifest a terrifying and uncontrollable power that her parents have long feared. To reveal more would be a crime; let’s just say that this fluid, sharply observant, and continually surprising film begins in the key of horror and ends somewhere completely different. A release of The Orchard.

Western
Dir. Valeska Grisebach, Germany and Bulgaria, 2017, 119m
U.S. Premiere
As its title suggests, German director Valeska Grisebach’s first feature in a decade is a supremely intelligent genre update that recognizes the Western as a template on which to draw out eternal human conflicts. In remote rural Bulgaria, a group of German workers are building a water facility. Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), the reserved newbie in this all-male company, immediately draws the ire of the boorish team leader, not least for his willingness to mingle with the wary locals. Cast with utterly convincing nonprofessional actors, Western is a gripping culture-clash drama, attuned both to old codes of masculinity and new forms of colonialism. A Cinema Guild release.

Zama
Dir. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain, 2017, 115m
U.S. Premiere
The great Lucrecia Martel ventures into the realm of historical fiction and makes the genre entirely her own in this adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 classic of Argentinean literature. In the late 18th century, in a far-flung corner of what seems to be Paraguay, the title character, an officer of the Spanish crown (Daniel Giménez Cacho) born in the Americas, waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. Martel renders Zama’s world—his daily regimen of small humiliations and petty politicking—as both absurd and mysterious, and as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia, subject to a creeping disorientation. Precise yet dreamlike, and thick with atmosphere, Zama is a singular and intoxicating experience, a welcome return from one of contemporary cinema’s truly brilliant minds.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.org (https://www.filmlinc.org/?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=8.8.2017NYFF55MainSlate&utm_content=version_A) and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

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[Chris Knipp]

"Projections" experimental sidebar series announced for 2017 NYFF.

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Safdie brothers and Robert Pattinson at FSLC.
Their collaboration, Good Time, begins wide release Friday 18 Aug. 2017.


New York, NY (August 17, 2017) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces the complete lineup for the Projections section of the 55th New York Film Festival, to take place October 6-9. The slate is comprised of eight features and eight shorts programs presenting an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today’s most significant and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.

"Projections is the New York Film Festival’s home for adventurous work, and our 2017 lineup attests to the sheer number and variety of ways in which our most vital artists are exploring the possibilities of cinematic language,” said Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming and one of the curators of Projections. “We’ve extended the program by a day this year, as well as expanded the range of work on offer. My sense is that this slate includes what will be remembered as some of the year’s very best and most enduring films, along with some of its boldest provocations and most startling revelations, and we’re excited to present these discoveries alongside two programs of newly restored work by a pair of singular figures: Barbara Hammer and Mike Henderson.”

This year’s lineup features 51 films. . .
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[Chris Knipp]

The Film Society of Lincoln Center "Projections" lineup for fall 2017.



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

Caniba
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, France, 2017, 90m
U.S. Premiere
The latest by the makers of Leviathan (NYFF50) is a harrowing engagement with the sheer presence of a man who did the unthinkable: Issei Sagawa, who became a tabloid magnet after killing and cannibalizing a woman in Paris in 1981. Caniba moves past sensationalism to immerse viewers in an unnervingly intimate encounter with Sagawa, who has since lived off his notoriety (as a sexploitation star and manga author), and his brother and primary caretaker. The filmmakers use this modern-day instance of cannibalism, long a subject of anthropological study, to raise questions about repulsion, desire, madness, and more. Audacious and unflinching, Caniba compels us to reckon with the most extreme limits of human behavior.
Sunday, October 8, 7:15pm
Monday, October 9, 8:45pm

Dragonfly Eyes
Xu Bing, China, 2017, 81m
U.S. Premiere
Chinese visual artist Xu Bing’s ambitious debut feature follows an ill-fated romance through a frightening and faceless urban environment, using only closed-circuit surveillance footage. Constructing a fictitious narrative from real-world encounters and frequently spectacular images, Xu turns the story of a young man attempting to relocate his object of desire into a cogent analysis of postmodern identity and digitally mediated communication.
Sunday, October 8, 9:30pm
Monday, October 9, 5:15pm

Electro-Pythagoras (a Portrait of Martin Bartlett)
Luke Fowler, U.K./Canada, 2017, 45m
U.S. Premiere
The life and work of highly influential, yet little known, Canadian composer and microcomputer pioneer Martin Bartlett is resurrected in this lovingly constructed biographical essay. Archival footage finds Bartlett at home, at work, and onstage, while voiceover readings of the proudly out artist’s reflections on his place in the era’s gay community convey a sense of intimate, holistic personal history.
Preceded by:
Vivian’s Garden
Rosalind Nashashibi, U.K., 2017, 30m
North American Premiere
Deep in the Guatemalan Highlands, Swiss-Austrian artists Vivian Suter and Elisabeth Wild live in a garden villa. Nashashibi captures the complexity of their unorthodox microcosm, which is dominated by their curiously intimate mother-daughter dynamic as well as the keen sense of dependency seen in their relationship with the Mayan domestic workers.
Sunday, October 8, 5:00pm

Le fort des fous
Narimane Mari, France/Algeria/Greece/Germany/Qatar, 2017, 140m
In this shape-shifting hybrid feature, Algerian citizens’ memories of their country’s occupation are brought to life via resurrected military reports and re-enactments of France’s decades-long colonial project. As the film moves into a more dramatic mode, two characters from the first act join up with a small community that has sought refuge along the coast. But utopia proves fleeting, and the film, seeming to sense their fate, reinvents itself yet again as documentary.
Monday, October 9, 5:30pm

Good Luck
Ben Russell, France/Germany, 2017, 143m
U.S. Premiere
In his first solo feature in eight years, Ben Russell takes us deep into the unforgiving copper mines of Serbia. When we emerge, we’re thousands of miles away, amongst an illegal band of gold miners in the Suriname jungle. The physical demands of labor, as well as the transformative power of music, connect these communities, each equally fortified by the realities of capital and a spirit of masculine camaraderie.
Saturday, October 7, 6:15pm
Sunday, October 8, 7:30pm

Occidental
Neïl Beloufa, France, 2017, 74m
U.S. Premiere
In a boho Parisian hotel, two sexually and politically ambiguous Italians romp through a succession of blatantly artificial, anachronistically decorated set pieces, stoking the prejudices of staff members and fellow guests. Outside, riots rage and protesters march, threatening to spill into the increasingly feverish atmosphere gathering indoors. French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa’s second feature—reminiscent of films by Bertrand Bonello and the stage-derived works of Alain Resnais—confirms the arrival of a uniquely provocative, socially attuned filmmaker.
Friday, October 6, 8:45pm

Tonsler Park
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2017, 80m
North American Premiere
Election Day, 2016. Kevin Jerome Everson and his 16mm camera quietly observe a community of mostly African-American voters and volunteers at a local polling precinct in Charlottesville, Virginia. Emerson’s film captures everyday faces and the general optimistic atmosphere with a casual formal elegance.
Saturday, October 7, 4:00pm

The Worldly Cave
Zhou Tao, China, 2017, 48m
North American Premiere
Anonymous figures are diminished against unforgiving environs, both natural and manmade, in Zhou’s expansive cross-continental diary, featuring monumental views of the Incheon Sea, the Balearic island of Menorca, and the Sonoran Desert that serve to visualize the infinitesimal stature of the human race.
Showing on loop at EBM Amphitheater:
Friday, October 6 – Monday, October 9, 12:00pm–6pm & 9:00pm–11:00pm

Barbara Hammer Program
Monday, October 9, 3:00pm
TRT: 82m
A pioneer of experimental cinema, Barbara Hammer has spent much of her five-decade career deconstructing gender and sexuality through material examinations of the celluloid image and representations of the female body onscreen. This program of 16mm films combines her surreal, sexualized 1970s fantasias with the forays into poetic nonfiction and the trailblazing experiments with optically printed visuals she helped popularize throughout the 1980s. Program includes Psychosynthesis, Women I Love, and Audience, preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation; and Still Point and No No Nooky T.V., preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Mike Henderson Program
Sunday, October 8, 2:30pm
TRT: 75m
A singular cinematic figure, San Francisco's Mike Henderson became one of the first independent African-American artists to make inroads into experimental filmmaking in the 1960s. Henderson’s work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, from which this program of 16mm films is culled, thrums with a sociopolitical, humorous sensibility that lends his small-scale, often musically kissed portraits (which he later dubbed “blues cinema”) a personal, artisanal quality. Program includes MONEY, Dufus (aka Art), The Shape of Things, The Last Supper, When & Where, Down Hear, Mother’s Day, and Pitchfork and the Devil. All films preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Program 1: SPECULATIVE SPACES
Friday, October 6, 4:00pm
Saturday, October 7, 5:15pm
TRT: 76m

Division Movement to Vungtau
Benjamin Crotty and Bertrand Dezoteux, France, 2016, 4m
U.S. Premiere
In Crotty and Dezoteux’s cheeky and damning political patchwork, a quartet of dancing, computer-animated fruits infiltrate amateur footage shot by soldiers during the Vietnam War.

Wherever You Go, There We Are
Jesse McLean, USA, 2017, 12m
North American Premiere
Assisted by a buoyant electro-acoustic soundtrack, McLean maps an evocative cross-country travelogue through elegantly illustrated postcards and the strangely intoxicating language of junk emails.

IFO
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2017, 10m
North American Premiere
In Everson’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, multiple UFO sightings yield both passionate firsthand accounts and detailed reflections; meanwhile, suburban youths raise their arms toward the heavens in becalmed surrender.

Silica
Pia Borg, Australia/U.K., 2017, 23m
North American Premiere
An unseen location scout explores an opal mining town in South Australia in Pia Borg’s sci-fi-laced essay film, which finds in this semi-deserted region both the traces of indigenous culture and remnants of cinema history.

Flores
Jorge Jácome, Portugal, 2017, 26m
U.S. Premiere
Island life, love, and labor are captured in vivid detail in this speculative fiction, in which two soldiers speak in voiceover about the over-proliferation of hydrangea flowers on their isolated Portuguese island in the Azores.

Program 2: PRESENT TENSE
Friday, October 6, 6:30pm
Saturday, October 7, 7:30pm
TRT: 76m

Pattern Language
Peter Burr, USA, 2017, 10m
Architect Christopher Alexander's design theories are applied towards a generative video game labyrinth, resulting in this rhythmic animation made of rippling, skipping, and strobing arrays of light infused with programmatic digital pixelation.

.TV
G. Anthony Svatek, USA/Tuvalu/New Zealand/France, 2017, 22m
World Premiere
The much sought-after, two-letter web domain suffix of the title is examined as both a form of capital and an emblem of a country on the brink of a climate-induced catastrophe in this simultaneously humorous and illuminating essay film centered on the environmentally contentious Pacific Islands of Tuvalu.

disruption
Belit Sağ, Netherlands, 2016, 5m
World Premiere
In the span of a short walk, images and information flow ceaselessly into view as our increasingly digitized lives absorb disparate movie and media moments, from the warmly humorous to the coldly clinical.

Dislocation Blues
Sky Hopinka, USA, 2017, 17m
The Standing Rock protests are the starting point for Ho-Chunk artist Sky Hopinka’s inquiry into identity, community, and mass media. Against twilit images of the Dakota landscape, the film frames present-day traumas through distinct first-person perspectives and reflects on the threatened environment and the complex social realities of the resistance camps.

Rubber Coated Steel
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2016, 21m
North American Premiere
Abu Hamdan, an artist and Forensic Architecture researcher, made an audio analysis to ascertain whether Israeli soldiers used rubber or live bullets in the murder of two Palestinian teens. Through the frame of a speculative court proceeding, the video acts as a tribunal for the case, which includes audio testimony and onscreen forensic animations.

Program 3: THE SHAPES OF THINGS
Saturday, October 7, 12:00pm
Sunday, October 8, 3:15pm
TRT: 78m

The Crack-Up
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2017, 16mm, 18m
World Premiere
Schwartz’s poetic 16mm work meditates on the sights and sounds of slowly crumbling glaciers, charting an interior dance between desperation and hope. The carefully deployed superimpositions, strident soundtrack, and contrasting tones of intensity and tranquility suggest the unpredictable rhythms of metaphysical transformation.

Saint Bathans Repetitions
Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2016, 16mm, 20m
U.S. Premiere
A series of cinematic portraits shot in domestic spaces in a former gold mining town in New Zealand expand into a tapestry of glistening natural light and vaporous movement, created via a painstaking process of in-camera layering effects.

Shape of a Surface
Nazli Dinçel, Turkey, 2017, 16mm, 9m
Shooting on 16mm amidst the Aphrodisias ruins in western Turkey, Dinçel refracts multiple epochs of religious history with mirrors and occluded space, finding figural as well as metaphorical power in the human body’s place within the landscape.

Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant
Jodie Mack, USA, 2017, 16mm, 5m
U.S. Premiere
Jodie Mack’s bracing 16mm montage film juxtaposes gleaming close-ups of electrical circuit boards with hyper-saturated images of a flower-littered landscape. In its rapid-fire presentation, the film offers a swift metaphorical representation of technology’s inexorable march.

On Generation and Corruption
Takashi Makino, Japan, 2017, 26m
In this Aristotle-inspired audiovisual panorama, a fathomless void slowly accumulates rippling digital textures, and waves of watercolor pastels wash atop barely perceptible images of natural phenomena. When the darkness returns, only the droning soundscape is left to point the way forward.

Program 4: FIRST PERSON
Saturday, October 7, 2:00pm
Sunday, October 8, 5:00pm
TRT: 76m

Art and Theft
Sara Magenheimer, USA, 2017, 7m
World Premiere
Magenheimer’s video explores the bounds of narrative and the illusion of received wisdom in the seven minutes and twenty-two seconds it takes to rob a house. Here, images of medieval art, popular cinema, and “live” news reportage speak candidly to the constructedness of all storytelling traditions.

Filter
Jaakko Pallasvuo, Finland/USA/Germany, 2017, 25m
World Premiere
Mixing crude animation, 3D modeling, and faux filmic textures in a self-reflexive essay on digitally abetted nostalgia, this playful work of fair use pastiche refracts all manner of postmodern touchstones (David Foster Wallace, Talking Heads, Reality Bites) into an aesthetic interrogation of its own methodology, resulting in, to paraphrase one onscreen subject, a critique of a critique of a critique.

Semen Is the Piss of Dreams
Steve Reinke, USA/Canada, 2016, 7m
In Reinke’s latest provocation, the words of author Hervé Guibert are made flesh through a montage of “human events” that work to collapse the boundaries between the private and public, the perverse and the prosaic.

Year
Wojciech Bąkowski, Poland, 2017, 6m
World Premiere
Bąkowski’s strangely personal, nostalgia-laced video combines the Polish animator’s love of everyday domestic objects and geometric aesthetics with a flickering synth score out of an eighties urban crime film.

BRIDGIT
Charlotte Prodger, U.K., 2016, 32m
Prodger examines issues of gender, sexuality, and creativity in this first-person essay film, shot in and around the Scottish Highlands and named for the Neolithic goddess of springtime.

Program 5: URBAN RHAPSODIES
Sunday, October 8, 12:00pm
Monday, October 9, 3:30pm
TRT: 75m

Tower XYZ
Ayo Akingbade, U.K., 2016, 3m
U.S. Premiere
A visual guide to the under-acknowledged multiethnicity of the London borough Hackney, Tower XYZ skips to the beat of the city’s vibrant youth culture and communal spirit, offering up a rebel cry for a new generation: “Let’s get rid of the ghetto!”

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder
Fern Silva, USA, 2017, 16mm, 9m
North American Premiere
Through softly textured 16mm photography and regional iconography, Silva offers a modernist reflection on two of upstate New York’s most storied 19th century touchstones—the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle—nodding to a few musical heroes along the way.

Fluid Frontiers
Ephraim Asili, USA, 2017, 23m
U.S. Premiere
Visually tracing the 19th-century Windsor-Detroit slave pass, with on-site readings of notable texts by many of Motor City’s most storied African-American poets, Asili deftly captures the city not simply as a repository of memory but as a landscape of living history.

Onward Lossless Follows
Michael Robinson, USA, 2017, 17m
U.S. Premiere
Robinson’s latest work of cinematic excavation uncovers the darkness inherent even in life’s most banal images and encounters. It’s an unsettling study in duality—between the earthbound and the cosmic, the found and forgotten, the rural and domestic, the verbal and written.

Aliens
Luis López Carrasco, Spain, 2017, 23m
U.S. Premiere
In this short nonfiction portrait, Tesa Arranz, one-time leader of pioneering Spanish new wave band Zombies, reminisces about her sexual and political conquests, while dozens of her recent paintings are examined by Carrasco’s inquisitive camera.

Program 6: THE FORGOTTEN
Monday, October 9, 1:00pm
Monday, October 9, 8:00pm
TRT: 77m

Barbs, Wastelands
Marta Mateus, Portugal, 2017, 25m
North American Premiere
In this accomplished debut, peasants of the Alentejo region of Portugal stand in stylized tableaux and speak to local youths of the Carnation Revolution, the postwar agrarian reform movement, and the ghosts of a postcolonial struggle that haunt the landscape to this day.

Fantasy Sentences
Dane Komljen, Germany/Denmark, 2017, 17m
U.S. Premiere
In a serene meditation on image-making and the slippery nature of storytelling, Komljen ominously mingles anonymous home video footage with images of contemporary Ukraine’s desolate landscapes.

Missing In-Between the Physical Proper
Olivia Ciummo, USA, 2017, 6m
World Premiere
A prismatic collection of re-photographed images––of deserts and oceans, plants and animals––are disrupted and transformed by an array of color filters, soft synth accompaniment, and familiarly boorish messages lifted from the online world.

The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy
Duncan Campbell, U.K./Ireland, 2016, 31m
U.S. Premiere
Campbell’s fictional narrative, concerning a pair of American anthropologists en route to the Irish village of Dún Chaoin, expands into a reflective investigation of filmmaking ethics and a portrait of a small community forced to confront the changing tides of traditions.
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[Chris Knipp]

FSLC announces Revivals lineup for the 2017 NYFF.

Find it HERE. (https://www.filmlinc.org/press/fslc-announced-today-special-events-and-revivals-lineup-for-nyff53/)

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[Chris Knipp]

FSLC announces Documentary lineup for the 2017 NYFF.

Find it HERE (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/daily/nyff55-spotlight-on-documentary-lineup-announced/).



New York, NY (August 23, 2017) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces the complete lineup for the Spotlight on Documentary section of the 55th New York Film Festival (September 28–October 15). This year’s series of dispatches from the front lines of nonfiction cinema features intimate portraits of artists, depictions of social upheaval, and much more.
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Arthur Miller: Writer
Dir. Rebecca Miller, USA, 2017, 98m
Rebecca Miller’s film is a portrait of her father, his times and insights, built around impromptu interviews shot over many years in the family home. This celebration of the great American playwright is quite different from what the public has ever seen. It is a close consideration of a singular life shadowed by the tragedies of the Red Scare and the death of Marilyn Monroe; a bracing look at success and failure in the public eye; an honest accounting of human frailty; a tribute to one artist by another. Arthur Miller: Writer invites you to see how one of America's sharpest social commentators formed his ideologies, how his life reflected his work, and, even in some small part, shaped the culture of our country in the twentieth century. An HBO Documentary Films release.

BOOM FOR REAL The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Dir. Sara Driver, USA, 2017, 79m
U.S. Premiere
Sara Driver’s documentary is both a celebration of and elegy for the downtown New York art/music/film/performance world of the late 1970s and early ’80s, through which Jean-Michel Basquiat shot like a rocket. Weaving Basquiat’s life and artistic progress in and out of her rich, living tapestry of this endlessly cross-fertilizing scene, Driver has created an urgent recollection of freedom and the aesthetic of poverty. Graffiti meets gestural painting, hip hop infects rock and roll and visa versa, heroin comes and never quite goes, night swallows day, and everybody looms as large as they feel like looming on the crumbling streets of the Lower East Side.

Cielo
Dir. Alison McAlpine, Canada/Chile, 2017, 74m
World Premiere
The first feature from Alison McAlpine, director of the beautiful 2008 “nonfiction ghost story” short Second Sight, is a dialogue with the heavens—in this case, the heavens above the Andes and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where the sky “is more urgent than the land.” McAlpine keeps the vast galaxies above and beyond in a delicate balance with the earthbound world of people, gently alighting on the desert- and mountain-dwelling astronomers, fishermen, miners, and cowboys who live their lives with reverence and awe for the skies. Cielo itself is an act of reverence and awe, and its sense of wonder ranges from the intimate and human to the vast and inhuman.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Dir. Travis Wilkerson, USA, 2017, 90m
How is it that some people escape the racism and misogyny in which they are raised, and some cling to it as their reason to exist? For 20 years, Travis Wilkerson has been making films that interrogate the malevolent effects of capitalism on the American Dream. Here he turns his sights on his own family and the small town of Dothan, Alabama, where his white supremacist great-great grandfather S.E. Branch once shot and killed Bill Spann, an African-American man. Branch was arrested but never charged with the crime. The life of his victim has been all but obliterated from memory and public record. “This isn’t a white savior story. This is a white nightmare story,” says the filmmaker, who refuses to let himself or anyone else off the hook.

El mar la mar
Dir. Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki, USA, 2017, 94m
The first collaboration between film and sound artist Bonnetta and filmmaker/anthropologist Sniadecki (The Iron Ministry, NYFF52) is a lyrical and highly topical film in which the Sonoran Desert, among the deadliest routes taken by those crossing from Mexico to the United States, is depicted a place of dramatic beauty and merciless danger. Haunting 16mm images of the unforgiving landscape and the human traces within it are supplemented with an intricate soundtrack of interwoven sounds and oral testimonies. Urgent yet never didactic, El mar la mar allows this symbolically fraught terrain to take shape in vivid sensory detail, and in so doing, suggests new possibilities for the political documentary. A Cinema Guild release.

Filmworker
Dir. Tony Zierra, USA, 2017, 94m
Leon Vitali was a name in English television and movies when Stanley Kubrick cast him as Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, but after his acclaimed performance the young actor surrendered his career in the spotlight to become Kubrick’s loyal right-hand man. For the next two decades, Vitali was Kubrick’s factotum, never not on call, for whom no task was too small. Along the way, Vitali’s personal life suffered, he drifted from his children, and his health deteriorated as he gave everything to his work. Filmworker is of obvious interest to anyone who cares about Kubrick, but it is also a fascinating portrait of awe-inspired devotion burning all the way down to the wick.

Hall of Mirrors
Dir. Ena Talakic and Ines Talakic, USA, 2017, 87m
World Premiere
In this lively documentary portrait, the great nonpartisan investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, still going strong at 81, takes us through his most notable articles and books, including close looks at the findings of the Warren Commission, the structure of the diamond industry, the strange career of Armand Hammer, and the inner workings of big-time journalism itself. These are interwoven with an in-progress investigation into the circumstances around Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of classified documents, resulting in Epstein’s recently published, controversial book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. One of the last of his generation of journalists, the energetic, articulate, and boyish Epstein is a truly fascinating character.

Jane
Dir. Brett Morgen, USA, 2017, 90m
U.S. Premiere
In 1960, Dr. Louis Leakey arranged for a young English woman with a deep love of animals to go to Gombe Stream National Park near Lake Tangyanika. The Dutch photographer and filmmaker Hugo van Lawick was sent to document Jane Goodall’s first establishment of contact with the chimpanzee population, resulting in the enormously popular Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, the second film ever produced by National Geographic. One hundred hours of Lawick’s original footage was rediscovered in 2014. From that material, Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) has created a vibrant film experience, giving new life to the experiences of this remarkable woman and the wild in which she found a home. A National Geographic Documentary Films release.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Dir. Griffin Dunne, USA, 2017, 92m
World Premiere
Griffin Dunne’s years-in-the-making documentary portrait of his aunt Joan Didion moves with the spirit of her uncannily lucid writing: the film simultaneously expands and zeroes in, covering a vast stretch of turbulent cultural history with elegance and candor, and grounded in the illuminating presence and words of Didion herself. This is most certainly a film about loss—the loss of a solid American center, the personal losses of a husband and a child—but Didion describes everything she sees and experiences so attentively, so fully, and so bravely that she transforms the very worst of life into occasions for understanding. A Netflix release.

No Stone Unturned
Dir. Alex Gibney, Northern Ireland/USA, 2017, 111m
World Premiere
Investigative documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney—best known for 2008’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and at least a dozen others—turns his sights on the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, a cold case that remains an open wound in the Irish peace process. The families of the victims—who were murdered while watching the World Cup in their local pub—were promised justice, but 20 years later they still didn’t know who killed their loved ones. Gibney uncovers a web of secrecy, lies, and corruption that so often results when the powerful insist they are acting for the greater good.

Piazza Vittorio
Dir. Abel Ferrara, Italy/USA 2017, 69m
North American Premiere
Abel Ferrara’s new documentary is a vivid mosaic/portrait of Rome’s biggest public square, Piazza Vittorio, built in the 19th century around the ruins of the 3rd century Trofei di Mario. The Piazza is now truly a crossroad of the modern world: it offers a perfect microcosm of the changes in the west brought by immigration and forced displacement. Ferrara, now a resident of Rome himself, talks with African musicians and restaurant workers, Chinese barkeeps and relocated eastern Europeans, homeless men and women, artists, members of the right wing movement CasaPound Italia, filmmaker Matteo Garrone, actor Willem Dafoe, and others, all with varying opinions about the vast changes they’re seeing in their neighborhood and world.

The Rape of Recy Taylor
Dir. Nancy Buirski, USA, 2017, 90m
North American Premiere
On the night of September 3, 1944, a young African-American mother from Abbeville, Alabama, named Recy Taylor was walking home from church with two friends when she was abducted by seven white men, driven away and dragged into the woods, raped by six of the men, and left to make her way home. Against formidable odds and endless threats to her life andthe lives of her family members, Taylor bravely spoke up and pressed charges. Nancy Buirski’s passionate documentary shines a light on a case that became a turning point in the early Civil Rights Movement, and on the many formidable women—including Rosa Parks—who brought the movement to life.

Sea Sorrow
Dir. Vanessa Redgrave, UK, 2017, 72m
Vanessa Redgrave’s debut as a documentary filmmaker is a plea for a compassionate western response to the refugee crisis and a condemnation of the vitriolic inhumanity of current right wing and conservative politicians. Redgrave juxtaposes our horrifying present of inadequate refugee quotas and humanitarian disasters (like last year’s clearing of the Calais migrant camp) with the refugee crises of WWII and its aftermath, recalled with archival footage, contemporary news reports and personal testimony—including an interview with the eloquent Labor politician Lord Dubs, who was one of the children rescued by the Kindertransport. Sea Sorrow reaches further back in time to Shakespeare, not only for its title but also to further remind us that we are once more repeating the history that we have yet to learn.

A Skin So Soft
Denis Côté, Canada/Switzerland/France, 2017, 94m
U.S. Premiere
Studiously observing the world of male bodybuilding, Denis Côté’s A Skin So Soft (Ta peau si lisse) crafts a multifaceted portrait of six latter-day Adonises through the lens of their everyday lives: extreme diets, training regimens, family relationships, and friendships within the community. Capturing the physical brawn and emotional complexity of its subjects with wit and tenderness, this companion piece to Cote’s singular animal study Bestiaire (2012) is a self-reflexive rumination on the long tradition of filming the human body that also advances a fascinating perspective on contemporary masculinity.

Speak Up
Dir. Stéphane de Freitas, co-directed by Ladj Ly, France, 2017, 99m
North American Premiere
Each year at the University of Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris, the Eloquentia competition takes place to determine the best orator in the class. Speak Up (À voix haute - La Force de la Parole) follows the students, who come from a variety of family backgrounds and academic disciplines, as they prepare for the competition while coached by public-speaking professionals like lawyers and slam poets. Through the subtle and intriguing mechanics of rhetoric, these young people both reveal and discover themselves, and it is impossible not to be moved by the personal stories that surface in their verbal jousts, from the death of a Syrian nightingale to a father’s Chuck Norris–inspired approach to his battle with cancer. Without sentimentality, Speak Up proves how the art of speech is key to universal understanding, social ascension, and personal revelation.

The Venerable W.
Dir. Barbet Schroeder, France/Switzerland, 2017, 100m
The Islamophobic Burmese monk known as The Venerable Wirathu has led hundreds of thousands of his Buddhist followers in a hate-fueled, violent campaign of ethnic cleansing, in which the country’s tiny minority of Muslims were driven from their homes and businesses and penned in refugee camps on the Myanmar border. Barbet Schroder’s portrait of this man again proves, along with his General Idi Amin Dada (1974) and Terror’s Advocate (2007), that the director is a brilliant interviewer, allowing power-hungry fascists to damn themselves with their own testimony. His confrontation with Wirathu—a figure whose existence contradicts the popular belief that Buddhism is the most peaceful and tolerant major religion—is revelatory and horrifying. A release from Les Films du Losange.
Preceded by:
What Are You Up to, Barbet Schroeder? (2017, 13m), in which the director traces the path that led him to Myanmar, a center of Theravada Buddhism, where racial hatred was mutating into genocide.

Voyeur
Myles Kane and Josh Koury, USA, 2017, 96m
World Premiere
Gerald Foos bought a motel in Colorado in the 1960s, furnished the room with louvered vents that allowed him to spy on his guests, and kept a journal of their sexual encounters…among other things. As writer Gay Talese, who had known Foos for more than three decades, came close to the publication of his book The Voyeur’s Motel (preceded by an excerpt in The New Yorker), factual discrepancies in Foos’s account emerged, and documentarians Kane and Koury were on hand to record some wild encounters between the veteran New York journalist and his enigmatic subject. A Netflix release.

Three Music Films by Mathieu Amalric
C’est presque au bout du monde (France, 2015, 16m)
Zorn (2010-2017) (France, 2017, 54m)
Music Is Music (France, 2017, 21m)
These three movies from Mathieu Amalric are musicals, from the inside out: they move with the mental and physical energies of John Zorn, the wildly prolific and protean composer/performer/bandleader/record label founder/club owner and all-around grand spirit of New York downtown music; and via the great Canadian-born soprano/conductor/champion of modern classical music Barbara Hannigan. Amalric’s Zorn film began as a European TV commission that was quickly abandoned in favor of something more intimate: an ongoing dialogue between two friends that will always be a work-in-progress. The two shorter pieces that bracket the Zorn feature Hannigan nurturing music into being with breath, sound, and spirit. Taken together, the three films make for one thrilling, intimate musical-gestural-cinematic ride.
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[oscar jubis]

I'm so excited: Martel's ZAMA, her first in 9 years, premieres in Venice Wednesday and then New York. I may have to wait till Miami in early March to watch it. Other than that, it's Ismael's Ghosts I'm eager to watch most urgently. It should open right after the NYFF ends I hear.

[Chris Knipp]

I just started a thread giving the Venice74 lineup with your relevant comment. Les Fantômes d'Ismaël of course opened Cannes this year.

[Chris Knipp]

FSLC has announced special events and shorts for the 2017 NYFF. See their website HERE (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/daily/special-events-and-shorts-announced-for-nyff55/). Links to the other special lieups.

Special events and shorts, just announced, include: world premiere documentaries on Steven Spielberg, Bob Dylan, and the Metropolitan Opera; a series of four new films from Claude Lanzmann (Shoah); a conversation with Kate Winslet; master class with cinematographers Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman; a new restoration of G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box premiering a new score; the return of Film Comment Presents; and other offerings. Bruce Weber’s work-in-progress Robert Mitchum documentary has been added to the Retrospective section. The Lanzmann sequence is called "Four Sisters" and consists of The Hippocratic Oath, 89 mins., Baluty, 64 mins., The Merry Flea, 52 mins., and Noah's Ark, 68 mins. (all France 2017). For the full lineup of special events and shorts go HERE (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/daily/special-events-and-shorts-announced-for-nyff55/).

For the other special lineups coming with the 2017 NYFF, already announced, follow these links:

DOCUMENTARY (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/sections/spotlight-on-documentary/)
PROJECTIONS
SERIES (experimental video) (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/sections/projections/)
REVIVALS (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/sections/revivals/)
CONVERGENCE series (virtual reality, augmented reality, live labs and demos,
etc. (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/sections/convergence/)

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[Chris Knipp]

The Main Slate - US releases.

Before We Vanish - No US release - Metacritic 57%
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

BPM (Beats Per Minute)/120 battements par minute​ - 20 Oct. limited release
Dir. Robin Campillo

​--​Bright Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur - None
Dir. Claire Denis

​--​Call Me by Your Name​ - 24 November US release​
Dir. Luca Guadagnino

​--​The Day After - None
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

Faces Places/Visages villages - 6 October US release
Dir. Agnès Varda & JR

Félicité​ - 27 October US limited release
Dir. Alain Gomis

The Florida Project​ - 5 Oct. US release​ (Landmark?)
Dir. Sean Baker

​--​Ismael’s Ghosts/Les fantômes d’Ismaël​ - No release (yet?)​
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Lady Bird​- 10 November US release​
Dir. Greta Gerwig

​--​Lover for a Day/L’Amant d’un jour - None
Dir. Philippe Garrel

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)​ 13 Oct. limited release
Dir. Noah Baumbach

Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde​ - Mar. 2018 France release​ - No US release
Dir. Serge Bozon

Mudbound​ - 17 Nov. release​
Dir. Dee Rees

​--​On the Beach at Night Alone - None
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

​?--​The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen​ - 1 Dec. NYC release ??​
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki

​--​The Rider​ - No US release Metacritic 86%​
Dir. Chloé Zhao

​--​Spoor/Pokot​ No US release​
Dir. Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik

​(--)​The Square - 27 October US release
Dir. Ruben Östlund
​​
Thelma​ - 10 Nov. US limited release​
Dir. Joachim Trier

​--​Western​ - 2018 US release (?)​
Dir. Valeska Grisebach

​--​Zama​ - No release listed​
Dir. Lucrecia Martel

[Chris Knipp]

The Main Slate - US releases.

Obviously the non-release ones are the ones to seek at the festival.

Before We Vanish Metacritic 57%
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

BPM (Beats Per Minute)/120 battements par minute​ - 20 Oct. release limited--​
Dir. Robin Campillo

​--​Bright Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur
Dir. Claire Denis

​--​Call Me by Your Name​ -24 Nov. release​
Dir. Luca Guadagnino

​--​The Day After
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

Faces Places/Visages villages
Dir. Agnès Varda & JR

Félicité​ - 27 Oct release limited​
Dir. Alain Gomis

The Florida Project​ 5 Oct. US release​
Dir. Sean Baker

​--​Ismael’s Ghosts/Les fantômes d’Ismaël​ (director's cut) - No release (yet?)​
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Lady Bird​ 10 Nov. US release​
Dir. Greta Gerwig

​--​Lover for a Day/L’Amant d’un jour - None
Dir. Philippe Garrel

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)​ 13 Oct. release limited​
Dir. Noah Baumbach

Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde​ Mar. 2018 France release​
Dir. Serge Bozon

Mudbound​ 17 Nov. release​
Dir. Dee Rees

​--​On the Beach at Night Alone - None
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

​?--​The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen​ - 1 Dec. NYC release ??​
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki

​--​The Rider​ No US release Metacritic 86%​
Dir. Chloé Zhao

​--​Spoor/Pokot​ No US release​
Dir. Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik

​(--)​The Square
Dir. Ruben Östlund
​​
Thelma​ 10 Nov. US limited release​
Dir. Joachim Trier

​--​Western​ 2018 US release (?)​
Dir. Valeska Grisebach

​--​Zama​ no release listed​
Dir. Lucrecia Martel

[Chris Knipp]

The Main Slate - US releases. A checklist.

All else being equal - which of course it never quite is, though - the don't-miss films are the not-to-be-released ones. Nine or ten of the 25 may fall into the category.



Opening Night, Centerpiece, and Closing Night films:

Last Flag Flying - 3 November US release

Dir. Richard Linklater

Wonderstruck - 20 Oct. US release

Dir. Todd Haynes

Wonder World - December US rleease

Dir. Woody Allen

] Before We Vanish - No US release Metacritic 57%
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

BPM (Beats Per Minute)/120 battements par minute​ - 20 October limited release
Dir. Robin Campillo

​--​Bright Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur​ - None; France 11 Oct.​
Dir. Claire Denis

​--​Call Me by Your Name​ - 24 November US release​
Dir. Luca Guadagnino

​--​The Day After - None
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

Faces Places/Visages villages​ - 6 October US limited release
​​Dir. Agnès Varda & JR​ ​

Félicité​ - 27 October US limited release
Dir. Alain Gomis

The Florida Project​ - 5 October US release (Landmark?)​
Dir. Sean Baker

​--​Ismael’s Ghosts/Les fantômes d’Ismaël​ (Director's cut) - No US release (yet?)
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Lady Bird​ - 10 November US release
Dir. Greta Gerwig

​--​Lover for a Day/L’Amant d’un jour - None
Dir. Philippe Garrel

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)​ - 13 October US limited release
Dir. Noah Baumbach

Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde​ - March 2018 release in France
Dir. Serge Bozon

Mudbound​- 17 November US releaase
Dir. Dee Rees

​--​On the Beach at Night Alone - None
Dir. Hong Sang-soo

​?--​The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen​ - 1 December NYC release (?)​
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki

​--​The Rider​ - No US release - but Sony PIctures Classics bought - Metacritic 86% -​
Dir. Chloé Zhao

​--​Spoor/Pokot​ No - No Us release
Dir. Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik

​(--)​The Square​ - 27 October US release​
Dir. Ruben Östlund
​​
Thelma​ - 10 November US limited release
Dir. Joachim Trier

​--​Western​ - 2018 US release (?)​
Dir. Valeska Grisebach

​--​Zama​ - No release listed​
Dir. Lucrecia Martel

I just assumed Hong Sang-soo and Philippe Garrel have no US releases, since they never do. According to AlloCiné Ismaël's Ghosts has done really well with French critics (average score 4.0), but Metacritic's 50's score shows its reception was very mixed with Anglo reviewers, 50% raves, 50% pans.

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

[Chris Knipp]

First review.

L'ENFANT SECRET (Philippe Garrel 1979) REVIVALS section (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36213#post36213)

A digitally remastered version of this extremely rare but celebrated Garrel film (it won the Prix Jean Vigo in 1982) is part of the Revivals section of the NYFF and also will show in early October at the Metrograph Theater, 7 Ludlow St., NYC. I was able to watch a press screening of it at the Metrograph today (25 Sept. 2017). It's vintage Garrel, austere, doomed, and poetic, sketching a filmmaker who suffers drugs, depression, and damaging shock treatments, and a girlfriend who has had a child named Swann by an actor who doesn't show up to acknowledge him.

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[Chris Knipp]

THE SQUARE (Ruben Östlund 201) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36218#post36218)

Östlund's entertaining (and Cannes Palme d'Or-winning) provocation about the social contract, class, robbery, art world pretension - what isn't it about? - has a series of striking set pieces and deft use of sound design and music (it was great to watch and listen to at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center). Its limited release by Magnolia Pictures comes next month. But it's the opposite of the director's previous film Force Majeure, a powerful and focused study of moral failure and its consequences. This is a scattershot effort where a maybe girlfriend has a pet chimp and a big shot has a Tesla. Only why? Maybe more focus next time from this increasingly ambitious filmmaker from Sweden.

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[Chris Knipp]

SPOOR/POKOT (Agnieszka Holland, Kasla Adamik 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36222#post36222)

A crime story in a woodsy area on the Polish-Czech border with a sixtyish female animal activist protagonist, this is impressive filmmaking that gets lost in disorganized kookiness and haranguing advocacy. Perhaps it makes more sense in Olga Tokarczuk’s provocative source novel. Still it was delicious to watch and hear in the fine projection of Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall - till it became repetitions and overlong.

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[Chris Knipp]

WESTERN (Valeska Grisebach 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36230#post36230)

Grisebach's third feature is a docudrama with non-actors in rural Bulgaria and focuses on Meinhard, a grizzled Sam Elliott lookalike working on a German construction crew enhancing the local water system one recent summer. Most attention is on Meinhard's efforts to make nice with the locals despite neither sides knowing much of the other's language. His successes make him the best link between the two groups, but in the end he remains a lonely cowboy - though the title's blunt allusion to the Hollywood genre is best ignored. Fascinating observations remain vaguely unresolved.

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[Chris Knipp]

ZAMA (Lucrecia Martel 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36235#post36235)

Admired Argentinian filmmaker Martel's fourth feature, her first in nine years, is a stunning and phantasmagoric costume film set in the late eighteenth-century adapted from Antonio Di Benedetto's 1956 cult novel (now recently finally translated into English), about a petty official in the Spanish colonies longing to be transferred to Buenos Aires. It might require repeated viewings (and study of the novel) to understand fully and might never be, but the filmmaking is assured and the images are striking.

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[Chris Knipp]

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Luca Guadagnino 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36238#post36238)

It's a brief but unforgettably intense summer romance between two American guys, a 17-year-old boy and the 23-year-old grad student summer intern with his father at their summer house in northern Italy. It's James Ivory's screen adaptation of André Aciman's much-loved novel that cuts the intellectual dithering and keeps the warm sensuality. It stars Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet as the two guys. This is likely to be the most mainstream-accessible and popular gay love story since Brokeback Mountain. There's Oscar talk, and Chalamet is a revelation, also Guadagnino's most straightforward and successful film so far. Opening 24 Nov. in theaters.

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[Chris Knipp]

FACES PLACES/VISAGES, VILLAGES (JR, Agnès Varda 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36251#post36251)

Not a huge fan of Varda for some reason, but she is amazing and really smart at 88 to team up with guy 55 years younger with a lot of talent, JR (Jean René, a French-born Jewish"urban artist" of Tunisian descent), a photo-muralist. They travel around France as a duo, she directing events and holding forth, he making his accomplished and beautiful giant produced-on-the-spot photo portraits mounted on walls or buildings to humanise spaces or celebrate local people. I started out rejecting this for its artificiality and was won over by its charm and perfection and sheer smooth Frenchness. Narrated throughout in French mostly by dialogues between JR and Varda. Raves in France, and here. Just out in NYC theaters.

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[Chris Knipp]

THE FLORIDA PROJECT (Sean Baker 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36252#post36252)

Switching from transgender prostitutes in Hollywood to the denizens of a three-story mauve motel on the edges of Orlando's Disney World, Sean Baker moves up several notches as a chronicler of marginal people. The scale is larger, the action is more complicated, and sometimes magic happens. Instead of iPhones, 35 mm.

Theatrical release of the NYFF Main Slate film began yesterday, 6 Oct. 2017.

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[Chris Knipp]

LOVER FOR A DAY/L'AMANT D'UN JOUR (Philippe Garrel 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36266#post36266)

Garrel's traditional look, style, and focus with an Electra story. Daughter of a Paris philosophy prof displaces his 23-year-old girlfriend. The third in a trilogy after his Jealousy (NYFF 2013) and In the Shadow of Women (NYFF 2015). Watched at its local premiere in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.

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[Chris Knipp]

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HONG SANG-SOO

The Korean auteur spoke recently (in excellent, fluent English) at Lincoln Center during the 2017 NYFF about his way of working. I've seen and reviewed quite a few of his films, though it's a drop in the bucket, since he's made 21 and unfortunately I haven't seen the two new ones in the festival; this interview is online. He is uniquely independent and creative - a bit like Godard, he makes up the script each day of the three-week or so shoot. Watch the interview H E R E (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017/daily/watch-hong-sang-soo-on-his-brisk-methods-of-production/).

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[Chris Knipp]

THE RIDER (Chloé Zhao 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36271#post36271)

The touching docu-drama of a young bronco buster & rodeo cowboy stopped in his tracks by a serious head injury. He's Lakota Sioux living in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Images of horses, riders, windswept horizons. For me, watching Brady Jandreau work his way through special magic onto the back of a bronco that's never been ridden before is like listening to a symphony. A poignant, unique film. Chloee Zhao is a Chinese-born Chinese American who studied filmmaking at NYU. She found this place and these people and bonded with them. Won top prize in Directors Fortnight at Cannes this year.

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[Chris Knipp]

ISMAEL'S GHOSTS/LES FANTÔMES D'ISMAËL (Arnaud Desplechin 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36273#post36273)

A disastrous mix of various plotlines seemingly from different scenarios, this is a muddle (despite the French critical raves) that adding back an additional 20 minutes for a NYFF "Director's Cut" can't save from disaster. My least favorite film that I saw at the NYFF.

My favorites, clearly, were Guadagnino's delirious Call Me by Your Name, destined to be a mainstream gay romance hit on a level with Brokeback Mountain, and the deeply touching and revelatory cowboy docudrama directed out of heartfelt real life by Chloé Zhao, The Rider.

Leaving New York tomorrow - but I'll continue seeking out NYFF Main Slate films and sidebar films, as I did last year, as opportunities arise.

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[Chris Knipp]

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55th New York Film Festival

Links to Reviews:

Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36238#post36238)
L'Enfant secret (Philippe Garrel 1979) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36213#post36213) NYFF Revivals
Faces Places/Visages, Villages (Jr, Agnès Varda 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36251#post36251)
Félicité (Alain Gomis 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36279#post36279)
Florida Project, The (Sean Baker 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36252#post36252)
Ismael's Ghosts/Les fantômes d'Ismaël (Arnaud Desplechin 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36273#post36273)
Lover for a Day/L'amant d'un jour (Philippe Garrel 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York Film-Festival-2017&p=36266#post36266)
Rider, The (Chloé Zhao 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36271#post36271)
Spoor/Pokot (Agnieszka Holland, Kasla Adamik 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36222#post36222)
Square, The (Ruben Östlund 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36218#post36218)
Western (Valeska Grisebach 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36230#post36230)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36235#post36235)


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[Chris Knipp]

THE SECRET CHILD (Philippe Garrel 1979) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36213#post36213)

[Already listed earlier.]

Richard Brody writes about this film in the current New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/highlights-from-the-second-weekend-of-the-new-york-film-festival)apropos of the recent death of its star, Anne Wiazemsky, who has a place in movie history.
On Thursday, the actress and writer Anne Wiazemsky died, at the age of seventy. She was an actress whose earliest roles were in Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar,” from 1966, Jean-Luc Godard’s “La Chinoise,” from 1967, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema,” from 1968. She was also married to Godard, from 1967 to 1979 (though they separated in 1970). One of her most significant later roles came in the drama “The Secret Child” (“L’Enfant Secret”), from 1979, by Philippe Garrel, a new restoration of which will screen at the New York Film Festival on October 10th. It’s a fierce, passionate, tender, painful romance, based in part on Garrel’s own relationship with the singer Nico; it’s also an ultra-low-budget independent film that aspires to—and often reaches—the imagistic grandeur of the silent cinema, and Wiazemsky’s blend of vulnerability and strength, reminiscent at times of Lillian Gish’s work in the nineteen-teens and twenties, is part of that achievement. “The Secret Child” (“L’Enfant Secret”), from 1979, by Philippe Garrel, a new restoration of which will screen at the New York Film Festival on October 10th. It’s a fierce, passionate, tender, painful romance, based in part on Garrel’s own relationship with the singer Nico; it’s also an ultra-low-budget independent film that aspires to—and often reaches—the imagistic grandeur of the silent cinema, and Wiazemsky’s blend of vulnerability and strength, reminiscent at times of Lillian Gish’s work in the nineteen-teens and twenties, is part of that achievement.

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[Chris Knipp]

FELICITÉ (Alain Gomis 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36279#post36279)

The story of a single mother who's a cafe singer in Kinshasha, Congo (the filmmaker is Senegalese but born in Paris), with hard times when her 14-year-old is seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. The structure is kind of rough especially toward the second half,. but Gomis has a sense of cinematic poetry and his use of vernacular Congllese and locally-made classical lifts things to a higher level.

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[Chris Knipp]

BPM/120 BATTEMENTS PAR MINUTE (Robin Campillo 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36281#post36281)

The dramatization by Eastern Boys director (and frequent Laurent Cantet co-scripter) Robin Campillo of his and others' Nineties French ACT-UP experience, fighting government and Big Pharma indifference in France in the Nineties. A story of activism, debating strategies and carrying them out, and love and drama in a time of maximum HIV crisis, the organization following the New York one started in 1987. Winner of the Grand Prix, Queer Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes. Watched in an MK2 Cinema in Paris.

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[Chris Knipp]

LET THE SUNSHINE IN/UN BEAU SOLEIL INTÉRIEUR (Claire Denis 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36286#post36286)

An offbeat, lighter, talkier, ironic, but also feminist and passionate ramble about a beautiful 50-something's search in wrong places for love. A painter, divorced, with a ten-year-old daughter, Juliette Binoche is the center of this script-heavy film that's a triumph for all concerned. The closest link in Denis work is her 2002 Friday Night. But this is quite different because Binoche, and because of coscripter novelist and playwright Christine Angot, evidently responsible for the cruelest and funniest lines. I like. With a great male cast including Xavier Beauvois, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Paul Blain, Alex Descas, Gérard Depardieu.


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[Chris Knipp]

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (Noah Baumbach 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36299#post36299)

Now in theaters and on Netflix, this latest Baumbach (whose dry, witty The Squid and the Whale was in the NYFF 2005) sacrifices such neatness for a messy structure and a lack of trendiness but in return achieves a new maturity and warm-spiritedness approaching things like mortality and forgiveness. With Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, and Dustin Hoffman heading a fine cast.

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[Chris Knipp]

More NYFF 2017 Main Slate upcoming. Reviews of these titles are coming shortly.

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig 2017)
Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater 2017)
The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen (Aki Kaurismäki 2017)
Mudbound (Dee Rees 2017)

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[Chris Knipp]

LADY BIRD (Greta Gerwig 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36313#post36313)

Coming of age in Sacramento when Gerwig did herself 2002-2003, her senior year in high school, bent on getting out to New York, or at least Vermont or Connecticut "where writers live in the woods" - an example of the idiocyncratic, original writing this somewhat overstuffed but charming, entertaining and rich film is full of.

This film actually debuted at Telluride and Toronto, but Gerwig is loved by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and got a warm welcome and interview with Kent Jones. See Gerwig here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlmQfR7GWZo) and here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFsgjrKDOXg) during the NYFF.

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[Chris Knipp]

LAST FLAG FLYING (Richard Linklater 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36318#post36318)

Adapted from a novel by Linklater with the author Darryl Ponicsan, it's a sort of sequel to "The Last Detail." Three men of contrasting personalities, Vietnam vets together, go to bury the son of one, a casualty of the Iraq war, and as they make the journey with the coffin to its burial place, debate their experiences and the issues of service, war, death, ritual. Good performances by Laurence Fishburne, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston and several others, and serious issues discussed. But the trip and the talk ramble on a bit too long and the film never takes on a clearcut dramatic shape. Shown as Opening Night Film at the NYFF, and out in US theaters since November 3rd.

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[Chris Knipp]

THELMA (Joachim Trier 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36338#post36338)

A Norwegian film showing in New York now and coming to some other locations Dec. 1st.

A young woman discovers same sex love at college but then develops strange physical problems. I loved Trier's first two films, the witty and nihilistic Reprise and the sad and haunting Oslo, August 31st. both starring the effortlessly riveting Anders Danielsen Lie. His third, in English, Louder than Bombs, with Isabelle Huppert, Gabriel Byrne, Jesse Eisenberg, et al, really disappointed me totally. This doesn't do that. It's a exquisite, erotic, strange, and scary, and really holds you for a while, but for me it tackles too many genres at once and seems like a beautiful game. The young people in it seem like pawns compared to the earthy, authentic kids in the wonderful Norwegian series "SKAM" which we could watch online earlier this year.

But hunt down Reprise - and especially Oslo, August 31, the latter an adaptation of the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle that was the basis for Louis Malle's .

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[Chris Knipp]

THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE (Aki Kaurismäki 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36340#post36340)

A continuation of what seems a trilogy about refugees. This film in Finnish and Arabic focuses on a Syrian in search of his sister who's adopted by a former shirt salesman who buys a failing restaurant. I disagree with those who think Kaurismäki's shift from gloom to a glimmer of hope and global concerns is a betrayal. The consummate style continues unabated and this is as clearly as ever one of the world's most distinctive filmmakers working at top form. Enjoy the old fashioned rock music, the usual deadpan, the minimalist storytelling, and a lovely Checker car.

Opening in NYC December 1st and elsewhere thereafter. In the Main Slate of the NYFF, it was shown first at Berlin, and in 30 other international festivals.

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[Chris Knipp]

WONDER WHEEL (Woody Allen 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36354#post36354)

Drama set at a declining Coney Island in 1950 where a schlub ticket-taker (Jim Belushi) is cuckolded by his wife (Kate Winslet), a former actress, with a lifeguard and aspiring playwright (Justin Timberlake), who falls for the schlub's daughter by a former marriage (Juno Temple) in a lurid mix of tragedy and pop movie of the period. The critics hated this (a miserable Metacritic 46% rating) but it's interesting to pick apart the story for its new and old elements, and one can enjoy the performances, especially of Timberlake and Winslet, and admire Italian great Vittorio Storaro's lurid-beautiful photography of the colorful rinky-dink period sets.

This was the closing night film at the 2017 NYFF - its world premiere.

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[Chris Knipp]

Review coming: ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE (Hong Sang-soo 2017)

I just saw (and enjoyed) it in the Contenders (https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/3900) series at MoMA last night.

Remaining to cover of NYFF 2017 Main Slate:
Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
The Day After (Hong Sang-soo)
Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde (Serge Bozon)
Mudbound(Dee Rees)
Wonderstruck(Todd Haynes) - Centerpiece The last two are easy to access, the first three, not so much.

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[Chris Knipp]

ON THE BEACH ALONE AT NIGHT (Hong Sang-soo 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36378#post36378)

Seen at the catch-up series at MoMA called The Contenders 23 Dec. 2017, one of three features the prolific director produced this year, two of which were in the NYFF Main Slate. It relates unusually closely to his life, being about a young actress whose affair with a married Korean director caused so much scandal at home she lost her manager and had to spend time abroad to cool off. She is played by Kim Min-hee, for whom Hong left his wife. She is captivating: one can understand. A series of the usual talking and drinking sessions among different combinations of people show Kim Min-hee in unusually intense and emotional form. The movie is worth watching just for her, but there are dreamlike, surreal elements too, and this is one of Hong's best, despite lacking the formal inventiveness of other redent efforts.

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[Chris Knipp]

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Luca Guadagnino 2017)
(http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36238#post36238)

There is talk that Call Me by Your Name may be "a series" - it may just mean a followup, because there is quite a lot about what happens to Elio after the summer with Oliver when he was seventeen, though it's just reviewed over certain moments at future times when he is, alas, never as happy with anybody again (that is the point).

Story in Dazed Digital (http://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/38524/1/call-me-by-your-name-might-turn-into-a-series-of-films), ‘Call Me By Your Name’ might turn into a series of films.


This all comes from an INTERVIEW (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/22/luca-guadagnino-call-me-by-your-name-step-inside-teenage-dreams) with Luca Guadagnino, the director, in the Guardian. (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/22/luca-guadagnino-call-me-by-your-name-step-inside-teenage-dreams)

There's actually a longer interview where he goes into more detail in Vulture (http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/director-luca-guadagnino-talks-call-me-by-your-name-sequels.html).

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[Chris Knipp]

BEFORE WE VANISH (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36462#post36462)

A return to form from two off films he made recently, but meandering and lacking suspense. It's an alien invasion movie that turns into an affirmation of the power of love. This was in the New York Film Festival, but I'm reviewing it because it comes out in theaters in a few days, February 2, 2018. It debuted at Cannes. But Metacritc rating 57. Still there is mastery and fun to be had here, especially for Kurosawa fans.

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[Chris Knipp]

Lucrecia Martel's Zama (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36235#post36235) opens today in New York (IFC Center in Lower Manhattan and Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center).