New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

FESTIVAL REVIEW THREAD

RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys Set as New York Film Festival Opening Night Film

The New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center (Sept. 27-Oct. 14, 2024) has announced the adaptation of Colson Whitehead's NICKEL BOYS, directed by RaMell Ross, will be the opening night film. The new film, from Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures, will open the festival on Sept. 27 before hitting theaters on Oct. 25.

The story follows two Black teenagers held at a cruel juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow-era Florida. It is based on the historic Dozier School, a reform school that operated for 111 years and was revealed as highly abusive. Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, two boys whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th century.

“’Nickel Boys’ signals the emergence of a major filmmaking voice,” said Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, in a statement. “RaMell Ross’ fiction debut, like his previous work in photography and documentary, searches for new ways of seeing and, in so doing, expands the possibilities of visual language. It’s the most audacious American movie I have seen in some time.”

The screening will be Sept. 27 at Alice Tully Hall. The adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel in addition to Herisse and Wilson features Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Director RaMell Ross is known for the Oscar-nominated HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING (ND/NF 2028), and EASTER SNAP (2019). Both are shorts.

[Chris Knipp]

SAORISE RONAN IN BLITZ

NYFF Closing Night Film announced: Steve McQueen's Blitz
SOURCE

Steve McQueen’s historical drama BLITZ, starring Saoirse Ronan, has been selected to close the 62nd New York Film Festival.

The movie will make its North American premiere on Oct. 10 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Apple Original Films is backing BLITZ, which will open in theaters on Nov. 1 ahead of its global premiere on Apple TV+ on Nov. 22.

Written and directed by McQueen, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of 12 YEARS A SLAVE (Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress), the World War II-set BLITZ follows a group of Londoners during the events of the British capital bombing. It tells the story from the perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Ronan) and her 9-year-old son George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. The supporting cast includes Kathy Burke, Benjamin Clémentine, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Hayley Squires, and Paul Weller.

"It is with immense pride, gratitude, and fondness that I’m able to return to the New York Film Festival with BLITZ,” said McQueen. "I’ve been lucky enough to have enjoyed a number of memorable experiences at the festival and with New York audiences, and I’m enormously grateful to have been invited back for closing night.”

A number of of McQueen’s prior films have played at NYFF, including HUNGER, SHAME (both starring Michael Fassbender), 12 YEARS A SLAVE, and the anthology TV feature series "Small Axe."

"BLITZ is a vivid and visceral depiction of life during wartime, a meticulous historical account that resonates unmistakably with our current age of endless war," said Dennis Lim, New York Film Festival’s artistic director. "We are thrilled to welcome back to the festival Steve McQueen, one of the most daring artists at work today, with one of the greatest achievements of his career."

McQueen's 2023 documentary film, not included in the NYFF, was also related to WWII: OCCUPIED CITY, the filmmaker’s elliptical, 4.5-hour nonfiction adaptation of co-screenwriter and partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945. It got a mixed reception (Metacritic 76%). Gleiberman wrote (Variety)" "In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it." Wendy Ide in The Observer said "Feels closer in approach to his early gallery installation work than it does to his narrative film-making."

SYNOPSIS: Follows the epic journey of George, a 9-year-old boy in World War II London whose mother Rita sends him to safety in the English countryside. George, defiant and determined to return home to Rita and his grandfather Gerald in east London, ensues on an adventure, only to find himself in immense peril, while a distraught Rita searches for her missing son. SOURCE

[Chris Knipp]

JULIANNE MOORE, TILDA SWINTON IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

NYFF Centerpiece Film announced: Pedro Almodovar's The Room Next Door

SOURCE

The comedic drama, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will make its U.S. premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Oct. 4. “The Room Next Door” is Almodóvar's first English-language feature film.

The director has described the New York-set movie as a story “about a very imperfect mother and her resentful daughter, who live separate lives because of a profound misunderstanding.” Swinton plays Martha, the “imperfect mother” and war journalist, while Moore plays a best-selling writer, Ingrid, who rekindles her relationship with Martha after losing touch for a number of years. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Sony Pictures Classics is backing the “The Room Next Door,” which will world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

From the festival blurb: "Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection."

The U.S. premiere of The Room Next Door marks NYFF mainstay Pedro Almodóvar’s 15th festival selection, of which a record-setting nine titles have been gala presentations. He made his NYFF debut in 1988 with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (NYFF26) as the Opening Night selection, and also opened NYFF with All About My Mother (NYFF37). Bad Education (NYFF42) and Volver (NYFF44) were selected as Centerpieces, and Live Flesh (NYFF35), Talk to Her (NYFF40), Broken Embraces (NYFF47), and Parallel Mothers (NYFF59) were Closing Night selections.m Additional NYFF selections include The Flower of My Secret (NYFF33), The Skin I Live In (NYFF49), Julieta (NYFF54), Pain and Glory (NYFF57), The Human Voice (NYFF58), and Strange Way of Life (NYFF61).

[Chris Knipp]

MARK EYDELSHTEYN AND MIKEY MADISON IN SEAN BAKER'S "RAMBUNCTIOUS PALME D'OR WINNER" ANORA

NYFF Main Slate Announced (33 Films)

Aug. 6, 2024: The 62nd New York Film Festival Main Slate has now been announced by Film at Lincoln Center. Here is the list with the NYFF blurbs followed by the festival debuts.

The NYFF Main Slate selection committee is chaired by Dennis Lim, NYFF Artistic Director, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen.

NYFF62 is generously supported by Co-Chairs Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Imelda and Peter Sobiloff, and Nanna and Dan Stern; and Vice-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, and Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg.

Opening Night
Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross, 2024, U.S., 140m
Rare is the film of a major book that maintains the power and precision of its source material while also generating its own singular aesthetic. Yet RaMell Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida, achieves just this. In breakout performances that cut to the bone, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th century. Ross, whose unforgettable Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Closing Night of New Directors/New Films, 2018) portrayed an Alabama community in moments of revelatory intimacy, has here fashioned a film of equal daring and intensity, buoyed by expressive, shallow-focus cinematography by Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), pinpoint-precise editing by Nicholas Monsour (NOPE), and deeply felt supporting performances from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, and Daveed Diggs. Inspired by actual events, this harrowing tale comes to vivid life via an ingenious visual approach that brilliantly adapts the novel’s exercise in subjectivity. Ross’s Nickel Boys sets the beauty of the natural world against the cruel realities of American racism, and confirms its maker’s status as a visionary cinematic artist. An Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios release. (NYFF debut)

Centerpiece
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar, 2024, Spain, 106m
U.S. Premiere
Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection. A Sony Pictures Classics release. (Venice)

Closing Night
Blitz
Steve McQueen, 2024, U.K., 114m
North American Premiere
Blitz, an authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg by the Germans during World War II, pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, NYFF51) to ever more impressive levels. Working on a vast scale, McQueen sets things at human eye level, telling his original tale from the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. Alternately overwhelming and tender, McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London too infrequently seen on screens. While Ronan and Heffernan emotionally match one another beat for beat, the supporting cast, including Kathy Burke, Benjamin Clémentine, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Hayley Squires, and Paul Weller, is uniformly superb, fleshing out a film that feels positively Dickensian in its scope and storytelling. An Apple Original Films release. (London BFI)

All We Imagine as Light
Payal Kapadia, 2024, France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg, 118m
Malayalam and Hindi with English subtitles
The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness by Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—and a newly retired coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on prosaic moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is pursued by a courtly doctor; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside resort with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actors with an unforced expressivity and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. (Cannes: winner of the Grand Prix)

Anora
Sean Baker, 2024, U.S., 138m
English and Russian with English subtitles
This year’s rambunctious Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival is a pure shot of frenetic pleasure, a New York odyssey that is the most immersive and accomplished comic adventure yet from American original Sean Baker (The Florida Project, NYFF55; Red Rocket, NYFF59). In a thrilling, star-making performance, Mikey Madison plays Annie, a tough-as-nails exotic dancer from Brighton Beach suddenly thrust into the lap of luxury when she’s whisked away on a whirlwind romance with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), an obscenely wealthy young customer at her strip club. However, Ivan turns out to be the spoiled scion of Russian oligarchs, and Annie’s wild ride is anything but your average rags-to-riches story. Baker always takes a good-natured, sociological approach to his subject matter and milieu, and here he has created an authentic 21st-century screwball comedy that tackles sex, love, class, and money with matter-of-fact directness. A NEON release. (Cannes: Palme d'Or winner)

April
Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024, France/Georgia/Italy, 134m
Georgian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili follows her striking debut feature Beginning (NYFF58), which told the story of a wife and mother persecuted for her religious beliefs in a provincial village, with this tenebrous, provocative drama about the precarious social position of a woman living in an isolated community. When a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery, obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) falls under suspicion for negligence, her standing in the small town further jeopardized by people’s knowledge that she also provides illegal abortion services to local women. Shot by Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All), balancing long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism, April is a complex and disquieting depiction of a caregiver in crisis, rich with haunting, metaphorical imagery that feels emanated from its maker’s subconscious. (Venice)

The Brutalist
Brady Corbet, 2024, U.S., 215m (incl. 15m intermission)
English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In this towering vision from American director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux), an accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor named László Toth (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in America, reconnecting with family in Pennsylvania. While awaiting news of his wife’s relocation from Budapest, fate leads the Bauhaus-instructed genius into the orbit of the volatile Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an obscenely wealthy captain of industry, who leads him to both professional success and personal chaos. Co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, this richly detailed recreation of postwar America is alternately hopeful and nightmarish in its portrayal of immigrant living, accruing in meaning and power as it builds to its overwhelming final passages. Interweaving a provocative tapestry of ideas around privilege, money, religious identity, architectural aesthetics, and the persistence of historical trauma, The Brutalist is an absorbing, brilliantly acted American epic that reminds us the past is always present. Also starring Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Isaach De Bankolé, Stacy Martin, and Alessandro Nivola. (Venice)

By the Stream
Hong Sangsoo, 2024, South Korea, 111m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Successful former director Chu Sieon (Kwon Haehyo), now working quietly as a bookshop owner, has arrived at a university to direct a short theater piece after its student director has been let go from the project. He appears at the invitation of his niece, Jeonim (Kim Minhee), an artist and teacher whom he hasn’t seen in 10 years. Living with regrets about decisions made at this very university decades earlier, Chu Sieon both rebuilds his family bond and forges a new one with the admiring Professor Jeong (Cho Yunhee). Hong Sangsoo’s latest portrait of people discovering emotional kinship and recharging their creative selves is wondrous in its simplicity yet expansive in feeling. By the Stream is a deeply affectionate rendering of the constant process of self-actualization, whether in youth or late middle-age, and features one of Hong’s most poignant scenes to date, in which Chu Sieon and the student actors share their hopes and promises for the future. A Cinema Guild release. (Locarno)


ZHAO TAO AND LI ZHUBIN IN SCENE REWORKED FOR "ANGUISHING VIOLENCE" (DEBORAH YOUNG) IN CAGHT BY THE TIDES

Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke, 2024, China, 111m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous Caught by the Tides. Assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years—a beguiling mix of fiction and documentary, featuring a cascade of images taken from previous movies, unused scenes, and newly shot dramatic sequences—Caught by the Tides is a free-flowing work of unspoken longing, carried along more by music than dialogue as it looms around the edges of a poignant love story. The film mostly adheres to the perspective of Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao) as she wanders an increasingly unrecognizable country in search of long-lost lover Bin (Li Zhubin), who left their home city of Datong seeking new financial prospects. The always captivating Zhao carries the film with her delicate expressiveness, while Jia constantly evokes cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change: of people, landscapes, cities, politics, ideas. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. (Cannes)

Dahomey
Mati Diop, 2024, France/Senegal/Benin, 67m
French with English subtitles
The African kingdom of Dahomey, which ruled over its region at the west of the continent until the turn of the 20th century, saw hundreds of its splendid royal artifacts plundered by French colonial troops in its waning days. Now, as 26 of these treasures are set to return to their homeland—now within the Republic of Benin—filmmaker Mati Diop documents their voyage back. As with her layered, supernaturally tinged Atlantics (NYFF57), Diop takes a singular approach to contemporary questions around belonging in our postcolonial world, transforming this rich subject matter into a multifaceted examination of ownership and exhibition, and employing multiple points of view, including—most strikingly—those of the artifacts themselves as they sail in darkness over the ocean to their rightful home. Alternating images of nocturnal melancholy and debates among students at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi about what should be done with the objects, Dahomey brilliantly negotiates a lost past and an unsure present. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival. A MUBI release. (Berlinale: Golden Bear winner)


IMAGE FROM MINERVINI'S THE DAMNED

The Damned
Roberto Minervini, 2024, Italy/U.S./Belgium, 88m
U.S. Premiere
A regiment of battle-fatigued Union soldiers makes its way west, forging ahead to survey the forbidding landscape of the Northwest frontier, in this transporting, existential Civil War drama from Italian-born director Roberto Minervini. The maker of What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (NYFF56) and Stop the Pounding Heart (New Directors/New Films 2014), gripping, idiosyncratic portraits of struggle on the margins of American life, Minervini applies his accomplished minimalist naturalism to the period war film, forgoing genre markers for an absorbing plunge into undying questions of morality and American identity. Punctuated by images of jarring violence and eerie beauty, and effectively cast with a troupe of compelling non-professional performers with weather-beaten faces, The Damned engages in the emotional and moral quandaries of fighting a homeland war whose purpose grows hazier as it trudges on. (Cannes: Un Certain Regard Director Award)

Eephus
Carson Lund, 2024, U.S./France, 98m
North American Premiere
For his gracefully accomplished debut feature, Carson Lund has fashioned perhaps the most elegiac baseball movie yet, a poignant celebration of a recent American past that already feels as though it has slipped away. Against an autumnal Massachusetts backdrop, sometime in the 1990s, the film lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down and paved over for the construction of a middle school. An afternoon of brilliant blue sky quietly fades into October twilight as the players battle and bond, trade barbs and memories, stretching their game out to extra innings, in no hurry to leave this hallowed space. Lund’s tranquil souvenir of a film captures the singular beauty of the sport itself. Recalling the work of Robert Altman and Richard Linklater, but with a touch of Tsai Ming-liang, Eephus (its title referring to a curveball so slow it confuses the batter) is a film about the passage of time—both the hours of the day and one era fading into another. (Cannes: Directors' Fortnight)


CRISTA ALFAIATE IN GRAND TOUR

Grand Tour
Miguel Gomes, 2024, Portugal/Italy/France, 128m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, the uncommonly ambitious Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50; Arabian Nights, NYFF53) takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon to tell the tale of an unsettled couple from colonial England and the world as it both expands and closes in around them. It’s 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) has escaped the clutches of beckoning marriage, leaving his bemused fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), in indefatigable pursuit. Edward gives chase from Mandalay to Bangkok to Shanghai and beyond, while Gomes responds with a splendid and enthralling series of scenes that use a magic form of cinema to situate us in these places both then and now, keeping us at a knowingly exotic traveler’s distance while also immersing us in rhythm, texture, and emotional reality. Whether black-and-white or color, zigzagging or meditative in tone, scripted or captured as documentary, Grand Tour is splendid, moving, and human-scaled. A MUBI release. (kCannes: Best Director Award)

Happyend
Neo Sora, 2024, Japan/U.S., 113m
Japanese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Contemporary global anxieties over the gradual slide into governmental totalitarianism find an original and touching outlet in this resonant drama about youth culture in Japan. Neo Sora, making his fiction feature debut following his elegant music tribute Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (NYFF61), sets his film in a Tokyo high school sometime in the near future. Here, two best friends since childhood, Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system after being the target of an elaborate prank. As the boys try to figure out how to align themselves within the increasingly oppressive education system, larger external forces summon further threats, including constant looming natural disasters. Sora’s absorbing and humane film tackles universal political fears, the tenuous bonds of friendship, and questions of individual will. (Venice)

Hard Truths
Mike Leigh, 2024, U.K./Spain, 97m
U.S. Premiere
Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year (NYFF48) for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, NYFF34) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister, Chantelle (a magnificent, gracious Michele Austin). Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. A Bleecker Street release. (Toronto)

Harvest
Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024, U.K./U.S./Germany/France, 131m
English and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, who deconstructed human behavior within bounded communities in Attenberg and Chevalier, sets her sights on entirely new environs in Harvest, which takes place in a remote village in medieval England. Adapted from the acclaimed novel by British writer Jim Crace, Tsangari’s film stars Caleb Landry Jones as Walter Thirsk, the former childhood friend and manservant of the village’s weak-willed landowner, Master Kent (Harry Melling). Marked by superstition and the scapegoating of outsiders, the town’s denizens fall under new threat after Kent’s iron-fisted city cousin comes into possession of the land, with new plans for agricultural profit. Shot in the sun-dappled Scottish countryside with natural light by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, Tsangari’s most ambitious work to date is both carnal and cerebral, a multifaceted reflection on man’s relationship to the land, rich in atmospherics and thematic resonance. (Venice)

Misericordia
Alain Guiraudie, 2024, France, 104m
French with English subtitles
The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, NYFF51), who returns with a sharp, sinister, yet slyly funny thriller. Set in an autumnal, woodsy village in his native region of Occitanie, his latest follows the meandering exploits of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-work baker who has drifted back to his hometown after the death of his beloved former boss, a bakery owner. Staying long after the funeral, the seemingly benign Jérémie begins to casually insinuate himself into his mentor’s family, including his kind-hearted widow (Catherine Frot) and venomously angry son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), while making an increasingly surprising—and ultimately beneficial—friendship with an oddly cheerful local priest (Jacques Develay). In Guiraudie’s quietly carnal world, violence and eroticism explode with little anticipation, and criminal behavior can seem like a natural extension of physical desire. The French director is at the top of his game in Misericordia, again upending all genre expectations. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. (Cannes)

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow
Julia Loktev, 2024, U.S., 322m
Russian with English subtitles
World Premiere
American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, NYFF49), born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev ends up immersing herself with a group of young women fighting to ensure the vocalization of dissent and outspoken criticism of the country—even as they are branded by the government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives increasingly at risk as the country creeps toward war. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film, the climactic days of which were filmed in Moscow during the first week of the invasion, when most independent journalists fled the country, is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety, as well as a vital depiction of the eternal hope that so many in Russia hold for living in a democratic state. Screening in two parts: Chapters 1–3 (198m), Chapters 4–5 (124m). (NYFF debut)

No Other Land
Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 2024, Palestine/Norway, 95m
Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles
This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military. Headed by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham (also two of the film’s directors), the collective commits itself to filming and protesting the demolitions of homes and schools and the resulting displacement of their inhabitants, which were carried out to make way for Israeli military training ground. In addition to the indelible footage of destruction and expulsion captured by its undaunted witnesses, No Other Land serves as a moving portrait of friendship between Adra and Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world. Winner of multiple awards including the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale. (Berlinale)


JACOB ELORDI IN OH, CANADA

Oh, Canada
Paul Schrader, 2024, Canada, 95m
In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Wracked with cancer, Leonard has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé (Michael Imperioli) in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Cinema becomes a confessional space as Leonard, accompanied by his stalwart wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman), excavates his own past, facing down regrets and guilt, and interrogating his own career, personal life, and political courage. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona. (Cannes)

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Rungano Nyoni, 2024, Zambia/U.K./Ireland, 98m
Bemba and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A middle-aged man’s sudden death brings about a reckoning with the past for an extended Zambian family in Rungano Nyoni’s scalding drama. Balancing domestic realism and expressionistic absurdity with precision and constant surprise, Nyoni, in the follow-up to her feature debut, I Am Not a Witch, commandingly delineates the contours of a community caught between tradition and modernity. Nyoni’s film centers on Shula (a furious and touching Susan Chardy), whose stoical response to finding her uncle’s body on the street in the middle of the night hints at the many emotional fissures that will lead to the exposure of difficult truths long repressed. The film’s compositional rigor, inventive sound design, and unexpected narrative turns and digressions confirm Nyoni as a distinctive new voice in international cinema. Winner of the Best Director prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section. An A24 release. (Cannes)

Pepe
Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic/Namibia/Germany/France, 2024, 123m
Afrikaans, German, Spanish, and Mbukushu with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In 1993, after the death of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, the wild array of exotic pets he kept in his menagerie were shipped off to zoos and other preserves. His hippopotamuses, however, escaped, fending for themselves, reproducing, and becoming the target of government sterilizers and poachers. Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (Cocote, New Directors/New Films 2018) takes a fascinating, highly unorthodox approach to this strange but true tale, which is told from the perspective of a sentient hippo, Pepe, at the moment of its death. We hear the animal’s thoughts as they’re spoken aloud by a raspy narrator, as the film skips across time and continents, from Pepe’s home country of Namibia to the Rio Magdalena in Colombia, where Pepe has escaped; shuffles modes of storytelling; and alternates between nonfiction and fantasy. In its sympathetic inquiry and aesthetic muscularity, Pepe poses provocative questions about the ever-shifting ecological stakes of life on earth and the nature of being. (Berlinale)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024, Iran/Germany/France, 166m
Farsi with English subtitles
A target of Iran’s hardline conservative government for his films’ criticism of the state, director Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence. The result, the searing drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, won a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is every bit as urgent and gripping as its real-life backstory would portend: longtime government worker Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just received a major promotion to the role of judge’s investigator, to the hopeful delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani); at the same moment, a series of student protests against the government have exploded in the streets, stoking the sympathies of their independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). The growing wedge between progressive children and traditional parents intensifies through a series of unsettling events that put Iman’s future in jeopardy. Both paranoia thriller and domestic drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is above all an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction. A NEON release. (Cannes)


VINCENT CASSEL, DIANE KRUGER IN THE SHROUDS

The Shrouds
David Cronenberg, 2024, France/Canada, 119m
U.S. Premiere
In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, The Shrouds is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite. (Cannes)

Stranger Eyes
Yeo Siew Hua, 2024, Singapore, 126m
Chinese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Young married Singaporean couple Junyang (Chien-Ho Wu) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) must confront the unimaginable when one morning their baby daughter goes missing from the playground. As the police begin their investigation, Junyang and Peiying receive an unsettling package at their doorstep: surreptitious video footage of their daily lives, taken before and after the child’s disappearance. Soon, their voyeur neighbor Wu (Lee Kang-sheng, the Taiwanese star of Tsai Ming-liang’s films, in a delicate, multilayered performance) falls under suspicion, revealing multiple secret inner lives among a group of interconnected characters. From this gripping set-up, writer-director Yeo Siew Hua constructs an unpredictable thriller that is as compelled by the mysteries of the human heart as it is by the ambiguities of living in a constant surveillance culture. (Venice)

Suburban Fury
Robinson Devor, 2024, U.S., 115m
World Premiere
On September 22, 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore took a revolver out of her purse and fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. This failed political assassination was destined to become a strange historical footnote, yet Moore is revealed as an extraordinary subject in this expansive, fascinating new documentary by the protean Robinson Devor (The Woman Chaser, NYFF37). Having served more than 30 years of a life prison sentence, Moore tells her own story, from FBI informant to would-be assassin, all of which Devor dramatizes against the backdrop of the era’s prevalent political unrest and militancy, of Attica, the Black Panthers, the U.S.-backed Chilean coup, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. A pugnacious and unapologetic interview subject, Moore holds the center of a fleet and compelling nonfiction drama with the feel of a 1970s thriller. (NYFF debut)

Transamazonia
Pia Marais, 2024, France/Germany/Switzerland/Taiwan/Brazil, 112m
English and Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In the eerie quiet of the vast, verdant Amazon jungle, a young girl stirs to life. Rescued by a member of the local Indigenous tribe, the child, Rebecca, is the only survivor of a plane crash. Years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) has become something of a local celebrity after her father (Jeremy Xido), an American missionary, has cast the teenager as a faith healer capable of miracles. Just as Rebecca is beginning to have a will of her own, doubting her father and the role in which she’s been cast, another crisis emerges when illegal loggers encroach on the land, threatening the livelihoods of the local tribe, and forcing emotional, familial, and racial reckonings. South Africa–born director Pia Marais has fashioned a mesmerizing, entrancingly photographed moral tale with no easy answers that is also a singular coming-of-age fable. (Locarno)

A Traveler’s Needs
Hong Sangsoo, 2024, South Korea, 90m
English, French, and Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Isabelle Huppert reunites with Hong Sangsoo for their third delightful outing, this time starring as a nomadic Frenchwoman named Iris who drifts into the lives of a disconnected group of people in a Seoul suburb. In need of money, she has taken up giving French lessons, although she has no teaching experience to speak of. Cutting an ethereal figure in a straw hat, flowered sundress, and green cardigan, Iris puzzles the locals with her unorthodox methods and unyielding love for the Korean rice wine makgeolli. Iris’s effect on those around her is at once familial, romantic, and pedagogical, leading to a succession of gently amusing moments of cultural confusion and curiosity. Hong’s endearing, enigmatic observational comedy is a gentle exploration of human motivation and the surprising connections between people despite—or because of—language barriers. A Cinema Guild release. (Berlinale: Grand Jury Prize)

​​Việt and Nam
Trương Minh Quý, 2024, Philippines/France/Singapore/Italy/Germany/Vietnam, 129m
Vietnamese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Two young men emerge from the stygian darkness of a cave. They are in the bowels of the earth working as coal miners, but Việt and Nam are also lovers, enjoying moments of physical embrace kept secret from the rest of the world, before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to Laos. From this personal drama, captured with sensual detail and mesmeric eroticism, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs even deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation. Set at the turn of the 21st century, Trương’s film resounds with echoes of the country’s war decades earlier, as Nam’s mother takes them on a pilgrimage to try and discover where his father was killed as a soldier. Shot in a hypnotic style on 16mm film—and banned in its home country—Việt and Nam is a remarkable work of quiet expressivity about two men with unsettled pasts and indeterminate futures. A Strand Releasing release. (Cannes, Sydney, Malta, Karlovy Vary)


Who by Fire/Comme le feu
Philippe Lesage, 2024, Canada/France, 161m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Québecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage (Genesis, New Directors/New Films 2019). Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage, who in recent years has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous. (Berlinale)

Youth (Hard Times)
Wang Bing, 2024, France/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 220m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Continuing the observational nonfiction saga that began with Youth (Spring) (NYFF61), Wang Bing returns to the Chinese district of Zhili, where more than 300,000 migrant workers from rural provinces are employed in clothing workshops. In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation’s economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management. Wang’s epic yet compressed documentary is a singular rendering of young people who have become so focused on “making a living” that they have no time for joy or rest. Says one of the film’s many subjects: “You have no rights, so what’s the use of having money?” Despite these grim realities, Wang’s film provides hope in its depiction of workers who may find their collective voice. The final part of the trilogy, Youth (Homecoming), also screens in this year’s NYFF. An Icarus Films release. (Cannes, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Toronto, El Gouna)

Youth (Homecoming)
Wang Bing, 2024, France/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 160m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories, which the filmmaker recorded over the course of five years. Centered around New Year’s break, when the workers are planning to visit their families in remote hometowns to celebrate the festivities, Homecoming functions as a sweeping portrait of contemporary rural China, incorporating images of tightly packed trains and buses climbing treacherous mountainside roads, and joyous interludes, including wedding celebrations for workers Shi Wei and Fang Lingping, into its scenes of factory life. Wang’s cyclical account of young people caught in constant survival mode comes to a poignant close here, giving definitive shape and meaning to his enormous act of observation. The middle part of the trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), also screens in this year’s NYFF. An Icarus Films release. (Cannes, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Toronto, El Gouna)


HONG SANG-SOO, BY THE STREAM

[Chris Knipp]

SELENA GOMEZ IN EMILIA PÉREZ

Omissions. Here are some titles that might have been included; or better omitted.

The NYFF as usual includes a healthy chunk of selections from this year's Cannes, but some widely admired Cannes films are omitted, such as: Emilia Perez (Jacques Audiard), Bird (Andrea Arnold), The Invasion (Sergei Loznitsa), C'est pas moi (Leos Carax), and Le Fil (Daniel Auteuil).

Also missing, these not-yet-seen-or-reported on colorful-sounding titles from this year's Venice: Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical sequel that some expect to be divisive; Maria (Pablo Larraín), A biopic by the opera diva Maria Callas by the Chilean filmmaker; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Tim Burton), the long-awaited sequel starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, and others; Queer (Luca Guadagnino), Starring Daniel Craig; and Modì (Johnny Depp). The NYFF jurors may be too serious for any of this. Queer, the adaptaton of William Burroughs' early autobiographical book, is directed by Luca Guadagnino, who is more and more hot these days. Modì is a biopic about the artist Modigliani.

Also notably omitted: The Substance (Coralie Fargeat), the body-horror-feminist film about which was a huge successat Cannes - and a triumph and career revival for Demi Moore. I was going to mention Kinds of Kindness (Yourgos Lanthimos), but that seems to be coming out in theaters now.

A couple NYFF choices contrarily seem possibly ill-advised: The Shrouds (David Cronenberg), said to be "more ideas for a movie than a movie"; and Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader), which some say is "clunky," or just may be grim and end-of-life in its POV. (A Letterboxd response is "man, what can I say It’s really an old man’s movie about old people dying.")

All this reflects the current FLC leadership, unlike earlier days such as when Richard Pe˜ña was its director. But the latest film by Almodóvar, whom Peña so strongly advocated, is here.


IMAGE FROM FORGEAT'S THE SUBSTANCE

[Chris Knipp]

THE IMAGE DOESN'T GIVE AWAY WHAT CRAIG WILL LOOK LIKE

Guadagnino's Queer named Spotlight Gala Screening

An omission mentioned above has just been corrected with the adding of Guadagnino's QUEER, a new movie adaptation of William Burroughs' autobiographical novel of drug addiction and gay love set in 1940's Mexico, named as Spotlight Gala Screening and U.S. premiere shown Oct. 6. (The 135-minute film will have its international debut earlier at Venice.)

Written by Justin Kuritzkes and starring Daniel Craig as the Burroughs alter ego William Lee, QUEER co-stars Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Michael Borremans, Andra Ursuta and David Lowery.

William Lee is a habitual heroin user who, while spending time with gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s, falls in love and embarks on an affair with the preppy ex-military Eugene Allerton (Starkey).

Written between 1951 and 1953, the novel was not published till 1985 and is far less known than Burrough's classic and controversial 1959 NAKED LUNCH, though the festival blurb says QUEER "has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature." It's a followup to his earlier (and published) novel JUNKIE,which ends with the stated ambition of finding a drug called yage (Ayahuasca). QUEER includes a trip deeper into Latin America looking for that legendary psychedelic, which Burroughs and Allen Ginzberg shared a fascination with and corresponded about.

The movie again features a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Festival artistic director Dennis Lim salutes Guadagnino (whose CALL ME BY YOUR NAME a and BONES AND ALL have been prevous NYFF Main Slate features) as " one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, and one of its biggest risk-takers."

We'll be expecting the film to explore the Mexican setting and post-WWII period in a fresh way and spin out this low-key tale with an unusual performance by Daniel Craig - which we hope will go beyond Peter Weller's pleasingly dry Burroughs impersonation in David Cronenberg's excellent 1991 NAKED LUNCH (which still holds up).

The festival blurb says Lee "swoons into a headlong love affair" and enters "an odyssey: to the Ecuadorian jungle "in pursuit of the ultimate high." It describes "go-for-broke performances" by Craig and Starkey and says QUEER "finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet," providing us with "a universal love story featuring expressionistic flights of fancy, gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism, and surprising tenderness." (Debuting at Venice)

[Chris Knipp]

More NYFF 62 Spotlight Screenings

SPOTLIGHT FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Spotlight Gala [previously announced]
Queer
Luca Guadagnino, 2024, U.S./Italy, 135m
Written in the early 1950s yet not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. In his wildly ambitious adaptation, Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55) expertly evokes the book’s post–World War II time period and cinematically translates Burroughs’s iconoclasm with panache. In a transformative role, Daniel Craig immerses himself into Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a habitual heroin user luxuriating in freedom and desiccation among a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he swoons into a headlong love affair, commencing an odyssey that will take them all the way to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high. Buoyed by go-for-broke performances from Craig and Starkey, and rollicking, unexpected supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, Queer is a dazzling showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s a film that finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet, featuring explicit eroticism, expressionistic flights of fancy, and gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism. (Venice)

Apocalypse in the Tropics
Petra Costa, 2024, Brazil/U.S./Denmark, 110m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In the follow-up to her Oscar-nominated documentary The Edge of Democracy, which examined Brazil’s increasingly polarized politics, Petra Costa dramatizes the chilling rise of the far right in her country. Apocalypse in the Tropics focuses on how the evangelical movement paved the way for the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and continues to pose the threat of a national theocracy. Gaining remarkable access to major figures on both sides of the extreme political divide, including fire-and-brimstone televangelist Silas Malafaia, who was Bolsonaro’s right-hand man, and Bolsonaro’s liberal predecessor and successor President Lulu da Silva, Costa provides a gripping and urgent précis on the recent tumultuous events that have put Brazil in the international spotlight while painting an unsettling portrait of democracy’s fragility. (Venice)

Elton John: Never Too Late
R.J. Cutler, David Furnish, 2024, U.S., 102m
U.S. Premiere
Co-directed by R.J. Cutler (Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry, Belushi, The September Issue) and David Furnish, this rousing, intensely personal documentary finds a legendary musician in a richly reflective mood during his final concert tour, the multiyear, globe-spanning Farewell Yellow Brick Road. Filled with revealing interviews and rare archival material, Elton John: Never Too Late offers keen insight into a life and career marked by soaring highs and crushing lows, and contemplates a legacy defined equally by advocacy and artistry. A Disney+ release. Featuring a special appearance by Elton John and directors R.J. Cutler and David Furnish. (Toronto)

Emilia Pérez
Jacques Audiard, 2024, France, 132m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
From the moment it introduces its titular antiheroine, a Mexican drug-cartel boss seeking gender-affirming surgery, this boldly genre-dissolving tour de force is predicated on the power of astonishing transformations. The most ambitious and exuberant film to date by Jacques Audiard, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, Emilia Pérez is at once a darkly funny crime drama and a jaw-dropping musical, powered by a quartet of superb actors—Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz—whose fearless performances defy every expectation. Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where its four leads also shared the Best Actress prize. A Netflix release. (Cannes)

The Friend
Scott McGehee, David Siegel, 2024, U.S., 120m
Novelist and creative writing teacher Iris (Naomi Watts) finds her comfortable, solitary New York life thrown into disarray after her closest friend and mentor (Bill Murray) commits suicide and bequeaths his beloved Great Dane to her. The regal yet intractable beast, named Apollo, immediately creates problems for Iris, from furniture destruction to eviction notices, as well as more existential ones, his looming presence constantly reminding her of her friend’s choice to take his own life. Yet as Iris finds herself unexpectedly bonding to the animal, she begins to come to terms with her past, her lost friend, and her own creative inner life. Featuring a warm, emotionally present central performance from Watts, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s (The Deep End) deeply fulfilling adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s beloved, slyly shape-shifting National Book Award winner is a rare kind of contemporary American film—humane, philosophical, curious, yet never diagnostic about loss, grief, and anger. (Toronto)

I’m Still Here/Ainda Estou Aqui
Walter Salles, 2024, Brazil/Spain, 135m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
One afternoon in 1970, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman and outspoken critic of Brazil’s newly instituted military dictatorship, was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro by government officials, told nothing more than that he must give a “deposition” to authorities, and disappeared. Adapted from his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, this overwhelming, richly realized political drama from Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) stays tightly wedded to the perspective of Rubens’s wife, Eunice (a shattering Fernanda Torres), whose indefatigable search for the truth about her husband would stretch out for decades. A devastating true story, I’m Still Here is exhilarating in its portrayal of human tenacity in the face of injustice. Featuring a deeply affecting appearance from Fernanda Montenegro, Oscar nominee for Salles’s Central Station. A Sony Pictures Classics release. (Venice)

It’s Not Me/C'Est pas moi
Leos Carax, 2024, France, 41m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
French cinema firebrand Leos Carax has spent 40 years making galvanizing movies that float in the beautifully perplexing nether space between reality and artifice, from Boy Meets Girl (NYFF23) and Lovers on the Bridge (NYFF30) to Holy Motors (NYFF50) and the recent musical Annette. In his new film, he lovingly evokes the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard, paying aptly cheeky respect to the late New Wave master, his own career, and cinema itself, rummaging through a century of movies to situate his work within a continuum of the medium. Rather than self-aggrandize, he uses this diaristic format for an iconoclastic and impudent inquiry into power, politics, and image-making that is at once wry and playful, oblique and deeply personal. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. Premiere screening followed by a conversation with Leos Carax. (Cannes)

Maria
Pablo Larraín, 2024, Italy/Germany/U.S., 122m
Following his acclaimed historical biopics Jackie and Spencer, about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana, respectively, Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made his third entry in an unofficial trilogy about world-famous women dealing with the blinding glare of celebrity while at emotional crossroads. In an all-consuming performance at once poignant and imperious, Angelina Jolie becomes Maria Callas, the American-born, Greek opera singer whose voice and intensely dramatic life captivated millions before her death from a heart attack at the age of 53. Set in Paris, September 1977, during the final week of her life, Maria follows the legendary soprano as she negotiates her public image and private self and reckons with the increasingly blurred boundaries between the venerated “La Divina” and the vulnerable human being Maria. Punctuated by grand operatic interludes, Maria is exquisitely shot by Ed Lachman and features a vivid supporting cast that includes Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino, and Valeria Golino. (Venice)

Pavements
Alex Ross Perry, U.S., 2024, 128m
North American Premiere
How best to commemorate the career of Pavement, one of the defining indie rock bands of the 1990s? Legendary frontman Stephen Malkmus would likely be opposed to the usual encomiums. A museum exhibition? How about a jukebox Broadway musical? Or perhaps a prestige movie biopic? Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip, NYFF52; Her Smell, NYFF56) gives us all of the above and more in his pleasurably rule-flouting sorta-documentary. Fueled by a sardonic, tricky sense of humor reminiscent of Pavement’s caustic, idiosyncratic music, Perry’s film shows little patience for hagiography—or any other orthodoxy—in its nonlinear, absurdist approach. Pavements integrates archival footage of the band at the height of their cult popularity, newly shot material following them during their recent comeback tour in 2022, and a kaleidoscope of semi-scripted contemporary scenes about the shooting of a movie within the movie starring Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Nat Wolff, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, and a hilarious Joe Keery as an actor seeking awards glory. Above all, Pavements’ irreverent inquiry into mythmaking evinces a deep love for its subject and for a now lost alternative culture. (Venice)

A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg, 2024, U.S./Poland, 90m
Born weeks apart, cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) were as close as brothers growing up, yet have drifted apart due to the responsibilities and disappointments of adult life. After the death of their beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, David accompanies Benji on a trip to Poland, as a pilgrimage to both her hometown and to sites haunted by the genocide of World War II. Initially following a tour group (featuring elegantly scripted characters played with effortless nuance by such actors as Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, and Will Sharpe), the tightly wound David and the manic-neurotic Benji confront their own raw resentments and personal demons, which are further laid bare by the backdrop of an insuperable history. Anchored by spirited performances by its dynamic stars, writer-director Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is a work of compassion and maturity that alternates nimbly between anxious comedy and meditative drama. A Searchlight Pictures release. (Sundance)

Rumours
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, 2024, Canada, 104m
U.S. Premiere
The world’s wealthy democratic world leaders have come together for the annual G7 summit, trading quips and nervous smiles as they do their best to diplomatically discuss vague matters of international emergency and draft statements of import between sips of wine. Yet a major, unforeseen crisis looms on the horizon for the presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors—nothing less than potential human apocalypse, hastened by the arrival of unearthed “bog men” from the Iron Age and a giant pulsating brain perched ominously in the woods. This sci-fi pulp satire finds Canadian trickster extraordinaire Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg) and fellow Manitoban co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson in a particularly wacky mood, corralling an outstanding, starry cast—including Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Denis Ménochet, Charles Dance, and Nikki Amuka-Bird—for a merciless, midnight-movie skewering of the bureaucratic processes that govern our precarious reality. A Bleecker Street release. (Cannes)

Scénarios + Exposé du Film annonce du film “Scénario”
Jean-Luc Godard, 2024, France, 53m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The release of Jean-Luc Godard’s summative, elegiac 2018 feature, The Image Book (NYFF56), a film about the end of things, would seem to be the final testament from one of the most important artists the medium has ever known. But now, two years after his death, the world has been gifted two more “last films” from Godard. An extraordinary epilogue to an uncompromised career, Scénarios assembles and layers paintings, collages, film clips, stills, and narration, including text from Sartre, read on screen—in an overwhelmingly poignant appearance—by Godard the day before his assisted death. Scénarios (17m) will be followed by Exposé du film annonce du film “Scenario” (36m), a documentary shot in 2021 by longtime collaborator Fabrice Aragno that affords a remarkable glimpse into the maestro’s agile mind at work: here Godard outlines a previous version of the project, a feature film never to be made. (Cannes Classics)

TWST / Things We Said Today
Andrei Ujică, 2024, France/Romania, 87m
English, French, and German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
It’s August 1965, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo have descended upon New York for a sold-out concert at Queens’ massive Shea Stadium. Throngs of young superfans stricken with Beatlemania tear through the streets of Manhattan for a glimpse of the Liverpudlians from their hotel room window. But this tells only one part of the story of that hot summer weekend in the metropolis. More than a decade in the making, Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică’s first feature since the monumental The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (NYFF48) finds the found-footage maestro fabricating a fresh kind of city symphony. This variegated rendering of New York and its people, from Harlem to Jones Beach, from the mundane to the magical, is made up entirely of archival material, from news station broadcasts to personal 8mm film diaries to the climactic concert scenes shot on 35mm. Ujică’s fanciful documentary is also a work of imagination, using superimposed animated drawings (by French artist Yann Kebbi) and descriptive voice-over (from personal writings by Geoffrey O’Brien and Judith Kristen, and Ujică’s own poetry) to memorialize this vanished moment in history with poignant, distinctive flair. (Venice, out of competition)

Union
Brett Story, , 2024, U.S., 104m
In 2022, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, sick and tired of the lack of job stability from a company notorious for constant worker turnover, made national headlines after the newly formed Amazon Labor Union voted to unionize. For their absorbing documentary, Brett Story (The Hottest August) and Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment) follow the day-to-day struggles of the ALU, made up of current and former employees, including charismatic and indefatigable leader Chris Smalls, and capture the events that led to this remarkable—but by no means conclusive—historical moment. The result is an immersive portrait that celebrates solidarity while acknowledging the difficult decisions and internal conflicts that make any collective action possible—especially when up against a corporate goliath in a post-Reagan era when worker organizations have become political anathema. (Sundance)

[Chris Knipp]

"Amsterdam and West 63rd Street, 1956" (Courtesy of New York City Parks Photo Archive)

SOURCE

A NYFF 62 Special Event Announced

San Juan Hill: Manhattan's Lost Neighborhood
Stanley Nelson, 2024, 60m

This 62nd New York Film Festival Special Event will feature a conversation with director Stanley Nelson, producer Rita Coburn, and special guests following the screening. The film is narrated by Ariana DeBose, edited by Sebastián Díaz, produced by Rita Coburn, and produced and directed by Stanley Nelson. It is made possible by support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

In the first half of the 20th century, the area now called Lincoln Square was known by another name: San Juan Hill. Musical phenomena like bebop and the Charleston were created there; its clubs and theaters nurtured creative geniuses like James P. Johnson, Josephine Baker, and Thelonious Monk; and artist spaces like the Lincoln Square Arcade counted luminaries like Eugene O’Neill, George Bellows, and Robert Henri among their inhabitants. Home to a largely working-class community, San Juan Hill was redlined in the 1930s and targeted by “urban renewal” in the 1940s and 1950s, when thousands of residents were displaced to make way for Amsterdam Houses, Lincoln Center, Fordham University, and additional developments. West Side Story also refers to this neighborhood as it was before being razed.

The film will be shown Wed., Oct. 9, 2024 at 6:00pm at Alice Tully Hall.Tickets will be sold for this event on a Choose What You Pay basis, starting at $5, Sept. 5 and Sept. 10. For more details see the Film at Lincoln Center website HERE.

The opening of David Geffen Hall two years ago also featured a tribute to San Juan Hill - a live performance. For a discussion of this film with Stanley Nelson at an earlier screening go HERE. SEE ALSO HERE.

[Chris Knipp]

This year's NYFF poster is by David Byrne. Here it is.