New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Payal Kapadia 2024)

This quietly luminous film from India by a woman director whois only 38 won the Grand Prix at Cannes. It's about three women working at a Mumbai hospital and their joys nd sorrows. When the oldest moves back to the country, the other two accompany her.
Q&A with Payal Kapadia on Oct. 7 & 8

Showtimes
Monday, October 7
6:00 PMStandby Only
Tuesday, October 8
9:15 PMStandby Only
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Venues
Alice Tully Hall - Walter Reade Theater - EBM Film Center

[Chris Knipp]

HARVEST (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2024).

One tends to get lost in this well-meaning but meanderng adaptaton of an eponymous Jim Crace novel about the last days of a medieval English village. Starring Caleb Landry Jones.

Showtimes
Sunday, September 29
3:15 PMBuy Tickets
Monday, September 30
6:00 PMBuy Tickets
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[Chris Knipp]

HAPPYEND (Neo Sora 2024)

Dystopia with a light touch, this film depicts some near-future techno-loving Tokyo high school kids who get into a tangle with their dictatorial, conventional Principal and some demonstrations result after he imposes a high tech surveillance system to spy on them. Sora is the son of Ryuichi Sakamoto and made an elegant film about his late father that was in last year's NYFf. Charming and thought-provoking, this promises Sora as a new voice in Japanese cinema.

Happyend, 113 mins., debuted at Venice in the Orizzonti sectioin, showing also at Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Zurich, Busan, Hawaii and London BFI. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF. To be released in Japan Oct. 4, 2024.

Showtimes
Sunday, September 29
6:00 PMStandby Only
Monday, September 30
9:15 PMStandby Only

[Chris Knipp]

VIET AND NAM (Trương Minh Quý 2024)

A beautiful, sensuous, almost trance-like film about Vietnam's war legacy, its present stagnation, and two gay twenty-something coalminers who make love down in the mines, and help the mother of one of them look for the body of her husband, his father, dead in the American war. In Un Ceertin Regard at Cannes.

Showtimes
Tuesday, October 1
8:30 PMStandby Only
Wednesday, October 2
6:00 PMBuy Tickets
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[Chris Knipp]

PEPE (Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias 2024)

Writer/director/editor/composer Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias has many ideas flying around in his head when he unreels this high-concept film, which takes the idea of the banished Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's dispersed ménage of exotic African animals and in particular, one hippo who escaped from the herd and was shot down. An opaque head-trip whose formats are too variable and chronology too languid to provide a viable experience for the viewer.

Showtimes
Saturday, October 5
9:30 PMBuy Tickets
Sunday, October 6
6:15 PMStandby Only
Wednesday, October 9
12:30 PM

[Chris Knipp]

ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (Rungano Nyoni 2024)

Surrealism and traditionalism blend in this funeral wake exposure of a dead uncle's sexual predations on young female family members. A continually enjoyable and eye-opening film. The Zambian-born, Welsh-raised filmmaker unfolds another misogyny fable focused basically on the harsh abuses faced by young girls even in ttoday's African society.

Showtimes
Thursday, October 3
9:00 PMBuy Tickets
Saturday, October 5
6:30 PMBuy Tickets

[Chris Knipp]

OH, CANADA (Paul Schrader 2024)

Based on the late Russell Banks' novel, this depicts a renowned documentarian in Canada who fled the US draft in the sixties. Deathly ill, sitting for an admiring portrait, he sets out, in the novel anyway, to undermine that project by revealing all his ugly secrets. But this message gets confused in the adaptation.

Showtimes
Saturday, October 5
12:45 PMStandby Only
Sunday, October 6
3:30 PMBuy Tickets
Wednesday, October 9

[Chris Knipp]

THE FRIEND (Scott McGehee, David Siegel 2024)

Engaging adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez's National Book Award winner about a woman friend (Naomi Watts) who falls heir to the harlequin Great Dane of her dear departed friend Walter (Bill Murray). The adjustment to the dog is a process of grieving, for both her and the dog. An enlightening charmer.

Showtimes
Thursday, October 3
6:00 PMStandby Only
Friday, October 4
3:00 PMStandby Only
Monday, October 14

[Chris Knipp]

HARD TRUTHS (Mike Leigh 2024)

This brilliant film by the great Mike Leigh about a women who verbally abuses everyone starts out hilarious and ends up deeply sad.

Showtimes
Saturday, October 5
3:15 PMS
Sunday, October 6
12:00 PM
Thursday, October 10
6:00 PM
Friday, October 11

[Chris Knipp]

AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (Albert Serra 2024)

An extraordinarily vivid and pure documentary of bullfighting in Spain focused exclusively on the gifted young Peruvian-born matador Andrés Roca Rey. Even if you have been a regular audience member you have never entered into the heart of the corrida del torros as intimately as this. Disturbing but beautiful. Premiered at San Sebastián, where it won the top prize. Included in the Spotlights section at the New York Film Festival.

Showtimes
Friday, October 4
9:00 PMStandby Only
Friday, October 11
3:45 PMStandby Only

[Chris Knipp]

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Pedro Almodóvar 2024)

The Spanish director's first feature film in English is based on a novel by American writer Sigrid Nunez, as is another NYFF Main Slate film this year, Scott McGehee and David Siegel's The Friend. This treatment, involving euthanasia in which Julianne Moore's successful novelist assists Tilda Swinton's cancer-ridden war correspondent, is more problematic, though of course beautiful and well acted. With John Turturro.

Centerpiece · U.S. Premiere · Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro, and Alessandro Nivola in person at Oct. 4 screenings at Alice Tully Hall

[Chris Knipp]

QUEER (Luca Guadagnino 2024)

Daniel Craig's casting wildly against type as William Lee, the autobiographical protagonist of William Burroughs' minor early novel, in an adaptation by Luca Guadangino is an event, however inexplicable the project.

Spotlight Gala · U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Luca Guadagnino, Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, and Justin Kuritzkes on Oct. 6 (joined by Jonathan Anderson) and Oct. 7

[Chris Knipp]

CAUGHT BY THE TIDES 风流一代 (Jia Zhang-ke 2024)

Jia Zhang-ke's symphonic, career-summarizing new film reviews many themes while resuming a favorite storyline. Jia weaves sequences from earlier films to tell a decades-long story of a failed romance that encapsulates the modern history of China. Impressive and recommended.

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Jia Zhangke on Oct. 8 & 9

[Chris Knipp]

THE SHROUDS (David Cronenberg 2024)

Respectfully received at Cannes. But excruciating, precise necrophilia may not be your thing; it's not mine, so despite careful direction and an excellent cast, this cannot be recommended

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with David Cronenberg on Oct. 5 & 6
Showtimes
Saturday, October 5
8:30 PMStandby Only
Sunday, October 6
5:45 PMStandby Only
Thursday, October 10
8:00 PMStandby Only
Friday, October 11
9:15 PM

[Chris Knipp]

I'M STILL HERE (Walter Salles 2024)

Based on memoirs and the director's own youthful memories, the portrait of an exceptionally happy Rio de Janeiro family destroyed by the Brazilian dictatorship in the early seventies and particularly of the brave surviving wife Eunice Paiva, who while pursuing the truthe about her "disappeared" former congressman husband, reinvented herself as a lawyer who worked to defend indigenous rights from land grabbers. A terrific, sad film.

Showtimes
Wednesday, October 9
8:00 PMStandby Only
Thursday, October 10
9:15 PMStandby Only