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21 Films to See at the 2024 New York Film Festival
Nickel Boys With this year’s New York Film Festival underway, Filmmaker is recommending 18 films to watch over the course of the festival, which runs this year from September 27 through October 14. This year, our staff has covered several festivals— including TIFF, Venice, and Cannes,—whose premieres will be screening at NYFF during these upcoming weeks, some of which have previously been featured on our site. Below, we have compiled a list of the must-see films playing at the New York Film Festival, along with links and excerpts from director interviews and festival dispatches as well as, for three titles we have covered yet, the reasons we’re anticipating them.
“A Cinderella fantasy that plays out in Brighton Beach… [Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora] represents a victory for American independent film…. Mikey Madison (best known from the FX comedy series Better Things) has, in the film’s thickly Brooklyn-accented title role, perhaps the most immediately forceful screen presence of any of Baker’s protagonists, and she’s nearly outmatched by Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, the guileless prince charming who seduces Anora and us alike into a fairytale existence that could be permanently dissociated from any and all economic concerns. The film’s protracted opening act, in which Anora and Ivan meet and fall for one another, is a pure dopamine rush of colorful, hedonistic bliss, and easily the best filmmaking of Baker’s career. — Blake Williams
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness to a personal reckoning, body and soul.—Nicolas Rapold
Spanning three and a half hours—including a fifteen-minute intermission—and shot entirely on VistaVision, Brady Corbet’s saga was designed, per his own admission, to ape the feel and textures of the big Hollywood epics from the forties and fifties, the decades in which most of this takes place. If there’s anything genuinely untimely about The Brutalist, however, that’s its writer-director’s belief in the medium’s power to yield large scale, sweeping spectacles on par with those classics. True, Corbet is by no means the only filmmaker stuck in the past that way. As far as scope and ambitions go, his approach isn’t all that different from the maximalist style of the few directors his latest was hastily compared to the second the festival’s embargo on reviews and social media reactions was lifted—Francis Ford Coppola, Christopher Nolan, and Paul Thomas Anderson. But Corbet’s filmmaking here exudes an effortlessness that makes The Brutalist fitfully breath-taking. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it self-effacing, but when the film landed on its most otherworldly moments, the transcendence didn’t register as the result of painstaking choices, but an alchemy of sounds and images coming together in near-perfect harmony, which is all the more impressive for a film that’s about toil.—Leonardo Goi
Like Jia Zhangke’s Ash is Purest White, Caught by the Tides is a multi-decade triptych beginning in the early aughts and ending in the present, its past emerging from a sort of video diary practice he maintained up through 2006’s Still Life. As he explains, “I got my first digital video camera in 2001. I took it to Datong in Shanxi back then and shot tons of material. It was all completely hit-and-miss. I shot people I saw in factories, bus stations, on buses, in ballrooms, saunas, karaoke bars, all kinds of places.” There are numerous other similarities with 2018’s Ash: the middle segment of Caughts takes place during the Three Gorges Dam’s construction, which Jia first captured in Still Life, gaining morbidly tremendous production value from large-scale demolition and displacement. While Ash seems to have at least partially re-staged the Three Gorges era, Caught by the Tides’s past is all-archival, assembled in part from 10 scenes used in previous films and other contemporaneous footage.—Vadim Rizov
In The Damned, Roberto Minervini embeds us with Union Army soldiers ranging across the Western front in 1862, far from the battlegrounds in the East but no less at risk. But when you direct a Civil War movie in 2020s America, it can be hard for audiences to view it as solely a fictional matter, especially when you’ve previously directed two of the most revealing documentary cross-sections of the United States in the last decade, The Other Side (2015) and What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire (2018). It’s possible to watch The Damned as a rugged journey with a rank-and-file company of bewhiskered volunteers, who trade marksmanship tips and tin-pot coffee in an isolating wilderness. But it’s perhaps inevitable that the underlying tension of that era’s schism doesn’t feel especially far from today’s feeling of mounting volatility, the not-so-calm before a bigger storm.—Nicolas Rapold
“Please stop me if any of the terms don’t make sense.” A few days before his feature debut, Eephus, will premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight, Carson Lund is sitting on a rooftop terrace in Cannes and worrying I may not catch all the jargon. Understandably. A chronicle of the last baseball game played at Soldiers Field in Douglas, MA before the grounds will be paved over and replaced by a middle school, the chat’s testing my—admittedly limited—knowledge of the sport. Yet how you’ll respond to Lund’s wistful film won’t depend on your level of inside baseball. It will depend on how much you like old guys, people who’re watching the world they love as it falls indelibly into the past, who know all too well this isn’t a game so much as a farewell, but can’t find the words to say goodbye. Eephus is a dazzling tribute to the sport itself, told by someone with a keen ear for its colloquialisms and lore, but it’s also something much bigger. It’s a snapshot of a fading universe that transcends the specifics of its subject; an ode to a place as much as one to a certain way of communing.—Leonardo Goi
At Thessaloniki, audiences could watch two episodes of exergue – on documenta 14, each day in blocks of roughly 2-to-2-1/2 hours. I managed to see the final four episodes, which, while made in observational fashion, flip back-and-forth in time frame to provide context. Szymczyk, tall and slender with a shaggy mop of hair, has a nervous, youthful energy that, with his minimalist attire, makes him look like the former leader of a No Wave band. (And not for nothing, I imagine, does the camera follow him to an opening party where he takes over the microphone while a rock band bashes away behind him). He’s fascinating to watch, but more so Athiridis commits to a deeper explication of the themes underlying the film’s conflict, where clashing cultural and economic positions between Germany and Greece cause ruptures and the eternal debate over art vs. commerce rears the ugliest of heads. Although a decade in the making, exergue arrives feeling very much of the moment. In a better world, it might stream on Netflix. —Steve Dollar
This year’s Best Director winner at Cannes, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour revises the bifurcated structure of 2012’s Tabu and its second-half pastiche of silent cinema. Both parts of Grand Tour mix documentary footage with studio-shot sequences, but the first half is heavier on the travelogue component than the staged mode; the latter half overwhelmingly surrenders to the former, a la imagining what Murnau would have done in the sound era mutated with the self-conscious stiffnesses, deliberate anachronisms and theatricalities of Manoel de Oliveira. While ambling to a definite resolution, the narrative—structured around the 1917 flight through Asia of British civil servant Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), seeking to escape his determined fiancé Molly (Crista Alfaiete)—pursues many non-essential byways, in a series of “glory to the director” gestures that, like 2015’s Arabian Nights, make a virtue of unresolved or truncated narratives just for the pleasure of storytelling. A few color passages aside, it’s shot in piercingly beautiful black-and-white 16mm which practically glows even in its final, digitally projected form. Basically, this is suspiciously engineered to appeal to people like me, a cinephile dog whistle of familiar, recondite pleasures.—Vadim Rizov
In Happyend, music isn’t a mere ornament or background noise but a living force. For a tale set in a near-future Japan wrestling with two specters—an imminent “once in a century” earthquake and a fascistic government eager to turn the threat into an excuse to tighten its grip on people—the techno tunes heard throughout heighten both the film’s things-fall-apart aura as well as the rebellious vein that thrums through it. “The systems that defined people are crumbling,” a title card warns at the start; while the PM’s “security first” dogma is used to sugarcoat harsh security measures and quell dissenting voices, Sora trains his camera on a couple of high school classmates, best friends and techno enthusiasts: Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka). Happyend, in its simplest terms, tracks the teenage boys as they reconsider their place in an increasingly authoritarian world, which is to say it charts their political awakening. After their umpteenth prank, the school’s principal sets up a state-of-the-art CCTV device, “Panopti,” designed to monitor pupils and flag the most innocent interactions as punishable offenses. Debates, protests and sit-ins ensue, with Yuta and Kou slowly waking up to the fact that there’s a lot more to life than music, that being a member of society comes with its share of duties, that rules need not be followed if they’re laid out solely to coerce and punish.—Leonardo Goi
Lázaro at Night begins with a simple kitchen scene in which a woman tells a man that she’s going to inform her boyfriend about their affair. The man’s seen first, drinking water in the center of a kitchen while resting against a back corner that gives the frame depth before the woman enters from foreground right. Their careful blocking, necessary for actors in a small space both in relation to each other and to the camera, is so skillful as to call attention to itself, undercutting the naturalism presumably being sought—a move confirmed as deliberate when the next scene reveals this to be from a to-be-made film we’re now watching a third performer audition for. The 72-minute Lázaro spends about 2/3 of its running time unpredictably and non-chronologically alternating between pre-production and, if not the film itself, presumably a vision of it; both those narratives center around infidelities, albeit not contemplated/committed by the same characters.—Vadim Rizov
Alain Guiraudie has also previously found alternate pathways for his usual proclivities; his 2014 novel Now the Night Begins reimagines the general plot of 2013’s Stranger by the Lake with the addition of coprophagic urges and Bataillan sexual directions the filmmaker would almost certainly never be able to raise meaningful funding to depict visually. Misericordie is his strongest work since Stranger, abandoning his typical pansexual couplings and trying to combat viewer expectations with near-chastity. “I imagine that today, a viewer of my films expects a few things from me, they see roughly where I am going to go,” Guiraudie explained in the press kit. “I am well aware of always working on the same questions, the same reasons, and I play with that, with what is expected of me. But I also want to surprise, to surprise myself, to renew myself. Perhaps it was also time that desire did not find its outcome in sex.”—Vadim Rizov
My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow
Julia Loktev, whose previous work includes the dramas The Loneliest Planet and Day Night Day Night as well as the documentary Moment of Impact, was in Russia working on a film about the threats to independent journalists there when Putin’s war on Ukraine broke out. Having been filming the journalists of TV Rain, the country’s last remaining independent TV channel, she continued her project, using her iPhone to capture journalist and on-camera host Anna Nemzer as well as other young female journalists and dissenters as they react to the shock of the invasion, cover it in real time, and grapple with the implications of the war, and Russia’s crackdown on its critics, on their own lives. Shown in five parts totaling 324 minutes, this urgent, propulsive, startling intimate work will be followed later by a part two, in which Loktev follows her subjects as they continue their work in exile. — Scott Macaulay
When Filmmaker spoke to RaMell Ross in 2015 for our 25 New Faces series, the director spoke of his days as a basketball player, political aide and, finally, a photographer with work published by the New York Times and Aperture. That photographic work lead directly into his debut documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening; about that connection, Ross told us, “My film naturally extends from my large-format photography, which looks at my insider-outsider relationship with the historic South and considers the iconic use of the African-American body. It uses recumbency, gesture, gaze and the actions of obstruction and concealment to incite interpretation and access to my fiction. Here, the tropes of skin are suspended in an arch of meaning to provide space to deconstruct our thoughts as they assist the decoding of the images.” Which makes Ross the inspired choice to direct, in his narrative debut, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel Nickel Boys, which in addition to employing a first-person point-of-view is shot in 1:33 aspect ratio. (Look for Vadim Rizov’s interview with Ross in the days ahead.) — Scott Macaulay
Co-directed by an Israeli-Palestinian collective of four, No Other Land was filmed in the West Bank, in Masafer Yatta, where Israeli military and increasingly civilians have forced Palestinians out from their villages. Premiered at the 74th Berlinale, the debut feature won both the juried documentary award and the Audience Award in its section, Panorama—amply deserved honors for its adroit, affecting and infuriating portrayal of a tight-knit Palestinian community resisting Israel’s relentless campaign of expulsion. Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, two of the co-directors, are also extensively on screen. Adra, whose father was also an activist, offers the film’s primary eyes and ears, both through the offenses he hustles to record at mortal risk—he’s essentially a war photographer who lives inside the war—and through the archival video that conveys his memories of growing up there. Abraham, an Israeli journalist, befriends Adra in the course of reporting, and the two grow closer as he gets invested in the survival of Adra’s community, whose adults and children we see menaced, shot at and pushed into living in a cave as homes, a schoolhouse and other buildings are demolished.—Nicolas Rapold
David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is emotionally rooted in the death of his wife Carolyn after 43 years of marriage. Vincent Cassel is undeniably a physical stand-in for Cronenberg, as confirmed in an interview: “Vincent’s approach as an actor was this character is David, and I am going to try to replicate David. He’s wearing clothes that I would not normally wear, and his hair is coiffed a little more carefully than mine. But undeniably he’s done a very good job of looking and sounding like me.” The latter is inaccurate; Cassel sounds less like Cronenberg than Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is funny and pleasingly offbeat, as is the movie as a whole. The degree to which it’s self-conscious of itself as a camp object, as often with Cronenberg, is unclear, but there’s a definite tilt towards comedy from the get-go, when Cassel’s character Karsh goes on a blind date and explains to the woman that the titular shrouds are placed on buried corpses, allowing their grieving loved ones to see their bodies as they decompose—and that he’s recently upgraded the visual resolution to 8K.—Vadim Rizov
Arriving unexpectedly on point with its look at a failed Presidential assassin — Sarah Jane Moore, who in 1985 shot at President Gerald Ford on a San Francisco sidewalk — Suburban Fury, an NYFF world premiere, is Robinson Devor’s return to documentary following 2007’s Zoo, which made the case of a Boeing aircraft engineer who died after having sex with a horse into a prescient look at the internet’s abilities to form communities around taboo paraphilias. Working with regular collaborator, Charles Mudede (a 2005 25 New Face), Devor again draws connections — according to the NYFF blurb, they crisscross “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.” — Scott Macaulay
Shot on 16mm stock, Viêt and Nam is at once a touching portrait of provincial poverty, a rousing love affair between two men, a heartbreaking exploration of a relationship between a mother and son, and a depiction of being haunted by a history that’s a relentless and faceless ghost. As solidified in his shorts Déjà Vu (2014) and How Green Was the Calabash Garden (2016), which play with illusion and memory, and his experimental documentaries The City of Mirrors: A Fictional Biography (2016) and The Tree House (2019), which find filmmakers looking back at history from dystopic futures, Quý uses cinema as a means of crossing invisible borders while questioning their existence in the first place. By intertwining personal narrative, speculative fiction, and documentary filmmaking techniques, he has become one of Southeast Asia’s most vital contemporary voices.—Jason Tan Liwag
Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s unsurprisingly riveting Union is the one Sundance selection most assuredly not coming to Prime Video anytime soon — or ever. (Nor I’m guessing will the doc’s producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone be receiving any Amazon Studios Producers Awards from the Sundance Institute. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bezos behemoth did try to bid for Union to then bury it.) As its title succinctly implies, the film follows a group of very brave, and admirably unrelenting, activist-workers in their fight to unionize a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8 back in 2021. Calling themselves the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), and led by the media-savvy Chris Smalls, it’s the classic David vs. Goliath setup. Only with Maing (whose Crime + Punishment followed the NYPD 12 whistleblowing cops) and Story (whose The Hottest August deeply embedded the Canadian director in NYC) jointly behind the lens — and on the frontlines — there’s enough street cred between the two to inspire the unwavering trust of their rightfully vigilant characters. Which, in turn, gives the critically acclaimed duo access to a tight-knit world the Blue Origin founder might try to infiltrate but could never imagine.—Lauren Wissot
Universal Language was made, it claims, “In the name of friendship,” and set in a fictitious Winnipeg, Manitoba where Farsi is the official language, the film is a parade of gags firing off the screen faster than I could scribble down one-word descriptors of each, beginning with a Marx Bros. inspired riff on Abbas Kiarostami’s education films (including a young student dressed as Groucho). Like Rankin’s previous feature, The Twentieth Century (2019), a comedy about Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s rise to power, I don’t feel nearly Canadian enough to get most of what this film is making fun of (and Canadians find nothing funnier than themselves), but the barrage of sight gags, which evoke comedians like Jacques Tati, Guy Maddin (natch) and, especially, Elia Suleiman, eventually pounded my funny bone into submission. By the time Rankin appears as himself (maybe) to consider his place under the foreign palimpsests that create Canadian national identity, its drunken stumble down memory lane transformed into a melancholy I managed to take seriously only because it was so shady.—Blake Williams
In order to collect the shots for the adaptation-film-collage that would become You Burn Me, the filmmaker traveled between New York and San Sebastian (where he teaches at the EQZE film school, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola), which gave him the possibility to “develop the material, watch it and think through themes in search of new ones” before he went back to Buenos Aires to shoot in the main actress’s garden. An intimate setting was crucial for approaching such a decisively non-dramatic text as Cesare Pavese’s “Sea Foam” (a fictional dialogue between the poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis, who proverbially share the sea as their final resting place), where two voices create worlds out of their articulated feelings, rather than imagistic storytelling. During the Berlinale, I sat down with Piñeiro, cinematographer Tomas Paula Marques and actress and musician Gabi Saidón to talk through the ways in which the film, premiering in the festival’s Encounters section, transcends language. (The film next plays at the Jeonju International Film Festival and will be released in the US by Cinema Guild.) However conceptually rich, the conversation could not be complete without a very important material element—the film’s non-linear timeline—which was hand drawn across 30 meters of tracing paper and then sketched out on a napkin for the purpose of our interview.—Savina Petkova
