Given what it took to arrive back at this point, anyone who introduced the first press and industry screening of this year’s New York Film Festival would have gotten a nice round of applause—I too am excited to be back at the Walter Reade Theater, my favorite NYC auditorium on a sheer projection quality/screen size/audio fidelity basis. But all politics is local, and NYFF’s significance relative to the larger festival landscape shouldn’t obscure the specific context of this year’s edition. With its union chapter recognized, Film at Lincoln Center’s staff are now attempting to negotiate and ratify a contract. The […]

A number of cinematic styles, narrative modes, and political agendas collide in Bacurau, one of two South American films on NYFF’s Main Slate this year. Urgent, yet vague enough to feel timeless, the film depicts a form of unhinged white supremacy in the outback of northern Brazil. We’re told up top, quite ominously, that Bacurau takes place “a few years from now,” as if to suggest that the wholly irrational racism herein is just around the corner. An angry movie, at once frightening and funny, it’s bound to rattle viewers aesthetically, politically, or both. Bacurau, a fictional town, is already […]

For 20 years running, the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have confronted a single fundamental facet of modern life: class. From their breakout La Promesse (1996) to The Unknown Girl (2016), the messy tangle of money, employment, and morality has defined their work. The brothers take a hard turn, in subject if not style, with Young Ahmed. The film debuted at Cannes, like their previous seven features, where it won the Best Director prize earlier this year. Despite that honor–which they won over Almodóvar, Tarantino, and Malick among other heavyweights–the film has earned the harshest reviews of the Dardennes’ career. […]

Arnaud Desplechin’s returned to his hometown onscreen many times: “I still have to go back in my tracks, as a malediction—not as a dream, but as a curse,” he’s said of Roubaix, where My Sex Life and My Golden Years‘ protagonist stand-in Paul Dédalus hails from and where A Christmas Tale unfolds. Desplechin’s also shot digitally before, but this is the first time he’s ever aggressively leaned into it: like Tale, Oh Mercy! also starts during the holiday season, but—opening strings of Christmas lights over city streets aside—the dominant colors aren’t red and green but the familiar digital color-correction staples of orange and blue. […]

Vitalina Varela is a luxuriantly claustrophobic staging of a story Pedro Costa’s title subject, playing herself, first orally recounted in 2014’s Horse Money. The world Costa constructs around her is, initially, an endless night—daylight is, at best, the barest suggestive sliver peeking in from outside. As the narrative unfolds, more sunlight penetrates interiors, but a full radiant glare seems, at best, a hypothetical perk for people with more money, and in the very final-stretch shots in exterior day, colors have been graded down enough where the effect isn’t overwhelming but mutedly in keeping. There isn’t a pixel Costa hasn’t accounted for in his […]

NYFF has announced the main slate for this year’s edition, set to run from September 27 to October 13. In addition to the previously announced opening night (Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman), centerpiece (Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story) and closing night screenings (Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn), 23 titles have been announced. In addition to expected titles from established auteurs including Pedro Almodóvar, Kelly Reichardt, the Dardennes brothers, Arnaud Desplechin and Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or-winning Parasite, the selection includes deeper cuts like Pietro Marcello’s loose Jack London adaptation Martin Eden and Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come, the third feature from the director of You All Are Captains and Mimosas. Below, from […]

For otherwise underinformed viewers like myself, one of the functions of watching Jia Zhangke’s movies in real time as they came out was pedagogical: because I don’t read the news enough, I’m not sure I would have known about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam otherwise, let alone developed a visceral understanding of its impact. It was Jia’s extended project, in narrative and nonfiction films made during its construction, to continually integrate footage documenting the destruction of houses where some 1.4 million people lived, the subsequent flooding of valley living areas and the fallout from residents’ displacement. These images […]

Hong Sang-soo has long been an NYFF staple; last year they showed two of his three works for 2017. I didn’t write about the one that didn’t make it in, Claire’s Camera, which is a) by far the most uncomplicatedly funny/breezy thing he’s made in a while b) nearly made me jump out of my seat with an insert cut. I can’t remember now what the cut was to; the point is, in the extremely limited visual language Hong’s codified over time, the one-time use of previously off-limits but otherwise totally normal devices really gets viewer attention. This is, of course, on some […]

It’s fitting that the first two films I saw at NYFF after returning from TIFF were Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana and Errol Morris’s American Dharma. It’s not that you never hear Our 45th President’s name in Canada (given that we’re at Twitter war with them or whatever the status is), but it doesn’t come up as much; to return to two movies that wrestle with Trump’s America was very much a “welcome home, whether you like it or not” moment. Monrovia is a highlight among Wiseman’s recent work, while Dharma continues what’s basically been a decade-plus downward spiral for Morris; nonetheless, the two pair […]

One of the highlights of the 55th New York Film Festival was the Master Class with Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman. Hosted by Kent Jones, the 90-minute presentation covered a wide range of subjects and also included key clips from the work of the two great cinematographers. Storaro and Lachman have been friends for over 40 years. Lachman claims that he was Storaro’s first American fan, after seeing both The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist at the 1970 NYFF. He subsequently worked with Storaro on Luna, when the Italian DP began shooting American movies but had not yet secured a […]