NYFF
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NYFF 2019 Announces Main Slate Titles
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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 6, 2019 -
NYFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 3: Ash is Purest White, Three Faces
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 3, 2018 -
NYFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 2: Grass, Hotel by the River
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 2, 2018 -
NYFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 1: Monrovia, Indiana, American Dharma
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 30, 2018 -
Color, Crews and Shooting Digitally: Ed Lachman and Vittorio Storaro at NYFF 2017
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 […]
by Jamie Stuart on Oct 13, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Mindhunter (Episodes 1-2), Good Streamable Chronological Narrative Content
The first two episodes of Netflix’s Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher, are slightly stylistically diluted but still distinctively his. Fincher also directed the last two episodes of the ten-episode first season, which has already been renewed for a second prior to dropping this Friday — whether I make it to his bookending episodes I have no idea, but fans should at least take a look at this starting point. “Peak TV,” or at least the limited-run series, has increasingly accommodated one director who wants to do it all: this year has seen airings of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Big Little […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 12, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Let the Sunshine In
At Cannes, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (subtitled Bright Sunshine In on the DCP) premiered to many nonplussed reactions. By some considerable measure her talkiest film, Sunshine tracks a painter, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), as she slams straight from one romantic dalliance into another. That is, effectively, the entire plot: there are a few scenes that do not involve men, but in general the film marches inexorably and restlessly through a series of failed partnerships. The dance and sex scenes are very familiar — Denis still gets defamiliarizingly close to skins and heads — but the rest is not, necessarily. Denis has […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2017 -
Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Faces Places, The Rape of Recy Taylor, Last Flag Flying
Seventeen years ago, Agnès Varda filmed her own hand in horror. The blotches, the wrinkles, the bulging blue veins: These may as well be the hands of a stranger. “My hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says in her 2000 film The Gleaners & I. Despite the forebodings of death in Gleaners and 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès is still with us; what a gift it is to have her still around. Varda, now 89, has partnered with French artist JR to co-direct another freewheeling, full-of-life documentary. Faces Places overflows with the […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 4, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Hong/Garrel/Hong
NYFF’s second week of press screenings were scheduled in such an apropos way: over 36 hours, you could watch two Hong Sang-soo films sandwiched around Philippe Garrel’s latest. Two of my absolute favorite working filmmakers, they share at least two important traits: creating an illusion of verisimilitude so strong it’s near-impossible to catch anyone onscreen “acting,” and an obsessive return to the same super-straight-male preoccupations, with the Venn diagram decidedly overlapping at infidelity. (Claire Denis is a big fan of both, and her Let the Sunshine In acts as an unexpected companion piece to the films discussed here; more on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 2, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Last Flag Flying
Until relatively recently, Richard Linklater’s hopscotching across genres and budgetary tiers had him generally pegged as an unpredictable magpie whose next move would never be clear; now, certain circles of online discourse have him basically pegged as the alpha male celebrator of white patriarchy (I did my song and dance on this a while ago, no reprise necessary). Setting aside those pejoratively-described constants, I think it’s true that starting with Before Midnight (the exact pivot point is arguable) the mandatory elements of A Film By Richard Linklater have become pretty fixed (put another way, I certainly don’t expect faithful filmings of mediocre plays […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 28, 2017
