New York Film Festival #46 Sept. 26-oct. 12, 2008

[Chris Knipp]

INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS

24 City (Jia)
Afterschool (Campos)
Ashes of Time Redux (Wong)
Bullet in the Head (Rosales)
Changling (Eastwood)
Che (Soderbergh)
Chouga (Omirbaev)
Christmas Tale, A (Desplechin)
Class, The (Cantet)
Four Nights with Anna (Skowlomowski)
Gororrah (Garrone)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Leigh)
Headless Woma, The (Martel)
Hunger (McQueen)
I'm Gonna Explode (Naranj0)
It's Hard Being Loved by Jerks (Leconte)
Let It Rain (Jaoui)
Lola Montes (Orphuls)
Night and Day (Hong)
Northern Land, The (Botelho)
Serbis (Mondoza)
Summer Hours (Assayas)
Tokoy Sonta (Kurosawa)
Tony Manero (Larrain)
Tulpan (Dvortsevoy)
Waltz with Bashir (Folman)
Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt)
Windmill Movie, The (Olch)
Wrestler, The (Aronofsky)

THE COMPLETE SLATE FOR THE NYFF 2008.

The FSLC festival page is here.

In future reviews and information on the NYFF 2009 will appear in the Filmleaf Festival Coverage section starting here.

August 12, 2008
The Film Society of Lincoln Center (FSLC) announced the festival slate today. Here it is, with their press release blurbs to describe the films. The NYFF is highly selective, so this is it, 27 films and one retrospective film. I expect to review them all for you. There will be some sidebar series too.

The Class / Entre les murs
Laurent Cantet, France, 2008; 128m
A tough, lively and altogether revelatory look inside a high school classroom, enacted by real teachers and students.

CENTERPIECE
Changeling
Clint Eastwood, USA, 2008; 140m
Angelina Jolie is a single mother whose troubles are just beginning when her son goes
missing in Clint Eastwood’s majestic fact-based period drama.

CLOSING NIGHT (AVERY FISHER HALL)
The Wrestler
Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2008; 109m
Mickey Rourke gives the performance of a lifetime in Darren Aronofsky’s raw and raucous new movie.

24 City / Er shi si cheng ji
Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong/Japan, 2008; 112m
The rise and fall of a Chinese factory town is chronicled in this film, straddling the border between fiction and documentary.

Afterschool
Antonio Campos, USA, 2008; 122m
When two students at a posh prep school accidentally overdose, a student filmmaker struggles to create an appropriate tribute for them.

Ashes of Time Redux
Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong, 2008; 93m
The final, definitive version of Wong Kar Wai’s modernist take on the classic Chinese martial arts tale.

Bullet in the Head / Trio en la cabeza
Jaime Rosales, Spain/France, 2008; 85m
A powerful, engrossing meditation on politics and the contemporary cult of surveillance.

Che
Steven Soderbergh, France/Spain, 2008; 268m
Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Spanish-language epic about Che Guevara’s revolutionary military campaigns in Cuba and Bolivia features a brilliant lead performance by Benicio del Toro.

Chouga / Shuga
Darezhan Omirbaev, France/Kazakhstan, 2007; 91m
A Kazakh, minimalist adaptation of Anna Karenina.

A Christmas Tale / Un conte de Noël
Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008; 150m
Arnaud Desplechin’s grand banquet of a movie brims with life, as Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos and the other members of a marvelous ensemble cast come home for Christmas.

Four Nights with Anna / Cztery noce z Anna
Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland/France, 2008; 87m
This visually mesmerizing tale of a shy man and his obsession with the woman across the way marks the triumphant return of Polish maestro Jerzy Skolimowski.

Gomorrah / Gomorra
Matteo Garrone, Italy, 2008; 137m
A blistering version of Roberto Saviano’s modern true crime classic about the modern-day Neapolitan mafia.

Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh, UK, 2008; 118m
An affectionate portrait of an unattached, 30-something London schoolteacher coming toterms with the fact that she’s no longer young.

The Headless Woman / La mujer sin cabeza
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain, 2008; 87m
Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s powerful third feature takes us into an altered perceptual state with a woman who hits something with her car.

Hunger
Steve McQueen, UK, 2008; 96m
British visual artist Steve McQueen’s feature film debut is an uncompromising look at the hunger strike led by IRA prisoner Bobby Sands in 1974.

I’m Going to Explode / Voy a explotar
Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2008; 103m
Two Mexican teenagers go into hiding to see the reactions their disappearance will get from relatives and friends.

Let It Rain / Parlez-moi de la pluie
Agnès Jaoui, France, 2008; 110m
A portrait of a rising feminist politician may be the ticket to fame and jobs for two aspiring filmmakers.

RETROSPECTIVE
Lola Montès
Max Ophuls, France/West Germany, 1955; 115m
The life of the legendary courtesan and circus performer—lover of kings, knaves and Franz Liszt—is presented in its definitive, restored version.

Night and Day / Bam guan nat
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2008; 144m
When his life in Seoul becomes too complicated, an artist hightails it to Paris—but things don’t get any easier.

The Northern Land / A Corte do Norte
João Botelho, Portugal, 2008; 101m
A woman searches for the truth about her life in the stories of ancestors and the distant manor house they inhabited.

Serbis
Brillante Mendoza, Philippines/France, 2008; 90m
A family tries to quell the tensions tearing it apart while it struggles to keep the family business—a porn movie theater—afloat.

Summer Hours / L’heure d’eté
Olivier Assayas, France, 2008; 103m
Juliette Binoche is one of three siblings brought face-to-face with time and mortality by the sudden death of her mother in this moving new film from Olivier Assayas.

Tokyo SonataKiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan/Netherlands, 2008; 85m
A Japanese family struggles to re-define itself after the father loses his corporate job.

Tony Manero
Pablo Larrain, Chile/Brazil, 2008; 98m
In the dark days of the Pinochet dictatorship, a John Travolta wannabe blazes a murderous trail through the back alleys of Chile.

Tulpan
Sergey Dvortsevoy, Germany/Kazakhstan/Poland/Russia/Switzerland, 2008; 100m
Winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Tulpan charts an aspiring herdsman’s efforts to win the attention of his intended.

Waltz with Bashir / Vals in BashirAri Folman, Israel/Germany/France, 2008; 90m
Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s haunting autobiographical memory piece about his experiences as a soldier during the 1982 war in Lebanon are given a hyper-real spin by state-of-the-art animation.

Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008; 80m
In Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to her acclaimed Old Joy, Wendy (Michelle Williams) searches for her dog Lucy. The troubled spirit of modern America is beautifully evoked along the way.

The Windmill Movie
Alexander Olch, USA, 2008; 80m
Filmmaker Alexander Olch, using material left by the late filmmaker Richard Rogers for a never completed film autobiography, attempts to make sense of the life of his former teacher and friend.