Nyff 2013

[Chris Knipp]

New York Film Festival 2013
September 27 - October 13, 2013

Filmleaf's NYFF 2013 Festival Coverage reviews thread begins here.

Links to reviews:
12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen 2013)
About Time (Richard Curtis 2013)
Abuse of Weakness (Catherine Breillat 2013)
Alan Partridge [Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa] (Declan Lowney 2013)
All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor 2013)
American Promise (Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson 2013)
At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman 2013)
Bastards (Claire Denis 2013)
Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d'Adèle; Abdelatif Kéchiche 2013)
Burning Bush (Agnieszka Holland 2013)
Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass 2013)
Child of God (James Franco 2013)
Club Sandwich (Fernando Eimcke 2013)
Gloria (Sebastián Lelioa 2013)
Her (Spike Jonze 2013)
Immigrant, The (James Gray 2013)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen 2013)
Invisible Woman, The (Ralph Fiennes 2013)
Jealousy (Philippe Garrel 2013)
Jimmy, Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (Arndau Desplechin 2013)
Last of the Unjust, The (Claude Lanzmann 2013)
Like Father, Like Son (Hirakazu Koreeda 2013)
Missing Picture, The (Rithy Panh 2013)
My Name Is Hmmm... (agnès b. 2013)
Nebraska (Alexander Payne 2013)
Nobody's Daughter (Hong Sang-soo 2013)
North, the End of History (Lav Diaz 2013)
Omar (Hany Abu-Assad 2013)
Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch 2013)
Real (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2013)
Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The (Ben Stiller 2013)
Square, The (Jehane Noujaim 2013)
Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie 2013)
Stray Dogs (Tsiai Ming-liang 2013)
Touch of Sin, A (Jia Zhang-ke 2013)
Week-End, Le (Roger Mitchell 2013)
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Corneliu Porumboiu 2013)
Wind Rises, The (Hayao Miyazaki 2013)

The main slate has been announced and is here. There are 35 films, the biggest main slate yet. There are usually 25-30. The Main Slate is also listed at the start of the 2013 NYFF Filmleaf Festival Coverage thread.

REMEMBER: This is the thread where individual Filmleaf reviews of the films will be announced with links to the Festival Coverage section, and it's also the place for members to post any comments they wish about the festival, the films, and the reviews.


A quick tour of the Main Slate. *

A lot from Cannes, as usual

"Familiar faces abound in the lineup, which features over 20 filmmakers making a return to NYFF, some of them for the fifth, sixth, even seventh time! Repeat returnees include Catherine Breillat (Abuse of Weakness), the Coen brothers (Inside Llewyn Davis), Claire Denis (Bastards), Arnaud Desplechin (Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Agnieska Holland (Burning Bush), Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive), Alexander Payne (Nebraska), and Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Evil)" -- Filmlinc, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, festival introduction page. All these (except Burning Bush and more come from this spring's Cannes festival, including items that won six of Cannes' big prizes, twelve Cannes films in all. Two other Cannes films included are Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin and James Gray's The Immigrant (with Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard). Also included from Cannes is Alain Giraudie's controversial (and admired) French film of anonymous gay sex and murder, The Stranger by the Lake; Strand Releasing will bring this out. And less blessed at Cannes but included is NYFF fave Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (ill received and by some, mocked). Last but not least is the top Cannes winner, Abdellatif Kechiche's steamy study of a youthful lesbian affair, Blue is the Warmest Color, with Léa Seydoux. There are some titles from Locarno and Venice too. There are also five English films and eight French ones. Is the fact that there's only one from Latin America due to the absence of Richard Peña? Let's hope not! More likely it's more than anything simply due to what was good and suitable for inclusion in the slate when it was made up this year.

More comedies. . . opening, centerpiece, and closing night films.

This is the first slate supervised by Kent Jones, the new Programming Director and Selection Committee (jury) Chair since Richard Peña retired. Variety suggests that Jones' different taste may be most visible in the greater number of comedies. They start with Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Spike Jonze's Her, the centerpiece and closing night films, respectively; and continue with Around Time (Richard Curtis), Le Week-End (Roger Mitchell), and Alan Partridge (Declan Lowney, with Steve Coogan, an actor who was featured in the NYFF 2005 film by Michael Winterbottom, Tristram Shandy ).

The opening night film is Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks, the true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years. (There are plenty of hijackings these days by Somalis, and the Danish film A Hijacking from earlier this year (ND/NF 2013) is a good fictionalized account of one that this will invite comparison with.)

Claire Denis is included, with Basterds. From J.C. Chandor, whose (Margin Call) was a highlight of ND/NF 2011, comes a one-man dialogue-less shipwreck film starring Robert Redvord, All Is Lost. Agnieszka Holland is back with Burning Bush. The Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki is represented with his first film in five years, The Wind Rises, as is NYFF regular Hong Sang-soo with Nobody's Daughter Haewon. Frederick Wiseman is on hand again with At Berkeley. Hirakasu Koreeda is on hand with Like Father, Like Son, another film about kids (like Nodoby Knows and the FCS 2012 I Wish).

There are some films from actors-turned-director: Ben Stiller's Walter Mitty, James Franco's Southern Gothic tale Child of God, and Ralph Fiennes' Dickens biopic, The Invisible Woman. The French clothing designer agnès B. dons the director's mantle with My Name Is Hmmm.

What about heavy stuff?

There may be more lightness, but the traditional NYFF serious, heavy films are not missing. Three or four clearly qualify in this category. One is Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture, about "four years spent under the Khmer Rouge and the destruction of the filmmaker's family and his culture; without a single memento left behind." Panh "creates his'missing images' with narration and painstakingly executed dioramas." Claude Lanzmann's 218 min. The Last of the Unjust rexamines Adolph Eichmann while primarily focusing on Benjamin Memelstein, the last Jewish elder of Theresienstadt. In his 250 min. North, the End of History Filippino director Lav Diaz delivers his version of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Tsai Ming-liang's 138-min. Stray Dogs concerns a homeless family "living the cruelest of existences on the ragged edges of the modern world." Also serious and political are Jehane Noujaim's portrait of events unfolding in Meidan at-Tahrir, the Cairo epicenter of the Egyptian revolution of 25 January 2011, through the Arab Spring and beyond, an updated documentary. Out of the Palestinian Occupied Territories from Hany Abu-Assad, director of Paradise Now (NYFF 2005), comes Omar, "a tense, gripping, ticking clock thriller about betrayal, suspected and real." Unflinching and long is Brewster and Stephenson's 140 min. doc about two black kids who attend Manhattan's prestigious Dalton School, which covers over a decade in a family's life at home and outside.

On the arid, conceptual side from Romanian Corneliu Porumboiu is When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, a "rigorously structured and fascinatingly oblique new film from Corneliu Porumboiu that examines the life of a film director during the moments on a shoot when the camera isn’t rolling."

Other cool stuff?

For fans of independent French cinema and the Garrel family (some detest one or both; I like both) there will be Jealousy, directed by Philippe Garrel and starring his son Louis and Anna Mouglalis.

Sebastián Lelio's Gloria, from Chile, concerns a middleaged woman who finds romance with some comic consequences.

I've already referred to Claire Denis' Bastards twice, but I want to mention it treats a French sex ring scandal as a noir, and is described by Variety as a "hypnotic nocturnal thriller. " This has Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille -- and Lola Créton "wandering the streets naked except for high heels" (Mike D'Anglo at Cannes for AV Club, who gave it a B).

Breillat's Abuse of Weakness, based on her own 2004 stroke and exploitation by the "star swinidler" Christophe Rocancourt, we may note, stars Isabelle Huppert in the main role.

This post has now mentioned just about all the Main Slate selections, but remember you can see detailed listings of them both in the Filmleaf Festival Coverage NYFF 2013 thread, and on the Film Society of Lincoln Center's website page for the festival, where you'll find the Film Society's short blurbs describing, and of course hyping, each film.

I will focus on the Main slate in my coverage and will try to provide a review of all the titles. However bear in mind that besides the Main Slate the NYFF includes other gala and special events, documentary sections, spotlights on emerging filmmakers, and panels that will be announced in subsequent days and weeks as well as NYFF’s Views From the Avant-Garde and Convergence programs. Since the Lincoln Center remodel completed two years ago the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center across the street from the Walter Reade Theater provides two small theaters and three screens, permitting more screenings, along with the main public venue, Alice Tully Hall. Watch the NYFF website for news about these other events.

[Chris Knipp]

ADDITIONAL TITLE.

The FSLC has added another feature film to this year's NYFF Main Slate so now it's 36 instead of 35 (last year it was 28).

REAL (2013) 127m
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Country: Japan
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first feature since 2008’s Tokyo Sonata, his most romantic movie yet, is an exquisitely crafted sci-fi fable about young love, marriage, and the merging of two psyches in the face of death.

I am happy about this addition but it's looking more and more like the screening schedule will be grueling with so many more movies to watch in the same number of days as before.

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF51 Gala Tributes will celebrate actress Cate Blanchett and actor/director Ralph Fiennes!
Read More

[Chris Knipp]

TELLURIDE, AUG. 29-SEPT. 2, 2013

The 40th Telluride Film Festival has announced its main program, the ‘SHOW,' below. Some of these are NYFF Main Slate items. A notable one excluded from the NYFF is Farhadi's THE PAST, which was much admired at Cannes. LA MAISON DE LA RADIO was delayed from its earlier planned inclusion in this year's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. THE UNKNOWN UNKNON is a one-one-one interview and review of the career around the Iraq war of Donald Rumsfeld, no doubt a kind of sequel to Errol Morris's famous film about Robert S. McNamara, THE FOG OF WAR. Other titles are worth looking into. Fore more details about this year's Telluride, go here. The Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado, just before the NYFF, was co-founded 40 years ago with James Card and Bill Pence by Tom Luddy, who's still at the helm. Each year the fest chooses a cool "Guest Director," and Errol Morris and Alexander Payne are among these, as well as: Laurie Anderson, Peter Bogdanovich, John Boorman, J.P. Gorin, Edith Kramer, Peter Sellars, Stephen Sondheim, Bertrand Tavernier and Slavoj Zizek.

Titles I'll be reviewing in the NYFF are highlighted in silver. A Cannes prize-winner I miss from the NYFF list is Farhadi's THE PAST, included at Telluride.

Philippe Garrel's BEFORE THE WINTER CHILL isn't listed elsewhere (the NYFF includes what IMDb lists as his newest film, JEALOUSY). CHILL may be the "untitled 2012 project" Allociné lists for Garrel, a sequel to A BURNING HOT SUMMER/UN ÉTÉ BRÛLANT with Louis Garrel, Monica Belluci, Laura Smet, and Michel Piccoli. It looks like he was working on two movies at once, or in close succession.



· ALL IS LOST (d. J.C. Chandor, U.S., 2013)

· BEFORE THE WINTER CHILL (d. Philippe Claudel, France, 2013)

· BETHLEHEM (d. Yuval Adler, Israel, 2013)

· BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (d. Abdellatif Kechiche, France, 2013)

· BURNING BUSH (d. Agnieszka Holland, Czech Republic, 2013)

· DEATH ROW: BLAINE MILAM + ROBERT FRATTA (d. Werner Herzog, U.S., 2013)

· FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS (d. Mitra Farahani, U.S., 2013)

· THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN (d. Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine, U.S., 2013)

· GLORIA (d. Sebastián Lelio, Chile, 2013)

· GRAVITY (d. Alfonso Cuarón, U.S./U.K., 2013)

· IDA (d. Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland, 2013)

· INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (d. Joel and Ethan Coen, U.S., 2013)

· THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (d. Ralph Fiennes, U.K., 2013)

· LABOR DAY (d. Jason Reitman, U.S., 2013)

· THE LUNCHBOX (d. Ritesh Batra, India, 2013)

· LA MAISON DE LA RADIO (d. Nicolas Philibert, France, 2013)

· MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN (d. Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2013)

· THE MISSING PICTURE (d. Rithy Panh, Cambodia/France, 2013)

· NEBRASKA (d. Alexander Payne, U.S., 2013)

· PALO ALTO (d. Gia Coppola, U.S., 2013)

· THE PAST (d. Asghar Farhadi, France/Italy, 2013)

· SLOW FOOD STORY (d. Stefano Sardo, Italy, 2013)

· STARRED UP (d. David Mackenzie, U.K., 2013)

· TIM’S VERMEER (d. Teller, U.S., 2013)

· TRACKS (d. John Curran, Australia, 2013)

· UNDER THE SKIN (d. Jonathan Glazer, U.K., 2013)

· THE UNKNOWN KNOWN (d. Errol Morris, U.S., 2013)

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF Revivals, Documentaries, and Convergence Announced

Film Society of Lincoln Center has revealed the lineup for newly-added sections of the upcoming 51st New York Film Festival that spotlight documentaries and restorations, in addition to the Main Slate's Official Selection and Gala Tributes. Plus: the program for three days of NYFF Convergence 2013 has been announced.

TO LEARN MORE click here.

(Lots of sidebar pieces on these and other new festival aspects there now.)

[Chris Knipp]

Press screenings schedule announced.

This came with my 2013 NYFF press accreditation today 29 Aug. 2013

View the schedule in the Festival Coverage section HERE.