New York Film Festival 2018 (forum)

[Chris Knipp]

An introduction to the 56th NYFF from A.O. Scott of the New York Times

Read it here: CLICK.

A quote. Why should people attend this festival? he asks. Well, because. . . "We are too easily lulled into complacency by pretentious prestige television, Oscar-thirsty biopics and presold franchises. We need reminders of strangeness and daring, films that don’t just confirm what we already thought we knew. Above all we need to be inoculated against the temptations of nostalgia, to recognize the golden age of right now. . .What I’m saying is that the presence in the New York festival lineup of new work by Claire Denis, Jia Zhangke, Alfonso Cuarón, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong and Olivier Assayas is news."

On Olivier Assayas' Non-Fiction/Doubles vies (reviewed in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage already: "Mr. Assayas’s “Non-Fiction” is in effect a series of arguments — lofty debates about the impact of digital technology on French politics and culture conducted by sophisticated Parisians who occasionally pause from their discourses for a nice meal or a bit of adultery. A French movie, in other words, almost to the point of deliberate and sly self-parody."

But Juliette Binoche plays it completely straight and relaxed. What about her Claire Denis' High Life, which Binoche is also prominent in? (and which was also just reviewed on this site? It's "a mind-bending science-fiction allegory elegantly accoutered with sex, violence and metaphysical speculation. Genre movies are something of a rarity in the main slate, but Ms. Denis’s daring, dialectical sensibility, her shrewd fusion of the visceral and the cerebral, transcend genre." Which he more or less says, is what good directors always do. Don't they?