New York Film Festival 2018 (forum)

[Chris Knipp]

A new press release about a surprise NYFF screening: Jonah Hill's directorial debut feature.

New York, NY (October 1, 2018) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center reveals the NYFF secret screening as Jonah Hill’s Mid90s, making its New York premiere at the 56th New York Film Festival (September 28 – October 14).

Jonah Hill’s directorial debut is a frank, intimate, and emotionally layered reflection on an unlikely coming-of-age in the world of 90s L.A. skate culture. Thirteen-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic), growing up with a loving but largely absent mother (Katherine Waterston) and a resentful brother (Lucas Hedges), seeks refuge with older kids who hang out (and barely work) at a Los Angeles skate shop. The energy between Stevie and his crew, played by Ryder McLaughlin, Olan Prenatt, Gio Galicia, and Na-kel Smith, fuels a film that is at once lyrical, hilarious, terrifying, and just…real.

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Kent Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming, and Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming.

Tickets for Mid90s are on sale now and are $25; $20 for students and Film Society members

[Chris Knipp]

Click here for thumbnail New York Movie journal revies of five more NYFF Main Slate films: Tamara Jenkins' Private Life,, Olivier Assayas' Non-fiction/Doubles vies, Ying Liang's A Family Tour, Lee Chang-dong's Burning, and Claire Denis' High Life.

[Chris Knipp]

PRIVATE LIFE (Tamara Jenkins 2018).

Eleven years since Jenkins' last film, Savages, this one seems still focused on the narrow aim of (affectionately) satirizing a hip white middle class demographic. Kathryn Kahn and Paul Giamatti play a couple in their forties, literary types living in the Lower East Side, going nuts trying with the help of a fancy fertility clinic to have a baby. Warmly received by the NYFF audience.

[Chris Knipp]

NON-FICTION/DOUBLES VIES (Olivier Assayas 2018).

A witty, fast-paced, smartly edited incarnation of traditional French farce, focused on two criss-crossing couples (and some others), with Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne and Pascal Greggory, and a lot of debating of entertainment, media, and the current cyber world vs. print. The result is both exhilarating and calming. Another feather in the cap of the versatile Olivier Assayas.

[Chris Knipp]

A FAMILY TOUR (Ying Liang 2018)

Things have changed since I watched Ying's mini-budget Taking Father Home with Travis Kirby in 2006 and Travis reviewed it disapprovingly in the Festival Coverage section. The director's subsequent films so angered the repressive Mainland Chinese regime that Ying was forced into exile with his wife and small child in Hong Kong. This film, his first since their exile began sic years ago, depicts with sad precision an experience they had meeting furtively with family members by joining a strict Mainland-run guided tour of Taiwan. Visa problems in Hong Kong prevented him from being present for the small NYFF screening. This was painful and even sometimes boring to watch but also very true and sometimes poetic and delicate, and fans of Chinese cinema need to see Ying's films.

[Chris Knipp]

BURNING / 버닝 (Lee Chang-dong 2018)

Sexual frustration, class, mystery, envy and revenge in a masterful spinoff of a 1992 Haruki Murakami story blended with Faulkner. One of the 2018 NYFF's true masterpieces.

[Chris Knipp]

A traumatic early scene in Never Look Away

Preview: a fine new German film (not in the festival)
Never Look Away (Florian Henckel von Donnersmark)

Another great movie I just saw a couple days ago (Sony Pictures Classics): NEVER LOOK AWAY (written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of The Lives of Others). Three hours long and starring Tom Schilling of A Coffee in Berlin, it traces the life of an artist in Germany from the Thirties to the Sixties and relates to the careers of a number of artists, particularly to Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. I have to hold my review for theatrical release, either the end of November or early 2019. It is the German entry for Best Foreign Oscar, and it's flawed in a few ways but still great - a splendid film whose treatment of the life of art and the art of the postwar period is worlds beyond the next tumultuous Van Gogh saga, or story of Picasso's women. It's surprising and gratifying to see the great events of the Twentieth Century drawn from the point of view of an important post-war German artist. It's subject is nothing less than modern art's fractured search for meaning in a world of exhausted ideas and shattered feelings.