New York Film Festival 2019 (forum)

[Chris Knipp]

FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD

Links to Reviews:
Atlantics/Atlantique (Mati Diop 2019)
Beanpole Дылда (Kantemir Balakov 2019)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt 2019)
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello 2019)
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach 2019) Centerpiece Film
Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton) Closing Night Film
Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une lumière (Arnaud Desplechin 2019)
Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria (Pedro Almodóvar 2019)
Parasite 기생충 Gisaengchung)(Bong Joon-ho 2019)
Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (You Lee 2019)
Sibyl (Justine Triet 2019)
Synonyms/Synonymes (Nadav Lapid 20190
Traitor, The/Il traditore (Marco Bellocchio 2019)
Whistlers, Tahe/Gomera (Corneliu Porumboiu 2019)
Wild Goose Lake, The 南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan 2019)

[Chris Knipp]

New York Film Festival 2019 (Sept. 27-Oct. 13). Opening, Centerpiece, closing night films.

FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD

NYFF Opening Night Film:
Martin Scorsese's THE IRISHMAN



Scorsese dramatizes Mafia snitch tale

Martin Scorsese has agreed to lend the $140 million-budgeted, now completing The Irishman, his first film since the 2016 Silence, to open the 57th annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center on Friday, September 27th. The Irishman is an American-set biographical American crime film adapted by Steven Zaillian from Charles Brandt's book, based on taped interviews, I Heard You Paint Houses. It's the story of Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, who claimed to work for the Mafia and to have assassinated Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

NYFF Centerpiece film:
Noah Baumbach's MARRIAGE STORY


SCARLETT JOHANSSON AND ADAM DRIVER IN MARRIAGE STORY

A new angle on themes of The Squid and the Whale

This is a Netflix film (as is Scorsese's). It's a kind of companion piece to Baumbach's 2005 NYFF debut The Squid and the Whale, which was a family breakup film from the kids' POV. This one is from the parents'. It stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, and tracks an "amicable" divorce that devolves spectacularly. The cast also includes Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Laura Dern, Merritt Wever, Julie Hagerty, and Azhy Robertson. Baumbach says he "grew up" attending the New York Film Festival with his parents, and that's where his first film Kicking and Screaming debuted 24 years ago. This one will open in Alice Tully Hall Oct. 4 and will show at Toronto and Venice.


EDWARD NORTON, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

NYFF Closing Night Film:
Edward Norton's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Continuing with the New York theme, the NYFF has chosen a new screen adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel for closing night. Motherless Brooklyn is a novel about a makeshift detective agency that investigates the murder of its boss. (Unlike Scorsese and De Niro, however, Norton is from Boston and Colombia, Maryland, not New York City.




THE IRISHMAN trailer.

Her is the trailer of Martin Scorsese's new film THE IRISHMAN, which has been announced as the Sept. 27 Opening Night Film of the 2019 New York Film Festival. The film uses computer-generated techniques to make Robert De Niro look young in some parts. This is Scorsese and De Niro's first film together in 24 years (their 9th film together). Also returning are from the "old crew" are Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel. De Niro plays union organizer Frank Sheeran. Al Pacino plays Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, his first time in a Scorsese film.

TRAILER

[Chris Knipp]

EDWARD NORTON, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

NYFF Closing Night Film:
Edward Norton's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

The movie will have its New York premiere at Alice Tully Hall Friday, October 11, 2019, ending the Main Slate presentations of the Sept. 27-Oct. 13 NYFF. Warner Bros. will release it Nov. 1.

A nostalgic, semi-musical New York noir to close the fest

Edward Norton stars, directs, and wrote the adaptation of the Jonathan Lethem novel, which he has transfered from contemporary Brooklyn to Fifties New York in a more overtly neo-noir format. The protagonist Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a lonely private dick with Tourette's syndrome who gets drawn into a multi-layered conspiracy expanding to include racial conflicts in the city as he solves his friend’s murder. Armed only with a few clues and the powerful engine of his obsessive mind, Lionel unravels closely-guarded secrets that hold the fate of the whole city in the balance.. There is a devious 'master builder' personality like the planner Robert Moses (Alec Baldwin). There are supporting performances by Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Mann, and Cherry Jones. A score by Daniel Pemberton has orchestration by Wynton Marsalis and an original song by Thom Yorke. The NYFF director and selection committee chair Kent Jones says Norton uses Lethem's novel "as a jumping-off point" for a "wildly imaginative" and "extravagant" "love letter to New York". He calls it "a beautifully told semi-musical hard-boiled yarn grounded in the mid-20th century history of the city."

So the 2019 NYFF defines its rootedness in the city by being framed by three New York stories: a mafia, labor boss conspiracy and murder by New Yorker Martin Scorsese; a New York family breakup tale from Noah Baumbach; and a noir reworking of a novel set in Brooklyn.

[Chris Knipp]

2019 NYFF poster by Pedro Almodóvar.


The 57th New York Film Festival Main Slate

(Officially announced August 6, 2019)

Opening Night
The Irishman
Dir. Martin Scorsese

Centerpiece
Marriage Story
Dir. Noah Baumbach

Closing Night
Motherless Brooklyn
Dir. Edward Norton

Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story/Atlantique
Dir. Mati Diop

Bacurau
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles

Beanpole/Dylda
Dir. Kantemir Balagov

Fire Will Come
Dir. Oliver Laxe

First Cow
Dir. Kelly Reichardt

A Girl Missing/よこがお
Dir. Koji Fukada

I Was at Home, But…
Dir. Angela Schanelec

Liberté
Dir. Albert Serra

Martin Eden
Dir. Pietro Marcello

The Moneychanger/Así habló el cambista
Dir. Federico Veiroj

Oh Mercy!//Roubaix, une lumière
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Pain and GloryDolor y gloria
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Parasite/기생충
Dir. Bong Joon-ho

Film Comment Presents
Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Dir. Céline Sciamma

Saturday Fiction
Dir. Lou Ye

Sibyl
Dir. Justine Triet

Synonyms/Synonymes
Dir. Nadav Lapid

To the Ends of the Earth/旅のおわり世界のはじまり
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

The Traitor/Traditore
Dir. Marco Bellocchio

Varda by Agnès
Dir. Agnès Varda

Vitalina Varela
Dir. Pedro Costa

Wasp Network
Dir. Olivier Assayas

The Whistlers/La Gomera
Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu

The Wild Goose Lake//南方车站的聚会
Dir. Diao Yinan

Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed
Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Zombi Child
Dir. Bertrand Bonello

NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Convergence, Shorts, Retrospective, Revivals, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.

Tickets for the 57th New York Film Festival will go on sale to the general public on September 8. Festival and VIP passes are on sale now and offer one of the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events, including Opening and Closing Night. Learn more at filmlinc.org/NYFF57Passes. Press and industry accreditation for NYFF57 is open now and closes August 16th; apply here.BEA

[Chris Knipp]

57th NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Films & Descriptions
(Main Slate. 9 from Cannes Competition.
These are the NYFF blurbs.)

Opening Night
The Irishman
Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA
World Premiere
The Irishman is a richly textured epic of American crime, a dense, complex story told with astonishing fluidity. Based on Charles Brandt’s nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses, it is a film about friendship and loyalty between men who commit unspeakable acts and turn on a dime against each other, and the possibility of redemption in a world where it seems as distant as the moon. The roster of talent behind and in front of the camera is astonishing, and at the core of The Irishman are four great artists collectively hitting a new peak: Joe Pesci as Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino, Al Pacino as Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, and Robert De Niro as their right-hand man, Frank Sheeran, each working in the closest harmony imaginable with the film’s incomparable creator, Martin Scorsese. A Netflix release.


MARRIAGE STORY (NOAH BAUMBACH)

Centerpiece
Marriage Story
Dir. Noah Baumbach, USA, 136m
Noah Baumbach’s new film is about the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. Adam Driver is Charlie, a 100-percent New York experimental theater director; Scarlett Johansson is Nicole, his principal actress and soon-to-be L.A.-based ex-wife. Their “amicable” breakup devolves, one painful rash response and hostile counter-response at a time, into a legal battlefield, led on Nicole’s side by Laura Dern and on Charlie’s side by “nice” Alan Alda and “not-so-nice” Ray Liotta. What is so remarkable about Marriage Story is its frank understanding of the emotional fluctuations between Charlie and Nicole: they are both short-sighted, both occasionally petty, both vindictive, and both loving. The film is as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving. With Merritt Wever and Julie Hagerty as Nicole’s sister and mom, and Azhy Robertson as their beloved son, Henry. A Netflix release.

Closing Night
Motherless Brooklyn
Dir. Edward Norton, USA, 144m
In an unusually bold adaptation, writer-director-producer Edward Norton has transplanted the main character of Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel Motherless Brooklyn from modern Brooklyn into an entirely new, richly woven neo-noir narrative, reset in 1950s New York. Emotionally shattered by a botched job, Lionel Essrog (Norton), a lonely private detective with Tourette syndrome, finds himself drawn into a multilayered conspiracy that expands to encompass the city’s ever-growing racial divide and the devious personal and political machinations of a Robert Moses–like master builder, played by Alec Baldwin. Featuring a rigorously controlled star turn by Norton and outstanding additional supporting performances by Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Mann, and Cherry Jones, plus a haunting soundtrack (featuring a score by Daniel Pemberton, with orchestration by Wynton Marsalis, and an original song by Thom Yorke), Motherless Brooklyn is the kind of movie Hollywood almost never makes anymore, and a complexly conceived, robust evocation of a bygone era of New York that speaks to our present moment. A Warner Bros. Picture.


ATLANTICS: A GHOST STORY (MATI DIOP)

Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story/Atlantique
Dir. Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Belgium, 105m
U.S. Premiere
Building on the promise—and then some—of her acclaimed shorts, Mati Diop has fashioned an extraordinary drama that skirts the line between realism and fantasy, romance and horror, and which, in its crystalline empathy, humanity, and political outrage, confirms the arrival of a major talent. Set in Senegal, the birth country of her legendary director uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty, the film initially follows the blossoming love between young construction worker Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), who’s being exploited by his rich boss, and Ada (Mama Sané), about to enter into an unwanted arranged marriage with a wealthier man. Souleiman and his fed-up coworkers soon disappear during an attempt to migrate to Spain in a pirogue, yet somehow his presence is still quite literally felt in Dakar. Transmuting a global crisis into a ghostly tale of possession, the gripping, hallucinatory Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story was the winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A Netflix release. Debut in Cannes Competition. Metascore 79

Bacurau
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, Brazil, 130m
U.S. Premiere
A vibrant, richly diverse backcountry Brazilian town finds its sun-dappled day-to-day disturbed when its inhabitants become the targets of a group of marauding, wealthy tourists. The perpetrators of this Most Dangerous Game–esque class warfare, however, may have met their match in the fed-up, resourceful denizens of little Bacurau. Those who remember Kleber Mendonça Filho’s wonderful NYFF54 crowd-pleaser Aquarius starring Sonia Braga—who appears here in a memorable supporting role—might be surprised by the new terrain and occasional ultraviolence of his latest, codirected with his longtime production designer Juliano Dornelles. Yet this wild shape-shifter shares with that film the exhilaration of witnessing society’s forgotten and marginalized standing up for themselves by any means necessary. With references to the fearless genre works of John Carpenter, George Miller, and Sergio Leone, Bacurau, winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is a vividly angry power-to-the-people fable like no other. A Kino Lorber release. Debut in Cannes Competition


BEANPOLE (KANTEMIR BALAGOV)

Beanpole/Dylda
Dir. Kantemir Balagov, Russia, 130m
In immediate post-WWII Leningrad, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), intensely bonded after fighting side by side as anti-aircraft gunners, attempt to readjust to a haunted world. As the film begins, Iya, long and slender and towering over everyone—hence the film’s title—works as a nurse in a shell-shocked hospital, presiding over traumatized soldiers. A shocking accident brings them closer and also seals their fates. The 27-year-old Russian director Kantemir Balagov—whose debut feature Closeness caused a stir at Cannes and the New Directors/New Films festival just last year—won Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for this richly burnished, occasionally harrowing rendering of the persistent scars of war. Debut Un Certain Regard at Cannes (Best Director prize)

Fire Will Come
Dir. Oliver Laxe, Spain/France/Luxembourg, 85m
U.S. Premiere
The beauties and terrors of nature—human and otherwise—drive this extraordinary, elemental new film from Oliver Laxe, in which the verdant Galician landscape becomes the setting for forceful internal and external dramas. After making films abroad for years, interrogating the line between filmmaker and subject in such locales as Tangiers (You Are All Captains) and [the Atlas Mountains of] Morocco (Mimosas), Laxe returns to the rustic village in northwest Spain where his grandparents were born to tell the story of Amador (Amador Arias), who has recently served time in prison for arson and has come home to live with his elderly mother, Benedicta (Benedicta Sanchez)—both played brilliantly by nonprofessional actors. Laxe follows Amador’s day-to-day readjustment, immersing the viewer in the deep eucalyptus forests and vast countryside of northwest Spain, building to an astonishing climax fueled by an uncontrollable fury. Debut Un Certain Regard at Cannes (Jury Prize)


FIRST COW (REICHARDT)

First Cow
Dir. Kelly Reichardt, U.S., 121m
Kelly Reichardt once again trains her perceptive and patient eye on the Pacific Northwest, this time evoking an authentically hardscrabble early 19th-century way of life. A taciturn loner and skilled cook (John Magaro) has traveled west and joined a group of fur trappers in Oregon Territory, though he only finds true connection with a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee) also seeking his fortune; soon the two collaborate on a successful business, although its longevity is reliant upon the clandestine participation of a nearby wealthy landowner’s prized milking cow. From this simple premise Reichardt constructs an interrogation of foundational Americana that recalls her earlier triumph Old Joy in its sensitive depiction of male friendship, yet is driven by a mounting suspense all its own. Reichardt shows her distinct talent for depicting the peculiar rhythms of daily living and ability to capture the immense, unsettling quietude of rural America. An A24 release. Debut NYFF

A Girl Missing/よこがお (横顔)
Dir. Koji Fukada, Japan, 111m
U.S. Premiere
Director Koji Fukada and star Mariko Tsutsui have created one of the most memorable, enigmatic movie protagonists in years in this compelling and beautifully humane drama. Middle-aged Ichiko (Tsutsui) works as a private nurse in a small town for a family, functioning as caregiver for the entirely female clan’s elderly matriarch, and befriending the two teenage daughters; when one of the girls disappears, Ichiko gets caught up in the resulting media sensation in increasingly surprising and devastating ways. Fukada keeps the story tightly focused on Ichiko’s perspective, illustrating with patience and compassion the different forms of trauma that can be created by one event, and—in keeping with the themes of his internationally acclaimed Harmonium—how easily and frighteningly a life can spiral out of control.


KOJI FUKADA'S A GIRL MISSING

I Was at Home, But…
Dir. Angela Schanelec, Germany, 105m
U.S. Premiere
Though she’s been an essential voice in contemporary German cinema since the ’90s, Angela Schanelec is poised to find wider international audiences with I Was at Home, But…, which won her the Best Director prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. An elliptical yet emotionally lucid variation on the domestic drama, her latest film intricately navigates the psychological contours of a Berlin family in crisis: Astrid—played with barely concealed fury by Maren Eggert—is trying to hold herself and her fragile teenage son and young daughter together following the death of their father two years earlier. Yet as in all her films, Schanelec develops her story and characters in highly unexpected ways, shooting in exquisite, fragmented tableaux and leaving much to the viewer’s imagination, hinting at a spiritual grace lurking beneath the unsettled surface of every scene. A Cinema Guild release. Debut at the Berlinale (winner of the Silver Bear)

Liberté
Dir. Albert Serra, France/Portugal/Spain, 132m
U.S. Premiere
For the bold of imagination, not the faint of heart, the latest work from Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra (The Death of Louis XIV) is easily his most provocative yet. In the 18th century, somewhere deep in a forest clearing, a group of bewigged libertines engage in a series of pansexual games of pain, torture, humiliation, and other dissolute, Sadean pleasures, attempting to reach some form of erotic nirvana, though rarely ever appearing to truly enjoy themselves. Serra’s truly radical film, set over the course of one night, is at once an aesthetic and sonic pleasure—every composition is a thing of eerily lit perfection, its soundtrack the chirps and rustles of the nighttime forest—and an unsparing depiction of the human drive for corporeal cruelty and sexual release. As its title suggests, Liberté is a film about the meaning of freedom, in both sex and in art.

Martin Eden
Dir. Pietro Marcello, Italy, 129m
U.S. Premiere
For the past fifteen years, Pietro Marcello has been working at the vanguard of Italian cinema, creating films that straddle the line between documentary and fiction, but which play off both a 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century neorealism in their class-conscious focus on wanderers and transients. Marcello’s most straightforwardly fictional feature to date, Martin Eden is set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy’s history yet was adapted from a 1909 novel by Jack London. Martin (played by Luca Marinelli) is a dissatisfied prole with artistic aspirations who hopes that his dreams of becoming a writer will help him rise above his station and marry a wealthy young university student (Jessica Cressy); the twinned dissatisfactions of working-class toil and bourgeois success lead to political reawakening and destructive anxiety. Martin Eden is an enveloping, superbly mounted bildungsroman. Debut at Venice


THE MONEYCHANGER (VEIROJ)

The Moneychanger/Así habló el cambista
Dir. Federico Veiroj, Uruguay, 97m
U.S. Premiere
Leading light of contemporary Uruguayan cinema Federico Veiroj (A Useful Life) specializes in complexly drawn protagonists struggling amidst the specters of professional and personal failures. His new film, based on the 1979 novella Así habló el cambista by fellow countryman Juan Enrique Gruber, is his most ambitious, political, and forceful yet. Set largely in Montevideo, The Moneychanger stars Daniel Hendler in a tightly coiled performance of comical discomfort as Humberto Brause, who takes advantage of Uruguay’s poor economy by specializing in offshore money laundering. Spanning the fifties to the seventies, the film follows Humberto as he gets increasingly in over his head with multiple shady book-cooking schemes throughout South America, leading to an ultimate life-or-death decision. (Local release Uruguay Oct. 2019)

Oh Mercy!//Roubaix, une lumière
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 119m
North American Premiere
In a change of pace from such recent kaleidoscopic knockouts as My Golden Years (NYFF53) and Ismael’s Ghosts (NYFF55), Arnaud Desplechin shows a different and no less impressive side of his mastery with this taut policier, based on a true murder case. The scene of the crime is Roubaix, the city in Northern France where Desplechin was born and where he’s set many of his films. Here, during a somber Christmas season, a middle-aged, French-Algerian detective is investigating the fatal strangulation of a poor, elderly woman in her apartment, with suspicion falling on her next-door neighbors, two young white women with a complicated interpersonal bond. Desplechin turns what might have been a lurid thriller into a work of engrossing psychological portraiture and socioeconomic inquiry that pays exquisite attention to the nuances of each remarkable performance, including Roschdy Zem as police captain Douad, and Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier as the suspects. Debut in Cannes Competition. Metascore: 48

Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 113m
Pedro Almodóvar cuts straight to the heart with his intensely personal latest, which finds the great Spanish filmmaker tapping into new reservoirs of introspection and emotional warmth. Antonio Banderas deservedly won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his miraculous, internalized portrayal of Salvador Mallo, a director not too subtly modeled on Almodóvar himself, whose growing health problems—including tinnitus, migraines, and spinal pain—and creative block have initiated a midlife reckoning. Moving in and out of time, evoking Salvador’s childhood in the sixties (featuring Penélope Cruz as his doting mother); his years of triumph in the eighties; and present-day Madrid, where he navigates new artistic challenges, Pain and Glory is both a moving summative statement on a career and an indication of more brilliant things to come. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Debut: in Cannes Competition (Best Actor and Best Soundtrack) Metascore: 81


PARASITE (BONG)

Parasite/기생충
Dir. Bong Joon-ho, South Korea, 132m
In Bong Joon-ho’s exhilarating new film, a threadbare family of four struggling to make ends meet gradually hatches a scheme to work for, and as a result infiltrate, the wealthy household of an entrepreneur, his seemingly frivolous wife, and their troubled kids. How they go about doing this—and how their best-laid plans spiral out to destruction and madness—constitutes one of the wildest, scariest, and most unexpectedly affecting movies in years, a portrayal of contemporary class resentment that deservedly won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. As with all of this South Korean filmmaker’s best works, Parasite is both rollicking and ruminative in its depiction of the extremes to which human beings push themselves in a world of unending, unbridgeable economic inequality. A NEON release. Debut: in Cannes Competition (Palme d'Or winner) Metascore 89

Film Comment Presents
Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Dir. Céline Sciamma, France, 121m
On the cusp of the 19th century, young painter Marianne travels to a rugged, rocky island off the coast of Brittany. Here, she has been commissioned to create a wedding portrait of the wealthy yet free-spirited Héloise, whose hand in marriage has been promised to a man she’s never met. Resentful of the forced union, Héloise at first refuses to be painted, yet a growing bond—at first emotional and then erotic—develops between the women, exquisitely etched by Noémie Merlant as the artist and Adèle Haenel as her initially reluctant muse. With a visual precision as delicate as that of Merlant’s Marianne—whose patient acts of creation are lovingly dwelt upon—Céline Sciamma classically builds her double portrait from tentative romance to melodramatic rapture to a quietly devastating ending, all while subverting the traditional story of an artist and “his” muse. Winner of the Best Screenplay award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A NEON release. Debut in Competition at Cannes

Saturday Fiction
Dir. Lou Ye, China, 125m
U.S. Premiere
The incomparable Gong Li (Raise the Red Lantern) gives a mesmerizing, take-no-prisoners performance in Saturday Fiction, a slow-burn spy thriller set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai on the cusp of World War II. She plays acclaimed actress Jean Yu, who has returned to Shanghai from China after a long absence. Jean Yu is in rehearsals for a play to be directed by a former lover (Mark Chao), but she seems to have ulterior motives, functioning as a double agent and gathering intelligence for the Allies, including the fateful realization of Japan’s imminent attack on Pearl Harbor. Shooting in evocative black-and-white, director Lou Ye (Spring Fever) has created here a gripping thriller that builds to a nerve-wracking climax, and which never loses sight of the human beings caught up in the gears of history. Debut at Venice


VIRGINIE EFIRA IN SIBYL (JUSTINE TRIET)

Sibyl
Dir. Justine Triet, France/Belgium, 100m
U.S. Premiere
Past and present collide in an increasingly complicated and highly entertaining fashion in Justine Triet’s intricate study of the professional and personal masks we wear as we perform our daily lives. Psychotherapist Sybil (Virginie Efira) abruptly decides to leave her practice to restart her writing career—only to find herself increasingly embroiled in the life of a desperate new patient: Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a movie star dealing with the aftermath of a traumatic affair with her costar, Igor (Gaspard Ulliel), while trying to finish a film shoot under the watchful eye of a demanding director (Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller, splendidly high-strung), who happens to be Igor’s wife. Sybil, negotiating her own past demons, makes the fateful decision to use Margot’s experiences as inspiration for her book, as boundaries of propriety fall one after another. As she proved in her previous film In Bed with Victoria, which also starred the magnificently expressive Efira, Triet is a master at creating heroines of intense complexity, and of maintaining a tricky balance between volatile drama and sly comedy. Debut in Competition at Cannes. Metascore 54

Synonyms/Synonymes
Dir. Nadav Lapid, France/Israel/Germany, 123m
U.S. Premiere
In his lacerating third feature, director Nadav Lapid’s camera races to keep up with the adventures of peripatetic Yoav (Tom Mercier), a disillusioned Israeli who has absconded to Paris following his military training. Having disavowed Hebrew, he devotes himself to learning the intricacies of the French language, falls into an emotional and intellectual triangle with a wealthy bohemian couple (Quentin Dolmaire and Louise Chevillotte), and frequently finds himself objectified, both politically and sexually. A powerful expression of the impossibility of escaping one’s roots, Synonyms is, even after the unforgettable Policeman (NYFF48) and The Kindergarten Teacher, Lapid’s boldest and most haunting work yet, a film about language and physicality, masculinity and nationhood. A Kino Lorber release. Debut in the Berlinale (winning the Golden Bear)

To the Ends of the Earth/旅のおわり世界のはじまり
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 120m
U.S. Premiere
For more than two decades, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been at the artistic forefront of Japanese cinema, bending the form to his own singular, internalized rhythms in such films as Cure, Pulse, and Tokyo Sonata (NYFF46). His latest is no exception, an unexpected narrative following Yoko (former J-pop idol Atsuko Maeda), a television host whose trip to Uzbekistan to shoot an episode of her reality travel show begins to dissolve her chipper persona, revealing the paranoia and dislocation beneath. Filled with absurdly humorous set pieces, and climaxing with a cathartic burst unprecedented in Kurosawa’s oeuvre, To the Ends of the Earth is both an entertaining tale of culture clash and a penetrating depiction of a young woman’s alienation and anxiety that pushes the director’s craft into new, mysterious, and enormously emotional realms.



TRAITOR (BELLOCCHIO)

The Traitor/Traditore
Dir. Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 145m
U.S. Premiere
Since the galvanizing burst of his unforgettable debut feature Fists in the Pocket (NYFF3), Marco Bellocchio has remained an Italian auteur of rigor and fury, representing social unrest in stories that range from the intimate to the epochal. In his 80th year, he has returned with one of his most compelling films. Pierfrancesco Favino commands the screen throughout this decades-spanning true-life narrative as Tommaso Buscetta, the mafia boss turned informant who helped take down a large swath of organized crime leaders in Sicily in the eighties. In one fully realized, impressively staged scene after another, including the notorious Maxi Trial, overseen by Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), Bellocchio interrogates received ideas about loyalty that so many other movies of this genre use to romanticize their characters. This is a very different kind of mafia drama, one that has the structure of a procedural but coasts on the waves of psychological portraiture. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Debut: in Cannes Competition

Varda by Agnès
Dir. Agnès Varda, France, 115m
When Agnès Varda died earlier this year at age 90, the world lost one of its most inspirational cinematic radicals. From her neorealist-tinged 1954 feature debut La Pointe Courte to her New Wave treasures Cléo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur to her inquiries into those on society’s outskirts like Vagabond/Sans toit ni loi (NYFF23), The Gleaners and I/Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (NYFF38), and the 2017 Oscar nominee Faces Places/Visages villages (NYFF55), she made enduring films that were both forthrightly political and gratifyingly mercurial, and which toggled between fiction and documentary decades before it was more commonplace in art cinema. In what would be her final work, partially constructed of onstage interviews and lectures, interspersed with a wealth of clips and archival footage, Varda guides us through her career, from her movies to her remarkable still photography to the delightful and creative installation work. It’s a fitting farewell to a filmmaker, told in her own words. A Janus Films release.


VITALINA VARELA (PEDRO COSTA)

Vitalina Varela
Dir. Pedro Costa, Portugal, 124m
U.S. Premiere
Portuguese director Pedro Costa has continually returned in his films to the Fontainhas neighborhood, a shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon that’s home to largely immigrant communities. Not merely a chronicler of the poor and dispossessed, Costa renders onscreen characters that exist somewhere between real and fictional, the living and the dead. His latest, a film of deeply concentrated beauty, stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in a truly remarkable performance. Reprising and expanding upon her haunted supporting role from Costa’s Horse Money (NYFF52), she plays a Cape Verdean woman who has come to Fontainhas for her husband’s funeral after being separated from him for decades due to economic circumstance, and despite her alienation begins to establish a new life there. The grief of the present and the ghosts of the past commingle in Costa’s ravishing chiaroscuro compositions, a film of shadow and whisper that might be the director’s most visually extraordinary work. A Grasshopper Film release. Debuted at Locarno

Wasp Network
Dir. Olivier Assayas, France/Spain/Brazil, 127m
U.S. Premiere
Olivier Assayas brings his customary style and urgency to an unexpected subject in this epic chronicle of a small group of Cuban defectors in Miami who in the early nineties established a spy web to infiltrate anti-Castroist terrorist groups carrying out violent attacks on Cuban soil. Amidst a dazzling ensemble that includes Gael García Bernal, Wagner Moura, Ana de Armas, and Leonardo Sbaraglia, Assayas mostly centers on the saga of network member René Gonzalez (Édgar Ramírez, star of Assayas’s Carlos, NYFF48) and his wife Olga (Penélope Cruz, in a superb performance of complex emotional transparency), who for many years is kept in the dark about René’s double life in America. Inspired by Fernando Morais’s meticulously researched book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, Wasp Network is a nuanced, gripping thriller from one of the world’s most adventurous, globe-hopping filmmakers, told with journalistic detail and vivid sympathy for those Cubans in exile who sought liberation back home while being targeted by the U.S. government. Debut at Venice

The Whistlers/La Gomera
Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 98m
In a delightful twist, leading Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, whose inventive comedies such as Police, Adjective (NYFF47) and The Treasure (NYFF53) have for more than a decade brought deadpan charm and political perceptiveness to his country’s cinematic renaissance, has made his first all-out genre film—a clever, swift, and elegant neo-noir with a wonderfully off-kilter central conceit. Easily corruptible Bucharest police detective Cristi—played by the eternally stoic Vlad Ivanov—arrives on the mist-enshrouded Canary Island of La Gomera, where he learns a clandestine, tribal language, improbably made entirely out of whistling; this form of hidden communication will keep his superiors off his trail as he becomes increasingly embroiled in a convoluted gangster scheme involving a stash of Euros hidden in a mattress and a sultry femme fatale named, of course, Gilda. Porumboiu’s take on the crime drama furthers his explorations of the intricacies and limitations of language, but is also his most playful, even exuberant, film. A Magnolia Pictures release. Debut in Cannes Competition


FROM DIAO YINAN'S WILD GOOSE LAKE

The Wild Goose Lake/南方车站的聚会,
Dir. Diao Yinan, China/France, 112m
U.S. Premiere
Chinese director Diao Yinan’s much anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough noir Black Coal, Thin Ice is an altogether more colorful crime drama. A formalist gangster thriller drenched in reds and blues, though imbued with a melancholic tone that speaks to contemporary China’s vast economic disparities, the elegantly down-and-dirty The Wild Goose Lake, set in the nooks and crannies of densely populated Wuhan, follows the desperate attempts of small-time mob boss Zhou Zenong (the charismatic Hu Ge) to stay alive after he mistakenly kills a cop and a dead-or-alive reward is put on his head. The filmmaker proves his action bona fides in a series of stylized set pieces and violent shocks—including a showstopper on a stolen motorbike—simultaneously devising a romance between Zhou and a mysterious young woman (Gwei Lun-mei) who’s out to either help or betray him. Diao deftly keeps multiple characters and chronologies spinning, all the while creating an atmosphere thick with eroticism and danger. A Film Movement release. Debut: in Cannes Competition

Young Ahmed//Le jeune Ahmed
Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 84m
North American Premiere
The Dardenne Brothers won this year’s Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for this brave new work, another intimate portrayal-in-furious-motion of a protagonist in crisis. The filmmakers’ radical empathy alights on a Muslim teenager (extraordinary first-time actor Idir Ben Addi) in a small Belgian town who is being gradually radicalized into extremism despite the desperate protestations of his single mother (Claire Bodson), and who winds up hatching a murderous plot targeting his beloved teacher (Myriem Akheddiou). Taking a serious view of a difficult issue—the effect of fanaticism on the body and soul—the Dardennes here remind viewers why they continue to be at the center of 21st-century cinema. Debut: in Cannes Competition

Zombi Child
Dir. Bertrand Bonello, France, 103m
U.S. Premiere
After giving multiple shots to the arm of contemporary French cinema with such audacious films as House of Tolerance, Saint Laurent (NYFF52), and Nocturama, Bertrand Bonello injects urgency and history into the well-worn walking-dead genre with this unconventional plunge into horror-fantasy. Bonello moves fluidly between 1962 Haiti, where a young man known as Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), made into a zombie by his resentful brother, ends up working as a slave in the sugar cane fields, and a contemporary Paris girls’ boarding school, where a white teenage girl (Louise Labèque) befriends Clairvius’s direct descendant (Wislanda Louimat), who was orphaned in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. These two disparate strands ultimately come together in a film that evokes Jacques Tourneur more than George Romero, and feverishly dissolves boundaries of time and space as it questions colonialist mythmaking. A Film Movement release. Debut: Cannes Directors Fortnight


ANTONIO BANDERAS IN PAIN AND GLORY

[Chris Knipp]

CÉLINE SCIAMMA'S PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
What looks most exciting in the Main Slate?

Of course all of these speculations are dubious, and it's best to see everything, if you have world enough and time. Film at Lincoln Center, formerly the Film Society of, chooses well.

Big tickets to save for later?

First off, there are some big ones I may not rush to see at Lincoln Center, and here's why. Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria: I've already seen and reviewed Pedro Almodóvar's important and unusually personal new film. It comes to theaters Oct. 18. And it's good. I don't need to see it again right now, though. The Irishman , which harks back to Scorsese's gangster epic works, looks very exciting - the trailer is already in theaters. However, it's a mainstream coming release, Netlix, so you could even watch it on your computer should you choose to cower in your lair. Though good for selling tickets, it doesn't seem urgent to see it at a festival. The Closing Night film, Motherless Brooklyn, is also not a priority because I am not a fan of Edward Norton, and got bogged down trying to read the book.

On the other hand, here are Main Slate films of NYFF57 I would not want to miss:

Marriage Story. Noah Baumbach's new film arrives as a return to his beginnings, an obvious companion piece to his debut feature, The Squid and a Whale, which premiered at the NYFF of 2005, which incidentally was my first NYFF. Both are about divorces. Logically, the first was from the point of view of the children. Now he is ready to live through it all as an adult.

Atlantics and Bacurau were sensations at Cannes. I'm excited to see them. I do not know about Beanpole or Fire Will Come (both are possibilities, though). I wasn't a fan of Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff , so this new historical film, First Cow, seems uncertain.

The Wild Goose Lake//南方车站的聚会. From everything I have heard and seen about it I will probably love this new film from Chinese director Diao Yinan, who won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for his 2014 film, Black Coal, Thin Ice. . Edgy, young, Asian, neo-noir: what's not to like? And a hit at Cannes.

The Moneychanger I am a fan of Federico Veiroj; I like his work very much, and look forward to seeing this.

Parasite기생충 Of course I want to see Bong Joon-ho's Cannes 2019 Palme d'Or winner. It does sound similar in theme to last year's, except that the homeless con-men of Shoplifters were Japanese, and these deceivers are South Korean.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire : Céline Sciamma is an interesting, important French director who grows better all the time. This Portrait is a new direction for her (because a costume drama), got great buzz at Cannes, and is an exciting prospect. There have been many detailed, enthusiastic reviews.

Saturday Fiction by top Chinese director Lou Ye has exciting elements, espionage, theater, the discovery of the Japanese plan to bomb Pear Harbor ], all shot in white. It sounds like a really good spy-crime mystery story. Probably one of the best Asian films of the year.

Sibyl. Directed by Justine Triet, whose work I don't think American critics exactly "get." Nor do they appreciate the great charm of her muse Virginie Efira. Beware when they write something is "as French as you can get." I love Justine Triet and her star and am ready to give this a whirl. Note the Metascore (of anglophone reviewers) is a lousy 54%, but the AlloCiné press rating is an excellent 3.7. Costars include with Efira, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Gaspard Ulliel, and Niels Schneider.

Synonyms/Synonymes by Israeli director Nadav Lapid - sounds great and important. I first encountered Lapid with his Policeman in the 2011 NYFF. More in the US saw his 2014 The Kindergarten Teacher (ND/NF 2014) . There has even been a remake starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. This one whose theme is "A young Israeli man absconds to Paris to flee his nationality, aided by his trusty Franco-Israeli dictionary" sounds as if it may be both strange and bold - and fun and has gotten great reviews (better from the anglophone critics than the French ones, but - a rarity - Cahiers du Cinéma gave it a top rating).

More doubtful prospects?

Koji Fukada's A Girl Missing sounds interesting, maybe, with a good performance by Mariko Tsutsui; Mark Shilling provides a description of that in The Japan Times). Trades reviews are unfavorable though. I'm doubtful about I Was at Home, But.... I'm not the best audience for puzzle movies. I am not a fan of Albert Serra, nor of Pietro Marcello. From what was said at Cannes, Desplechin's Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une lumière is a boring police procedural that starts out slow and fizzles out. Desplechin has his devoted fans no matter what. I am an admirer. But this has the marks of a misstep.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's To the Ends of the Earth/旅のおわり世界のはじまり sounds doubtful, and he has disappointed lately. Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor/Traditore likewise though clearly a very important subject for Italians, has sounded in reviews to have turned out to be less impressive than hoped. As for Varda by Agnès, it may be essential viewing for fans of French cinema, though to be honest, one had gotten a lot of her lately already.

Pedro Costa is a director whose work I find hard going. It gives one a sense of a duty performed. About Olivier Assayas' Wasp Network, it's really hard to know. But it is a possibility.

Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed looks pretty dubious, one of those rare missteps by the Dardenne brothers. This appears to be a loser - especially for me given its Arab subject matter (clearly out of the brothers' comfort zone). The main actor seemed embarrassingly unenlightened in the Cannes press conference, perhaps a dubious piece of casting.

Though I am a big fan of Bertrand Bonello, Zombi Child appears to be a bit of a misstep for him, plus this kind of genre isn't my thing. There will be good things, though - the music, which he often composes himself.

None of these is to be written off. These are just suggestions, from personal taste, a little knowledge, in case you want to pare down to a more manageable to-do list. -- CHRIS KNIPP.

[Chris Knipp]

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
This year's documentary series.

The NYFF now presents outstanding non-fiction films as a separate series.
This year's selections have just been announced. Here they are with the festival blurgs.


FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

45 Seconds of Laughter
Dir. Tim Robbins, USA, 95m
U.S. Premiere
A selected group of inmates at the Calipatria State maximum-security facility have convened for a highly unlikely workshop. In prison they normally segregate themselves by gang or by race, but here they are all mixed together, sitting in a circle. Over the course of several recurring meetings, the men, many of whom have been incarcerated for serious crimes, will take part in a series of acting exercises that enhance bonding and emotional connection, each session closing with the participants bursting into 45 seconds of unbridled, cleansing laughter. The entire endeavor—part of The Prison Project, a remarkable program conducted by the L.A. theater troupe The Actors’ Gang that has proven to cut down recidivism rates—will climax in a final performance inspired by the Commedia dell’arte tradition. In his contemplative, pared down, and wildly engaging documentary, Dead Man Walking director Tim Robbins—who also appears in the film**, taking part in the workshop—captures these extraordinary sessions, and introduces us to the individuals fearlessly investigating their own performative natures and the masculine social roles they play.

63 Up
Dir. Michael Apted, UK, 138m
U.S. Premiere
Those of us who have devotedly followed Michael Apted’s one-of-a-kind British film series for the past several decades anticipate with great warmth—and more than a little poignant anxiety—returning every seven years to the lives of Tony; Nicholas; Suzy; Symon and Paul; Jackie, Sue, and Lynn; Andrew and John; Neil and Peter; and Bruce. Charting their growth has constituted one of the most rewarding documentary projects of all time, an ongoing inquiry into economic determination and the elusive search for happiness. In the rich, searching, and entertaining latest installment, they are more introspective than ever at age 63, coming to terms with death and illness, the disappointments of a fractured England, and uneasy prospects for their children and grandchildren’s futures. But they also remain, to a person, witty, optimistic, and delightful company.

Bitter Bread
Dir. Abbas Fahdel, Lebanon/Iraq/France, 87m
World Premiere
Among the countless Syrian citizens who have fled their country, about one-and-a-half-million have relocated to neighboring Lebanon. In this patient, heart-rending portrait, Iraqi-born filmmaker Abbas Fahdel, director of the epic Homeland (Iraq Year Zero), settles in with a community of refugees living in a tent camp in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, most of them children. Hopeful to earn a meager wage as they work under the supervision of a Lebanese shawish, who owns the plot of land they’re essentially renting, the adults try to keep their families together amidst flooding and destructive seasonal weather, all the while listening to the radio for news from back home. Fahdel burrows in with his subjects in close quarters, alighting on the various human dramas that occur throughout the camp, including the frustrations of a young man waiting to bring in his fiancée from back home. Most importantly, Fahdel, working as director, producer, cinematographer, and editor, simply lets these desperate yet resilient people—so often treated as statistics—speak for themselves.

The Booksellers
Dir. D.W. Young, USA, 99m
World Premiere
What once seemed like an esoteric world now seems essential to our culture: the community of rare book dealers and collectors who, in their love of the delicacy and tactility of books, are helping to keep the printed word alive. D.W. Young’s elegant and entertaining documentary, executive produced by Parker Posey, is a lively tour of New York’s book world, past and present, from the Park Avenue Armory’s annual Antiquarian Book Fair, where original editions can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars; to the Strand and Argosy book stores, still standing against all odds; to the beautifully crammed apartments of collectors and buyers. The film features a litany of special guests, including Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese, and a community of dedicated book dealers who strongly believe in the wonder of the object and the everlasting importance of what’s inside.

Born to Be
Dir. Tania Cypriano, USA, 92m
World Premiere
Soon after New York state passed a 2015 law that health insurance should cover transgender-related care and services, director Tania Cypriano and producer Michelle Hayashi began bringing their cameras behind the scenes at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where this remarkable documentary captures the emotional and physical journey of surgical transitioning. Lending equal narrative weight to the experiences of the center’s groundbreaking surgeon Dr. Jess Ting and those of his diverse group of patients, Born to Be perfectly balances compassionate personal storytelling and fly-on-the-wall vérité. It’s a film of astonishing access—most importantly into the lives, joys, and fears of the people at its center.

Bully. Coward. Victim.
The Story of Roy Cohn
Dir. Ivy Meeropol, USA, 94m
World Premiere
This thorough and mesmerizing documentary takes an appropriately unflinching look at the life and death of Roy Cohn, the closeted, conservative American lawyer whose first job out of law school was prosecuting filmmaker Ivy Meeropol’s grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Moving from the fifties—when he was also chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy—to the crooked deals and shady power brokering of the eighties that led Cohn to becoming the right-hand man and mentor of Donald J. Trump, this film is not merely a depiction of a brutal, ideologically diseased man—it’s an interrogatory work in search of the true character behind an icon of the political right in a deeply troubled America. Featuring interviews with such figures as Cindy Adams, Alan Dershowitz, Tony Kushner, Nathan Lane, John Waters, and a trove of fascinating, recently unearthed archive video and audio material. An HBO Documentary Films release.

College Behind Bars
Dir. Lynn Novick, USA, 222m
World Premiere
Out of the more than 50,000 men and 2500 women incarcerated in New York State, only a tiny fraction have access to higher education. The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) enrolls incarcerated men and women earning Associate and Bachelor’s degrees; it’s a program with wide-ranging benefits, including lower rates of recidivism, and it challenges our prioritization of punishment over education. Veteran filmmaker Lynn Novick, whose producing and directing credits include epochal miniseries Baseball, Jazz, Prohibition, and The Vietnam War, in collaboration with longtime producer Sarah Botstein, have created an intimate documentary event: a four-part chronicle filmed in correctional facilities in Napanoch and Bedford Hills. The film follows a handful of ambitious and inspiring incarcerated students—most of them serving time for serious crimes—as they debate and discuss American history and mathematics, philosophy and science, Moby Dick and King Lear, DuBois and Arendt, and simultaneously navigate the difficulties and cruelties of prison life and attempt to come to terms with their pasts. A PBS Distribution release.

Cunningham 3D
Dir. Alla Kovgan, Germany/France/USA, 93m
U.S. Premiere
One of the most visionary choreographers of the 20th century, Merce Cunningham could also be counted among its great modern artists, part of a coterie of important experimenters across media that included Robert Rauschenberg, Brian Eno, Jasper Johns, and his long-term romantic partner John Cage. This painstakingly constructed new documentary both charts his artistic evolution over the course of three decades and immerses the viewer in the precise rhythms and dynamic movements of his choreography through a 3D process that allows us to step inside the dance. Director Alla Kovgan has created a visceral experience that both reimagines and pays tribute to Cunningham’s groundbreaking technique. A Magnolia Pictures Release.

Free Time
Dir. Manfred Kirchheimer, USA, 61m
World Premiere
Manny Kirchheimer is one of the great masters of the American city symphony, as is clear from films like Stations of the Elevated (1981) and Dream of a City, which showed at last year’s NYFF. In his latest work, the 88-year-old Kirchheimer has meticulously restored and constructed 16mm black-and-white footage that he and Walter Hess shot in New York between 1958 and 1960. This lustrous evocation of a different rhythm of life captures the in-between moments—kids playing stickball, window washers, folks reading newspapers on their stoops—and the architectural beauty of urban spaces, set to the stirring sounds of Ravel, Bach, Eisler, and Count Basie. The breathtaking footage was shot in several distinct New York neighborhoods, including Washington Heights, the Upper West Side, and Hell’s Kitchen, and features impressionistic stops throughout the city, making time for an auto junkyard in Inwood, a cemetery in Queens, and the elegant buildings of the financial district.

Preceded by
Suite No. 1, Prelude
Dir. Nicholas Ma, USA, 15m
Nicholas Ma—producer of the winning Mister Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?—has made a short, loving portrait of his legendary father, Yo-Yo Ma. Avoiding idolatry, the film uses its casual intimacy to focus on the nuances of craft and the drive for perfection, detailing the world-renowned cellist’s endeavor, at age 61, to record Bach’s Cello Suites for the third and, he says, last time. Filmed in the splendid Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts.

My Father and Me
Dir. Nick Broomfield, UK, 97m
North American Premiere
For decades among the foremost names in documentary, Nick Broomfield (Tales of the Grim Sleeper, NYFF52) has often implicated himself in the filmmaking process, with honesty and candor. Yet never has he made a movie more distinctly personal than this complex and moving film about his relationship with his humanist-pacifist father, Maurice Broomfield, a factory worker turned photographer of vivid, often lustrous images of industrial post-WWII England. These images inspired Nick’s own filmmaking career, but also spoke to a difference in outlook between Maurice and Nick, whose less romantic, more left-wing political identity stemmed from his Jewish mother’s side. My Father and Me is both memoir and tribute, and in its intimate story of one family takes an expansive, philosophical look at the twentieth century itself.

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
Dir. Ric Burns, USA, 110m
U.S. Premiere
For decades, Oliver Sacks, M.D. captured the imagination of the public with his eloquently written case studies of cognitive disorders. Despite sharing with the world one revelation after another about the intricacies, idiosyncrasies, and amazements of the human mind, Sacks remained private for much of his life, specifically about his struggles growing up gay in the repressive England of the 1950s. In Ric Burns’s invigorating documentary, partly shot before Sacks’s death in 2015 and featuring extensive scenes with the man himself, we get to know Sacks, from his childhood with a schizophrenic older brother, to his years as a champion bodybuilder and motorcycle aficionado, to his remarkable accomplishments as one of our foremost neurologists, including his groundbreaking work on patients with the sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, which became the basis for his book Awakenings. Burns’s documentary is a fitting and moving tribute to a man who never stopped wondering what it was like to be in the head of another sentient being. A PBS/ American Masters Release.

Santiago, Italia
Dir. Nanni Moretti, Italy, 80m
North American Premiere
In the early seventies, the world was watching as Chile democratically elected Socialist leader Salvador Allende. His political ideals and aspirations—among them providing education for all children and distributing land to the nation’s workers—terrified the country’s right-wing, as well as the U.S., who helped orchestrate a military coup that replaced him with dictator Augusto Pinochet. This tragic history has been well documented, but Italian director Nanni Moretti (Caro Diario, Ecce Bombo) adds an angle many viewers may not know about: the efforts of the Italian Embassy to save and relocate citizens targeted by the fascist regime. Told through the testimonies of those who were there, Santiago, Italia is a chilling depiction of living under junta rule and an ultimately inspiring expression of hope amidst dire circumstances.

State Funeral
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa, Netherlands/Lithuania, 132m
U.S. Premiere
As proven in his recent documentaries Maidan, The Event, and The Trial, versatile Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has become one of the contemporary masters of the found-footage documentary, using the form to study the nature of the Soviet regime and uncover its darkest legacies for contemporary and future generations. In State Funeral, he has uncovered a wealth of astonishing, mostly unseen archival footage of the “Great Farewell” in the days following the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953: the teeming mass of mourners clogging Moscow’s Red Square, the speech announcing the hasty appointment of Malenkov, and finally Stalin’s burial in Lenin’s Tomb. While speeches about the Soviet Union’s unyielding fortitude and unity in the face of tragedy blare endlessly on speakers, and the pomp and ostentation grows increasingly surreal, the brilliantly edited and sound-designed State Funeral becomes an ever-relevant meditation on not just the horrors but also the absurdity of totalitarianism and the cult of personality.

[Chris Knipp]

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Special events, shorts, talks.

Speakers include Scorsese, Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Bong Joon-ho and Mati Diop. See filmlinc


FROM AMERICAN TRIAL: THE ERIC GARNER STORY

SPECIAL EVENTS DESCRIPTIONS

American Trial: The Eric Garner Story
Dir. Roee Messinger, USA, 100m
World Premiere
The idea is powerfully simple: engage the services of two actual legal teams to create a rigorous, legally based fictional—yet unscripted—trial that never happened for one of the nation’s most disturbing recent tragedies. The accused is Officer Daniel Pantaleo (only recently fired by New York City Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill), charged in the July 17, 2014 death of Eric Garner with reckless manslaughter and strangulation in the first degree. The judge is played by a seasoned defense lawyer, while the officer is played by the only actor in the cast (Anthony Altieri). Eyewitnesses, bystanders, friends, and his widow, Esaw Snipes, all come to testify; meanwhile, credible expert witnesses who would have likely been called to testify in a real trial provide their testimonies for both the prosecution and the defense to create fair judicial proceedings. Roee Messinger’s film goes deep into the case, placing the audience in the position of the jury. American Trial is a one-of-a-kind film, and this special screening will be free to the public.

The Cotton Club Encore
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, U.S., 1984, 139m
It’s now clear that Francis Ford Coppola’s eighties constituted his most fruitfully experimental period of filmmaking, when he used the clout from such behemoth masterpieces of the previous decade as the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now to try his hand at films of various genres and budget levels. At the time, The Cotton Club, Coppola’s stylish throwback to those 1930s Hollywood standbys the gangster film and the musical, was considered a costly disappointment, altered seemingly irrevocably due to behind-the-scenes conflicts with producers and financiers. Yet this sophisticated, witty, wildly ambitious movie, starring Gregory Hines and Richard Gere, about the titular Harlem nightclub, where legendary black musicians like Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington performed for an exclusively white clientele, was always something special, a rousing American entertainment that was both an evocation of the work of such directors as Raoul Walsh and William Wellman and a loving recreation of the period itself. The brilliance of Coppola’s vision is more apparent than ever in this “reawakened” version, The Cotton Club Encore, for which the director recovered lost negatives to bring the film back to its original length and luster, with restored sound and image.


JOAQUIN PHOENIX IN TODD PHILLIPS' JOKER

Joker
Dir. Todd Phillips, USA, 122m
The Joker began life on April 25, 1940 as the anarchic enemy of DC Comics’ Batman, and his appearance was possibly inspired by Conrad Veidt’s permanently, demonically smiling face from the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs. The Joker has gone through many transformations and iterations, but his origin story has never been as vividly or shockingly imagined and realized as it is here, in one of the most anticipated films of the year. Join us for a special screening and discussion with the creative team behind this stunning, truly disturbing vision, led by director Todd Phillips and his brilliant star, Joaquin Phoenix. A Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and BRON Creative release.

Screenwriting Master Class with Olivier Assayas
Presented by Warby Parker
The amazing and eclectic career of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas has encompassed autobiography (Cold Water, Summer Hours, Something in the Air), contemporary meta-fiction (Irma Vep, demonlover, Clouds of Sils Maria), literary adaptation (Les destinées sentimentales), and in the case of the epic Carlos and his latest film in this year's festival, the exhilarating Wasp Network, about a ring of Cuban refugees functioning as spies for the Castro government while living in Miami in the early nineties, intimate narratives based on true stories. In this special discussion, Assayas will talk about the process of turning real events into creative fictions. Starring Penélope Cruz and Édgar Ramirez, Wasp Network is based on Fernando Morais’s meticulously researched 2015 book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War.

SHORT FILM DESCRIPTIONS

Program 1: International (TRT: 89m)
A mixture of narrative and documentary, this program showcases bold, new films by emerging and established filmmakers working in international cinema today.
Programmed by Tyler Wilson.

Party Day / Dia de Festa
Sofia Bost, Portugal, 2019, 17m
Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A cash-strapped single mother is pulled into an unresolved family conflict as she struggles to host her daughter’s seventh birthday party. Sofia Bost’s 16mm-shot drama, filled with illuminating performances, renders a complicated depiction of motherhood and the inconsolable grievances inherited by each generation.

Blessed Land / Một Khu Đất Tốt
Phạm Ngọc Lân, Vietnam, 2019, 19m
Vietnamese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Searching for her deceased husband’s grave, a mother wanders with her son through a cemetery that has been partially remade into a golf course. Phạm Ngọc Lân’s intricately staged single-location film merges two disparate time periods, creating unnerving harmony between sociopolitical conspiracy and the natural erosion of memory, spiritual calm and modern decadence.

Circumplector
Gastón Solnicki, Argentina/France, 2019, 3m
U.S. Premiere
Gastón Solnicki’s miniature of Notre-Dame—filmed days before the fire—impressionistically links various media the cathedral evokes, including still-life painting and Baroque music, to present-day footage of work and performance.

San Vittore
Yuri Ancarani, Italy, 2019, 11m
Observing security guards as they search and escort children through Milan’s oldest prison, San Vittore depicts the lingering effects of the institution on its visitors. Visual artist Yuri Ancarani’s short documentary remains firmly immersed in a child’s-eye point of view, evoking the young subjects’ increasing understanding of the institution’s purpose with quiet, disturbing tension.

She Runs / Nan Fang Shao Nv
Qiu Yang, China/France, 2019, 19m
Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Set in Changzhou, a city in China’s southern Jiangsu province, She Runs follows a young student after she tries to quit her school’s aerobic dance team. Eschewing close-ups for long shots—around building corners, or from entirely different rooms—Qiu Yang’s Cannes-winning short follows its protagonist’s mounting desperation, implicating the underlying foundation of Changzhou as much as people inhabiting it.

Shakti
Martin Rejtman, Argentina/Chile, 2019, 20m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Not long after his grandmother dies, a twenty-something man in Buenos Aires breaks up with his girlfriend and begins obsessing over her unexpected reaction—but then he meets someone else. The stylistic exactness, narrative shrewdness, and droll pacing emblematic of Martin Rejtman’s cinematic sensibility are perfectly at home in this short comedy of peculiar minutiae and casual digressions.

Program 2: Documentary (TRT: 68m)
This documentary program connects the imperfections of the human experience to the influence of technology and mass media by pairing Pia Borg’s chilling account of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s with Theo Anthony’s wry, imaginative essay film about the instant replay system of professional tennis.
Programmed by Tyler Wilson.

Demonic
Pia Borg, Australia, 2019, 30m
North American Premiere
The real and the imagined fold together in Pia Borg’s horror-documentary about the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s, a mass hysteria during which people around the world “recovered” memories of debauchery and human sacrifices related to satanic cults. Using a cunning combination of archival media coverage, audio footage, and historical recreation by way of computer animation and 16mm, Demonic reframes our current moment of misinformation and distrust, revealing the forces at play between psychiatry, media, and false memory.

Subject to Review
Theo Anthony, USA, 2019, 38m
World Premiere
The latest from Theo Anthony (Rat Film) charts the rise and development of the instant replay system Hawk-Eye in professional tennis, cleverly relating innovative technology and the imperfections of the human experience to the history of cinema, sports entertainment, and humanity’s desire to objectively interpret the world. Featuring music by composer Dan Deacon, Subject to Review is another odd, imaginative, and accessible documentary essay from the Baltimore-based filmmaker.

Program 3: Narrative (TRT: 96m)
From absurdist thrillers and political fantasies to lo-fi sci-fi and body horror, these seven shorts from emerging and established international filmmakers make up this wildly eclectic narrative program.
Programmed by Tyler Wilson.

Automatic
Emma Doxiadi, Greece, 2019, 10m
Greek with English subtitles
World Premiere
Two young women convince each other they are under threat after accidentally photographing what they believe to be a concealed automatic rifle. Shot in drawn-out, static takes, Emma Doxiadi's comical mystery comments on Greece's ongoing refugee crisis in real time, pointing squarely at foolish knee-jerk reactions.

Mthunzi
Tebogo Malebogo, South Africa, 2019, 9m
North American Premiere
While walking home from the store, a young man is prompted to help a seizing woman, and unknowingly demonstrates the danger of doing the right thing. Cape Town–based filmmaker Tebogo Malebogo's briskly tense script and direction elevate Mthunzi from a simple morality tale into a nervous thriller about implicit biases in unfamiliar circumstances.

Control Plan
Juliana Antunes, Brazil, 2018, 15m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Set shortly after former President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, Control Plan follows a young Brazilian woman who uses her cell phone's teleportation service to flee the country. Politically serious but always funny, this lo-fi sci-fi from Juliana Antunes (Baronesa) is as much a commentary on the fraught paradigm shifts of 2016 as it is a pointed takedown of limited data plans.

Nimic
Yorgos Lanthimos, Germany/UK/USA, 2019, 12m
North American Premiere
Matt Dillon stars as a professional cellist whose seemingly innocent question to a stranger results in weirdly repetitive consequences to his daily routine. Working with cinematographer Diego García (Cemetery of Splendor), Lanthimos lends his distressing, absurdist vision to the instruments, patterns, and lonesome gestures of modern city life.

Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You
Brandon Cronenberg, Canada, 2019, 9m
Brandon Cronenberg uses only in-camera effects to tell the hilarious, house-of-mirrors horror story of a patient at an experimental psychiatric facility (Deragh Campbell) who receives a brain implant that allows her to revisit dreams.

Austral Fever / Fiebre austral
Thomas Woodroffe, Chile, 2019, 21m
U.S. Premiere
After an injury places a teenager on bed rest, he and his adult caretaker develop an unusual attraction to his wound. Filmed mostly in dimly lit spaces with southern Chile’s mountain range as its backdrop, Austral Fever is a slow-burning, quietly perverse fantasy about cabin fever, addictive pleasures, and the mysteries of the human body.

The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady / Les Extraordinaires mésaventures de la jeune fille de Pierre
Gabriel Abrantes, France/Portugal, 2019, 20m
North American Premiere
A female sculpture escapes from the Louvre to experience the aggressive streets of contemporary Paris in this fairy-tale pastiche from Gabriel Abrantes. Slyly raising questions of liberation through crisply rendered CGI characters in direct contact with the harsher outside world, Abrantes critiques the power structures of venerable institutions without ever forgoing his ability to entertain.

Program 4: New York Stories (TRT: 98m
This program, now in its fifth year, showcases work from some of the most exciting filmmakers living and working in New York today, including established names and ones to watch.
Programmed by Madeline Whittle and Tyler Wilson.

Good News
Joe Stankus, USA, 2019, 10m
World Premiere
Novelist Evan is excited to share the news that he’s been accepted to a prestigious summer writers’ colony with his husband and their friends over an intimate dinner party. But the big reveal doesn’t go as planned in this finely calibrated domestic-drama-in-miniature.

Caterina
Dan Sallitt, USA, 2019, 17m
World Premiere
Dan Sallitt intimately crafts a small-scale portrait of an inquisitive and compassionate young woman in this subtly episodic slice of life, following the eponymous protagonist through her ongoing, everyday search for connection among friends, lovers, and fellow travelers.

Moving
Adinah Dancyger, USA 2019, 8m
World Premiere
The act of transporting an old mattress into a new walk-up apartment becomes absurdist, cinematic one-woman choreography in this wordless vignette from Adinah Dancyger, full of humor and pathos, and painfully familiar to city-dwellers.

Foreign Powers
Bingham Bryant, USA, 2019, 17m
World Premiere
A nameless young woman recounts a peculiar dream, set in a mysterious fictional city and populated by her real-world friends and acquaintances, in Bingham Bryant’s vivid, precisely conceived exploration into the uncanny logic and banal strangeness of our subconscious wanderings.

the thing that kills me the most
Jay Giampietro, USA, 2019, 5m
World Premiere
Faces, voices, light: language itself is rendered abstract in this impressionistic fugue about fraught interpersonal dynamics at a weekly social engagement, narrated in retrospect by an exasperated fellow guest.

The Sky Is Clear and Blue Today
Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2019, 16m
World Premiere
Ricky D’Ambrose brings his trademark marriage of formalist rigor and sly narrative wit to this faux-documentary account of an American director developing an experimental film for German television about the events of September 11, 2001.

Fit Model
Myna Joseph, USA, 2019, 20m
World Premiere
In Myna Joseph’s deft depiction of a woman fiercely determined to get by on her own terms, Lu Simon (Lucy Owen) is a thirty-something struggling actor navigating day jobs and errands across the city, while juggling negotiations with an unhelpful hospital billing department.

Laying Out
Joanna Arnow, USA, 2019, 5m
World Premiere
This tersely lyrical meditation on sex and gender roles from Joanna Arnow features two fed-up mermaids lounging on a beach, drinks in hand, as they vent and commiserate over underacknowledged frustrations and unspoken desires.

TALKS DESCRIPTIONS

On Cinema: Martin Scorsese
In these annual special events, New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones sits down with world-renowned filmmakers for in-depth talks about films from other directors that have influenced them, their discussion illustrated with film clips. In the first of two On Cinema events that the festival is pleased to present this year, Jones will talk with Martin Scorsese, whose epic crime drama The Irishman is this year’s highly anticipated opening night event. Scorsese, known as much for his work as a film historian as for his unparalleled, decades-spanning cinematic career, will guide the audience through a selection of films that inspired this remarkable new work.

On Cinema: Pedro Almodóvar
Among the world’s most beloved auteurs, Pedro Almodóvar has shown films at the New York Film Festival eleven times over the past four decades. This year’s selection is perhaps his most personal film yet: Pain and Glory, starring a Cannes Film Festival–awarded Antonio Banderas in the role of a director—essentially a surrogate Almodóvar figure—who has reached a creative block. As with all of his films, there is a deep wellspring of emotion in Pain and Glory, as well as a rich tapestry of allusions and references to a cinematic past, which this conversation will help elucidate.

Directors Dialogues
The Directors Dialogues are the New York Film Festival’s annual series of intimate conversations, in which a selection of filmmakers from this year’s festival sit down for special Q&As to discuss the ideas and the craft behind their buzzed about newest works. Participating directors include:

Bong Joon-ho
The South Korean filmmaker, whose unpredictable and diverse filmography has taken us from the gonzo monster movie The Host to the intense, bloody melodrama of Mother to the graphic novel action of Snowpiercer, has created perhaps his masterpiece with this year’s Palme d’Or–winner Parasite. Bong will discuss his spring-trap-loaded comedy-drama-thriller with a social conscience—so make sure you see it first to not spoil its many surprises.

Mati Diop
The French-Senegalese director made perhaps the year’s most talked-about debut feature with Atlantics, which earned her the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Both ghost and love story, the film feels unlike any other, hypnotic and supernatural yet grounded in the realities of life as it’s experienced by those living in contemporary, working-class Dakar. Diop will be on hand to discuss how she negotiated these registers and how she constructed her singular film.

[Chris Knipp]

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Revivals and retrospective sections


DAYS OF HEAVEN

These two sections allow the NYFF to look at and share great films of the past the juries admire, present new restorations, and remember highlights of earlier festivals. This year it also celebrates American cinematographers.

The NYFF57 Retrospective section is programmed by NYFF director Kent Jones and Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) Assistant Programmer Dan Sullivan. The Revivals section is programmed by Jones, Sullivan, Dennis Lim, and Florence Almozini. Retrospective pays tribute to the 100th anniversary of the American Society of Cinematographers, including a rare I.B. Technicolor print of Francis Ford Coppola'd The Godfather: Part II. shot by Gordon Willis. ("IB" abbreviates "imbibition", a dye-transfer operation.) Revivals showcases 11 restorations of significant works in cinema history, including William Wyler’s Dodsworth and Béla Tarr’s [7-hour plus] Sátántangó.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

RETROSPECTIVE

America, America
Elia Kazan, USA, 1963, 35mm, 174m
The great Haskell Wexler shot any number of films that could be highlighted in this section, but few can match the overwhelming ambition of this epic by Elia Kazan, based on the life of his uncle. Powered by a largely unknown cast, America, America follows Stavros (Stathis Giallelis), a Cappadocian Greek, from his tiny Anatolian village to Constantinople and finally to New York City, encountering poverty, hardship, and struggle all along the way. Wexler’s sumptuous and kinetic black-and-white handheld cinematography suffuses America, America with a spontaneous energy uncharacteristic of period films at the time, greatly enhancing Kazan’s turn-of-the-20th-century portrayal of an immigrant’s journey to a better life.

Dave Chapelle’s Block Party
Michel Gondry, USA, 2005, 35mm, 103m
One of the great recent concert films, Michel Gondry’s 2005 documentary of a free daylong performance in Brooklyn hosted by comedian Dave Chapelle abounds with life, energy, and rhythm—thanks in no small part to DP Ellen Kuras’s nimble camera, which captures the all-star concert as a kaleidoscopic, reverberant event. Featuring the likes of Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, the Fugees, Jill Scott, and more, Block Party also makes for an indelible portrait of the event’s host, arguably the world’s greatest working standup comedian at the time, operating at the height of his powers, clowning around with members of the lineup, and, most crucially, serving as the catalyst for this unforgettable happening.

Days of Heaven
Terrence Malick, USA, 1978, 94m
Before coming to the United States and joining the ASC, Néstor Almendros cut his teeth as a go-to cinematographer for François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer; his first Hollywood film was Terrence Malick’s anticipated follow-up to his debut, Badlands. Almendros promptly won a 1979 Academy Award for his work. (Haskell Wexler, who received an Additional Photography credit, stepped in to help finish the film.) Hired by Malick for his sure hand with natural lighting, Almendros ravishingly draws out and amplifies the inherent beauty and poetry of Malick’s 1916-set story, concerning a laborer (Richard Gere) who accidentally kills his boss and flees Chicago for the Texas Panhandle with his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) and younger sister (Linda Manz), where they find work with a farmer (Sam Shepard).

Dead Man
Jim Jarmusch, USA, 1995, 129m
Jim Jarmusch’s hypnotic, parable-like, revisionist Western follows the spiritual rebirth of a dying 19th-century accountant (Johnny Depp) named William Blake (no relation to the poet . . . or is there?). Guiding Blake through a treacherous landscape of U.S. Marshals, cannibalistic bounty hunters, shady missionaries, and cross-dressing fur traders is a Plains Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), one of the most fully realized Native American characters in contemporary cinema. Dead Man doubles as a barbed reflection on America’s treatment of its indigenous people and a radical twist on the myths of the American West, expressed in no small part by frequent Jarmusch collaborator Robby Müller’s striking black-and-white cinematography.

The Godfather: Part II
Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974, 35mm, 212m
Francis Ford Coppola and Gordon Willis enjoyed one of the 1970s’ most defining cinematographic partnerships, and their most astonishing collaboration was this, the second installment of Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel. Picking up where the first film left off—with Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) having assumed power over his family’s criminal syndicate—Part II tracks the young don’s move into the casino business in Las Vegas while dealing with increased attention from Washington, D.C. But most striking are the flashbacks to the early life of Michael’s father, Vito (portrayed here by an Oscar-winning Robert De Niro), lent unsurpassed dimension and atmosphere by Willis’s masterful compositions and lighting. Rare I.B. Technicolor print!

The Grapes of Wrath
John Ford, USA, 1940, 129m
Though Gregg Toland is perhaps best known for his work with Orson Welles and William Wyler on such films as Citizen Kane and The Best Years of Our Lives, his camerawork in John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic novel rates among the influential cinematographer’s greatest achievements. Starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, the iconic itinerant ex-con leading his large family down Highway 66 in search of work and a better life in California, The Grapes of Wrath—one of American literature’s great politically liberal books adapted by a famously conservative auteur—stands as perhaps Ford’s most powerfully compassionate movie.

The Hard Way
Vincent Sherman, USA, 1943, 35mm, 109m
The pioneering Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe shot more than 130 films during his distinguished career—perhaps none as engrossing and entertaining as Vincent Sherman’s 1943 genre-melding musical melodrama. Ida Lupino stars as housewife social-climber Helen, who schemes to use the budding career of her singer sister Katie (Joan Leslie) as her ticket out of their dingy steel town (conjured by earlier documentary footage shot by Pare Lorentz). But when Katie falls for an up-and-coming band leader (Jack Carson), she must choose between her new love and her conniving sister. 35mm print courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive.

He Walked by Night
Alfred L. Werker, USA, 1948, 35mm, 79m
Alfred Werker’s pseudo-documentary noir is a lean, mean thriller concerning a petty thief (Richard Basehart) who kills a cop and roams Los Angeles, igniting a manhunt—including future Dragnet star Jack Webb as a shrewd LAPD forensics specialist—that culminates in a climactic chase scene reminiscent of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Finished by an uncredited Anthony Mann, the film represents one of cinematographer John Alton’s crowning achievements, an endless, anxious maze of urban shadows. 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation.

Leave Her to Heaven
John M. Stahl, USA, 1945, 110m
John M. Stahl’s landmark Technicolor melodrama-noir stars Gene Tierney as Ellen, a young socialite who meets Richard (Cornell Wilde), a reclusive ex-con novelist, on a train; they fall in love and marry after she leaves her fiancé (Vincent Price), setting off a chain of events that leads to Ellen’s escalating suspicion that Richard is actually in love with her adopted sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain). Stahl steers his brilliant cast through a mind-boggling, winding plot, toward its exorable tragic crescendo. Fox stalwart DP Leon Shamroy’s Oscar-winning work on Leave Her to Heaven marks a historically inspired attempt at a kind-of squaring of the circle: shooting a gripping noir in vibrantly beautiful Technicolor.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Robert Altman, USA, 1971, 121m
Robert Altman’s revisionist western classic stars Warren Beatty at the height of his powers as fur-clad gambler John McCabe, who blows into a snowy town in Washington State and sets up a brothel. He lucks into a business (and, later, romantic) partnership with a wayward cockney woman (Julie Christie), but their success lands McCabe on the radar of some unsavory types who want to buy the brothel and its adjoining zinc mines and won’t take no for an answer. Equally known for Beatty and Christie’s lead performances, Altman’s signature overlapping dialogue, and use of Leonard Cohen songs, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is defined by Vilmos Zsigmond’s fleet camerawork, which masterfully captures Altman’s characters amid snow-covered landscapes and in candlelit back rooms.

The Passion of Anna
Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1969, 100m
Filmed on Fårö, Ingmar Bergman’s bleak island home, The Passion of Anna is the case history of a contemporary Everyman, one Andreas Winkelmann (Max von Sydow), a lost soul ricocheting emotionally among a trio of equally damaged folk. Trapped in one of Bergman’s hellish marriages, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson are worlds apart—she, fading from lack of love; he, armored in cold cynicism. Anna (Liv Ullmann), the woman who becomes Andreas’s lover, assaults him with her righteous honesty until he explodes in brutal rage. Passion was filmed by legendary Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist, who would later secure his American Society of Cinematographers membership working in America with Philip Kaufman, Bob Rafelson, James L. Brooks, Woody Allen, and others.

Soldier Girls
Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill, USA/UK, 1981, 87m
Following a platoon of female cadets through basic training at Georgia’s Fort Gordon, Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill’s 1981 documentary endures as a comical and often critical look at the military industrial complex. The film’s subjects have enlisted for a myriad of reasons, ranging from genuine patriotism to socioeconomic circumstance. But once the women begin training, they find themselves performing strange drills, encountering stranger drill sergeants, and experiencing no shortage of sadism and prejudice. In her collaborations with Broomfield, Churchill’s work is always impeccable, but it’s especially striking here, where her dual role as cinematographer and director intensifies her already complicated relationship to the subject.

Street Angel
Frank Borzage, USA, 1928, 102m
In Frank Borzage’s essential silent melodrama, a young woman (Janet Gaynor in an Oscar-winning role) forced into a life of crime by her ailing mother’s escalating medical costs finds herself on the lam, seeking refuge with a traveling circus—where she falls in love with a bad boy painter, played by Borzage axiom Charles Farrell. Brilliantly shot by Ernest Palmer and Paul Ivano, Street Angel has endured as one of Borzage’s most transporting and affecting weepies. The film is also notable for being a key example of the transitional silent/sound hybrid form, featuring no recorded dialogue but nevertheless boasting an early Movietone track of sound effects and passages of recorded music. 4K restoration!

REVIVALS

L’age d’or
Luis Buñuel, 1930, France, 63m
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí followed up their seminal first collaboration, the short Un chien andalou, with this equally bold, unforgettable surrealist masterpiece, which they co-wrote. In L’age d’or, a documentary about scorpions gives way to a series of seemingly disconnected, absurdist scenarios and Freudian symbols—a young couple writhing in the mud near a religious ceremony, a woman fellating the toe of a statue—adding up to an acridly funny picture of the hypocrisies of modern bourgeois life. Months after its premiere, right-wing groups rioted against the film, leading to its being banned in France until the eighties. L’age d’or eventually came to be seen as an essential modernist work, and this incredible new 4K restoration by the Cinémathèque française and Centre Pompidou (MNAM-CCI expérimental cinema department) has brought its image and sound back to brilliant life. Special thanks to Pathé and Maison de Champagne Piper-Heidsieck.

Dodsworth
William Wyler, 1936, USA, 101m
This worldly, richly layered adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s 1929 novel is one of the triumphs of the storied career of director William Wyler—and that’s saying a lot. A stoic yet tender Walter Huston brilliantly inhabits the title character, a newly retired Midwestern auto magnate whose marriage to the perpetually dissatisfied Fran (early talkies star Ruth Chatterton in perhaps her finest role) is put to the test during an extended voyage to Europe. Mary Astor, David Niven, and Paul Lukas round out the luminous supporting cast as the various objects of flirtation who guide the Dodsworths as they change life’s course. Considered a high watermark of Hollywood sophistication upon release, this Samuel Goldwyn production (a Retrospective selection in NYFF24) increasingly feels like a singular movie about the variable definitions of American progress, with Wyler effortlessly depicting the shifting tides of marriage with restraint and maturity. Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with The Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Family Trust, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

The Incredible Shrinking Man
Jack Arnold, 1957, USA, 81m
A dangerous combination of radiation and insecticide causes the unfortunate Scott Carey (Grant Williams) to shrink, slowly but surely, until he is only a few inches tall. His home becomes a wilderness where he must survive everything from spiders living in the cellar to his beloved cat. Through the clarity of its existential vision and trick photography effects, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a cornerstone of the sci-fi B-movie boom of the American fifties, written by the incomparable Richard Matheson, based on his own story, and directed by Jack Arnold, whose credits also include It Came from Outer Space and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. A Universal Pictures release. This is the domestic premiere of a new 4K digital restoration by Universal Pictures; the restoration work was conducted by NBCUniversal StudioPost.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day
Bert Stern, 1959, USA, 85m
One of the most extraordinary concert films ever made, Brooklyn-born fashion photographer Bert Stern’s glistening, full-color document of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island is as intimate and gorgeous a depiction of a live music event as one could hope to see. And the lineup of legendary talent truly astonishes: Thelonius Monk, Big Maybelle, Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Anita O’Day, Gerry Mulligan, and many others, all of them performing at the top of their game and captured on warm, saturated color film stock, with close-up camerawork that captures every bead of sweat. New 4K Restoration by IndieCollect, created with support from the Library of Congress.

Le franc + The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun
Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1999/1994, Senegal, 45m/46m
The great Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, who is best known for 1971’s epochal Touki Bouki—and whose legacy can be felt in this year’s NYFF, with his niece Mati Diop’s masterful, Cannes-awarded Atlantics in the Main Slate—made two wonderful medium-length films in the nineties that were intended to be part of a trilogy titled “Tales of Ordinary People,” but the filmmaker in died 1998 before he could finish. In Le franc, a broke musician comes upon a lottery ticket after his beloved instrument is confiscated by his landlady; in the posthumously released The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, a young girl decides to sell newspapers on the streets, despite the fact that boys have historically run that racket. The two films function beautifully as a pair of magical realist works grounded in the political realities of Dakar. Restored in 2K in 2019 by Waka Films with the support of the Institut Français, Cinémathèque Afrique and CNC - Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, in agreement with Teemur Mambéty, at Éclair Laboratories from the original negative.

Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned)
Luis Buñuel, 1950, Mexico, 80m
Nearly two decades after the scandals of Un chien andalou and L’age d’or, Luis Buñuel had a major international comeback with Los Olvidados, which remains one of the world’s most influential films in its unsentimental yet vivid, sometimes surreal depiction of impoverished youths in Mexico City. In the story of a juvenile delinquent who reunites with his gang after breaking out of prison, unflinching, desperate violence becomes riveting visual poetry with lyrical experimental flourishes. Buñuel won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this film, which all but reignited his career, leading to two decades of increasingly daring work. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Fundación Televisa, Televisa, Cineteca Nacional Mexico, and Filmoteca de la UNAM. Restoration funding provided by The Material World Foundation.

Le Professeur
Valerio Zurlini, 1972, Italy/France, 132m
In Valerio Zurlini’s penetrating character study, Alain Delon—who also co-produced—stars as Daniele, a tragically hip poetry and literature professor who travels to Rimini for a four-month teaching assignment with his suicidal wife, Monica (Lea Massari), in tow. During his tenure, Daniele is indifferent to his students, even letting them smoke in class. He spends his free time gambling with locals, and begins an ill-fated affair with one of his students, Vanina (Sonia Petrovna). This melancholic visual poem, a film of cold and fog, shot in shades of gray disaffection, was cut down upon its release at the insistence of Delon. Now, 45 minutes have been added back in for a new generation of viewers. New 4K restoration by Pathé and Films du Camélia, by the lab L’Image Retrouvée (Paris). Special thanks to Ronnie Chammah.

Sátántangó
Béla Tarr, Hungary/Germany/Switzerland, 1994, 432m (plus two intermissions)
Among the world’s most respected and transformative filmmakers, Béla Tarr—whose final film, The Turin Horse, played at NYFF49—made his international breakthrough with this astonishing, singular adaptation of the novel by László Krasznahorkai about the arrival of a false prophet in a small farming collective during the waning days of Communism. Divided into 12 distinct episodes, this seven-and-a-half hour masterpiece weaves in and out of the lives of the locals as the silver-tongued Irimiás (played by Tarr’s longtime musical composer Mihály Vig) promises a bright future in a new promised land. This bleak yet mordantly funny study of domestic and social decay was ranked 36th on the most recent Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the greatest film ever made. Sátántangó has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by Arbelos in collaboration with the Hungarian Filmlab. An Arbelos release. Opening October 18 at Film at Lincoln Center.

Three Short Films by Sergei Parajanov
Sergei Parajanov, Soviet Union, 1966–86, 46m
Armenian-Georgian filmmaker and artist Sergei Parajanov’s radical, visually dynamic Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Color of Pomegranates, distinguished by cultural folklore and myth, are only the best known works of this peerless Soviet-era filmmaker, a student of Moscow’s prestigious VGIK film school. Internationally respected, he nevertheless became increasingly controversial in the Soviet Union, dealing with censorship and imprisonment. This program brings together three remarkable short works, meditations on the nature of art and artists that boast his singular, colorful, collage-like style and which have been newly restored: Kiev Frescoes (1966), consisting of the remaining footage of a confiscated project about post–WWII Kiev; Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967), a tribute to the art of nineteenth-century Armenian painter; and Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme (1986), bringing to life the playful work of Georgian outsider artist Niko Pirosmani. Restorations by Fixafilm (Warsaw), produced within the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project. Restoration supervised by Lukasz Ceranka and produced by Daniel Bird. Financial support from Kino Klassika Foundation (London).

Preceded by
The House Is Black
Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 1962, 21m
In her only film—one of the most acclaimed shorts ever made—Iranian director Forough Farrokhzad depicts with compassion and poetry the lives of people living in a leper colony in Northern Iran. Farrokhzad wrote, directed, and edited The House Is Black, and she creates a world unto itself, using unexpected disjunctions between sound and image to enhance the feeling of marginalized experienced by her subjects. Restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Ecran Noir productions, in collaboration with Ebrahim Golestan. With the support of Genoma Films and Mahrokh Eshaghian.

Ten Documentary Shorts by Vittorio De Seta
Vittorio De Seta, Italy, 1954*–59, 119m
The extraordinary documentary shorts made by Italian director Vittorio De Seta in the fifties stand alone from the films of his contemporaries for the rigor of their observational eye. Shot in locations around Sicily, Sardinia, and Calabria, these vivid, colorful, narration-free nonfiction works alight on the daily labors and traditional customs of rural workers and their families, bringing out their rituals with such focused determination that they become almost dreamlike. Watching these films together creates a mesmeric immersion into a time, place, and cinema itself. Titles include Lu tempu di li pisci spata (1954), Isole di fuoco (1954), Pasqua in Sicilia (1955), Surfarara (1955), Contadini del mare (1955), Parabola d’oro (1955), Un giorno in Barbagia (1958), Pescherecci (1958), Pastori di orgosolo (1958), and I dimenticati (1959). Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

[Chris Knipp]

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Revivals and retrospective sections



These two sections allow the NYFF to look at and share great films of the past the juries admire, present new restorations, and remember highlights of earlier festivals. This year it also celebrates cinematographers.

The NYFF57 Retrospective section is programmed by NYFF director Kent Jones and Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) Assistant Programmer Dan Sullivan. The Revivals section is programmed by Jones, Sullivan, Dennis Lim, and Florence Almozini. Retrospective pays tribute to the 100th anniversary of the American Society of Cinematographers, including a rare I.B. Technicolor print of Francis Ford Coppola'd The Godfather: Part II. shot by Gordon Willis. Revivals showcases 11 restorations of significant works in cinema history, including William Wyler’s Dodsworth and Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

RETROSPECTIVE

America, America
Elia Kazan, USA, 1963, 35mm, 174m
The great Haskell Wexler shot any number of films that could be highlighted in this section, but few can match the overwhelming ambition of this epic by Elia Kazan, based on the life of his uncle. Powered by a largely unknown cast, America, America follows Stavros (Stathis Giallelis), a Cappadocian Greek, from his tiny Anatolian village to Constantinople and finally to New York City, encountering poverty, hardship, and struggle all along the way. Wexler’s sumptuous and kinetic black-and-white handheld cinematography suffuses America, America with a spontaneous energy uncharacteristic of period films at the time, greatly enhancing Kazan’s turn-of-the-20th-century portrayal of an immigrant’s journey to a better life.

Dave Chapelle’s Block Party
Michel Gondry, USA, 2005, 35mm, 103m
One of the great recent concert films, Michel Gondry’s 2005 documentary of a free daylong performance in Brooklyn hosted by comedian Dave Chapelle abounds with life, energy, and rhythm—thanks in no small part to DP Ellen Kuras’s nimble camera, which captures the all-star concert as a kaleidoscopic, reverberant event. Featuring the likes of Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, the Fugees, Jill Scott, and more, Block Party also makes for an indelible portrait of the event’s host, arguably the world’s greatest working standup comedian at the time, operating at the height of his powers, clowning around with members of the lineup, and, most crucially, serving as the catalyst for this unforgettable happening.

Days of Heaven
Terrence Malick, USA, 1978, 94m
Before coming to the United States and joining the ASC, Néstor Almendros cut his teeth as a go-to cinematographer for François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer; his first Hollywood film was Terrence Malick’s anticipated follow-up to his debut, Badlands. Almendros promptly won a 1979 Academy Award for his work. (Haskell Wexler, who received an Additional Photography credit, stepped in to help finish the film.) Hired by Malick for his sure hand with natural lighting, Almendros ravishingly draws out and amplifies the inherent beauty and poetry of Malick’s 1916-set story, concerning a laborer (Richard Gere) who accidentally kills his boss and flees Chicago for the Texas Panhandle with his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) and younger sister (Linda Manz), where they find work with a farmer (Sam Shepard).

Dead Man
Jim Jarmusch, USA, 1995, 129m
Jim Jarmusch’s hypnotic, parable-like, revisionist Western follows the spiritual rebirth of a dying 19th-century accountant (Johnny Depp) named William Blake (no relation to the poet . . . or is there?). Guiding Blake through a treacherous landscape of U.S. Marshals, cannibalistic bounty hunters, shady missionaries, and cross-dressing fur traders is a Plains Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), one of the most fully realized Native American characters in contemporary cinema. Dead Man doubles as a barbed reflection on America’s treatment of its indigenous people and a radical twist on the myths of the American West, expressed in no small part by frequent Jarmusch collaborator Robby Müller’s striking black-and-white cinematography.

The Godfather: Part II
Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974, 35mm, 212m
Francis Ford Coppola and Gordon Willis enjoyed one of the 1970s’ most defining cinematographic partnerships, and their most astonishing collaboration was this, the second installment of Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel. Picking up where the first film left off—with Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) having assumed power over his family’s criminal syndicate—Part II tracks the young don’s move into the casino business in Las Vegas while dealing with increased attention from Washington, D.C. But most striking are the flashbacks to the early life of Michael’s father, Vito (portrayed here by an Oscar-winning Robert De Niro), lent unsurpassed dimension and atmosphere by Willis’s masterful compositions and lighting. Rare I.B. Technicolor print!

The Grapes of Wrath
John Ford, USA, 1940, 129m
Though Gregg Toland is perhaps best known for his work with Orson Welles and William Wyler on such films as Citizen Kane and The Best Years of Our Lives, his camerawork in John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic novel rates among the influential cinematographer’s greatest achievements. Starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, the iconic itinerant ex-con leading his large family down Highway 66 in search of work and a better life in California, The Grapes of Wrath—one of American literature’s great politically liberal books adapted by a famously conservative auteur—stands as perhaps Ford’s most powerfully compassionate movie.

The Hard Way
Vincent Sherman, USA, 1943, 35mm, 109m
The pioneering Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe shot more than 130 films during his distinguished career—perhaps none as engrossing and entertaining as Vincent Sherman’s 1943 genre-melding musical melodrama. Ida Lupino stars as housewife social-climber Helen, who schemes to use the budding career of her singer sister Katie (Joan Leslie) as her ticket out of their dingy steel town (conjured by earlier documentary footage shot by Pare Lorentz). But when Katie falls for an up-and-coming band leader (Jack Carson), she must choose between her new love and her conniving sister. 35mm print courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive.

He Walked by Night
Alfred L. Werker, USA, 1948, 35mm, 79m
Alfred Werker’s pseudo-documentary noir is a lean, mean thriller concerning a petty thief (Richard Basehart) who kills a cop and roams Los Angeles, igniting a manhunt—including future Dragnet star Jack Webb as a shrewd LAPD forensics specialist—that culminates in a climactic chase scene reminiscent of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Finished by an uncredited Anthony Mann, the film represents one of cinematographer John Alton’s crowning achievements, an endless, anxious maze of urban shadows. 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation.

Leave Her to Heaven
John M. Stahl, USA, 1945, 110m
John M. Stahl’s landmark Technicolor melodrama-noir stars Gene Tierney as Ellen, a young socialite who meets Richard (Cornell Wilde), a reclusive ex-con novelist, on a train; they fall in love and marry after she leaves her fiancé (Vincent Price), setting off a chain of events that leads to Ellen’s escalating suspicion that Richard is actually in love with her adopted sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain). Stahl steers his brilliant cast through a mind-boggling, winding plot, toward its exorable tragic crescendo. Fox stalwart DP Leon Shamroy’s Oscar-winning work on Leave Her to Heaven marks a historically inspired attempt at a kind-of squaring of the circle: shooting a gripping noir in vibrantly beautiful Technicolor.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Robert Altman, USA, 1971, 121m
Robert Altman’s revisionist western classic stars Warren Beatty at the height of his powers as fur-clad gambler John McCabe, who blows into a snowy town in Washington State and sets up a brothel. He lucks into a business (and, later, romantic) partnership with a wayward cockney woman (Julie Christie), but their success lands McCabe on the radar of some unsavory types who want to buy the brothel and its adjoining zinc mines and won’t take no for an answer. Equally known for Beatty and Christie’s lead performances, Altman’s signature overlapping dialogue, and use of Leonard Cohen songs, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is defined by Vilmos Zsigmond’s fleet camerawork, which masterfully captures Altman’s characters amid snow-covered landscapes and in candlelit back rooms.

The Passion of Anna
Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1969, 100m
Filmed on Fårö, Ingmar Bergman’s bleak island home, The Passion of Anna is the case history of a contemporary Everyman, one Andreas Winkelmann (Max von Sydow), a lost soul ricocheting emotionally among a trio of equally damaged folk. Trapped in one of Bergman’s hellish marriages, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson are worlds apart—she, fading from lack of love; he, armored in cold cynicism. Anna (Liv Ullmann), the woman who becomes Andreas’s lover, assaults him with her righteous honesty until he explodes in brutal rage. Passion was filmed by legendary Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist, who would later secure his American Society of Cinematographers membership working in America with Philip Kaufman, Bob Rafelson, James L. Brooks, Woody Allen, and others.

Soldier Girls
Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill, USA/UK, 1981, 87m
Following a platoon of female cadets through basic training at Georgia’s Fort Gordon, Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill’s 1981 documentary endures as a comical and often critical look at the military industrial complex. The film’s subjects have enlisted for a myriad of reasons, ranging from genuine patriotism to socioeconomic circumstance. But once the women begin training, they find themselves performing strange drills, encountering stranger drill sergeants, and experiencing no shortage of sadism and prejudice. In her collaborations with Broomfield, Churchill’s work is always impeccable, but it’s especially striking here, where her dual role as cinematographer and director intensifies her already complicated relationship to the subject.

Street Angel
Frank Borzage, USA, 1928, 102m
In Frank Borzage’s essential silent melodrama, a young woman (Janet Gaynor in an Oscar-winning role) forced into a life of crime by her ailing mother’s escalating medical costs finds herself on the lam, seeking refuge with a traveling circus—where she falls in love with a bad boy painter, played by Borzage axiom Charles Farrell. Brilliantly shot by Ernest Palmer and Paul Ivano, Street Angel has endured as one of Borzage’s most transporting and affecting weepies. The film is also notable for being a key example of the transitional silent/sound hybrid form, featuring no recorded dialogue but nevertheless boasting an early Movietone track of sound effects and passages of recorded music. 4K restoration!

REVIVALS

L’age d’or
Luis Buñuel, 1930, France, 63m
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí followed up their seminal first collaboration, the short Un chien andalou, with this equally bold, unforgettable surrealist masterpiece, which they co-wrote. In L’age d’or, a documentary about scorpions gives way to a series of seemingly disconnected, absurdist scenarios and Freudian symbols—a young couple writhing in the mud near a religious ceremony, a woman fellating the toe of a statue—adding up to an acridly funny picture of the hypocrisies of modern bourgeois life. Months after its premiere, right-wing groups rioted against the film, leading to its being banned in France until the eighties. L’age d’or eventually came to be seen as an essential modernist work, and this incredible new 4K restoration by the Cinémathèque française and Centre Pompidou (MNAM-CCI expérimental cinema department) has brought its image and sound back to brilliant life. Special thanks to Pathé and Maison de Champagne Piper-Heidsieck.

Dodsworth
William Wyler, 1936, USA, 101m
This worldly, richly layered adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s 1929 novel is one of the triumphs of the storied career of director William Wyler—and that’s saying a lot. A stoic yet tender Walter Huston brilliantly inhabits the title character, a newly retired Midwestern auto magnate whose marriage to the perpetually dissatisfied Fran (early talkies star Ruth Chatterton in perhaps her finest role) is put to the test during an extended voyage to Europe. Mary Astor, David Niven, and Paul Lukas round out the luminous supporting cast as the various objects of flirtation who guide the Dodsworths as they change life’s course. Considered a high watermark of Hollywood sophistication upon release, this Samuel Goldwyn production (a Retrospective selection in NYFF24) increasingly feels like a singular movie about the variable definitions of American progress, with Wyler effortlessly depicting the shifting tides of marriage with restraint and maturity. Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with The Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Family Trust, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

The Incredible Shrinking Man
Jack Arnold, 1957, USA, 81m
A dangerous combination of radiation and insecticide causes the unfortunate Scott Carey (Grant Williams) to shrink, slowly but surely, until he is only a few inches tall. His home becomes a wilderness where he must survive everything from spiders living in the cellar to his beloved cat. Through the clarity of its existential vision and trick photography effects, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a cornerstone of the sci-fi B-movie boom of the American fifties, written by the incomparable Richard Matheson, based on his own story, and directed by Jack Arnold, whose credits also include It Came from Outer Space and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. A Universal Pictures release. This is the domestic premiere of a new 4K digital restoration by Universal Pictures; the restoration work was conducted by NBCUniversal StudioPost.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day
Bert Stern, 1959, USA, 85m
One of the most extraordinary concert films ever made, Brooklyn-born fashion photographer Bert Stern’s glistening, full-color document of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island is as intimate and gorgeous a depiction of a live music event as one could hope to see. And the lineup of legendary talent truly astonishes: Thelonius Monk, Big Maybelle, Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Anita O’Day, Gerry Mulligan, and many others, all of them performing at the top of their game and captured on warm, saturated color film stock, with close-up camerawork that captures every bead of sweat. New 4K Restoration by IndieCollect, created with support from the Library of Congress.

Le franc + The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun
Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1999/1994, Senegal, 45m/46m
The great Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, who is best known for 1971’s epochal Touki Bouki—and whose legacy can be felt in this year’s NYFF, with his niece Mati Diop’s masterful, Cannes-awarded Atlantics in the Main Slate—made two wonderful medium-length films in the nineties that were intended to be part of a trilogy titled “Tales of Ordinary People,” but the filmmaker in died 1998 before he could finish. In Le franc, a broke musician comes upon a lottery ticket after his beloved instrument is confiscated by his landlady; in the posthumously released The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, a young girl decides to sell newspapers on the streets, despite the fact that boys have historically run that racket. The two films function beautifully as a pair of magical realist works grounded in the political realities of Dakar. Restored in 2K in 2019 by Waka Films with the support of the Institut Français, Cinémathèque Afrique and CNC - Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, in agreement with Teemur Mambéty, at Éclair Laboratories from the original negative.

Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned)
Luis Buñuel, 1950, Mexico, 80m
Nearly two decades after the scandals of Un chien andalou and L’age d’or, Luis Buñuel had a major international comeback with Los Olvidados, which remains one of the world’s most influential films in its unsentimental yet vivid, sometimes surreal depiction of impoverished youths in Mexico City. In the story of a juvenile delinquent who reunites with his gang after breaking out of prison, unflinching, desperate violence becomes riveting visual poetry with lyrical experimental flourishes. Buñuel won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this film, which all but reignited his career, leading to two decades of increasingly daring work. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Fundación Televisa, Televisa, Cineteca Nacional Mexico, and Filmoteca de la UNAM. Restoration funding provided by The Material World Foundation.

Le Professeur
Valerio Zurlini, 1972, Italy/France, 132m
In Valerio Zurlini’s penetrating character study, Alain Delon—who also co-produced—stars as Daniele, a tragically hip poetry and literature professor who travels to Rimini for a four-month teaching assignment with his suicidal wife, Monica (Lea Massari), in tow. During his tenure, Daniele is indifferent to his students, even letting them smoke in class. He spends his free time gambling with locals, and begins an ill-fated affair with one of his students, Vanina (Sonia Petrovna). This melancholic visual poem, a film of cold and fog, shot in shades of gray disaffection, was cut down upon its release at the insistence of Delon. Now, 45 minutes have been added back in for a new generation of viewers. New 4K restoration by Pathé and Films du Camélia, by the lab L’Image Retrouvée (Paris). Special thanks to Ronnie Chammah.

Sátántangó
Béla Tarr, Hungary/Germany/Switzerland, 1994, 432m (plus two intermissions)
Among the world’s most respected and transformative filmmakers, Béla Tarr—whose final film, The Turin Horse, played at NYFF49—made his international breakthrough with this astonishing, singular adaptation of the novel by László Krasznahorkai about the arrival of a false prophet in a small farming collective during the waning days of Communism. Divided into 12 distinct episodes, this seven-and-a-half hour masterpiece weaves in and out of the lives of the locals as the silver-tongued Irimiás (played by Tarr’s longtime musical composer Mihály Vig) promises a bright future in a new promised land. This bleak yet mordantly funny study of domestic and social decay was ranked 36th on the most recent Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the greatest film ever made. Sátántangó has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by Arbelos in collaboration with the Hungarian Filmlab. An Arbelos release. Opening October 18 at Film at Lincoln Center.

Three Short Films by Sergei Parajanov
Sergei Parajanov, Soviet Union, 1966–86, 46m
Armenian-Georgian filmmaker and artist Sergei Parajanov’s radical, visually dynamic Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Color of Pomegranates, distinguished by cultural folklore and myth, are only the best known works of this peerless Soviet-era filmmaker, a student of Moscow’s prestigious VGIK film school. Internationally respected, he nevertheless became increasingly controversial in the Soviet Union, dealing with censorship and imprisonment. This program brings together three remarkable short works, meditations on the nature of art and artists that boast his singular, colorful, collage-like style and which have been newly restored: Kiev Frescoes (1966), consisting of the remaining footage of a confiscated project about post–WWII Kiev; Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967), a tribute to the art of nineteenth-century Armenian painter; and Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme (1986), bringing to life the playful work of Georgian outsider artist Niko Pirosmani. Restorations by Fixafilm (Warsaw), produced within the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project. Restoration supervised by Lukasz Ceranka and produced by Daniel Bird. Financial support from Kino Klassika Foundation (London).

Preceded by
The House Is Black
Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 1962, 21m
In her only film—one of the most acclaimed shorts ever made—Iranian director Forough Farrokhzad depicts with compassion and poetry the lives of people living in a leper colony in Northern Iran. Farrokhzad wrote, directed, and edited The House Is Black, and she creates a world unto itself, using unexpected disjunctions between sound and image to enhance the feeling of marginalized experienced by her subjects. Restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Ecran Noir productions, in collaboration with Ebrahim Golestan. With the support of Genoma Films and Mahrokh Eshaghian.

Ten Documentary Shorts by Vittorio De Seta
Vittorio De Seta, Italy, 1954*–59, 119m
The extraordinary documentary shorts made by Italian director Vittorio De Seta in the fifties stand alone from the films of his contemporaries for the rigor of their observational eye. Shot in locations around Sicily, Sardinia, and Calabria, these vivid, colorful, narration-free nonfiction works alight on the daily labors and traditional customs of rural workers and their families, bringing out their rituals with such focused determination that they become almost dreamlike. Watching these films together creates a mesmeric immersion into a time, place, and cinema itself. Titles include Lu tempu di li pisci spata (1954), Isole di fuoco (1954), Pasqua in Sicilia (1955), Surfarara (1955), Contadini del mare (1955), Parabola d’oro (1955), Un giorno in Barbagia (1958), Pescherecci (1958), Pastori di orgosolo (1958), and I dimenticati (1959). Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

[Chris Knipp]

The NYFF begins today, Sept. 27, 2019.

I will be attending and reviewing some of the selections right away, others later. Manhola Dargis of the NYTimes gives her opinions of the Main Slate selections and the festival HERE.

“Every fall, the New York Film Festival arrives to remind you of the pleasures of sitting in the dark with a community of movie nuts as new worlds and visions open your mind and blow it. This year’s edition—153 movies, two dozen talks, assorted free events—offers plenty of chances for mind-and-spirit expansion with new and old movies, short and long . . . the festival’s exceptionalism stems not just from Lincoln Center and the city itself but also from its longevity (this is the 57th edition) and ethos of selective programming. Curation is crucial, and is the main reason that while other fests appear overly eager to be part of the Oscar race, New York still seems to hover above the fray, even with its photo calls and red carpet.”

continue reading

[Chris Knipp]

PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA (Pedro Almodóvar 2019)

As many know - it's been extensively written about since Cannes - Pain and Glory is a solemn, beautiful kind of summing up for Almodóvar, with a powerful, subtle performance by Antonio Banderas in the lead role as a movie director going through a life and career crisis.

It comes out theatrically in the US next Fri., Oct. 4, 2019. A lovely, moving film.

[Chris Knipp]

Wild Goose Lake

Coming tomorrow: The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会 Chinese director Diao Yinan's much anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough noir Black Coal. Jessica Kiang of Variety called it "sumptuously sleazy" but thought it was more style than substance. I thought that with Black Coal, but I can find gorgeous visual style very seductive sometimes. However, my initial prediction here,"From everything I have heard and seen about it I will probably love this new film. . ." may have been overoptimistic.

[Chris Knipp]

THE IRISHMAN (Martin Scorsese 2019).

It opened the NYFF Friday night, the official world premiere. I have not seen it yet. It will be Out in theaters November 1 and on Netflix streaming November 27. It is said to be redolent of Scorese's signature gangster movie style and the current review consensus is a rave, Metascore 92%, no less. Scorsese's "next masterpiece," somebody said. "Coldly enthralling, says Variety. I think it will be big fun for everyone who loves Scorsese.

[Chris Knipp]

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE 南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan 2019).

Found this somehow insufficiently moving in terms of classic noir, but the mise-en-scène, score, sound design, glowing neon, young men in gaudy T shirts, busy rain machine, and snappy action conspire to make this an arty Asian B picture to beat all. And the mostly young Chinese audience in Alice Tully Hall seemed to be enjoying it very much too and make this American premiere of the Cannes Competition film a festive occasion. Current Metascore 72%.