New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Payal Kapadia 2024)

This quietly luminous film from India by a woman director whois only 38 won the Grand Prix at Cannes. It's about three women working at a Mumbai hospital and their joys nd sorrows. When the oldest moves back to the country, the other two accompany her.
Q&A with Payal Kapadia on Oct. 7 & 8

Showtimes
Monday, October 7
6:00 PMStandby Only
Tuesday, October 8
9:15 PMStandby Only
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Venues
Alice Tully Hall - Walter Reade Theater - EBM Film Center

[Chris Knipp]

HARVEST (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2024).

One tends to get lost in this well-meaning but meanderng adaptaton of an eponymous Jim Crace novel about the last days of a medieval English village. Starring Caleb Landry Jones.

Showtimes
Sunday, September 29
3:15 PMBuy Tickets
Monday, September 30
6:00 PMBuy Tickets
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[Chris Knipp]

HAPPYEND (Neo Sora 2024)

Dystopia with a light touch, this film depicts some near-future techno-loving Tokyo high school kids who get into a tangle with their dictatorial, conventional Principal and some demonstrations result after he imposes a high tech surveillance system to spy on them. Sora is the son of Ryuichi Sakamoto and made an elegant film about his late father that was in last year's NYFf. Charming and thought-provoking, this promises Sora as a new voice in Japanese cinema.

Happyend, 113 mins., debuted at Venice in the Orizzonti sectioin, showing also at Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Zurich, Busan, Hawaii and London BFI. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF. To be released in Japan Oct. 4, 2024.

Showtimes
Sunday, September 29
6:00 PMStandby Only
Monday, September 30
9:15 PMStandby Only

[Chris Knipp]

VIET AND NAM (Trương Minh Quý 2024)

A beautiful, sensuous, almost trance-like film about Vietnam's war legacy, its present stagnation, and two gay twenty-something coalminers who make love down in the mines, and help the mother of one of them look for the body of her husband, his father, dead in the American war. In Un Ceertin Regard at Cannes.

Showtimes
Tuesday, October 1
8:30 PMStandby Only
Wednesday, October 2
6:00 PMBuy Tickets
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[Chris Knipp]

PEPE (Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias 2024)

Writer/director/editor/composer Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias has many ideas flying around in his head when he unreels this high-concept film, which takes the idea of the banished Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's dispersed ménage of exotic African animals and in particular, one hippo who escaped from the herd and was shot down. An opaque head-trip whose formats are too variable and chronology too languid to provide a viable experience for the viewer.

Showtimes
Saturday, October 5
9:30 PMBuy Tickets
Sunday, October 6
6:15 PMStandby Only
Wednesday, October 9
12:30 PM

[Chris Knipp]

ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (Rungano Nyoni 2024)

Surrealism and traditionalism blend in this funeral wake exposure of a dead uncle's sexual predations on young female family members. A continually enjoyable and eye-opening film. The Zambian-born, Welsh-raised filmmaker unfolds another misogyny fable focused basically on the harsh abuses faced by young girls even in ttoday's African society.

Showtimes
Thursday, October 3
9:00 PMBuy Tickets
Saturday, October 5
6:30 PMBuy Tickets

[Chris Knipp]

OH, CANADA (Paul Schrader 2024)

Based on the late Russell Banks' novel, this depicts a renowned documentarian in Canada who fled the US draft in the sixties. Deathly ill, sitting for an admiring portrait, he sets out, in the novel anyway, to undermine that project by revealing all his ugly secrets. But this message gets confused in the adaptation.

Showtimes
Saturday, October 5
12:45 PMStandby Only
Sunday, October 6
3:30 PMBuy Tickets
Wednesday, October 9