- Festivals
The 60th New York Film Festival
The 60th New York Film Festival runs from September 30 to October 16. Founded in 1963 by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel with the support of then Lincoln Center president William Schuman, the NYFF it is one of the longest-running and most prestigious film festivals in the United States.
Held annually in the early fall, screening 20–30 feature films, many of them having their U.S. premiere, the quality of the catalogue and the time on the calendar has positioned the NYFF as a reliable window of the movies that could be nominated in the upcoming award season.
The festival also includes additional sections for experimental cinema and new restorations. This year, as part of its 60th anniversary celebration, the NYFF will offer additional screenings outside the Lincoln Center in all five boroughs of New York City in partnership with Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Maysles Documentary Center (Harlem) and The Museum of the Moving Image (Queens).
The main movies shown this year are (in alphabetical order):
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
A documentary directed by Laura Poitras about the New York photographer Nan Goldin. It was just awarded with the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice International Film Festival. “One of the most important and influential artists of her generation, Goldin has revolutionized the art of photography through her frank and deeply personal portraiture”, announces the NYFF; and this year the posters of the festival are pictures by her.
Aftersun
Scottish director Charlotte Wells’ memory piece inspired by her family, starring Paul Mescal and Francesca Corio as a divorced father and his daughter, whose close bond is quietly shaken during a weekend in Turkey.
Alcarràs
The land and livelihood of a Catalonian farming family is threatened in Carla Simón’s drama about changing times. Golden Bear (Best Film), Berlinale 2022.
Armageddon Time
The most personal film yet from James Gray, a detailed coming-of-age drama that follows Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a 6th grader who dreams of becoming an artist. Also starring Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway, all Golden Globe winners.
Corsage
Directed by Marie Kreutzer, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her 40th birthday.
Decision to Leave
A Busan detective is increasingly obsessed with a murder suspect in a puzzling new case: a middle-aged businessman has mysteriously fallen. Is his wife guilty? Park Chan-wook just won the Cannes Best Director award with this twisting detective thriller.
Enys Men
From Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin. An isolated middle-aged woman spends her days in the enigmatic environmental study on an uninhabited, windswept island off the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, haunted by her own nightmarish visitations.
EO
At age 84, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski has shot one of his most visually inventive films yet, following the travels of a peripatetic donkey who begins as a circus performer before escaping across the Polish and Italian countryside.
Master Gardener
Paul Schrader, Golden Globe nominee, directed a tale about dormant violence and the possibility of regeneration. It follows a horticulturist (Joel Edgerton, Golden Globe nominee) who works for the imperious owner of a wealthy estate (Sigourney Weaver, Golden Globe winner).
No Bears
Two parallel love stories in which the partners are thwarted by hidden, inevitable obstacles, the force of superstition, and the mechanics of power. By Jafar Panahi, Iranian former Golden Lion winner (Venice 2000), imprisoned and subject to a filmmaking ban in his country.
One Fine Morning
Recent winner of the Europa Cinemas’ award for best European film in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannnes film festival. Director Hansen-Løve weaves autobiographical elements into this story about a single mother facing the mental decline of her intellectual father, while falling in love with an old friend, now a married man.
Pacifiction
Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra brings the story of a French bureaucrat (Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety.
Return to Seoul
From Cannes 2022 (Un Certain Regard), Davy Chou’s film follows a young but cynical French woman’s quest to discover her Korean roots after being given up for adoption.
R.M.N.
Golden Globe nominee Cristian Mungiu directs a gripping, mosaic-like portrait of a rural Transylvanian town riven by ethnic conflicts, economic resentment and personal turmoil.
Saint Omer
A Successful journalist/author attends the trial of a young Senegalese who has allegedly murdered her own baby daughter. It’s Alice Diop sensitive fiction feature debut.
Scarlet
The first film made in France by Italian director Pietro Marcello. A man who returns home from World War I to his rural village discovers his wife has died and that he must take care of their daughter.
Showing Up
Continuing their rich collaboration, director Kelly Reichardt reunites with Golden Globe winner Michelle Williams for this particularized portrait of a sculptor’s daily work and frustrations in an artist’s enclave in Portland. It competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
In Claire Denis’ contemporary thriller, a dissolute young American journalist (Margaret Qualley, Golden Globe nominee) and an English businessman (Joe Alwyn) meet by chance while on different, mysterious assignments in modern-day Nicaragua.
Stonewalling
The plans of a young flight-attendant-in-training to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s film is a critique of a modern-day world that has few options for women in need of care.
The veteran Golden Globe winner Cate Blanchett portraits a world-famous orchestra conductor in a gradual unraveling. It’s the first film in sixteen years from Golden Globe nominee director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children).
A middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother take an emotional trip to the past when they stay at a hotel in the English countryside. Director Joanna Hogg explores a parent-child relationship in another rich performance by Golden Globe nominee Tilda Swinton.
The Inspection
Elegance Bratton makes his ambitious narrative debut with this drama based on his own experiences as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training following a decade of living on the streets.
The Novelist’s Film
Veteran Hong Sang-soo takes on the perspective of a prickly middle-aged novelist, Junhee (Lee Hye-young), whose dormant creativity is stoked following a chance encounter with a famous actress (Kim Min-hee).
Trenque Lauquen
Laura Citarella takes the viewer on a 12-chapter journey through stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) and centered on the strange disappearance of a local academic.
Winner of the Palme d’Or in Cannes 2022 (2nd time for its director Ruben Östlund).
A bizarre satirical movie about contemporary frivolity versus what really matters in the world, during a fashion week, a rich cruise and a shipwreck after a pirate attack.
Unrest
Anarchist and socialist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) experiences a quiet revolution in Cyril Schäublin’s movie set in the hushed environs of the Swiss watch making town of Saint-Imier in the 1870s.
Walk Up
Another movie of Hong Sang-soo this year at NYFF. A successful middle-aged man drops by to visit a female old friend only to find his life taking a series of unexpected turns. The film explores the complexities of relationships, growing older and artistic pursuit.
In one of the year’s most gratifyingly ambitious American films, Golden Globe nominee Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s epochal postmodern 1985 novel -long perceived as unfilmable- into a richly layered contemporary satire.