While Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and Toronto premiere some of the year’s best films, no annual cinematic event boasts finer curation than the New York Film Festival, which kicks off this weekend. Those attending will witness, over two weeks, some of the best features that this year — and next — have to offer.
When it comes to a preview of what to see, a simple copy-and-pasting of the line-up would suffice, but we’ve done our best to narrow it down to 25 selections that are the most worth your time. This doesn’t even include shorts from Bertrand Bonello, Jia Zhangke, and more, as well as comprehensive Retrospective and Revivals sections that include restored films from Robert Bresson, Jean-Pierre Melville, Edward Yang, Marlon Brando, and more — but it should serve as a basic primer for what to seek out.
Check out our favorites below, and look for our complete coverage over the next few weeks.
13th (Ava DuVernay)
For the first time ever, a non-fiction film will open the New York Film Festival, and the rest of us will thankfully be able to see it fairly soon after. Ava DuVernay‘s timely follow-up to Selma chronicles the history of racial inequality in the United States as it pertains to the prison system. It’ll arrive on Netflix and in limited theaters shortly after its premiere, where we imagine it will be a vital watch, particularly during this election year. – Jordan R.
20th Century Women (Mike Mills)
Mike Mills‘ Beginners marked something of a real surprise for yours truly, its blend of unusual conceits with specific emotional registers doing a good deal to match my own way of seeing the world and understanding those who I share it with. I’m thus left to wonder if his follow-up, 20th Century Women, will live up to that effect – or if it’ll even try. Heightening the anticipation is that little’s known about the project, outside its ’70s setting and who its ensemble cast comprises. (Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, and newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann.) The latter is promising and the former, like all else, remains up in the air, but if 20th Century Women ends up carrying even a trace of Beginners‘ impact, we – or perhaps just I – will be handed a stirring experience. – Nick N.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Steve James)
Steve James’ filmography has long been about finding entry into larger conversations through intimate portraits. The director’s landmark debut, Hoop Dreams, and latter-day efforts like 2014’s monument to critic Roger Ebert, Life Itself, don’t have much in common on the surface, but they both use their central characters to tell larger stories about big picture topics like structural dysfunction and the purpose of film criticism. – Michael S. (full review)
Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
The staggeringly accomplished debut feature by Brazilian critic-turned-director Kleber Mendonça Filho, Neighboring Sounds, announced the arrival of a remarkable new talent in international cinema. Clearly recognizable as the work of the same director, Mendonça’s equally assertive follow-up, Aquarius, establishes his authorial voice as well as his place as one of the most eloquent filmic commentators on the contemporary state of Brazilian society. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk (Ang Lee)
One of the most promising films of the fall — and not just because it has an eclectic cast including Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Garrett Hedlund, Vin Diesel, and Steve Martin — is Ang Lee‘s latest drama, which might push the boundaries of cinematic technology. The story of a teenage soldier who survives a battle in Iraq and is brought home for a victory lap before returning has been shot at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film. After setting it for an NYFF premiere, Kent Jones said, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk astonished me, and it moved me deeply—in the grandest way, as a story of America in the years after the invasion of Iraq, and on the most intimate person-to-person wavelength.” – Jordan R.
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
The cinema of Kelly Reichardt lives in quiet, tender observations with deeply rooted characters and location. Even when adding a thriller element as with her last feature, the overlooked Night Moves, her style is never compromised. Her latest feature, Certain Women, is a loosely connected three-part drama adapted from the short stories of Maile Meloy. It’s perhaps the purest distillation of her sensibilities yet as she patiently explores the longing for human connection in a world where men too often get prioritized. – Jordan R. full review)
Elle (Paul Verhoeven)
It takes all of zero seconds for the first rape to occur in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. The film opens on a black screen and to the sounds of breaking glass and stifled struggle. When it then cuts to a cute kitty spectating the off-screen assault, we know we’re in Verhoeven territory. The ensuing countershot reveals Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), her blouse ripped open, pinned to the floor by a black-clad man with his face hidden inside a ski mask. Funny Games-like, this is our warning: run for the door now or keep watching and be implicated. Unlike Haneke, however, Verhoeven renders what follows irresistibly enjoyable, and the resulting implication is all the more severe. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Hermia and Helena (Matías Piñeiro)
For beginning with a dedication to Setsuko Hara, recently departed muse of Ozu and Naruse, Hermia & Helena — the new film by Viola and The Princess of France director Matías Piñeiro — perhaps aligns us to be especially attuned to the Argentinian auteur’s use of female collaborators. One to already emphasize the charisma and big-screen friendly faces of frequent stars Agustina Munoz and Maria Villar, he still seems to have an ability to make them points of representation, not fetish. – Ethan V. (full review)
Jackie (Pablo Larraín)
Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín certainly isn’t beating around the bush with his latest film, Jackie, a strange, refreshingly cynical, and unexpectedly cerebral account of First Lady’s Jacqueline Kennedy’s actions in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It’s one of three films to be released by the prolific director in 2016 (alongside El Club and Neruda), as well as his first to be made in the United States and English. Such changes in surroundings might have thrown a lesser director off, or at least compromised their style, but Larraín’s conviction, signature moves, and leftward-leaning politics appear to have remained intact. Produced by Darren Aronofsky and boasting a staggering, disorientating string-based soundtrack from Mica Levi (Under the Skin), Jackie has the sophisticated psychological aesthetic of a Jonathan Glazer movie but focuses on one of the most contentious and traumatic events in U.S. history. How’s that for radical filmmaking? – Rory O. (full review)
Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar)
A woman recalls the pivotal moments of her adult life in Julieta, the latest film from Pedro Almodóvar and his fifth to screen in competition here in Cannes. It’s adapted from a series of short stories of Canadian Nobel prize-winning author Alice Munro and marks a return to the female-centric dramas with which the director made his name, having recently tried his hand at musical (I’m So Excited) and psychological horror (The Skin I Live In). It’s charmingly self-aware in its use of kitsch and melodrama — almost to the point of self-parody — and, while small in scope, it’s also one of his lusher and leaner offerings. – Rory O. (full review)
The Lost City of Z (James Gray)
With The Lost City of Z recently securing a spring 2017 release from Amazon Studios and Bleecker Street, we’ll soon get the first look at James Gray‘s new film, which follows his deeply felt The Immigrant, as it closes NYFF this year. Whether this is the epic adventure its source material might lead to, an intimate, Herzogian story of mad passion, a bit of both, or ultimately none of these things, a craftsman of Gray’s strengths stepping outside their comfort zone (e.g. not setting a movie in New York City) is an attraction all its own. – Nick N.
Manchester By the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
With his unassuming, quietly affecting films leaving such a distinctly indelible impact long after the credits roll, we may only have three films from Kenneth Lonergan across sixteen years, but they provide a lifetime’s worth of human experience. His latest, Manchester By the Sea, finds him in the quaint northeastern Massachusetts town as he immaculately constructs a layered, non-linear exploration of the ripple effects of loss and grief. – Jordan R. (full review)
Mimosas (Oliver Laxe)
A “religious western” is how Moroccan-based Spanish director Oliver Laxe describes his second film, Mimosas, winner of the top prize at Cannes’ Critics’ Week. It’s a spiritual, ambiguously plotted journey through the Atlas Mountains, and those willing to give in to its mystical embrace and gorgeous visuals should find it a sensual, engrossing watch. – Ed F. (full review)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
What’s it like to be a young boy on the drug-filled streets of Miami without friends, without family, without hope? As cliques begin to feign superiority by ganging up on the weak to prove themselves hard enough for what’s coming, Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) — or “Little” as they call him — can do nothing but struggle to survive. So who would have thought the one man to show kindness would be the king of the very drug holes his bullies seek to rise up within? In a city where masculinity is cracking skulls, calling names, and pulling guns, Juan (Mahershala Ali) gives a sweet smile and helping hand to a runt in need. This isn’t a play for recruitment either. It’s a beautifully honest moment of human compassion. – Jared M. (full review)
Neruda (Pablo Larraín)
Pablo Larraín is not finished wrestling with his nation’s psyche. His first three films, Tony Manero, Post Mortem, and No, formed a loose triptych that confronted the trauma of the Augusto Pinochet years from different angles. His fourth, The Club, was a blistering attack against the contemporary institution of the Catholic Church in Chile, which accused it of deep-seated corruption and of collusion with the Pinochet regime. With Neruda he returns to the past, back to 1948, the year the eminent poet and Communist senator Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) went into hiding after the Chilean president outlawed Communism in the country. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues)
Publicly stated by its director to concern Saint Anthony, the Portuguese priest and friar who legend calls the most supernatural of saints, The Ornithologist luckily manages to see the profane outweigh the sacred — no white elephantine “spirituality,” but rather a progression of set-pieces. We have something of a return for João Pedro Rodrigues to his debut feature Fantasma, a nocturnal “erotic thriller” of sorts that moved by the logic of its own images, this in opposition to more character-driven films such as Two Drifters and To Die Like a Man or his most recent The Last Time I Saw Macao, a tad too much an academic exercise in mirroring post-colonialism through a deadpan “non-mystery.” – Ethan V. (full review)
Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)
In his Village Voice review of Jim Jarmusch’s criminally under-appreciated The Limits of Control, J. Hoberman described the director as “a full-blown talent [who] erupts once a decade: Stranger than Paradise in the ’80s, Dead Man in the ’90s and The Limits of Control [in the ’00s].” Jarmusch has now validated Hoberman’s estimation with a fresh new masterpiece for our present decade: Paterson. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)
After Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper confirms Olivier Assayas as the director most adept at drawing the best out of Kristen Stewart. Here she follows in the footsteps of Maggie Cheung and Asia Argento, actors whose exceptional central performances prevented fundamentally flawed films by Assayas – Clean and Boarding Gate, respectively – from foundering altogether. Stewart’s achievement is arguably even more remarkable considering that for the bulk of Personal Shopper’s running time, her only co-actor is an iPhone. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)
“You are alone you your revolution, Ms. Dickinson,” spouts a stoic headmistress in the opening sequence of A Quiet Passion, a biopic of 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson and the latest work from proud Liverpudlian auteur Terence Davies. In the scene, young Emily has apparently rejected both a life in the seminary and the option to be a practicing catholic, a decision the famously atheistic director clearly vibes with. That sense of empathy and understanding with his subject is rife throughout this quietly cleansing and exquisitely considered film, which shows the writer from her late teens (portrayed by Emma Bell) through to adulthood (Cynthia Nixon) and old age. – Rory O. (full review)
Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)
For this critic’s money, of the several excellent filmmakers to emerge from the Romanian New Wave, Cristi Puiu ranks as the most formidable. After kicking off his career in 2001 with the outstanding Stuff and Dough, a small-scale but expertly modulated road/drug-deal movie, Puiu made two bona fide masterpieces back to back: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Aurora. While his newest dramatic feature, Sieranevada, may fall just short of M-word classification by not reaching the same level of radical invention as its two predecessors, it is nonetheless another proud entry in Puiu’s stellar filmography. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Son of Joseph (Eugène Green)
It might be disingenuous to say Eugène Green — whose work is making its second consecutive Cannes and NYFF appearances this year, and has earned yet another U.S. release from Kino Lorber — is a well-kept secret, but something about the label feels appropriate when his movies are so hard to pinpoint. Or they’re just deceptively simple — a label I feel all right applying when the fact of the matter is that his latest feature, The Son of Joseph, is laugh-out-loud, guffaw-inducing, is-this-really-happening hilarious. As if Bresson and Buñuel collaborated (direction and screenplay, respectively) on a parody of Europe’s literary circles, it gives as much time for jokes about Proust as a recurring gag involving the selling of semen over the Internet, all (somehow) pitched at those auteurs’ sense for acting style and surreality. Yet the way in which it recalls the excellent La Sapienza (which one might say was a Bressonian Certified Copy) makes clear that Green has his proclivities down to a T. – Nick N.
Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie)
Those only familiar with Alain Guiraudie’s sublime Stranger By the Lake, which finally brought the gifted French director to a (relatively) wider audience following a laureled Un Certain Regard premiere in 2013, will likely find themselves confounded by its follow-up, Staying Vertical. With his first entry in Cannes’ main competition, Guiraudie returns to the psychoanalytic mode of the features preceding Stranger, where he gradually and stealthily eroded the boundary between reality and fantasy to probe the complexities of human desire — particularly of the sexual kind — exposing the stifling effects of social norms and conventions to thoroughly bewildering results. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve)
The twists and turns of fate and the ways in which individuals react to them constitute the central preoccupations of Mia Hansen-Løve’s cinema. Her exceptional second feature, Father of My Children, observed a film producer’s escalating desperation in the face of snowballing debt, and then considered the impact of his unexpected suicide on the family he left behind. Her disappointing follow-ups, Goodbye First Love and Eden, charted the progressive dissolution of its protagonists’ idealism over a period of several years – a teenage couple’s fanciful notions of love and a DJ’s chimeric aspirations of success, respectively. Considering the largely universal relatability of the former and the fact that the latter represented a fictionalization of her own brother’s / co-writer’s path as a DJ, the tremendous accomplishment of Things to Come, which centers on the emotional tribulations of a woman in late middle-age, suggests that the 35-year-old writer-director is a lot more adept at crafting stories that depart from her direct experiences. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)
Maren Ade has kept us waiting. It’s been seven years since her superb second feature Everyone Else premiered at the Berlinale, taking home the Jury Prize, and she’s spent the interim collaborating on the production of other people’s films (e.g. Miguel Gomes’) rather than releasing one of her own. Now that her new directorial effort is finally here, it validates all the eager anticipation, as Toni Erdmann is one of the most stirring cinematic experiences to come around in a long time. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo)
See enough films by any director and you’ll start to think you’ve got a grip on the whole thing. See everything they’ve directed — “everything,” here, constitutes 17 features and three shorts, two of which are around half an hour — and expected pleasures are chief among the reasons for continuing the journey. Yourself & Yours is enjoyable the way every other Hong Sang-soo film is enjoyable: funny, relatable and emotionally honest, structurally innovative, and composed with a patient eye that favors the peaks and valleys of conversation over standard get-to-the-point construction. But this is a sharper blade: in defying conventional understanding, its narrative (about doubles or twins or doppelgängers or all or none) forces contemplation of romantic relationships’ softest points, as well as the potentially irreparable gaps between men and women. And it’s funny! Hong’s consistent amusement with idiocy will never not hit this writer’s funny bone, and cultural barriers mean nothing. Isn’t drunken stupidity, like love and cinema, among the most universal languages of all? – Nick N.