New York Film Festival 2024

Gone are the days when cinephiles could just expect “Cannes on the Hudson” from the New York Film Festival. In his fifth year since assuming leadership of the selection committee from Kent Jones, artistic director Dennis Lim continues to bring both vitality and variety to the festival. If there’s a near-constant among the changes, it’s Hong Sang-soo having two movies in the main slate. (This year it’s By the Stream and A Traveler’s Needs.)

Elder statesmen like David Cronenberg, Mike Leigh, and Paul Schrader return with their latest films. But this 62nd edition of the festival, which runs from September 27 to October 24, doesn’t belong to the veterans. If any streak runs through the main slate, it’s the prominence of second features, including Ra’Mell Ross’s Nickel Boys (this year’s opening-night selection), Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Giving these sophomore outings prime festival real estate is quite a vote of confidence in the next generation of auteurs leveling up on the global cinema circuit. (Not to be outdone, longtime Slant contributor Carson Lund is the lone debut feature filmmaker working in a fictional storytelling mode with Eephus.)

For those whose tastes run to the Croisette, the major prize recipients from this year’s Cannes, including Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winner Anora, are of course well-represented. And so are this year’s winners out of Berlinale (Mati Diop’s Dahomey) and Venice (Pedro Almodóvar’s subdued but still subversive The Room Next Door, the centerpiece selection). Meanwhile, the closing-night selection, Steve McQueen’s Blitz, will have its premiere screening at the BFI London Film Festival a day before screening for the public in New York.

Documentary also takes up an increased prevalence in the main slate following the festival sunsetting their “Spotlight on Documentary” sidebar. The major world premieres in the lineup are both nonfiction works: Julia Loktev’s five-hour My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow and Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury. Rivaling Hong with his prolific output, Wang Bing also returns with the final two parts of his Youth trilogy: Hard Times and Homecoming.

But the documentary likeliest to make the most noise is the verité chronicle of Palestinian life, No Other Land. The film sparked a political firestorm in Berlin following the festival award acceptance speech by Yuval Abraham, one of the four credited directors of the film. With a group called the New York Counter Film Festival advocating a boycott of the festival in the name of solidarity with Palestine, the film may shape reality in addition to reflecting it.

And all this is to say nothing of the festival’s sidebars and their own embarrassment of riches. Spotlight, which features Luca Guadagnino’s Queer as its centerpiece, boasts no shortage of buzzy titles. Currents helps to surface innovative features and shorts at the cutting edge of film form. Among the many titles ripe for discovery, this year’s lineup offers new films by Jem Cohen and Matías Piñeiro, as well as Canada’s Oscar submission, Michael Rankin’s Universal Language, a one-of-a-kind riff on Iranian cinema. And while the restorations in this year’s Revivals section cover canonical legends of cinema ranging from Robert Bresson to Ousmane Sembène, one title in the mix turned quite a few heads: Clive Barker’s splatter film classic Hellraiser, an extreme offering that demonstrates just how wide a net the festival casts.

While the Toronto International Film Festival may still lay claim to the “festival of festivals” branding, this year’s New York Film Festival offers America’s version of a cinematic cornucopia. With 101 films from 48 countries spread across 18 glorious days, it’s hard to think of another festival that balances such expert curation with a wide variety of choices. Marshall Shaffer

For full reviews of the films in this year’s lineup, click on the links in the capsules below. (Titles will be added across the upcoming weeks.) For a complete schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, visit Film at Lincoln Center.

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)

All We Imagine as Light’s characters are circumscribed by social disadvantages and personal hardships, yet they maintain a stubborn freedom. The film’s urban landscape is gaseous, gyrating, dizzyingly complex. Yet when night falls, it’s quiet and poetic, drawing you into an embrace. Payal Kapadia’s mode of understanding and constructing her Mumbai on screen makes fluid shifts from the cerebral to the viscerally sensual to the didactically political. These are tectonic transitions occurring on the level of the form, and Kapadia makes them look effortless. With this follow-up to A Night of Knowing Nothing, her 2021 docufiction about the student protest movements that swept India after the death of anti-caste student activist Rohith Vemula, Kapadia has created an exceptional document of a city and its people. Ryan Coleman

Anora (Sean Baker)

The eponymous character of Anora, a feisty 23-year-old Brooklyn sex worker, lives the sort of hardscrabble and precarious life that writer-director Sean Baker has vigorously tracked across his work. But while Baker’s protagonists are typically mired in the same place, Ani (Mikey Madison), as Anora emphatically prefers to be called, manages to escape the familiar, and crash through the class divide with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Her quixotic quest to remain among Russian oligarchs is a riotously funny neorealist farce that will be familiar to fans of Tangerine and Red Rocket, though at times it feels like the rougher edges of Baker’s vision have been smoothed out in the interest of driving home an easily digestible allegory. Mark Hanson

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

Even though it also concerns an architect fighting entrenched elites to achieve his singular vision, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist doesn’t bow before the altar of The Fountainhead. Yet he takes a gauntlet thrown down early in King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel—no place originality exists in architecture, and the past cannot be improved upon—more seriously than either artist. Corbet’s epic, like Adrien Brody’s László Toth, remains unconcerned with choosing between honoring the past and catering to the present. They instead seek to transcend time altogether, thus equipping their artistry to endure well into the future. László is an imperfect but never inconsistent protagonist, which is part of why his jagged edges mesh so well with the airtight construction of the film. Corbet builds on celluloid what László does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character. Shaffer

By the Stream (Hong Sang-soo)

Hong Sang-soo’s By the Stream opens on a pastoral autumn landscape of Seoul, with a stream running toward a bridge. Wide landscape shots are unusual for Hong, and this image introduces this stream as the first of several refrains that will run through the film as, well, currents. Amid a vast narrative, especially for Hong, one that’s rich in scandals and disappointments and broken promises, there’s the relief for the characters of the stream, the foliage, and the moon. So many of Hong’s films, but especially By the Stream, derive their volatility from his interest in the pitfalls of individuals making and consuming art, namely selfishness and isolation, which exist irreconcilably with the potential of art as a vehicle of personal expression and social unity. Art is a mode of potential connection built in large part on narcissism, then, and Hong is without peer these days in wrestling that irony onto the screen. Chuck Bowen

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke)

Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides attests to the fact that making art under the most adverse conditions can prove to be serendipitous. If shooting a film from scratch wasn’t feasible under China’s restrictive Covid lockdowns, Jia viewed the situation as a formal constraint, in the same way a poet might approach the rules of a sestina. Turning to his existing body of work, he recycled earlier material, editing together unused footage with what could be shot under the circumstances. The result is a bricolage of documentary, minimalist drama, and experimental remake. As Jia’s filmography is inseparable from the career of his spouse and longtime collaborator, actress Zhao Tao, the film also operates as a dual retrospective. William Repass

Dahomey (Mati Diop)

Throughout its 69 minutes, Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey focuses on the return of 26 artifacts that France had stolen from the historical Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) when, after centuries of occupation and colonial meddling, it was finally conquered and ransacked in the 1890s. The film confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage. Its narrator, such as it is, is the spirit embodied by the statue of a Dahomey king, represented by a reverberating, multitracked voice that periodically dominates the soundtrack. The effect is haunting and powerful, a vivid reminder that in their original context, these figures had a presence and a personality suppressed but not erased by the distanced, anthropological gaze of the museum. Pat Brown

The Damned (Robert Minervini)

Recalling Roberto Minervini’s past docufiction work (Low Tide, Stop the Pounding Heart, The Other Side), The Damned is a show of impressionistic portraiture. Here, the regimented tasks of nomadic living are given the treatment that Gustave Caillebotte gave The Floor Scrapers. Shadows play on faces at night, and not a single scene is shot in the flatness of noon light. But while Minervini’s camera—its vintage lenses dropping off focus everywhere outside the immediate center of the frame—floridly beautifies the soldiers’ quotidian tasks, these men don’t see their lives as beautiful. “Does God approve of war?” asks a soldier at one point. Such fragments of dialogue heard throughout The Damned give the impression that every soldier in the film has been cut from the brooding cloth of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. Zach Lewis

Eephus (Carson Lund)

Carson Lund’s Eephus subtly tasks us with thinking of its characters as extensions of the titular pitch: weapons of deception and surprise, not least of which for how they increasingly reveal their passion for the sport and each other as the final game between their teams at an intramural field due to be paved over unfurls. Though set in the 1990s, Eephus feels keyed to the current anxiety over the erosion of public gathering spaces and America’s so-called loneliness epidemic. While the characters care deeply for baseball, their desperate efforts to prolong the game, in lieu of making far simpler plans for future meet-ups, make it obvious that their reasons for doing so go well beyond sport. It’s an irony that hangs over the final stretch of the film, and it’s one that Lund treats with elegiac empathy for the power of a shared interest. Jake Cole

Happyend (Neo Sora)

Neo Sora’s Happyend uses a Tokyo high school as a synecdoche for Japan when a principal (Sano Shirô) desperate to preserve his power over the subjects in his charge installs a cutting-edge surveillance system across campus. Named Panopty, the cheeky repacking of Foucauldian concepts gamifies the control of the student population. Of course, no demographic group is less likely to submit to mechanized discipline and punishment than teenagers. While the film is alternately impressive as teen drama and political commentary, Sora struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large. It’s a confident narrative feature debut, with plenty of insight into the direction of a nation and generation, but it wants for more connective tissue between the small details and Sora’s bigger-picture views. Shaffer

Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari)

An eventful week in the waning days of a medieval English village provides the narrative backbone for Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel. Tsangari finds her own way into the story’s setting—a lord-of-the-manor-ruled agricultural collective—by accentuating the grit and the grime. This is evident in everything from Sean Price Williams’s grainy 16mm cinematography to the casting of Caleb Landry Jones, who often seems like he’s just emerged dazed and confused from primordial sludge. But a good deal of Harvest tends to the sluggish, recreating the basic incidents of Crace’s story without adeptly communicating the main character’s peculiarities of perspective. What we’re left with is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed. The muck that the film requires, both spiritual and psychological, shouldn’t have its own dressing room. Keith Uhlich

It’s Not Me (Leos Carax)

It’s Not Me began as a question posed by the Centre Pompidou in Paris: “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” The film begins with a modest “I don’t know” as a riposte to the proposed riddle, uttered through Carax’s hoarse and disaffected voice. This not knowing becomes the empty space to be filled with the philosophical speculations that are so central to the essay film as a genre. Here we have, then, a self-portrait that performs doubt as the purveyor of an unstable, and always preliminary, truth. For in the world of the essay, which Carax mimics with text-book precision, the filmmaker shares his vulnerability, not a ready-made argument. The one who’s supposed to know is exposed, perhaps sacrificed, as the one who’s simply supposed to wonder. And the forging of the oeuvre, ever so tentative, becomes the oeuvre itself. Diego Semerene

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)

Fans of Alain Guiraudie’s work may take the opening sequence of Misericordia as a sign that they’re in familiar terrain. A view from behind the windshield of a car winding its way through back roads to a small hillside village, it announces the premiere chronicler of lust and violence in the French countryside’s return to the milieu in which he made his name. Indeed, Misericordia finds Guiraudie revisiting old standbys—a linking of queer desire and mortality, a distanced but lighthearted absurdism, and a refusal to get moralistic about transgressive behavior—under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever. Brad Hanford

No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor)

Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor’s documentary No Other Land embeds the viewer within the dry hills and craggy caves of Masafer Yatta, in the wake of a court decision rejecting its denizens’ decades-long suit against the illegal Israeli seizure of their land and destruction of their homes. What becomes most evident as we see homes, schools, and playgrounds fall to heavy machinery cordoned off by armed guards is the patience of the Palestinians at No Other Land’s center. Instead of meeting destruction in kind, Basel, an activist with a camera and a law degree who’s lived in the area his whole life, and his friends argue with the troops and organize marches on the desolate road that runs through the territory. With exceptional lucidity, No Other Land reminds us of the human stakes of Israel’s resettlement of the West Bank, and that fighting for justice starts from the ground up. Brown

Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)

A free-associational portrait of Richard Gere’s Leonard as he slips in and out of consciousness while a film crew interviews him about his career as a celebrated political documentarian, Oh, Canada is also in conversation with Paul Schrader’s life as an aging filmmaker with an ailing wife and regrets over his treatment of his brother , also named Leonard. The result is a project that’s spring-loaded with tensions both explicit and implicit. Leonard is an avatar for haunted artists, one of whom has already joined him in the hereafter. There’s a sense in this adaptation of Russell Banks’s 2021 novel Foregone of Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible. Bowen

Pepe (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias)

With Pepe, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias uses the strange story of a murdered hippopotamus to tie together themes and ideas around eco-capitalism, the prosecution of Pablo Escobar, the relationship between countries in the global south, European racism, and ecological disaster. But while the film is clearly ambitious, its patchwork approach, a consistently dizzying game of reorientation meant to mirror Pepe’s plight, only winds its way to a point of inconclusiveness that will prove frustrating for most. As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests. In an especially astute way, it demonstrates how even knowledge and intellectualism can be colonial invaders, though it’s a shame that this demonstration comes at the expense of the film itself striking an overly intellectual pose. Greg Nussen

A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)

A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to When You Get Done Saving the World, is a cavalcade of angst and agony, from the familial to the historical, with an occasionally quite bleak assessment of the human condition. But it’s also levitated by a joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance. A Real Pain isn’t a film that embraces easy answers or platitudes. Even after David (Eisenberg), a digital ad salesman, reveals so much of his and his cousin Benjy’s (Kieran Culkin) past in a monologue to the other members of their tour group in Poland, it doesn’t seem clear how they’ll move forward. You sense that, after their trip, the two may have a better understanding of the pain they carry but that they still won’t know how to escape it. Chris Barsanti

The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar)

Strange events precipitate the bonds of sisterhood in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. While staring down death, Martha (Tilda Swinton) makes a request of her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore). She procures a euthanasia pill and intends to slip peacefully into death. The intention isn’t to implicate Ingrid in her euthanasia by having her administer the pill or witness the passage. Martha simply wishes for the comfort of knowing that she has a loving presence in an adjacent room. As the women attempt to communicate across a divide, Almodóvar’s gaze lingers on pointed silences and unexplained gestures. Given the tremendous nuances that Moore and Swinton can pack into a single facial contortion, the camera has no problem picking up those grace notes. Together, the actresses’ harmonizing illuminates the film’s subversive observation that only death can help mend a frayed friendship. Shaffer

Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson)

Eschewing the primitive style for which Guy Maddin developed a following, Rumours stages its genre-inflected political satire in a surprisingly straightforward fashion. Co-directed with frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, the film is set at a G7 summit hosted by a fictional German chancellor, Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett), at a woodsy estate, where the participants are set to draft a provisional statement regarding an unnamed world crisis. The film’s skewering of the uselessness of politicians in our turbulent modern world goes into full comic overdrive once an explicitly apocalyptic event occurs. The apocalyptic endpoint may be a farcical fantasy on the surface, but the way the world’s leaders are prone to getting lost in the wilderness while the rest of us are annihilated by transparently immediate concerns is something that the film traces with chillingly droll precision. Hanson

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohamed Rasolouf)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is another one of Mohammed Rasolouf’s clear-eyed accounts of the sacrifices and moral compromises forced on ordinary people by Iran’s oppressive regime. The state’s affinity for capital punishment is again a target of Rasolouf’s ire, but he also has in his sights bourgeois complacency, the tyranny of traditional values, and, above all, the cruel machinations of Iran’s patriarchal culture. Bringing implicit violence and a family’s simmering psychological warfare to the surface, the gradual mental deterioration of its put-upon patriarch sees the film’s final hour not only enter conventional action-thriller terrain but careen right through it, and it ends up somewhere not too far away from Overlook Hotel, in spirit at least. As much as this epic’s sermonizing approach might want for more subtlety, sometimes recalling a PSA, it’s refreshingly balanced and open in its inclusion of differing perspectives. David Robb

Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua)

Between Stranger Eyes and A Land Imagined, Yeo Siew Hua has a tendency to stage elaborate setups around comparatively straightforward concepts. This film in particular feels as though it wants to go much further—on governmental overreach, punitive justice, fractured identities, sex by way of screens—but it can’t seem to conceive of many uses for these ideas beyond suggestion. The notes it ultimately hits, even with an unexpected and emotional final sting, are frustratingly predictable. Still, the road there is windy and dense with intrigue, especially in moments contextualized as character studies of Lee Kang-sheng’s Wu. It’s a testament to the tremendous subtlety of Lee’s acting that it only becomes obvious in retrospect how much of Stranger Eyes is about him, and how much its world bends and refracts around his presence. Cole Kronman

Transamazonia (Pia Marais)

Pia Marais’s fourth feature centers around American faith healer Lawrence (Jeremy Xido), who preaches the Gospel to an impoverished Brazilian village in the heart of the Amazon, aided by his daughter, Rebecca (Helena Zengel), the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her mother. Their role in the community is troubled when a conflict arises between a local Indigenous tribe and a violent gang in the employ of the logging industry laying waste to their homeland. Plunging headlong into the murk of exploitative missionary work and environmentally destructive capitalism, Transamazonia is a film with undeniable import and sociopolitical urgency, which its muddled narrative can’t completely dampen. Robb

A Traveler’s Needs (Hong Sang-soo)

In A Traveler’s Needs, though, Hong’s sleight of hand with narrative is less consistent than usual. For a long stretch of the film’s running time, Hong appears to have built the wrong concept around the wrong actor, giving Isabelle Huppert a conceptual role that leans hard on her brand of curt whimsicality. Kim Min-hee, a veteran of similar roles in Hong’s films, as well as his partner and a key collaborator behind the scenes, might’ve made a meal of this part, suffusing it with a customary sense of gravity and turmoil. But Huppert stays outside of the character, leaving a hole at the center of A Traveler’s Needs that’s atypical for Hong’s films. The variableness of this movie is the risk of a working method as rapid and intuitive as Hong’s, but even in this unusually uneven film fruit is eventually born. Bowen

A Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, which is set in a parallel-universe Canada that recalls 1980s Iran as envisioned by one of the auteurs of the Iranian New Wave, takes an irreverent approach to depicting his country’s geography and socio-political environment. Though juxtaposing Canada’s drabness and relative lack of heritage with Iran’s millennia of unbroken tradition brings out the former aspects particularly clearly, Universal Language is aiming beyond mere satire or culture-clash playfulness. Throughout the film, Rankin succeeds in finding an effective tonal balance between deadpan irony and heartfelt sincerity, allowing for something like a sign for a Tim Hortons restaurant written in Farsi to be not only a solid sight gag and a gentle provocation, but also an illustration of how people are shaped by the social practices, visual symbols, and built environment that surround them. Robb

Viet and Nam (Truong Minh Quy)

Deliberately paced and prone to indulge in poetic intermezzos, at once earthy and otherworldly, Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam has earned comparisons to the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others. But if the film is conversant with many of the prevailing trends in international art cinema, Quy doesn’t shy away from staring down the incensing specificities of current events. Quy has said in interviews that his film was at least partially a response to the deaths of 39 Vietnamese refugees, discovered in a refrigerated trailer outside of London in 2019. And interestingly enough, the further Viet and Nam progresses into its increasingly symbolic and fragmented second half—forget Weerasethakul, Quy at times seems to be channeling Muriel-era Alain Resnais—the more direct and polemical it also becomes. Eric Henderson

Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing)

Youth (Spring), the first in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers in Zhejiang province in eastern China, eschewed incident to stress the numbing quality of the manual labor and economic stagnation of its young migrant workers. The second installment in the trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope. There’s a fascinating tension here between the length of individual scenes and their documentation of the arduous process of worker organization, as well as the external and internal struggle with ingrained power dynamics between the average joe and the powers that be. Rarely has one of Wang’s films so nakedly called out the collusion between state and commerce to ensure the powerlessness of average citizens. Cole

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