That’s a Wrap on the New York Film Fest (NYFF) ’24!

Over the last couple weeks whenever I mentioned I was attending NYFF to a normie, they told me, “oh yeah, I saw the long lines.” What those normies didn’t realize is that the lines they saw were actually to enter the mobile Criterion Closet, which is basically a winnebago full of blu-ray DVDs. Criterion is having a moment with a diverse array of physical media-seeking Zillenials, but the festival itself also had long lines and sellouts. Every October we remind ourselves, cinema is alive! After calling out some punk for line-cutting at The Brutalist P&I in Toronto, I knew that The Brutalist screenings at NYFF would be equally hard to get into. Sold out screenings at these festivals create demand and hype, and are essential to a film’s commercial and awards success.
I was lucky enough to get into the opening night premiere of Nickel Boys, which drew mostly positive reactions afterwards from the festival tastemakers at the tavern on the green party. RaMell Ross directed an incredible documentary Hale County This Morning This Evening (2018), and builds on that creative spark in his feature debut. The biggest challenge for the first person POV is that it can rob the actors of their performance. The festival is known to make bold choices, and Nickel Boys is stylistically groundbreaking. Plus it’s based on a novel by Colson Whitehead who grew up on the Upper West Side. Hopefully Amazon/MGM give it a big theatrical push.
Before opening night, I was able to catch a number of press screenings at the Walter Reade Theater, which is always a great way to see films early. We kicked things off with The Seed of the Sacred Fig which was a big disappointment for me (sorry), although most critics have highly praised it with an 84 on Metacritic. While it is an important story about political unrest in Tehran, I felt the direction was heavy handed. How many times do we need a close up on Chekhov’s gun? Neon will fare much better with Anora, a raucous crowd pleaser that matches the energy of Uncut Gems, while handling each of its characters with Sean Baker’s signature emotional warmth.
I was pleasantly surprised by two films that struck me in very different ways. Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths had me in stitches in the first half, until it effortlessly slid into drama and had me crying in the theater for the first time all year. Actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste is a force of nature as a mother and wife constantly on the edge of a meltdown. Watching it sent me straight to seek out Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996), which I found streaming on Max and–you guessed it–the Criterion channel. That film stars a younger Jean-Baptiste and was nominated for five Oscars (though it didn’t win any). The second surprise was Misericordia, which is a strange homoerotic murder coverup movie from Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake). It is supremely enjoyable and at times laugh out loud funny. It features one of the best confessional scenes in cinema history, with clever dialogue that is artfully restrained–every word has a purpose.
On the documentary side, Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics continues her chronicle of Brazil’s political fracture. Hopefully the Bolsonaro days are over, but it was a tough climb for Lula to get back to the Presidency, showing how he had to court the evangelical vote in order to win. Costa uses a pan and scan technique across gorgeous artworks with religious and apocalyptic overtones, which is something new and exciting that was not present in her last doc, The Edge of Democracy, which was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary.
Another doc programmed by the NYFF was Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s Union, which premiered at Sundance and continues its festival run in the hopes of making it onto this year’s doc shortlist. The story of Chris Smalls and Amazon is one we’re reminded of every day, especially on the streets of New York, as I watched delivery men and women pushing their massive carts of packages down 65th street. Then there was No Other Land, which was made by a film collective of Isralis and Palestinians working together. While the film mostly takes place right before the Oct 7th attacks, the violent displacement on display foreshadows the war to come. Even if the subject matter is nightmarish, the fact that the Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers could form a meaningful alliance is cause for celebration.
Perhaps the film that got the biggest boost from NYFF is director Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, for which Kapadia traveled to New York City for the very first time in her life. The crowd at the New York premiere received her warmly with a standing ovation and a full house for the Q&A. Though it won the Grand Prix prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (which went to The Zone of Interest last year), it was unfortunately overlooked by India and France for their country’s Oscar submission. It needs a ton of great press and word of mouth to stand a chance at claiming any noms at all. That’s one of the duties of the New York Film Festival, to give life to special films that don’t have a huge marketing budget. #NYFF62 offered one of the most exciting lineups in recent memory, and now it’s our turn to spread the gospel to the rest of the world.
– Matt Delman (@ItstheRealDel)