The New York Film Festival Offers a Sneak Peek of the Year’s Best

Autumn in New York and its fancy events and high profile guests unofficially begins with the U.S. Open (in which contestants bat a spinning ball around until someone is declared a winner), climaxes with the United Nations General Assembly (much the same activity), and ends with the New York Film Festival, the last of the major international film festivals and the beginning, for many in the movie industry, of the slow death march known as “awards season” that ends at the Oscars five months later.

The New York Film Festival, which just wrapped its 62nd iteration, stands a bit differently than its brethren. Unlike the Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, Venice, and Sundance film festivals, it awards no prizes. (Venice, the oldest of the bunch, has been around so long that for several years its winning trophy was called the Mussolini Cup—yikes!) Also, the programming team doesn’t worry too much about securing world premieres. There’s a certain New York attitude at play here—we’re last, we’re best, if you’re any good we’ll invite you for your victory lap. The films shown are a healthy mix of “prestige pictures” that will be nominated for Oscars, auteurist fare from established international directors, fervent documentaries on current events, avant-garde sound-and-light experiences that don’t quite fit into a box, and some restored revivals. All told, that’s about 65 movies to squeeze into 18 days.

Most of the screenings and panel events take place at Lincoln Center—there are three auditoriums devoted to movies year-round, plus Alice Tully Hall, typically home to chamber music and other western classical performances, which is converted for the big premieres. (As such, the audio is quite good.) Additional screenings are peppered throughout the five boroughs, even Staten Island, proving Jerry Garcia’s maxim of “don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart/you just gotta poke around” for those that consider that distant realm to be a cultural desert.

For film workers and members of the entertainment press, so many of whom live or have lived in New York, the fact that NYFF coincides with “back to school” weather lends a certain excitement, a turning of a new page. The kickoff party, held at Tavern on the Green, which can pack in 1,500 people at max capacity, is jokingly referred to as “film prom.” It has its share of celebs but isn’t too poisoned by paparazzi. I kid you not, most of the people there are gabbing away about art. Invitations are so dear that I have it on good authority that one gadfly of the New York City film scene actually scaled the fence at the popular Central Park venue this year in order to hobnob and drink prosecco.

Gossip aside, the best thing about NYFF is how it engages the community to build an audience. No one from the city of Cannes goes to screenings at the Cannes Film Festival, but plenty of New Yorkers will buy a ticket for a random show that fits their schedule. I personally have non-film friends—lawyers and educators with children who usually only see movies with Minions in them—who simply “trust the fest” and get a sitter a few times each autumn.

And what was on view this year was special. Audiences got an early look at movies that are likely to make annual “best of” lists and receive Oscar nominations. Among them were Sean Baker’s Anora, a New York-set comedy-drama that is both a tender and frank look at the life of a struggling sex worker and a Keystone Kops-esque farce filled with chase scenes and slapstick. Though I have not yet seen all of 2024’s contenders, I’m pretty confident that Anora—led by 25-year-old Mikey Madison in one of those star-making, out-of-nowhere roles you only hear about in the movies—is the best film of the year.

Other well-received titles included Nickel Boys, a dreamy, experiential adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel that itself was based on recent discoveries of criminal activity at a Florida reform school during the Jim Crow era. Director RaMell Ross (whose previous work is as a documentarian, fine art photographer, and academic) deploys a singular shooting style, essentially making the camera the perspective of the main character. That main character, however, toggles between two different people as the story progresses, occasionally detouring through, as Ross put it at a Q&A session, the archive of Black experience, both from without and within. That may sound a little perplexing, but it totally works while you are watching it, and it is new and exciting.

The closing night film was Blitz, the latest from Steve McQueen, another auteur with a foot in the fine art world. By his standards (see, for example, the nearly four-and-a-half-hour Occupied City, a roving evaluation of modern Amsterdam and the secrets it covers up, on a near block-by-block basis) this new one is far more traditional, but still striking. It follows a mother and son that are separated during the Nazi air raids over London, taking several unexpected and near-Dickensian tangents. Blitz will soon see a short theatrical release by Apple Original Films before hitting Apple TV+, which awards-watchers know is the only streaming company to have thus far won the Best Picture Oscar, with CODA (2021).

Another narrative film that grabbed me this year was A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who also co-stars in the film opposite Kieran Culkin. The two play cousins who decide to go on a “Holocaust tour,” and to visit the village where their recently deceased grandmother lived prior to her time in a concentration camp. It is a small and delicate film, mostly of people walking around and talking set to solo Chopin piano pieces, but big of spirit as two very different American Jews try to figure out how best to honor the survivors of an attempted genocide. (That a recent Rwandan convert to Judaism is also on the tour adds a fascinating counterpoint.)

The Holocaust also looms over The Brutalist, a maximalist symphony quite the opposite to A Real Pain’s quiet etude. Adrien Brody plays a concentration camp survivor and brilliant architect who comes to America with implacable ideas about work and art. He becomes entangled with an eccentric industrialist who commissions him to create a grand gathering place atop a hill in Pennsylvania, before the story takes some unpredictable turns. Director Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour picture, shot with the widescreen 35mm VistaVision process and evoking a mid-century classic, struts around a bit with some macho “film bro” posturing, but it surprisingly all comes together in the end, and is a substantial work.

From beyond Hollywood, I was very taken with On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the second feature from Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni. Mixing deadpan sarcasm with a moody visual palette, the film offers a fascinating view of traditional funeral protocols among middle class Zambian families. (Who gets to feed the widow when, for example, is a whole production.) As the story teases out, we discover that the deceased Uncle Fred, whom everyone seems to love, was actually a serial rapist, but was protected time and again by an unfair patriarchal system.

Also from Africa is the half-documentary, half-narrative Dahomey, a rumination on the repatriation of sculptures from a French museum to Benin. Written and directed by the Senegalese French director Mati Diop (whose previous fiction film Atlantics mixed supernatural elements and a sleek digital sheen), Dahomey is almost three movies in one. It follows the process of moving enormous art works from one location to another, it chronicles a lengthy town hall debate among students arguing whether the move is a success for anti-colonialism or mere crumbs from the table, and, leaning hardest into pure cinema, it is a first-person account of the story from the all-seeing spirits of the sculptures themselves. (They speak, poetically, in voice-over.)

Documentaries got a lot of attention at this year’s festival, especially two about ongoing conflicts. A highly sought after ticket was to No Other Land, a group effort from two Israeli and two Palestinian filmmakers about the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta and the decades-long displacement of the Arab residents there. It came to New York having already won a top prize in Berlin, which caused some controversy when two of the directors, Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, gave speeches accepting their award. As they both condemned the situation in their native lands, the German minister of state and culture was seen applauding. She later, in pure Monty Python form, issued a statement saying she was only applauding the Israeli half of the speech, not the Palestinian half.

Abraham and Adra, who also appear on screen as friends with some very heavy outside pressures put upon their relationship, unfortunately left New York before they could appear at scheduled talks, due to the expansion of the current war into Lebanon. Incidentally, the conflict between Israel and its neighbors led to a temporary disruption during the post-screening discussion of Pedro Almodóvar’s film The Room Next Door. Demonstrators accused the New York Film Festival of “art washing” on behalf of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which donates to Lincoln Center as well as institutions in Israel. The Spanish director decided it was best to give the protestors a moment to say their piece, and star Tilda Swinton called the interruption “uncomfortable … but necessary” before security escorted the sloganeers away to a mix of boos and applause.

Another tense political situation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, received a close examination in Julia Loktev’s five-and-a-half-hour film (separated into digestible episodes), My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow. Shot almost entirely on her phone (but well, not in portrait mode!), Loktev, an American, visits friends who work in independent media in Moscow just before the war begins. One by one, Putin’s government labels them as “foreign agents,” which isn’t (yet) a prison sentence, but is still a stamp of disenfranchisement. As the water boils around them, each person (most of whom are young women, several quietly gay) has to decide if they must flee Russia. Anyone who has ever looked at history and thought “why didn’t they just leave?” needs to watch this movie to realize just how naive it is to think it’s that simple.

A more upbeat documentary was Union, a fly-on-the-wall look at the first successful union drive at an Amazon warehouse, which happened in 2022 on Staten Island. Amazon is the second largest company by revenue on Earth, and the employees there barely have time to eat a sandwich or use the restroom. (It’s far easier to hand out absurd demerits and fire people than it is to give raises, after all.) Union shows the slowly grinding gears of labor organizing, but with a modern New York style—for instance, handing out free bags of decriminalized marijuana to exhausted workers after they put their names on a petition.

Nearly all the films in the festival had a small dinner or cocktail reception either before or after the premiere. I found it a little amusing that the one for Union was held at a well-meaning millionaire heiress’s apartment near Gramercy Park. These are the funny situations one can uncover each autumn in New York.