Author Archives: Melissa Hanson

About Melissa Hanson

Melissa Hanson aka Dial M For Melissa - Managing Editor / Podcast Producer - Growing up, Melissa’s favorite destination was always the video store and would agonize over whether to watch something new or to rewatch a favorite. Things have not changed. Follow on Twitter @DialMForMelissa

Netflix News: Sequel to ‘Bright’ in the works

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Today Netflix confirmed via social that they will make a sequel to Bright.  David Ayer will write and direct the sequel with Will Smith and Joel Edgerton expected to return and Eric Newman and Bryan Unkeless set as producers.

  • Bright premiered on Netflix on December 22, 2017.

  • Bright is the highest viewed Netflix film ever on the service in its first week of release and one of the biggest originals (including sequels/additional seasons) Netflix has ever launched.

  • Bright is the #1 movie on Netflix in every country (190+ countries) since its release with more people viewing the film internationally than domestically.

NYFF review: ‘The Meyerowitz Stories (New & Selected)’ – on Netflix 10/13

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You may remember that this was one of two films that Netflix screened at the Cannes Film Festival and it caused quite a controversy.

Meyerowitz Stories is one of the two films in the competition — the other being Bong Joon-ho’s Okja— that Netflix has brought to Cannes, stirring up controversy, with the fest promising not to screen any films next year that aren’t guaranteed a theatrical release. – via Hollywood Reporter

I’ve enjoyed many of Noah Bambach’s work and The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is no exception. It’s got an extra layer of New York-ness throughout that gives it a special punch.

From writer/director Noah Baumbach, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is the emotional, and comic intergenerational tale of adult siblings (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel) contending with the long shadow their strong-willed father (Dustin Hoffman) has cast over their lives. With an original screenplay by Baumbach, the film also stars Emma Thompson, Grace Van Patten, Adam Driver, Candice Bergen, Judd Hirsch, and Rebecca Miller. The film was produced by Scott Rudin, Baumbach, Lila Yacoub, and Eli Bush.

Although it is told through a limited worldview, you’ll likely identify with some aspect of any of the characters, especially if you have siblings. The film pulls no punches and will make you laugh more than you even realize. The editing is purposeful, so don’t think something is cutting off. That just adds to the abruptness and comedy. At the risk of sounding awful, it’s so New York.

I’ve been slightly annoyed with Ben Stiller in the past few Baumbach movies (Greenberg and While We’re Young) but this character is not nearly as negative or needy. It’s quite possibly my favorite Ben Stiller role to date.

So what is the “New and Selected” all about? Well, it really seems to just let you know that this is a collection of stories of the Meyerowitz family and you couldn’t possibly show everything, so these stories are New and Selected.

Quite possibly his most accessible film to date, it definitely raises the bar of Originals on Netflix. Streaming now! (Oh, and so is Okja, which is AWESOME.

16 New York Film Festival movies coming to theaters soon

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Author Joan Didion at home in Hollywood.

The Florida Project
Description: A six-year-old girl (the remarkable Brooklynn Prince) and her two best friends run wild on the grounds of a week-by-week motel complex on the edge of Orlando’s Disney World. Meanwhile, her mother (talented novice Bria Vinaite) desperately tries to cajole the motel manager (an ever-surprising Willem Dafoe) to turn a blind eye to the way she pays the rent. A film about but not for kids, Baker’s depiction of childhood on the margins has fierce energy, tenderness, and great beauty. After the ingenuity of his iPhone-shot 2015 breakout Tangerine, Baker reasserts his commitment to 35mm film with sun-blasted images that evoke a young girl’s vision of adventure and endurance beyond heartbreak. An A24 release.

Liz loved it! 

The genuine chemistry between Willem Dafoe and rambunctious newcomer Brooklyn Prince is what makes The Florida Project so perfect.

Directed By: Sean Baker
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 10/6/2017
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AMC LOEWS LINCOLN SQUARE 13
1998 Broadway, New York, NY 10023

ANGELIKA FILM CENTER
18 W Houston St, New York, NY 10012

Jane
Description: In 1960, Dr. Louis Leakey arranged for a young English woman with a deep love of animals to go to Gombe Stream National Park near Lake Tangyanika. The Dutch photographer and filmmaker Hugo van Lawick was sent to document Jane Goodall’s first establishment of contact with the chimpanzee population, resulting in the enormously popular Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, the second film ever produced by National Geographic. One hundred hours of Lawick’s original footage was rediscovered in 2014. From that material, Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) has created a vibrant film experience, giving new life to the experiences of this remarkable woman and the wild in which she found a home. A National Geographic Documentary Films release.
Directed By: Brett Morgen
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
Theater Date: 10/9/17
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Find a screening here

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Description: Noah Baumbach revisits the terrain of family vanities and warring attachments that he began exploring with The Squid and the Whale in this intricately plotted story of three middle-aged siblings (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel) coping with their strong-willed father (Dustin Hoffman) and the flightiness of his wife (Emma Thompson). Baumbach’s film never stops deftly changing gears, from surges of pathos to painful comedy and back again. Needless to say, this lyrical quicksilver comedy is very much a New York experience. A Netflix release.
Directed By: Noah Baumbach
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 10/13/17
Netflix Streaming Date: 10/13/17
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Los Angeles – The Landmark, Laemmle Noho
New York City – Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, IFC Center
Atlanta – Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema
Boston – Landmark’s Kendall Square Cinemas
Chicago – Landmark’s Century Centre
Dallas – Landmark’s Magnolia Theatre
Miami – Landmark at Merrick Park
Philadelphia – Landmark’s Ritz Bourse
San Francisco – Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema
Washington D.C.- Landmark’s Bethesda

Wonderstruck
Description: In 1977, following the death of his single mother, Ben (Oakes Fegley) loses his hearing in a freak accident and makes his way from Minnesota to New York, hoping to learn about the father he has never met. A half-century earlier, another deaf 12-year-old, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), flees her restrictive Hoboken home, captivated by the bustle and romance of the nearby big city. Each of these parallel adventures, unfolding largely without dialogue, is an exuberant love letter to a different bygone era of New York. The mystery of how they ultimately converge, which involves Julianne Moore in a lovely dual role, provides the film’s emotional core. Adapted from a young-adult novel by Hugo author Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck is an all-ages enchantment, entirely true to director Todd Haynes’s sensibility: an intelligent, deeply personal, and lovingly intricate tribute to the power of obsession. An Amazon Studios release.
Directed By: Todd Haynes
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Centerpiece
Theater Date: 10/20/2017
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BPM (Beats Per Minute)
Description: In the early 1990s, ACT UP—in France, as in the U.S.—was on the front lines of AIDS activism. Its members, mostly gay, HIV-positive men, stormed drug company and government offices in “Silence=Death” T-shirts, facing down complacent suits with the urgency of their struggle for life. Robin Campillo (Eastern Boys) depicts their comradeship and tenacity in waking up the world to the disease that was killing them and movingly dramatizes the persistence of passionate love affairs even in dire circumstances. All the actors, many of them unknown, are splendid in this film, which not only celebrates the courage of ACT UP but also tacitly provides a model of resistance to the forces of destruction running rampant today. A release of The Orchard.
Directed By: Robin Campillo
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 10/27/2017
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Félicité
Description: The new film from Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauan and Senegalese descent, is largely set in the roughest areas of the rough city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, a woman named Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) scrapes together a living as a singer in a makeshift bar (her accompanists are played by members of the Kasai Allstars band). When her son is seriously injured in an accident, she goes in search of money for his medical care and embarks on a double journey: through the punishing outer world of the city and the inner world of the soul. Félicité is tough, tender, lyrical, mysterious, funny, and terrifying, both responsive to the moment and fixed on its heroine’s spiritual progress. A Strand Releasing release.
Directed By: Alain Gomis
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Berlin Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 10/27/2017
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The Square
Description: A precisely observed, thoroughly modern comedy of manners, Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winner revolves around Christian (Claes Bang), a well-heeled contemporary art curator at a Stockholm museum. While preparing his new exhibit—a four-by-four-meter zone designated as a “sanctuary of trust and caring”—Christian falls prey to a pickpocketing scam, which triggers an overzealous response and then a crisis of conscience. Featuring several instant-classic scenes and a vivid supporting cast (Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, and noted motion-capture actor Terry Notary), The Square is the most ambitious film yet by one of contemporary cinema’s most incisive social satirists, the rare movie to have as many laughs as ideas. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Directed By: Ruben Östlund
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Cannes Film Festival (2017), Toronto Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 10/27/2017
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Author Joan Didion at home in Hollywood.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Description: Griffin Dunne’s years-in-the-making documentary portrait of his aunt Joan Didion moves with the spirit of her uncannily lucid writing: the film simultaneously expands and zeroes in, covering a vast stretch of turbulent cultural history with elegance and candor, and grounded in the illuminating presence and words of Didion herself. This is most certainly a film about loss—the loss of a solid American center, the personal losses of a husband and a child—but Didion describes everything she sees and experiences so attentively, so fully, and so bravely that she transforms the very worst of life into occasions for understanding. A Netflix release.
Directed By: Griffin Dunne
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
Theater Date: 10/27/2017
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Last Flag Flying
Description: In Richard Linklater’s lyrical road movie, as funny as it is heartbreaking, three aging Vietnam-era Navy vets—soft-spoken Doc (Steve Carell), unhinged and unfiltered Sal (Bryan Cranston), and quietly measured Mueller (Laurence Fishburne)—reunite to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of Doc’s only child, who has been killed in the early days of the Iraq invasion. As this trio of old friends makes its way up the Eastern seaboard, Linklater gives us a rich rendering of friendship, a grand mosaic of common life in the USA during the Bush era, and a striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. To put it simply, Last Flag Flying is a great movie from one of America’s finest filmmakers. An Amazon Studios release.
Directed By: Richard Linklater
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Opening Night
Theater Date: 11/3/2017
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Mudbound
Description: Writer-director Dee Rees’s historical epic, based on the novel by Hillary Jordan, details the daily hardships and vicissitudes of farm life in Mississippi during the post–World War II era. Two families, one white (the landlords) and one black (the sharecroppers), work the same miserable piece of farmland. Out of need and empathy, the mothers of the two families bond as their younger male relatives go off to war and learn that there is a world beyond racial hatred and fear. The flawless ensemble cast includes Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Jason Clarke, Rob Morgan, and Jonathan Banks. A Netflix release.
Directed By: Dee Rees
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Sundance Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 11/7/2017
Streaming Date: 11/7/2017
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Lady Bird
Description: Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut is a portrait of an artistically inclined young woman (Saoirse Ronan) trying to define herself in the shadow of her mother (Laurie Metcalf) and searching for an escape route from her hometown of Sacramento. Moods are layered upon moods at the furious pace of late adolescence in this lovely and loving film, which shifts deftly from one emotional and comic register to the next. Lady Bird is rich in invention and incident, and it is powered by Ronan, one of the finest actors in movies. With Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet as the men in Lady Bird’s life, Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, and Tracy Letts as her dad. An A24 release.
Directed By: Greta Gerwig
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Telluride Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 11/10/2017
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Thelma
Description: In the new film from Joachim Trier (Reprise), an adolescent country girl (Eili Harboe) has just moved to the city to begin her university studies, with the internalized religious severity of her quietly domineering mother and father (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Henrik Rafaelsen) always in mind. When she realizes that she is developing an attraction to her new friend Anja (Okay Kaya), she begins to manifest a terrifying and uncontrollable power that her parents have long feared. To reveal more would be a crime; let’s just say that this fluid, sharply observant, and continually surprising film begins in the key of horror and ends somewhere completely different. A release of The Orchard.
Directed By: Joachim Trier
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Toronto Film Festival (2017), Fantastic Fest (2017), Toronto Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 11/10/2017
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On the Beach at Night Alone
Description: Hong Sang-soo’s movies have always invited autobiographical readings, and his 19th feature is perhaps his most achingly personal film yet, a steel-nerved, clear-eyed response to the tabloid frenzy that erupted in South Korea over his relationship with actress Kim Min-hee. The film begins in Hamburg, where actress Young-hee (played by Kim herself, who won the Best Actress prize at Berlin for this role) is hiding out after the revelation of her affair with a married filmmaker. Back in Korea, a series of encounters shed light on Young-hee’s volatile state, as she slips in and out of melancholic reflection and dreams. Centered on Kim’s astonishingly layered performance, On the Beach at Night Alone is the work of a master mining new emotional depths. A Cinema Guild release.
Directed By: Hong Sang-soo
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Berlin Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 11/17/2017
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Call Me by Your Name
Description: A story of summer love unlike any other, the sensual new film from the director of I Am Love, set in 1983, charts the slowly ripening romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet), an American teen on the verge of discovering himself, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), the handsome older grad student whom his professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) has invited to their vacation home in Northern Italy. Adapted from the wistful novel by André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name is Guadagnino’s most exquisitely rendered, visually restrained film, capturing with eloquence the confusion and longing of youth, anchored by a remarkable, star-making performance by Chalamet, always a nervy bundle of swagger and insecurity, contrasting with Hammer’s stoicism. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Directed By: Luca Guadagnino
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Sundance Film Festival (2017), Toronto Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 11/24/2017
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Wonder Wheel
Description: In a career spanning 50 years and almost as many features, Woody Allen has periodically refined, reinvented, and redefined the terms of his art, and that’s exactly what he does with his daring new film. We’re in Coney Island in the 1950s. A lifeguard (Justin Timberlake) tells us a story that just might be filtered through his vivid imagination: a middle-aged carousel operator (Jim Belushi) and his beleaguered wife (Kate Winslet), who eke out a living on the boardwalk, are visited by his estranged daughter (Juno Temple)—a situation from which layer upon layer of all-too-human complications develop. Allen and his cinematographer, the great Vittorio Storaro, working with a remarkable cast led by Winslet in a startlingly brave, powerhouse performance, have created a bracing and truly surprising movie experience. An Amazon Studios release.
Directed By: Woody Allen
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Closing Night
Theater Date: 12/1/2017
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Lover for a Day
Description: Lover for a Day is an exquisite meditation on love and fidelity that recalls Garrel’s previous NYFF selections Jealousy (NYFF 2013) and In the Shadow of Women (NYFF 2015). After a painful breakup, heartbroken Jeanne (Esther Garrel) moves back in with her university professor father, Gilles (Eric Caravaca), to discover that he is living with optimistic, life-loving student Ariane (newcomer Louise Chevillotte), who is the same age as Jeanne. An unusual triangular relationship emerges as both girls seek the favor of Gilles, as daughter or lover, while developing their own friendship, finding common ground despite their differences. Gorgeously shot in grainy black and white by Renato Berta (Au revoir les enfants), Lover for a Day perfectly illustrates Garrel’s poetic exploration of relationships and desire. A MUBI release.
Directed By: Philippe Garrel
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Theater Date: 1/12/2018
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New York Film Festival 55 Review: ‘The Other Side of Hope’ is subtle, quirky & timely

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Finland’s master of deadpan comedy, Aki Kaurismäki (‘Lights in the Dusk’, ‘Le Havre’), returns with the story of an unlikely friendship between a Syrian asylum seeker and a middle-aged Finnish restaurant owner. Winner of the Berlin Silver Bear for Best Director, it’s a beautiful, timely film from one of the world’s leading auteurs. Khaled (Sherwan Haji) arrives at the port of Helsinki concealed in a coal container, fleeing war-torn Syria to seek asylum in Finland. Dazed and frustrated by the monolithic administration he encounters at the detention centre, he makes a break for it and heads out onto the streets. There he meets Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), a former shirt salesman who has recently left his alcoholic wife for a new life as a bachelor restaurateur. Together, they help each other to navigate the adversities they face in these unfamiliar and often baffling new worlds. Stream The Other Side of Hope on Volta now: https://goo.gl/6CrV4v

Sometimes with so much in the news about refugees and asylum seekers, it becomes hard to put a face to the issue. Director Aki Kaurismäki brings the issue humanity and humor in The Other Side of Hope.  This truly deadpan comedy focuses on Khaled, who fled Syria because of the war and is now desperate to find his sister. Add to that Wikström, a man who just left his alcoholic wife and bought a restaurant, with no experience. Wikström does not set out to help Khaled, it sort of just happens.

Aside from the story, the film is beautifully shot, and although set in our time, has the look of a 70s film. Many shots are zoomed out to show all the action and the absurd movements of the characters. It’s a delight to just visually follow what’s happening.

I also enjoyed the soundtrack immensely. The song from the trailer (at 0:37) is so fantastic and you’ll find yourself wanted to listen to it again.

To be totally honest, it doesn’t move very fast, but this is one of those films that you can turn on at any point, watch a scene and be totally satisfied. If you’ll watch a home, it’ll likely be a little rough to watch all at once, but really worth seeing.

How to watch: check out their website http://www.theothersideofhope.com/

OFFICIAL SELECTION:
Berlin International Film Festival 2017 – Winner: Best Director
Telluride Film Festival 2017
Toronto International Film Festival 2017
New York Film Festival 2017

Below are some clips for you to enjoy.

 

New York Film Festival 55 Review: ‘Hall of Mirrors’ exposes investigative journalism at it’s finest

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I’m not quite sure which is more interesting: the life of Edward Jay Epstein or the stories he investigates. Add to that an original documentary style and Hall of Mirrors turns into an accessible, artistic, and entertaining documentary. First-time filmmaker sisters, Ena Talakic and Ines Talakic spent four years writing, directing and editing after a chance meeting with Epstein at a party.

Rather than the boring chronological story style, the directors move back and forth between the life of Epstein his investigations. At first, it’s almost confusing, then as you’re watching you start to realize what an amazing life he’s lead and what a huge contribution he’s made to journalism. It’s quite inspiring.

If you’re in the Washington D.C. area, the film has just been announced at the Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival.

HALL OF MIRRORS
Washington, DC Premiere
Directors Ena Talakic and Ines Talakic
Italy / United States

Saturday, October 21, 2017 – 2:30 PM
Naval Heritage Center
http://doubleexposurefestival.com/films/hall-of-mirrors/

Edward Jay Epstein has built a career on taking a deeper look at hidden trends and unquestioned scripts that enter mainstream thinking. In Hall of Mirrors, he delves into Edward Snowden’s historic leak of data on U.S. government surveillance, delighting in the absurdities he discovers.

Filmmakers in attendance.

Books of Edward Jay Epstein:

  • Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (1966)
  • Counterplot (1968)
  • News from Nowhere. Television and the News (1973)
  • Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism (1975)
  • Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America (1977)
  • Cartel (1978)
  • Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (1978)
  • The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion (1982)
  • Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB & the CIA (1989)
  • The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (1992)
  • Dossier: The Secret Life of Armand Hammer (1996)
  • The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood (2000)
  • The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies (2010)
  • The Annals of Unsolved Crime (2013)
  • The JFK Assassination Diary: My Search for Answers to the Mystery of the Century (2013)
  • How America Lost Its Secrets: Snowden, the Man and the Theft (2017)

TRT: 87 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Directors: Ena Talakic, Ines Talakic
Producers: Ena Talakic, Ines Talakic
Editors: Ena Talakic, Ines Talakic
Directors of Photography: Ena Talakic, Ines Talakic

15 U.S. Premieres of the New York Film Festival

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A Skin So Soft
Description: Studiously observing the world of male bodybuilding, Denis Côté’s A Skin So Soft (Ta peau si lisse) crafts a multifaceted portrait of six latter-day Adonises through the lens of their everyday lives: extreme diets, training regimens, family relationships, and friendships within the community. Capturing the physical brawn and emotional complexity of its subjects with wit and tenderness, this companion piece to Cote’s singular animal study Bestiaire (2012) is a self-reflexive rumination on the long tradition of filming the human body that also advances a fascinating perspective on contemporary masculinity.
Directed By: Denis Côté
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Locarno International Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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BOOM FOR REAL The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Description: Sara Driver’s documentary is both a celebration of and elegy for the downtown New York art/music/film/performance world of the late 1970s and early ’80s, through which Jean-Michel Basquiat shot like a rocket. Weaving Basquiat’s life and artistic progress in and out of her rich, living tapestry of this endlessly cross-fertilizing scene, Driver has created an urgent recollection of freedom and the aesthetic of poverty. Graffiti meets gestural painting, hip hop infects rock and roll and visa versa, heroin comes and never quite goes, night swallows day, and everybody looms as large as they feel like looming on the crumbling streets of the Lower East Side.
Directed By: Sara Driver
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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BPM (Beats Per Minute)
Description: In the early 1990s, ACT UP—in France, as in the U.S.—was on the front lines of AIDS activism. Its members, mostly gay, HIV-positive men, stormed drug company and government offices in “Silence=Death” T-shirts, facing down complacent suits with the urgency of their struggle for life. Robin Campillo (Eastern Boys) depicts their comradeship and tenacity in waking up the world to the disease that was killing them and movingly dramatizes the persistence of passionate love affairs even in dire circumstances. All the actors, many of them unknown, are splendid in this film, which not only celebrates the courage of ACT UP but also tacitly provides a model of resistance to the forces of destruction running rampant today. A release of The Orchard.
Directed By: Robin Campillo
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Caniba
Description: The latest by the makers of Leviathan (NYFF50) is a harrowing engagement with the sheer presence of a man who did the unthinkable: Issei Sagawa, who became a tabloid magnet after killing and cannibalizing a woman in Paris in 1981. Caniba moves past sensationalism to immerse viewers in an unnervingly intimate encounter with Sagawa, who has since lived off his notoriety (as a sexploitation star and manga author), and his brother and primary caretaker. The filmmakers use this modern-day instance of cannibalism, long a subject of anthropological study, to raise questions about repulsion, desire, madness, and more. Audacious and unflinching, Caniba compels us to reckon with the most extreme limits of human behavior.
Directed By: Véréna Paravel,Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017), Venice Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Projections
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Dragonfly Eyes
Description: Chinese visual artist Xu Bing’s ambitious debut feature follows an ill-fated romance through a frightening and faceless urban environment, using only closed-circuit surveillance footage. Constructing a fictitious narrative from real-world encounters and frequently spectacular images, Xu turns the story of a young man attempting to relocate his object of desire into a cogent analysis of postmodern identity and digitally mediated communication.
Directed By: Xu Bing
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Locarno International Film Festival (2017),Toronto Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Projections
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Félicité
Description: The new film from Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauan and Senegalese descent, is largely set in the roughest areas of the rough city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, a woman named Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) scrapes together a living as a singer in a makeshift bar (her accompanists are played by members of the Kasai Allstars band). When her son is seriously injured in an accident, she goes in search of money for his medical care and embarks on a double journey: through the punishing outer world of the city and the inner world of the soul. Félicité is tough, tender, lyrical, mysterious, funny, and terrifying, both responsive to the moment and fixed on its heroine’s spiritual progress. A Strand Releasing release.
Directed By: Alain Gomis
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Berlin Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Good Luck
Description: In his first solo feature in eight years, Ben Russell takes us deep into the unforgiving copper mines of Serbia. When we emerge, we’re thousands of miles away, amongst an illegal band of gold miners in the Suriname jungle. The physical demands of labor, as well as the transformative power of music, connect these communities, each equally fortified by the realities of capital and a spirit of masculine camaraderie.
Directed By: Ben Russell
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Locarno International Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Projections
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Jane
Description: In 1960, Dr. Louis Leakey arranged for a young English woman with a deep love of animals to go to Gombe Stream National Park near Lake Tangyanika. The Dutch photographer and filmmaker Hugo van Lawick was sent to document Jane Goodall’s first establishment of contact with the chimpanzee population, resulting in the enormously popular Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, the second film ever produced by National Geographic. One hundred hours of Lawick’s original footage was rediscovered in 2014. From that material, Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) has created a vibrant film experience, giving new life to the experiences of this remarkable woman and the wild in which she found a home. A National Geographic Documentary Films release.
Directed By: Brett Morgen
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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Occidental
Description: In a boho Parisian hotel, two sexually and politically ambiguous Italians romp through a succession of blatantly artificial, anachronistically decorated set pieces, stoking the prejudices of staff members and fellow guests. Outside, riots rage and protesters march, threatening to spill into the increasingly feverish atmosphere gathering indoors. French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa’s second feature—reminiscent of films by Bertrand Bonello and the stage-derived works of Alain Resnais—confirms the arrival of a uniquely provocative, socially attuned filmmaker.
Directed By: Neïl Beloufa
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Projections
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Sea Sorrow
Description: Vanessa Redgrave’s debut as a documentary filmmaker is a plea for a compassionate western response to the refugee crisis and a condemnation of the vitriolic inhumanity of current right wing and conservative politicians. Redgrave juxtaposes our horrifying present of inadequate refugee quotas and humanitarian disasters (like last year’s clearing of the Calais migrant camp) with the refugee crises of WWII and its aftermath, recalled with archival footage, contemporary news reports and personal testimony—including an interview with the eloquent Labor politician Lord Dubs, who was one of the children rescued by the Kindertransport. Sea Sorrow reaches further back in time to Shakespeare, not only for its title but also to further remind us that we are once more repeating the history that we have yet to learn.
Directed By: Vanessa Redgrave
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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Spoor
Description: Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) is a vigorous former engineer, part-time teacher, and animal activist, living in a near wilderness on the Polish-Czech border, where hunting is the favored year-round sport of the corrupt men who rule the region. When a series of hunters die mysteriously, Janina wonders if the animals are taking revenge, which doesn’t stop the police from coming after her. A brilliant, passionate director, Agnieszka Holland—who like Janina comes from a generation that learned to fight authoritarianism by any means necessary—forges a sprawling, wildly beautiful, emotionally enveloping film that earns its vision of utopia. It’s at once a phantasmagorical murder mystery, a tender, late-blooming love story, and a resistance and rescue thriller.
Directed By: Agnieszka Holland,Kasia Adamik
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Berlin Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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The Day After
Description: Hong continues in the openly emotional register of his On the Beach at Night Alone, also showing in this year’s Main Slate. Shot in moody black and white, The Day After opens with book publisher Bongwan (Kwon Hae-hyo) fending off his wife’s heated accusations of infidelity. At the office, it’s the first day for his new assistant, Areum (Kim Min-hee), whose predecessor was Bongwan’s lover. Mistaken identity, repetition compulsion, and déjà vu figure into the narrative as the film entangles its characters across multiple timelines through an intricate geometry of desire, suspicion, and betrayal. The end result is one of Hong’s most plaintive and philosophical works.
Directed By: Hong Sang-soo
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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The Florida Project
Description: A six-year-old girl (the remarkable Brooklynn Prince) and her two best friends run wild on the grounds of a week-by-week motel complex on the edge of Orlando’s Disney World. Meanwhile, her mother (talented novice Bria Vinaite) desperately tries to cajole the motel manager (an ever-surprising Willem Dafoe) to turn a blind eye to the way she pays the rent. A film about but not for kids, Baker’s depiction of childhood on the margins has fierce energy, tenderness, and great beauty. After the ingenuity of his iPhone-shot 2015 breakout Tangerine, Baker reasserts his commitment to 35mm film with sun-blasted images that evoke a young girl’s vision of adventure and endurance beyond heartbreak. An A24 release.
Directed By: Sean Baker
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Western
Description: As its title suggests, German director Valeska Grisebach’s first feature in a decade is a supremely intelligent genre update that recognizes the Western as a template on which to draw out eternal human conflicts. In remote rural Bulgaria, a group of German workers are building a water facility. Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), the reserved newbie in this all-male company, immediately draws the ire of the boorish team leader, not least for his willingness to mingle with the wary locals. Cast with utterly convincing nonprofessional actors, Western is a gripping culture-clash drama, attuned both to old codes of masculinity and new forms of colonialism. A Cinema Guild release.
Directed By: Valeska Grisebach
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Zama
Description: The great Lucrecia Martel ventures into the realm of historical fiction and makes the genre entirely her own in this adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 classic of Argentinean literature. In the late 18th century, in a far-flung corner of what seems to be Paraguay, the title character, an officer of the Spanish crown (Daniel Giménez Cacho) born in the Americas, waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. Martel renders Zama’s world—his daily regimen of small humiliations and petty politicking—as both absurd and mysterious, and as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia, subject to a creeping disorientation. Precise yet dreamlike, and thick with atmosphere, Zama is a singular and intoxicating experience, a welcome return from one of contemporary cinema’s truly brilliant minds.
Directed By: Lucrecia Martel
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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NYFF Live – FREE Talks at the New York Film Festival

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NYFF55 talks also include On Cinema: Richard Linklater and Directors Dialogues with Lucrecia Martel, Agnès Varda & JR, Hong Sang-soo, and Philippe Garrel

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces the lineup for the sixth edition of free talk series NYFF Live during the 55th New York Film Festival (September 28 – October 15). HBO® is the presenting sponsor of NYFF Live, which features actors, directors, writers, critics, and other industry insiders participating in daily evening discussions from September 29 – October 13 in the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

NYFF55 Directors Dialogues, for which HBO® is also the presenting sponsor, include conversations with Main Slate filmmakers Lucrecia Martel, Agnès Varda & JR, Hong Sang-soo, and Philippe Garrel. This year’s On Cinema features Opening Night filmmaker Richard Linklater (Last Flag Flying) in an in-depth discussion with NYFF Director Kent Jones about films that have influenced and inspired him, illustrated with film clips.

NYFF Live features panels on The Square, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), The Florida Project, and other films from NYFF55, as well as discussions with festival talent including Vanessa Redgrave, Luca Guadagnino, and Claire Denis. For updates and additional details about panelists and moderators, visit filmlinc.org. NYFF Live is organized by FSLC Deputy Director Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks, FSLC’s Manager of Talks and Artist Programs.

Free tickets to both NYFF Live and Directors Dialogues events will be distributed at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center box office (144 West 65th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam) on a first-come, first-served basis starting one hour prior to the talks. Limit one ticket per person, subject to availability. For those unable to attend, video from these events will be available online at filmlinc.org.

The 18-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming; and Amy Taubin, contributing editor for Film Comment and Artforum.

Friday, September 29
7:00PM     Ruben Östlund, The Square
8:00PM     VR and the Future of Virtual Production by Lucasfilm

Saturday, September 30
6:00PM     On Cinema: Richard Linklater
7:00PM     Gamescape: The Revenge of Full Motion Video
8:00PM     IndieWire Screen Talk LIVE podcast with Eric Kohn & Anne Thompson

Sunday, October 1
3:00PM      HBO Directors Dialogues: Lucretia Martel
7:00PM     Film Comment: The Cinema of Experience
8:00PM     Serge Bozon & Isabelle Huppert, Mrs. Hyde

Monday, October 2
6:00PM     HBO Directors Dialogues: Agnès Varda & JR
7:00PM     Noah Baumbach, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
8:00PM     NYFF Shorts Filmmakers

Tuesday, October 3
7:00PM     Making The Florida Project: Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch

Wednesday, October 4
7:00PM     Making Call Me by Your Name: Luca Guadagnino, Armie Hammer, and Michael Stuhlbarg

Thursday, October 5
7:00PM     Spotlight on Documentary Filmmakers

Friday, October 6
7:00PM     Documenting Creativity: Griffin Dunne, Rebecca Miller, Susan Lacy, Josh Koury & Myles Kane

Saturday, October 7
7:00PM     Film Comment: Filmmakers Chat

Sunday, October 8
7:00PM     Vanessa Redgrave, Sea Sorrow

Monday, October 9
7:00PM     Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
8:00PM     HBO Directors Dialogues: Hong Sang-soo

Tuesday, October 10
7:00PM     Field of Vision Presents
8:00PM     HBO Directors Dialogues: Philippe Garrel

Wednesday, October 11
7:00PM     Keeping Cultural Borders Open: Laurie Anderson and special guests

Thursday, October 12
7:00PM     Real Characters: Writing Biopics and Origin Stories

Friday, October 13
7:00PM     Film Comment: Festival Wrap
8:00PM     Access New Audiences: Wonderstruck & The Blind Boys of Alabama

Friday, September 29
7:00pm
Ruben Östlund, The Square
Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s The Square won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. The satirical drama, starring Claes Bang and Elisabeth Moss, follows a well-heeled contemporary art curator at a Stockholm museum who falls prey to a pickpocketing scam, triggering an overzealous response and then a crisis of conscience. Östlund, whose features also include Play and Force Majeure, will talk about writing and directing The Square, which plays at this year’s NYFF.

8:00pm
VR and the Future of Virtual Production by Lucasfilm
Demo and Talk with Rachel Rose, Jose Perez, and Nick Rasmussen
From the depths of earth’s oceans to galaxies far, far away, VR allows us to be anyone, go anywhere, and see anything. Lucasfilm and its visual effects division, Industrial Light & Magic, have harnessed the power of this medium to create a new Virtual Production toolset, allowing filmmakers to build and scout a virtual set, manipulate props, puppeteer characters and vehicles, even compose shots to create virtual storyboards. It’s a game-changing application that is easy to learn, allowing storytellers to focus on the elements that blend together to form great stories. The creators of the toolset will participate in a conversation about the development of the platform and its potential to impact the filmmaking process, followed on Saturday by a public demonstration that will allow audiences to experience the system first hand.

Saturday, September 30
6:00pm
On Cinema: Richard Linklater
In this annual special event, NYFF Director Kent Jones sits down with world-renowned filmmakers for an in-depth talk about films that have influenced and inspired them, illustrated with film clips. This year, Jones will talk with Richard Linklater, whose intensely emotional comic drama Last Flag Flying is this year’s opening night selection, and whose many superb films (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and Boyhood, to name just a few) have been genuine gifts to modern American cinema.

7:00pm
Gamescape: The Revenge of Full Motion Video
It’s 1983. You find yourself in an arcade in the ’burbs. Among the future classics—Galaga, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong—you find something different: Sega’s Astron Belt or Cinematronics’ Dragon’s Lair, games that eschewed pixelated sprites for video and vivid animation. Full Motion Video games were movies you could play—to a point: the technical execution left something to be desired. Games were unreliable, systems crashed, and FMV all but disappeared. But FMV is making a comeback as creators breathe new life into this 35-year-old form. The 2017 edition of Gamescape celebrates some of the best new FMV work and looks back on titles both famous and infamous from the golden age of the arcade. GameScape is co-curated by Clara Fernandez-Vara, of the NYU Game Center.

8:00pm
IndieWire Screen Talk LIVE podcast with Eric Kohn & Anne Thompson
Take a seat to watch IndieWire’s Chief Film Critic Eric Kohn and Editor at Large Anne Thompson engage in film debate and banter as they record the next episode of their popular podcast, Screen Talk. Kohn and Thompson will give their takes on the first weekend of the New York Film Festival, and talk about how awards season is shaping up.

Sunday, October 1
3:00pm
HBO Directors Dialogues: Lucrecia Martel
A singular artist working in cinema today, Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel makes films that are unlike any others. This year, Zama, showcased in the Main Slate, marks Martel’s fourth feature and fourth New York Film Festival appearance, following La Cienaga (2001), The Holy Girl (2004), and The Headless Woman (2009). Join Martel for a discussion of her films and her remarkable latest, an adaptation of a classic Argentinean novel, set in the late 18th century.

7:00pm
Film Comment: The Cinema of Experience
At this year’s NYFF, filmmakers are rising to the challenge of representing race and immigration at a pivotal time in our nation’s history. Our guests will discuss how cinematic technique is used to reflect such experiences and what is different about the latest generation of storytelling. Moderated by Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, and featuring critic Teo Bugbee, writer-programmer Ashley Clark, and writer-filmmaker Farihah Zaman.

8:00pm
Serge Bozon & Isabelle Huppert, Mrs. Hyde
Academy Award nominee Isabelle Huppert headlines Serge Bozon’s eccentric comedic thriller loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Huppert plays a timid physics professor at a suburban high school constantly mocked by colleagues and students. During a stormy night, she is struck by lightning, and wakes up as the newly powerful Madame Hyde. Meet Huppert as she talks about transforming into this character, and her career in movies and television; and Bozon, who will share his experiences making the movie.

Monday, October 2
6:00pm
HBO Directors Dialogues: Agnès Varda & JR
At age 89, legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda has collaborated with 34-year-old visual artist JR on a remarkable new film, titled Faces Places. In it, the two of them journey from one rural French village to another, meeting people, taking their photographs, and printing large-scale versions of them, placed grandly within the environments. The two artist friends will discuss their unique project and the wise and wonderful film that came out of it.

7:00pm
Noah Baumbach, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
No stranger to the New York Film Festival, Noah Baumbach has presented The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007), and Frances Ha (2012) here. Baumbach returns this year with the comedic drama The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), starring Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Emma Thompson. The film harkens back to the themes of family vanities and warring attachments he has explored in previous movies. Baumbach will talk about writing the film, and working with a cast that includes screen legend Hoffman.

8:00pm
NYFF Shorts Filmmakers
For the past three years, the New York Film Festival has celebrated short form filmmakers living and working in the city. Meet the directors with films in the festival’s “New York Stories” program: Jason Giampietro (Unpresidented), Adinah Dancyger (Cheer Up Baby), Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus (The Layover), Kevin Wilson, Jr. (My Nephew Emmett), John Wilson (The Road to Magnasanti) and Pacho Velez & Yoni Brook (Mr. Yellow Sweatshirt).

Tuesday, October 3
7:00pm
Making The Florida Project: Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
Sean Baker (writer-director-producer-editor) and Chris Bergoch (writer-producer) collaborated on The Florida Project, which is having its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. In this discussion, they’ll delve into the particulars of how The Florida Project was conceived and executed through its various stages in development. Set over one summer, the film follows precocious six-year-old Moonee as she courts mischief and adventure with her ragtag playmates and bonds with her rebellious but caring mother, all while living in the shadow of nearby Disney World.

Wednesday, October 4
7:00pm
Making Call Me by Your Name: Luca Guadagnino, Armie Hammer, and Michael Stuhlbarg
Luca Guadagnino’s film has already caused a sensation at the Sundance, Berlin, and Toronto film festivals. Based on the book by André Aciman and from a screenplay by James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name centers on the son of an American professor who falls for the graduate student who comes to study and live with his family in their northern Italian home during the summer. Join Guadagnino and actors Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg as they talk about what is sure to be one of the most debated films of the fall.

Thursday, October 5
7:00pm
Spotlight on Documentary Filmmakers
The amount of nonfiction films has skyrocketed since the turn of the century. Festivals around the world have celebrated the form, while critics and filmgoers have increasingly included docs on their roster of films to see. The group of filmmakers showing at this year’s NYFF—including Alison McAlpine (Cielo), Nancy Buirski (The Rape of Recy Taylor), Ena and Ines Talakic (Hall of Mirrors), among others—represent a cross-section of some of the most compelling documentarians working today.

Friday, October 6
7:00pm
Documenting Creativity: Griffin Dunne, Rebecca Miller, Susan Lacy, Josh Koury & Myles Kane
Many documentaries showing at this year’s NYFF focus on the lives and work of major writers and artists. At this talk, the directors behind four of these films will speak about their processes in representing creative people onscreen: Griffin Dunne, on creating a portrait of his aunt in Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold; Rebecca Miller, on the long road to constructing a documentary on her father in Arthur Miller: Writer; Susan Lacy, who traces the private, public, and artistic development of one of cinema’s true giants in Spielberg; and Josh Koury & Myles Kane on Voyeur, which closely followed Gay Talese as he worked on his controversial book The Voyeur’s Motel.

Saturday, October 7
7:00pm
Film Comment: Filmmakers Chat
For the second year, Film Comment gives you the rare chance to see some of today’s most important filmmakers in dialogue with each other. A selection of NYFF directors past and present will talk together about their influences and inspirations in a discussion moderated by the magazine’s editor-in-chief Nicolas Rapold, with filmmakers Claire Denis (Let the Sun Shine In) and Joachim Trier (Thelma).

Sunday, October 8
7:00pm
Vanessa Redgrave, Sea Sorrow
Her career as an actor has spanned six decades, but Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave has now become a documentary director with Sea Sorrow, a timely examination of the world’s urgent migrant crisis. Redgrave will be joined by producer Carlo Gabriel Nero to discuss what moved her to take on the project and how she set out to accomplish her filmmaking goals.

Monday, October 9
7:00pm
Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig is a familiar presence at the New York Film Festival, seen in films such as Frances Ha (2012), Eden(2014), and 20th Century Women (2016). Gerwig has returned to the festival this year as a filmmaker, presenting her directorial debut, Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan as an artistically inclined young woman trying to define herself in the shadow of her mother (Laurie Metcalf) and searching for an escape route from her hometown of Sacramento. Join Gerwig as she talks about segueing to behind the camera and telling a story that comes from a very personal place.

8:00pm
HBO Directors Dialogues: Hong Sang-soo
Beyond prolific, South Korean director Hong Sang-soo has presented new films in NYFF’s Main Slate for five years in a row. And this year, he has two new movies: The Day After, a black-and-white tale of mistaken identity, déja vu, and adultery; and On the Beach at Night Alone, an achingly personal response to public scandals surrounding his romantic life, starring Kim Min-hee (The Handmaiden). Hong will be on-hand to discuss these intimate, dialogue-driven, comic-tinged dramas.

Tuesday, October 10
7:00pm
Field of Vision Presents
Since its launch in 2013, Field of Vision has been a trailblazer in producing and championing short-form documentaries about developing and ongoing stories from around the world. This evening will spotlight three current films, featuring clips and discussions with their filmmakers. These include Marshall Curry’s A Night at the Garden, about a chilling rally held in New York nearly 80 years ago and which has resonance today; Josh Begley’s Best of Luck with the Wall, which gives perhaps the first true look at the consequences of Trump’s proposed wall between the U.S. and Mexico; and a sneak from Farihah Zaman and Jeff Reichert’s latest project, American Carnage, about the films and politics of Breitbart News chief and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

8:00pm
HBO Directors Dialogues: Philippe Garrel
French master Philippe Garrel represents a strain of modernist cinema that stretches from the post–New Wave era to today, as evidenced by three of his films showing during NYFF this year. We’re pleased to present his newest film, the penetrating meditation on relationships and fidelity Lover for a Day, showing in the Main Slate, as well as restorations of his La Révélateur, made while the events of May ’68 were unfolding, and his devastatingly personal 1979 film L’Enfant secret. And we’re thrilled to have Garrel at this rare public appearance.

Wednesday, October 11
7:00pm
Keeping Cultural Borders Open: Laurie Anderson and special guests
This year at the New York Film Festival, hundreds of artists and activists will band together to launch The Federation. Formed by Laurie Anderson, Laura Michalchyshyn, and Tanya Selvaratnam in response to the increased xenophobia and closing of physical borders, The Federation is a coalition of individuals and organizations committed to keeping cultural borders open and recognizing how essential artistic experiences are to fostering compassion, critical thinking, and joy. Join Anderson, Selvaratnam, Sara Driver, Barbet Schroeder, and other special guests for a discussion about the aims of the initiative and the role artists play in combatting cultural barriers. Presented with The Federation

Thursday, October 12
7:00pm
Real Characters: Writing Biopics and Origin Stories
One of the deepest connections we can have to a movie is through fully conceptualized, credible characters. Without them, even the most engrossing plot may not resonate. The Writers Guild of America, East brings together the creators behind some unforgettable recent movie characters to tell us how they made them intriguing and believable. Presented with WGA East

Friday, October 13
7:00pm
Film Comment: Festival Wrap
In what is becoming an annual tradition, Film Comment contributing critics and editors gather for the festival’s last weekend and talk about the films they’ve seen, discussing—or arguing about—the selections in the lineup, from Main Slate and beyond.

8:00pm
Access New Audiences: Wonderstruck & The Blind Boys of Alabama
Join Michele Spitz (Woman of Her Word) and Jo-Ann Dean (SIGNmation) for a discussion on how filmmakers and distributors can increase audience outreach and box-office by incorporating accessible language components for both Deaf and Blind communities. Participating are Deaf actors Lauren Ridloff, Anthony Natale, and John McGinty, featured in NYFF Centerpiece Wonderstruck; Leslie McCleave, producer-director of How Sweet the Sound: The Blind Boys of Alabama; and award-winning audio producer, director, and engineer Cliff Hahn. The panelists will provide insight on budgeting, grant opportunities, and how American Sign Language (ASL), Audio Description (AD) and Open/Closed Captioning (OC/CC) are inclusive assets. ASL Interpretation Provided. Presented with NYWIFT

Review: Amy Ryan gives a moving performance in ‘Abundant Acreage Available’ winner of Best Screenplay at the Tribeca Film Festival

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From writer/director Angus MacLachlan and Executive Producer Martin Scorsese, ABUNDANT ACREAGE AVAILABLE tells the story of a family in flux. Still reeling over the recent death of their father, brother and sister Jesse & Tracy (Terry Kinney & Amy Ryan) are attempting to settle into their new lives in his absence. Their quiet and simple existence is unexpectedly disrupted by the sudden arrival of three mysterious brothers, camping on their land and possessing a surprising connection to their family farm. The two sets of siblings are set on a direct collision course that will change all of their lives, for better or for worse. Tackling complicated issues of family legacies, and anchored by an amazing set of performances, the film is a brilliant showcase for all involved.

 

In Theaters September 29, 2017 at Cinema Village in New York
on demand October 6, 2017

Written & Directed by: 
Angus MacLachlan (Academy Award-nominated film Junebug)

Executive Produced by:
Martin Scorsese

Starring: 
Amy Ryan (Academy Award nominee for Gone Baby Gone, Birdman)
Terry Kinney (“Billions,” “Oz”) 
Steve Coulter (The Wizard of Lies, “House of Cards”)
Francis Guinan (Hannibal, Constantine)
Max Gail (42, “Barney Miller”)

Told almost entirely outdoors in the cold winter, Abundant Acreage Available, is a slice-of-life tale that surprises and moves you. Amy Ryan’s heartfelt performance reveals a woman who is struggling to come to terms with the loss of her father as three brothers show up to reclaim their father’s land.

I especially enjoyed the dynamic between the two sets of siblings. Tracy and her brother, Jesse, both took care of their father until his recent passing. When three brothers show up, their own complicated history interferes but also strengthens their bond.

Secrets, illness, despair, loneliness, all of it pulls you into thinking how you would handle the same situation. You never know what’s around the next corner, but leaning on your sibling is not to be taken for granted.

10 North American Premieres at the New York Film Festival

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Ismael’s Ghosts
Description: Phantoms swirl around Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), a filmmaker in the throes of writing a spy thriller based on the unlikely escapades of his brother, Ivan Dedalus (Louis Garrel). His only true source of stability, his relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is upended, as is the life of his Jewish documentarian mentor and father-in-law (László Szabó), when Ismael’s wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard), who disappeared twenty years earlier, returns, and, like one of Hitchcock’s fragile, delusional femmes fatales, expects that her husband and father are still in thrall to her. A brilliant shape-shifter—part farce, part melodrama—Ismael’s Ghosts is finally about the process of creating a work of art and all the madness required. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Directed By: Arnaud Desplechin
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Let the Sun Shine In
Description: Juliette Binoche is both incandescent and emotionally raw in Claire Denis’s extraordinary new film as Isabelle, a middle-aged Parisian artist in search of definitive love. The film moves elliptically, as though set to some mysterious bio-rhythm, from one romantic/emotional attachment to another: from the boorish married lover (Xavier Beauvois); to the subtly histrionic actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle), also married; to the dreamboat hairdresser (Paul Blain); to the gentle man (Alex Descas) not quite ready for commitment to . . . a mysterious fortune-teller. Appropriately enough, Let the Sun Shine In (very loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) feels like it’s been lit from within; it was lit from without by Denis’s longtime cinematographer Agnès Godard. It is also very funny. A Sundance Selects release.
Directed By: Claire Denis
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Lover for a Day
Description: Lover for a Day is an exquisite meditation on love and fidelity that recalls Garrel’s previous NYFF selections Jealousy (NYFF 2013) and In the Shadow of Women (NYFF 2015). After a painful breakup, heartbroken Jeanne (Esther Garrel) moves back in with her university professor father, Gilles (Eric Caravaca), to discover that he is living with optimistic, life-loving student Ariane (newcomer Louise Chevillotte), who is the same age as Jeanne. An unusual triangular relationship emerges as both girls seek the favor of Gilles, as daughter or lover, while developing their own friendship, finding common ground despite their differences. Gorgeously shot in grainy black and white by Renato Berta (Au revoir les enfants), Lover for a Day perfectly illustrates Garrel’s poetic exploration of relationships and desire. A MUBI release.
Directed By: Philippe Garrel
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Mrs. Hyde
Description: Serge Bozon’s eccentric comedic thriller is loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with many a twist. Mrs. Géquil (Isabelle Huppert), a timid and rather peculiar physics professor, teaches in a suburban technical high school. Apart from her quiet married life with her gentle stay-at-home husband, she is mocked and despised on a daily basis by pretty much everyone around her—headmaster, colleagues, students. During a dark, stormy night, she is struck by lightning and wakes up a decidedly different person, a newly powerful Mrs. Hyde with mysterious energy and uncontrollable powers. Highlighted by Bozon’s brilliant mise en scène, Isabelle Huppert hypnotizes us again, securing her place as the ultimate queen of the screen.
Directed By: Serge Bozon
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Locarno International Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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Piazza Vittorio
Description: Abel Ferrara’s new documentary is a vivid mosaic/portrait of Rome’s biggest public square, Piazza Vittorio, built in the 19th century around the ruins of the 3rd century Trofei di Mario. The Piazza is now truly a crossroad of the modern world: it offers a perfect microcosm of the changes in the west brought by immigration and forced displacement. Ferrara, now a resident of Rome himself, talks with African musicians and restaurant workers, Chinese barkeeps and relocated eastern Europeans, homeless men and women, artists, members of the right wing movement CasaPound Italia, filmmaker Matteo Garrone, actor Willem Dafoe, and others, all with varying opinions about the vast changes they’re seeing in their neighborhood and world.
Directed By: Abel Ferrara
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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Speak Up
Description: Each year at the University of Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris, the Eloquentia competition takes place to determine the best orator in the class. Speak Up (À voix haute – La Force de la Parole) follows the students, who come from a variety of family backgrounds and academic disciplines, as they prepare for the competition while coached by public-speaking professionals like lawyers and slam poets. Through the subtle and intriguing mechanics of rhetoric, these young people both reveal and discover themselves, and it is impossible not to be moved by the personal stories that surface in their verbal jousts, from the death of a Syrian nightingale to a father’s Chuck Norris–inspired approach to his battle with cancer. Without sentimentality, Speak Up proves how the art of speech is key to universal understanding, social ascension, and personal revelation.
Directed By: Stéphane de Freitas
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Description: Noah Baumbach revisits the terrain of family vanities and warring attachments that he began exploring with The Squid and the Whale in this intricately plotted story of three middle-aged siblings (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel) coping with their strong-willed father (Dustin Hoffman) and the flightiness of his wife (Emma Thompson). Baumbach’s film never stops deftly changing gears, from surges of pathos to painful comedy and back again. Needless to say, this lyrical quicksilver comedy is very much a New York experience. A Netflix release.
Directed By: Noah Baumbach
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Cannes Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
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The Rape of Recy Taylor
Description: On the night of September 3, 1944, a young African-American mother from Abbeville, Alabama, named Recy Taylor was walking home from church with two friends when she was abducted by seven white men, driven away and dragged into the woods, raped by six of the men, and left to make her way home. Against formidable odds and endless threats to her life and the lives of her family members, Taylor bravely spoke up and pressed charges. Nancy Buirski’s passionate documentary shines a light on a case that became a turning point in the early Civil Rights Movement, and on the many formidable women—including Rosa Parks—who brought the movement to life.
Directed By: Nancy Buirski
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017),Venice Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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The Worldly Cave
Description: Anonymous figures are diminished against unforgiving environs, both natural and man-made, in Zhou’s expansive cross-continental diary, featuring monumental views of the Incheon Sea, the Balearic island of Menorca, and the Sonoran Desert that serve to visualize the infinitesimal stature of the human race.
Directed By: Zhou Tao
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Projections
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Tonsler Park
Description: Election Day, 2016. Kevin Jerome Everson and his 16mm camera quietly observes a community of mostly African-American voters and volunteers at a local polling precinct in Charlottesville, Virginia. Emerson’s film captures everyday faces and the general optimistic atmosphere with a casual formal elegance.
Directed By: Kevin Jerome Everson
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Projections
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9 World Premieres at New York Film Festival

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Cielo
Description: The first feature from Alison McAlpine, director of the beautiful 2008 “nonfiction ghost story” short Second Sight, is a dialogue with the heavens—in this case, the heavens above the Andes and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where the sky “is more urgent than the land.” McAlpine keeps the vast galaxies above and beyond in a delicate balance with the earthbound world of people, gently alighting on the desert- and mountain-dwelling astronomers, fishermen, miners, and cowboys who live their lives with reverence and awe for the skies. Cielo itself is an act of reverence and awe, and its sense of wonder ranges from the intimate and human to the vast and inhuman.
Directed By: Alison McAlpine
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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Hall of Mirrors
Description: In this lively documentary portrait, the great nonpartisan investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, still going strong at 81, takes us through his most notable articles and books, including close looks at the findings of the Warren Commission, the structure of the diamond industry, the strange career of Armand Hammer, and the inner workings of big-time journalism itself. These are interwoven with an in-progress investigation into the circumstances around Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of classified documents, resulting in Epstein’s recently published, controversial book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. One of the last of his generation of journalists, the energetic, articulate, and boyish Epstein is a truly fascinating character.
Directed By: Ena Talakic,Ines Talakic
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Description: Griffin Dunne’s years-in-the-making documentary portrait of his aunt Joan Didion moves with the spirit of her uncannily lucid writing: the film simultaneously expands and zeroes in, covering a vast stretch of turbulent cultural history with elegance and candor, and grounded in the illuminating presence and words of Didion herself. This is most certainly a film about loss—the loss of a solid American center, the personal losses of a husband and a child—but Didion describes everything she sees and experiences so attentively, so fully, and so bravely that she transforms the very worst of life into occasions for understanding. A Netflix release.
Directed By: Griffin Dunne
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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Last Flag Flying
Description: In Richard Linklater’s lyrical road movie, as funny as it is heartbreaking, three aging Vietnam-era Navy vets—soft-spoken Doc (Steve Carell), unhinged and unfiltered Sal (Bryan Cranston), and quietly measured Mueller (Laurence Fishburne)—reunite to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of Doc’s only child, who has been killed in the early days of the Iraq invasion. As this trio of old friends makes its way up the Eastern seaboard, Linklater gives us a rich rendering of friendship, a grand mosaic of common life in the USA during the Bush era, and a striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. To put it simply, Last Flag Flying is a great movie from one of America’s finest filmmakers. An Amazon Studios release.
Directed By: Richard Linklater
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Opening Night
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No Stone Unturned
Description: Investigative documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney—best known for 2008’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and at least a dozen others—turns his sights on the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, a cold case that remains an open wound in the Irish peace process. The families of the victims—who were murdered while watching the World Cup in their local pub—were promised justice, but 20 years later they still didn’t know who killed their loved ones. Gibney uncovers a web of secrecy, lies, and corruption that so often results when the powerful insist they are acting for the greater good.
Directed By: Alex Gibney
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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The Opera House
Description: Renowned documentarian Susan Froemke takes viewers through the history of the Metropolitan Opera via priceless archival stills, footage, and interviews (with, among many others, the great soprano Leontyne Price). The film follows the development of the glorious institution from its beginnings at the old opera house on 39th Street to the storied reign of Rudolph Bing to the long-gestating move to Lincoln Center, the construction of which traces a fascinating byway through the era of urban renewal and Robert Moses’s transformation of New York. Most of all, though, this is a film about the love for and devotion to the preservation of an art form and the upkeep of a home where it can live and thrive.
Directed By: Susan Froemke
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Special Events
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Trouble No More
Description: Like every other episode in the life of Bob Dylan, the “born again” period that supposedly began with the release of Slow Train Coming (1979) and supposedly ended with Shot of Love (1981) has been endlessly scrutinized in the press. Less attention has been paid to the magnificent music he made. This very special film consists of truly electrifying video footage, much of it thought to have been lost for years and all newly restored, shot at shows in Toronto and Buffalo on the last leg of the ’79-’80 tour (with an amazing band: Muscle Shoals veteran Spooner Oldham and Terry Young on keyboards, Little Feat’s Fred Tackett on guitar, Tim Drummond on bass, the legendary Jim Keltner on drums and Clydie King, Gwen Evans, Mona Lisa Young, Regina McCrary and Mary Elizabeth Bridges on vocals) interspersed with sermons written by Luc Sante and beautifully delivered by Michael Shannon. More than just a record of some concerts, Trouble No More is a total experience.
Directed By: Jennifer Lebeau
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Special Events
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Voyeur
Description: Gerald Foos bought a motel in Colorado in the 1960s, furnished the room with louvered vents that allowed him to spy on his guests, and kept a journal of their sexual encounters…among other things. As writer Gay Talese, who had known Foos for more than three decades, came close to the publication of his book The Voyeur’s Motel (preceded by an excerpt in The New Yorker), factual discrepancies in Foos’s account emerged, and documentarians Kane and Koury were on hand to record some wild encounters between the veteran New York journalist and his enigmatic subject. A Netflix release.
Directed By: Myles Kane,Josh Koury
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Spotlight on Documentary
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Wonder Wheel
Description: In a career spanning 50 years and almost as many features, Woody Allen has periodically refined, reinvented, and redefined the terms of his art, and that’s exactly what he does with his daring new film. We’re in Coney Island in the 1950s. A lifeguard (Justin Timberlake) tells us a story that just might be filtered through his vivid imagination: a middle-aged carousel operator (Jim Belushi) and his beleaguered wife (Kate Winslet), who eke out a living on the boardwalk, are visited by his estranged daughter (Juno Temple)—a situation from which layer upon layer of all-too-human complications develop. Allen and his cinematographer, the great Vittorio Storaro, working with a remarkable cast led by Winslet in a startlingly brave, powerhouse performance, have created a bracing and truly surprising movie experience. An Amazon Studios release.
Directed By: Woody Allen
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2017)
Section of NYFF: Closing Night
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Where you can watch the 2010 New York Film Festival selections

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The Social Network
Description: Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, but is later sued by two brothers who claimed he stole their idea, and the co-founder who was later squeezed out of the business because the predictive analytics they’d done didn’t bade well for the company.
Directed By: David Fincher
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Opening Night
Where to watch: Rent/Buy only

The Tempest
Description: A shipwreck casts members of a royal court ashore on a mysterious island. Their fateful arrival is no accident, for it was engineered by Prospera (Helen Mirren), a sorceress whom these men banished, and who now plans to take vengeance on them. With the help of Caliban and Ariel, her sometimes-unwilling aides, Prospera brings her powers to bear on her former tormentors. Then love casts a spell on her daughter and the king’s son, and Prospera is powerless to intervene.
Directed By: Julie Taymor
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Centerpiece
Where to watch: Rent/Buy only

Hereafter
Description: A drama centered on three people — a blue-collar American, a French journalist and a London school boy — who are touched by death in different ways.
Directed By: Clint Eastwood
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Closing Night
Where to watch: CINEMAX

Another Year
Description: A look at four seasons in the lives of a happily married couple and their relationships with their family and friends.
Directed By: Mike Leigh
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Cannes Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Sundance NOW

Aurora
Description: An apartment kitchen: a man and a woman discuss Little Red Riding Hood, their voices hushed, mindful of waking the little girl sleeping next room. Waste land on the city outskirts: behind a line of abandoned trailers, the man silently watches what seems to be a family. The same city, the same man: driving through traffic with two hand-made firing pins for a hunting rifle. The man is 42 years old, his name – Viorel. Troubled by obscure thoughts, he drives across the city to a destination known only to him.
Directed By: Cristi Puiu
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Cannes Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Fandor

Carlos
Description: The story of Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who founded a worldwide terrorist organization and raided the 1975 OPEC meeting.
Directed By: Olivier Assayas
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: FilmStruckNetflix

Certified Copy
Description: In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged British writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano. While there, a chance question reveals something deeper.
Directed By: Abbas Kiarostami
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Cannes Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: huluFilmStruckSundance NOW

Film Socialisme
Description: A symphony in three movements. Things such as a Mediterranean cruise, numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday… Our Europe. At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. The children demand serious explanations of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The movie draws concepts from places like https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/07/20-quotes-about-equality.html about equality, and in which sense, are portrayed in a vague manner with the pith of equality remaining the same. Our humanities. Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona.
Directed By: Jean-Luc Godard
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: tubiTV

Inside Job
Description: Takes a closer look at what brought about the 2008 financial meltdown.
Directed By: Charles Ferguson
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: hulu

Meek’s Cutoff
Description: Settlers traveling through the Oregon desert in 1845 find themselves stranded in harsh conditions.
Directed By: Kelly Reichardt
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Netflix, Fandor, Sundance NOW

Mysteries of Lisbon
Description: Follows a jealous countess, a wealthy businessman, and a young orphaned boy across Portugal, France, Italy and Brazil where they connect with a variety of mysterious individuals.
Directed By: Raúl Ruiz
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Toronto Film Festival (2017),Toronto Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Fandor

Of Gods and Men
Description: Under threat by fundamentalist terrorists, a group of Trappist monks stationed with an impoverished Algerian community must decide whether to leave or stay.
Directed By: Xavier Beauvois
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Cannes Film Festival (2010),Telluride Film Festival (2010),Toronto Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Rent/Buy only

Oki’s Movie
Description: A love story between a middle-aged professor, a young student who prepares a movie and a student/film-maker who drinks too much.
Directed By: Sang-soo Hong
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Venice Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: amazon Prime

Poetry
Description: A sixty-something woman, faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, finds strength and purpose when she enrolls in a poetry class.
Directed By: Chang-dong Lee
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Cannes Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: tubiTV

Post Mortem
Description: In Chile, 1973, during the last days of Salvador Allende’s presidency, an employee at a Morgue’s recording office falls for a burlesque dancer who mysteriously disappears.
Directed By: Pablo Larraín
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Venice Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Rent/Buy only

The Robber
Description: A story based on Johann Rettenberger, an Austrian marathon runner and a bank robber.
Directed By: Benjamin Heisenberg
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: FilmStruck, vudu Movies On Us

Silent Souls
Description: Present days. A man and his companion go on a journey to cremate the dead body of the former beloved wife, on a riverbank in the area where they spent their honeymoon.
Directed By: Aleksey Fedorchenko
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010),Venice Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: amazon Prime, Fandor

The Strange Case of Angelica
Description: The line between reality and fantasy blurs for a photographer (Ricardo Trêpa) when a dead bride appears to come to life through his camera lens.
Directed By: Manoel de Oliveira
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Fandor

Tuesday After Christmas
Description: Middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) lives in a pleasant Bucharest apartment with his wife, Adrianna (Mirela Oprisor), and their 9-year-old daughter. But unbeknown to Adrianna, Paul is also having an affair with the family’s dentist, Raluca (Maria Popistasu). As Christmas approaches, Paul finds himself forced to choose between the woman with whom he has shared the last decade of his life and the passionate new partner who has given him a revitalized image of himself.
Directed By: Radu Muntean
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Fandor

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives
Description: Afflicted with kidney disease, Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is preparing himself for death. He has assembled his relatives in the countryside, convinced he will die within a few days. The ghost of his wife appears and offers guidance on his journey into the beyond, while his estranged son materializes in the guise of a jungle creature. Surrounded by his loved ones, Uncle Boonmee reflects on memories of his past lives, and he decides he must visit a special place before he goes.
Directed By: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Festivals: New York Film Festival (2010)
Section of NYFF: Main Slate
Where to watch: Fandor

Now THIS is a movie poster: ‘Thirst Street’

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Don’t think this tells you anything? Oh yes, it does. It tells you this is not a blockbuster and likely to have unconventional storylines.

Alone and depressed after the suicide of her lover, American flight attendant Gina (Lindsay Burdge, A TEACHER) travels to Paris and hooks up with nightclub bartender Jerome (Damien Bonnard, STAYING VERTICAL) on her layover. But as Gina falls deeper into lust and opts to stay in France, this harmless rendezvous quickly turns into unrequited amour fou. When Jerome’s ex Clemence (Esther Garrel) reenters the picture, Gina is sent on a downward spiral of miscommunication, masochism, and madness. Inspired by European erotic dramas from the ’70s, THIRST STREET burrows deep into the delirious extremes we go to for love.

Lindsay Burdgem, Damien Bonnard, Esther Garrel, Lola Bessis
Narrated by Academy Award-winner Anjelica Huston.

Release Dates:          Sept 20, 2017 – NYC – Quad Cinema
Sept 29, 2017 – LA – Laemmle TBC
— Additional cities nationwide to follow —

Ready to buy some New York Film Festival Tickets? These are the most limited

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Wonder why these are the most limited? I did too, so here’s what I found out.

Check here for the latest on NYFF tickets

Most of these go on sale at noon today, so make sure you choose wisely!

Mrs. Hyde – Oct 1, 12:30pm, Walter Reade Theater – Limited Tickets
The Other Side of Hope – Oct 10, 8:30pm, Howard Gilman Theater
Spoor – Oct 1, 12pm, Howard Gilman Theater
Thelma – Oct 7, 12pm, Howard Gilman Theater

  • Mrs. Hyde
  • Serge Bozon
  • 2017
  • France
  • 95 minutes

Serge Bozon’s eccentric comedic thriller is loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with many a twist. Mrs. Géquil (Isabelle Huppert), a timid and rather peculiar physics professor, teaches in a suburban technical high school. Apart from her quiet married life with her gentle stay-at-home husband, she is mocked and despised on a daily basis by pretty much everyone around her—headmaster, colleagues, students. During a dark, stormy night, she is struck by lightning and wakes up a decidedly different person, a newly powerful Mrs. Hyde with mysterious energy and uncontrollable powers. Highlighted by Bozon’s brilliant mise en scène, Isabelle Huppert hypnotizes us again, securing her place as the ultimate queen of the screen.

This film was first screened at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland.

Isabelle Huppert is a veteran of the New York Film Festival having starred in several over the past 10 years alone. She starred in two features last year, Elle (where she was nominated for an Academy Award) and Things To Come.

TICKETS

Leave it to Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, NYFF 2011), peerless master of humanist tragicomedy, to make the first great fiction film about the 21st century migrant crisis. Having escaped bombed-out Aleppo, Syrian refugee Khlaed (Sherwan Haji) seeks asylum in Finland, only to get lost in a maze of functionaries and bureaucracies. Meanwhile, shirt salesman Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) leaves his wife, wins big in a poker game, and takes over a restaurant whose deadpan staff he also inherits. These parallel stories dovetail to gently comic and enormously moving effect in Kaurismäki’s politically urgent fable, an object lesson on the value of compassion and hope that remains grounded in a tangible social reality. A Janus Films release.

Won Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival where it first screened.

TICKETS

  • Spoor
  • Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik
  • 2017
  • Poland/Germany/Czech Republic
  • 128 minutes

Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) is a vigorous former engineer, part-time teacher, and animal activist, living in a near wilderness on the Polish-Czech border, where hunting is the favored year-round sport of the corrupt men who rule the region. When a series of hunters die mysteriously, Janina wonders if the animals are taking revenge, which doesn’t stop the police from coming after her. A brilliant, passionate director, Agnieszka Holland—who like Janina comes from a generation that learned to fight authoritarianism by any means necessary—forges a sprawling, wildly beautiful, emotionally enveloping film that earns its vision of utopia. It’s at once a phantasmagorical murder mystery, a tender, late-blooming love story, and a resistance and rescue thriller.

Won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Official Entry from Poland for Best Foreign Language Film to the Academy Awards.

TICKETS

  • Thelma
  • Joachim Trier
  • 2017
  • Norway/Sweden/France
  • 116 minutes

In the new film from Joachim Trier (Reprise), an adolescent country girl (Eili Harboe) has just moved to the city to begin her university studies, with the internalized religious severity of her quietly domineering mother and father (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Henrik Rafaelsen) always in mind. When she realizes that she is developing an attraction to her new friend Anja (Okay Kaya), she begins to manifest a terrifying and uncontrollable power that her parents have long feared. To reveal more would be a crime; let’s just say that this fluid, sharply observant, and continually surprising film begins in the key of horror and ends somewhere completely different. A release of The Orchard.

Warning: This film contains flashing lights which may not be suitable for photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised. 

Screened at the Toronto Film Festival. Official entry from Norway for Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards.

TICKETS

Netflix News: Jerry cannot not be funny in trailer for ‘Jerry Before Seinfeld’

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Jerry Before Seinfeld, a Netflix Original Stand-Up Special Launching Globally on September 19

Jerry Before Seinfeld: Jerry Seinfeld returns to The Comic Strip for an intimate stand-up set at the club that helped launch his career. Interspersed with never-before-seen material — including a library of legal pads with every joke he’s written since 1975, childhood videos, and more — Jerry performs the jokes that put him on the comedy map in an hour-long stand-up special, only on Netflix.

Will You Find the Force? – Star Wars launches Force Friday II

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http://www.starwars.com/findtheforce

Following the global phenomenon of Force Friday in 2015, Disney and Lucasfilm today announced Find the Force, a global augmented reality (AR) event rolling out on Force Friday II (September 1) to commemorate the worldwide launch of new products inspired by Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

The pop-up AR treasure hunt aims to unite fans around the world in the battle against the dark side in a unique three-day event at over 20,000 retail locations across 30 countries. As fans turn up to take home new The Last Jedi products, they will have the opportunity to activate a unique augmented reality experience featuring Star Wars characters, including fan-favorites and new surprise additions from the film.

“Force Friday II is a major milestone in the countdown to Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Star Wars has always championed new technology, and we are excited that augmented reality will allow fans to experience the universe in a whole new way,” says Kathleen Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm.

From September 1-3, retailers around the world will invite fans to Find the Force by taking part in an AR treasure hunt.

To celebrate Force Friday II, fans can reveal new and favorite characters from Star Wars: The Last Jedi in augmented reality, and help the Resistance find information about key personnel:

  1. Download the Star Wars app (for iPhone® and Android™) and launch the “Find The Force” feature.
  2. Starting September 1, look for Star Wars graphics with the “Find The Force” logo at participating retail locations and websites. Click here for full list.
  3. Scan these graphics using the “Find The Force” feature to reveal AR character experiences.
  4. A data chip will be unlocked each time a new AR character experience is revealed. Unlock digital rewards as you collect more data chips!
  5. Each graphic reveals a different AR character experience every day from September 1-3. 

Try it now! Download the Star Wars app, launch “Find The Force” and scan the image below to unlock an AR character early:

(15 in total across the program’s three-day run). Click here for more information:www.starwars.com/findtheforce.

“Force Friday II puts fans right at the center of the action using augmented reality to bring our characters to life like never before. The technology theme continues in the Star Wars: The Last Jediproduct line, which is our most innovative yet – we can’t wait for fans to see what’s in store.” said Jimmy Pitaro, Chairman, Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media.

Fans can download the latest version of the Star Wars App (v. 2.3 or higher) beginning Aug. 24 for an early look at the new Porg characters in AR before the AR treasure hunt goes live at retail.

By sharing photos or videos featuring the in-store AR characters on Twitter or Instagram using #FindtheForce and #Sweepstakes throughout Force Friday II weekend, fans in select global markets can participate in a sweepstakes for the chance to win the ultimate fan experience: tickets to the Star Wars: The Last Jedi premiere in December.

No Purchase Necessary. Enter sweepstakes between August 31, 2017 at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time (“PT”)/3:00 p.m. British Summer Time (“BST”) and September 4, 2017 at 2:59 a.m. PT/10:59 a.m. BST. Open to legal residents in 50 U.S. + D.C., Canada (excluding Quebec), Australia, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, France, South Korea and Chile who are 18+ or the age of majority in their place of residence, whichever is older. Limit 15 entries per person. There is 1 Grand Prize available to be won (ARV: US $4,500). Grand Prize winner must travel to Los Angeles, California USA on or about December 12, 2017. Visit starwars.com/findtheforce. for Official Rules including details on how to enter, additional eligibility requirements, prize descriptions and limitations. Void where prohibited. Sponsor: The Walt Disney Company (Australia) Pty. Limited, Level 5, Chapel Street, South Yarra, Victoria 3141, Australia.

More information about Find the Force and a how-to video is available atwww.starwars.com/findtheforce.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens in U.S. theaters on December 15, 2017.

Netflix News: ‘Jerry Before Seinfeld’ first look photos & release date

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What was he like before the show about nothing? 
 
Find out September 19 when Jerry Seinfeld makes his Netflix debut with the original stand-up special Jerry Before Seinfeld
 
In the hour-long special, Jerry Seinfeld returns to The Comic Strip in New York City for an intimate stand-upset at the club that helped launch his career. Interspersed with never-before-seen material — including a library of legal pads with every joke he’s written since 1975, childhood videos, and more — Jerry performs the jokes that put him on the comedy map.

Visit Jerry Before Seinfeld on Netflix.

Netflix News: ‘Narcos’ Season 3 trailer premieres at the coffee & donut truck near Grand Central

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Netflix unveiled the trailer for Narcos season 3 today in New York City, where this season was partially filmed, and the trailer will be shown at various locations around Manhattan today via a Narcos truck, which will also be serving white powdered donuts and Colombian coffee to passersby throughout the day. For those seeking a sugar high today, follow @NarcosNetflix for the latest truck location.

Narcos premieres globally on Netflix on September 1st.

I went to the truck this morning and it was so amazing!

They both are delicious! Check out that cash straw too!

****************************************************************

“Narcos” Season Three Synopsis:

Now that the bloody hunt for Pablo Escobar has ended, the DEA turns its attention to the richest drug trafficking organization in the world: the Cali Cartel. Led by four powerful godfathers, this cartel operates much differently than Escobar’s, preferring to bribe government officials and keep its violent actions out of the headlines.

For more information on Narcos visit Netflix.com/narcos

Follow #Narcos on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Meet the Kings:

  • Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela (Damian Alcazar)- leader of Cali Cartel, “boss of bosses”
  • Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela (Francisco Denis)- the brains behind the rise of the of Cali Cartel and Gilberto’s brother
  • Pacho Herrera (Alberto Ammann)- the on-the-low hitman, runs the Mexican connection and international distribution
  • Chepe Santacruz Londono (Pepe Rapazote)–  runs the satellite NYC empire of the Colombian drug network

Just as Gilberto announces a bold plan to walk away from the business, DEA agent Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal) enlists the help of American and Colombian law enforcement to take it down. This season opens up a complex and ruthless world of new figures.

Other new players include:

  • Jorge Salcedo (Matias Varela)- Cali’s head of security who prioritizes his wife and kids’ protection over his bosses
  • DEA agents Chris Feistl (Michael Stahl-David) and Daniel Van Ness (Matt Whelan), who enter the operation with enthusiasm and inexperience
  • Franklin Jurado (Miguel Angel Silvestre)- the cartel’s money launderer who unknowingly puts his wife, Christina (Kerry Bishe) in mortal danger
  • David Rodriguez (Arturo Castro)- Miguel’s oldest son, who is reluctant at first to take a leading role in the cartel structure

 

This time around, all rules have changed for the narcos and their opponents – a fact many won’t realize until it’s too late.

‘Narcos’ donut & coffee truck coming to Midtown Manhattan August 3rd (Oh, I’m totally going)

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On Wednesday, August 3rd, a Narcos truck will be making some drops around the city – powdered donuts and Colombian coffee (hot or iced!). Come pick yours up while you check out the new trailer for season three of Narcos, which premieres September 1, only on Netflix.

New Yorkers can chase that sugar high at the below locations. Follow @NarcosNetflix on Twitter to find out when!

    • East 42nd Street, between Park & Madison (beginning at 8am, across from Grand Central Station); then traveling to:
    • 48th Street & Sixth Avenue
    • 57th Street & 8th Avenue
    • Albany Street between S. End Avenue and West Street
    • Union Square West between 16th and 17th Streets

About “Narcos” Season Three:

Now that the bloody hunt for Pablo Escobar has ended, the DEA turns its attention to the richest drug trafficking organization in the world: the Cali Cartel. Led by four powerful godfathers, this cartel operates much differently than Escobar’s, preferring to bribe government officials and keep its violent actions out of the headlines.

Review: Dan Aykroyd narrates ‘Good Fortune’ about entrepreneur/philanthropist John Paul DeJoria

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Ten years ago, I worked for a hair care distributor in the midwest where we sold Paul Mitchell products. At the time, the company had three hair care brands and Paul Mitchell, was, by far, the most organized, had the best attitude and the best marketing thanks to paraphernalia like that Digital Business Card.

In Good Fortune, Dan Aykroyd (yes, THE Dan Aykroyd), narrates a well-produced biography of John Paul DeJoria, the man who started John Paul Mitchell Systems with hair stylist, Paul Mitchell, as well as Patron Spirits Company.

Told through interviews and some funny movie clips (I’m talking about you, Clint Eastwood), you’ll be fascinated by the cast of friends that DeJoria as accumulated. From Danny Trejo to Michelle Phillips, there’s no end to the stories they can tell. Immerse yourself in the excitement of live casino games on คาสิโนสด UFABET where you can interact with real dealers and other players in real-time. Those who love playing slot online games at the comfort of their homes may visit a casino website. Hopandcleaver.com is the best site for slot gacor games.

What I liked most about this story is the philanthropic attitude that DeJoria embodies. This guy cares about people and cares about people who care about people. You can see this all over the Paul Mitchell brand. I witnessed first hand how Paul Mitchell takes care of their stylists and salon owners and it makes those people very loyal and empowered.

John Paul DeJoria & Paul Mitchell

One thing I didn’t like was Dan Aykroyd’s narration. Perhaps he’s too close, as his delivery was a little too silly and forced. However, it depends on how you view. If I was watching this on a network, with commercials, I think it would have been a lot more enjoyable. All in all, it’s a well put together biography of a man who seems to have it all figured out.

Available now on iTunes and Amazon video!

HBO announced a bunch of stuff – Find out when ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ finally returns

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  • Curb Your Enthusiasm – New Season October 1st
  • Jon Stewart to headline 2 comedy specials
  • Drama series The Deuce, starring James Franco (x 2) and Maggie Gyllenhaal, debuts Sept. 10
  • Documentary lineup for second half of 2017

 

Curb Your Enthusiasm – New Season October 1st

The Emmy®– and Golden Globe-winning comedy series CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, starring Larry David, returns for its ten-episode ninth season SUNDAY, OCT. 1 (10:00-10:30 p.m. ET/PT), on HBO. The show stars “Seinfeld” co-creator David as an over-the-top version of himself in an unsparing but tongue-in-cheek depiction of his life.

The new season brings back cast favorites Cheryl Hines as Cheryl, Jeff Garlin as Jeff, Susie Essman as Susie and J.B. Smoove as Leon, as well as series veterans Richard Lewis, Bob Einstein, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen.

Also appearing on CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM this season are Elizabeth Banks, Ed Begley, Jr., Carrie Brownstein, Bryan Cranston, Lauren Graham, Jimmy Kimmel, Nick Offerman, Nasim Pedrad and Elizabeth Perkins.

Season nine directors include Jeff Schaffer, Larry Charles, Robert B. Weide, Jessie Nelson and Bryan Gordon.

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM was created by Larry David; executive produced by Larry David, Jeff Garlin and Jeff Schaffer.

Jon Stewart to headline 2 comedy specials

Jon Stewart is set to headline two HBO comedy specials, it was announced today by Casey Bloys, president, HBO Programming. He will return to HBO for his first stand-up special since the 1996 HBO presentation “Jon Stewart: Unleavened,” with the date and location to be announced as they are confirmed.

Additionally, this fall Stewart will host the latest “Night of Too Many Stars” all-star benefit for NEXT For AUTISM, to be presented live from The Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York on Saturday, Nov. 18. The special will feature stand-up performances, sketches and short films. The comedy event was created by comedy writer and performer Robert Smigel to support autism schools, programs and services. NEXT for AUTISM (formerly New York Collaborates for Autism) is a non-profit organization that strategically designs, launches and supports innovative programs to improve the lives of people living with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

“We’re excited to bring Jon to the network with this pair of specials,” said Bloys. “We’ve all missed his uniquely thoughtful brand of humor.”

“I’m really thrilled to be able to return to stand-up on HBO,” adds Stewart. ”They’ve always set the standard for great stand-up specials. Plus, I can finally use up the last of the Saddam Hussein jokes left over from my first special.”

Jon Stewart became the host of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in 1999, stepping down from the show in 2015. The series received 23 Primetime Emmys® and two Peabody Awards. Stewart hosted the Academy Awards® twice, in 2006 and 2008, and wrote the New York Times bestselling books “Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race” and “America (The Book): A Guide to Democracy Inaction,” which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 18 consecutive weeks. He also wrote and directed the 2014 feature film “Rosewater.”

In addition to “Jon Stewart: Unleavened,” his first HBO stand-up special, his previous HBO credits include hosting the special “George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy,” “Mr. Show with Bob and David” and a recurring role on “The Larry Sanders Show.”

Drama series The Deuce, starring James Franco (x 2) and Maggie Gyllenhaal, debuts Sept. 10

THE DEUCE chronicles that moment in time when sex went from being a back-alley, brown-paper-bag commodity to a billion-dollar universal in American life, a moment when ground zero for the earliest pioneers in the flesh trade was the midtown heart of the nation’s largest city, New York’s Times Square.

Titled after the local slang for New York’s fabled 42nd Street and starring James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal, THE DEUCE begins its eight-episode season SUNDAY, SEPT. 10 (9:00-10:20 p.m. ET/PT), followed by other episodes subsequent Sundays at the same time. The show was created by George Pelecanos and David Simon; George Pelecanos, David Simon, Nina K. Noble and James Franco executive produce.

THE DEUCE follows the rise of the porn culture in New York from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, exploring the rough-and-tumble world of the sex trade from the moment when both a liberalizing cultural revolution in American sexuality and new legal definitions of obscenity created a billion-dollar industry that is now an elemental component of the American cultural landscape, with sites where you can see naked girls online all the time. Beginning in 1971, the show follows a cast of barkeeps, prostitutes, pimps, police and nightlife denizens as they swirl through a world of sex, crime, high times and violence and the porn business begins its climb from Mafia-backed massage parlors and film labs to legitimacy and cultural permanence.

Documentary lineup for second half of 2017

Upcoming HBO documentaries include (in chronological order):

BRILLO BOX  (3¢ OFF) (Aug. 7) blends a humorous family narrative with Pop Art history, following an iconic Andy Warhol work as it makes its way from a New York family’s living room to the contemporary global art market. Exploring the ephemeral nature of art and value and the decisions that shape a family’s history, the film debuts the week of Warhol’s 89th birthday. An official selection of the 54th New York Film Festival.  Directed by Lisanne Skyler.

CLINICA DE MIGRANTES (Sept. 25) is an affecting portrait of a volunteer-run health clinic that treats uninsured, undocumented immigrants, many of whom have left their families behind to come to America and perform physically exhausting labor for meager wages. With extraordinary access and moving vérité footage, it highlights these admirable doctors and the patients who have nowhere else to turn for health care. Directed by Max Pozdorovkin (HBO’s “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer”).

SPIELBERG (Oct. 7) pulls back the curtain on the remarkable career of Steven Spielberg, one of the most famous filmmakers in the world.  Producer-director Susan Lacy conducted nearly 30 hours of interviews with the director for the documentary, as well as interviewing members of Spielberg’s family, close friends and A-list colleagues. The result is a remarkably intimate portrait, combining personal narrative with an in-depth exploration of Spielberg’s creative process and craftsmanship. Directed by Susan Lacy.

ROLLING STONE DOCUMENTARY (untitled) (Nov.) chronicles the last 50 years of American music, politics and popular culture through the story of the magazine that understood rock‘n’roll was more than music – it was a cultural force that re-shaped America. Drawing on previously unheard recordings provided by some of Rolling Stone’s greatest writers, as well as original interviews, rare photos and footage, this two-part special is an inside look at how the magazine helped define the zeitgeist and has endured for a half-century. Directed by Alex Gibney and Blair Foster.

BALTIMORE RISING (Nov.) goes deep behind the scenes of a city on edge in the wake of the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody, which sparked protests and destructive riots. Director Sonja Sohn, one of the stars of the HBO series “The Wire,” follows local activists, police officers, community leaders and gang affiliates, many of whom had previously only seen each other as adversaries, as they fight for change and struggle to hold Baltimore together. Directed by Sonja Sohn.

HAPPENING: A CLEAN ENERGY REVOLUTION (Dec.) follows filmmaker Jamie Redford on a colorful journey to discover the leading edge of clean energy across the U.S. Unlikely entrepreneurs in communities from Georgetown, Tex. to Buffalo, NY reveal pioneering clean energy solutions that are creating jobs, turning profits and making communities stronger and healthier. Reaching beyond a story of technology and innovation, his discoveries underscore issues of human resilience, social justice, embracing the future and finding hope for humanity’s survival. Directed by Jamie Redford.