The New York Film Festival has always prided itself on bringing an eclectic yet still resonant and probing selection of the world’s best films to the Big Apple at the start of every Fall.
In the past David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Spielberg have screened their latest releases at the NYFF ahead of them hitting cinemas.
So it is no surprise that exciting and illuminating directors of the calibre of Julian Schnabel, Yorgos Lanthimos, Barry Jenkins, and Alfonso Cuaron and the Coen Brothers will be showing theirs across the city in the next few weeks.
What is surprising, though, is that the movies from the latter two filmmakers, both of whom are Oscar winners, are from Netflix, the supposed adversary of the festival circuit.
Both Cuaron’s “Roma” and the Coens’ “The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs” are expected to be in contention during the upcoming awards season, and while they’re also being released in theaters so that they can get that push, their firmly fixed abode will be on Netflix.
Which is a clear sign yet that the previously snubbed streaming site, whose output is banned in Cannes, might just be about to become an even stronger player in the movie industry.
Away from Netflix, Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy “The Favorite,” starring Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, will open the 56th NYFF, while Willem Dafoe’s performance as Vincent Van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate,” which is one of the most eagerly anticipated of the festival, will end it.
While, after his Best Picture Oscar success with “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk” will draw a lot of attention, especially as it is an adaptation of a James Baldwin novel that is set in 1970s Harlem.
As per usual the New York Film Festival, which is presented by the FSLC, brings the latest and best from across the world of cinema to the city, too.
Gangster melodrama “Ash Is Purest White,” Lee Chang-dong’s thriller-cum-romance “Burning,” Oscar winner Pawel Pawlikowski’s follow-up to “Ida” “Cold War” and Ying Liang’s autobiographical look at a mother-daugher relationship in “A Family Tour” are all set to be standouts.
There will be plenty of film from mainstream and American folk, too, as indie darling Alex Ross Perry’s “Her Smell,” the Robert Pattinson starring “High Life,” Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary “Monrovia, Indiana,” Olivier Assayas’ “Non-Fiction,” led by Juliette Binoche, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giammatti in “Private Life” and Paul Dano’s directorial debut “Wildlife” will all garner interest.
At the same time, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall are part of a panel for Orson Welles’ “The Other Side Of The Wind,” which has finally been finished 50 years after production began, while Jenkins, Cuaron and documentarian Errol Morris, whose controversial film on Steve Bannon “American Dharma” is screening, are just some of the people that will embark on extended talks about their prestigious careers.
Whatever tickles your fancy, there’s no doubt that the festival will provide a cinematic feast for New Yorkers when it runs between 28 September and October 14.
