An actress will travel to Maine to study the life of a woman she will play in a film.
Lately, it’s been difficult to find momentum in film. The big trio of fall film festivals – Venice, Telluride, Toronto – came and went without the usual hype. With the actors on strike, the red carpets have been almost bare. It’s almost as if, since the heady moments of “Barbenheimer,” cinema has been sleeping off its hangover.
When the 61st New York Film Festival opens Friday night, things may get lively again. There is movement in the work stoppage. The scriptwriters are about to ratify a new contract after almost five months of strike. Actors union SAG-AFTRA will resume negotiations with studios next week.
At the same time, the New York Film Festival will undoubtedly host the best selection of films this year. All the big festivals have had their highlights, but over the next two weeks many of the fall’s best films will be screened at Lincoln Center.
Bella Baxter is an experiment. And she will take us on an adventure like no other. (20th Century Studios)
“The unstable state of the industry is an inevitable topic of conversation these days, but my hope is that our festival, as it has done throughout its 61-year history, serves as a reminder that the art of film is in robust health. ”commented Dennis Lim, artistic director of the festival, when revealing the programming.
Under heavy rain, the New York Film Festival was set to kick off on Friday with Todd Haynes’ May December, a playful and nuanced comedy starring Natalie Portman as an actress preparing a docudrama spending time with a couple (Julianne Moore, Charles Melton) whose relationship years ago caused a scandal in the tabloid press. If Hollywood’s awards season is off to a slow start, May December is just one of the festival jolts looking to pick up the pace in New York.
There are also Poor Creatures, Yorgos Lanthimos’ great success in Venice, with Emma Stone; “Priscilla,” by Sofia Coppola, starring Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley; and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, in which he plays Leonard Bernstein and which has already been much discussed, will have an especially appropriate release in North America. The film will not be shown on the festival’s main stage, Alice Tully Hall, but across the street at the new David Geffen Hall, home of the philharmonic that Bernstein once directed. But many of the festival’s films are concerned with speed, perhaps none more so than Michael Mann’s masterful Ferrari, which will close the festival.
Sofia Coppola’s vision of the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis Presley.
Ferrari, which Neon releases in theaters December 25, stars Adam Driver as Italian automaker Enzo Ferrari. It is charged with a frightening intensity. We follow Ferrari for three months in 1957, when his company is under immense financial pressure as it prepares for the all-important Mille Miglia road race. There is a relentless drive to be fast, to win, mixed with the specter of death. Ferrari, like some of Mann’s best work (Heat, The Insider), is obsessed with supreme dedication and the high price that must be paid for it.
Work and speed mean something radically different in Youth (Spring), by Chinese director Wang Bing. The film is one of several long, monumental documentaries screening at the festival, along with Steve McQueen’s Occupied City and Frederic Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, all of which are over 200 minutes long.
During the summer of 1957, former racing driver Enzo Ferrari is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the company that he and his wife Laura built ten years ago. In this crucial stage, Ferrari will make risky decisions, and will end up betting everything on the iconic race, Mille Miglia.
Youth (Spring) captures the lives of young migrant workers—most of them in their twenties—who work at a fast pace in textile factories on the outskirts of Shanghai. His speed and dexterity—his hands are a blur—are a necessity of his low-paying job. Wang, however, is more interested in the marginal but passionate personal lives of the workers, whose youth is spent among sewing machines and dirty bedrooms. In such a busy life, they have relationships, crushes and heartbreaks, all of which Wang (who spent about five years working on the film) deftly observes. It is a sweet and heartbreaking film.
The same could be said of Andrew Haigh’s radiant We’re All Strangers, a high point of the fall film festival circuit, of the film year, and of Haigh, the British filmmaker of Weekend and 45 Years.
Andrew Scott plays a middle-aged screenwriter, Adam, struggling with a script about his parents, who died when he was young. We Are All Strangers is almost as cloistered in her almost empty apartment building as Juventud is in his dorm. Adam is the only occupant, except for another man, Harry (Paul Mescal), who shows up drunk at his door one night.
One night, in his London apartment, Adam has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor, Harry, who breaks the rhythm of his daily life. (Searchlight Pictures)
Visits and memories follow one another, transporting Adam to his youth. Haigh’s film, which Searchlight Pictures will release in December, takes place in a metaphysical, dreamlike, melancholic daze. Through a series of intimate dialogues, the film, adapted from a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada, ruminates on the estrangement of a generation of gay men and the healing refuges of both companionship and fiction.
We’re All Strangers is a movie you’ll probably hear a lot more about. Scott, the terrific actor from Fleabag, gives a performance so moving that he is sure to join the Oscar race. But a film like this is almost done a disservice by including it in the awards fray. It is a painful and unbreakable beauty.
Part of the continuing pleasure of the New York Film Festival is that it tends to focus attention squarely on the films. There are premieres and parties, but it is a festival with a little less talk and eyes on the movie screens.
A love story that chronicles the lifelong relationship between cultural icon Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. A love letter to life and art. (Netflix)
That makes it an especially apt place for movies that, like We’re All Strangers, almost exist in a realm outside of time. In a way, Lincoln Center is also that, a place where the “unstable” aspects of today’s cinema are kept at bay, at least temporarily: the fight for distribution and audiences in an increasingly fractured media world.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s first film, Janet Planet, couldn’t be set more specifically. It is the summer of 1991, in rural western Massachusetts. There, Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), live among the trees.
Janet Planet is about this mother-daughter relationship, which is maintained as men drift in and out. But she is also about silence and inactivity, and is exquisitely in sync with the rhythms and feelings of adolescence, or at least a pre-digital adolescence. As accurate as Janet Planet is, it might as well be another world.
Source: AP
2023-09-29 19:26:00
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