Of course, it is not the same. If it was an ordinary year, the 58th edition of the New York Film Festival would give us plenty to be grateful for (and to complain about) amidst the mad moose at Lincoln Center. While a lot of things about this year are familiar – lots of movies, few stars, reliable, long run times – nothing else is. The bulk of the event, which kicks off Thursday and runs through October 11, is being presented online, making the program accessible to a national audience. This Manhattan-centric festival also comes out of the nabe, with drive-in screenings in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.
The sociable rituals of standing in line, buying snacks, and silencing other moviegoers have been put on hold for now, but the movies are still here, including those that inevitably offer nostalgic and pre-pandemic glimpses of New York City and other cities. And the festival has kept its identity, with restored classics, familiar writers and a solid roster of documentaries. Two non-fiction stars, “Time” by Garrett Bradley and “The Truffle Hunters” by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, performed at Sundance. Other selections echo the Cannes which could have been and the Toronto which in a way is. Needless to say, we miss New York so to speak, but we’re happy to share this selection of must-see movies.
‘Lovers Rock’
The opening night film, directed by Steve McQueen, is part of an Amazonian series (called “Small Ax”) about the lives of Caribbean immigrants living in Britain during different post-war periods. Looser and warmer than his most famous films (“Widows”, “12 Years a Slave”), “Lovers Rock” administers a welcome antidote to the deprivations of life in quarantine.
The correct way to describe this 68-minute delight would be to say that it’s a house party in London in 1980, where Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and Franklin (Micheal Ward) cross paths. eyes and fall into each other. arms. But really, the movie is a party, and you feel less like a spectator than a participant, intoxicated by the signs of danger, the pulse of the music, and the tantalizing possibility of love. (AO Scott)
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“The monopoly of violence”
Between practice and theory, David Dufresne’s documentary takes a dialectical look at the yellow vests movement that erupted because of economic injustice in France in 2018 and resumed last week. The title is borrowed from the sociologist Max Weber who, in 1922, defined the state as a political institution which claimed “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”. The limits of this monopoly are explored in the film, which combines video of often violent protests with commentary from intellectuals and activists watching with you. The results are very French, but the protest, the violence and the arguments are quite identifiable. (Manohla Dargis)
«Gunda»
A prodigious pig, a hen with one leg and a herd of lissome cattle are at the center of this extraordinary and obviously intimate look at the daily life of a group of animals. Working in black and white and with nimble, fluid cameras that sometimes graze the ground, Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky shows a world most people never notice or care to understand, a world that respects other living creatures. and sees, truly sees, their distinct behaviors and relationships. To some extent, the film reflects the issues that John Berger addressed in his 1970s essay ” Why watch animals?Which weighed sadly on what was lost as humans increasingly severed their ties with animals. “Animals are disappearing everywhere,” Berger wrote. “In zoos, they are the living monument of their own disappearance.” (MARYLAND)
“MLK / FBI”
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Between the March on Washington in the summer of 1963 and the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nearly five years later, the FBI subjected him to continuous surveillance on the orders of its director, J. Edgar Hoover. The tapes, now in the National Archives, will be unsealed in 2027, and in the meantime, Sam Pollard has put together a gripping and disturbing documentary. The voices of historians, civil rights veterans and former FBI employees are heard in archive footage that tells a familiar story like a blunt tale of state power and a nuanced essay on the fallibility of heroes and the ethics of historical inquiry. Rigorously centered on the facts of the past, the film is also as timely as a revival. (AOS)
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