There were forty-eight films total in the Main Slate and Spotlight categories, so the fourteen I saw might not seem like that much of a sample, but based on the consistent quality of what I did see, I have to conclude that this was a very strong year. Following are brief notes on what I saw at this year’s New York Film Festival.

__________________________________________________

Sunday, October 1. Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki, director/writer)  Like Kaurismäki’s previous films, Fallen Leaves has deadpan charm, humor, and a lot of humanity. I’ve especially liked Le Havre (2011) and The Other Side of Hope (2017). Fallen Leaves gives us two lonely outsiders, a man and woman who meet and are attracted, but whose efforts to start a relationship are continually thwarted by miscommunication, lost phone numbers, etc. Nothing much happens in any conventional sense, but the feelings are real. It’s a beautiful film.

Fallen Leaves opened in New York on November 17.

__________________________________________________

Sunday, October 1. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, director)  This is my favorite film of  all I saw at this year’s festival. Per David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter, the film is “non-stop bonkers brilliance.” That it is. It’s just one jaw-dropping moment after another. I wasn’t sure at first, but it pretty quickly overwhelmed me with its insanity and I was helpless to resist, not that I wanted to. It’s a wild ride, an amazing journey that constantly surprises, delights, and sometimes horrifies. Poor Things is described by the distributor as “the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). It obviously has Frankenstein in its DNA, but goes way beyond that. There’s such an overload of images and ideas that I’ll have to see it again to sort things out. The production design is amazing. The cruise ship seen below is but one example of the world the film creates.

The following posters also give a sense of what you’re in for.

________________________________________________

Emma Stone is absolutely fearless in her performance. Mark Ruffalo’s performance would be considered over-the-top anywhere else, but feels just right in this film. He’s absolutely great. Willem Dafoe is excellent as usual. There’s no explanation for the deep grooves and scars in his face, but none is needed.

________________________________________________

Poor Things opens with a limited release on December 8, followed by a wide release on December 22.

_____________________________________________________

Monday, October 2. In Water (Hong Sangsoo, director/writer)  Hong Sangsoo is an incredibly prolific South Korean filmmaker. Since his first feature in 1996, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, he has made 30 features in 27 years, three in this year alone, two of which are included in this year’s NYFF. It often feels like nothing much is happening in his films, which at times remind me of those by Yasujiro Ozu and Eric Rohmer.  Writing last year in New Yorker magazine, Dennis Lim had this to say:

“It is a critical truism—and only partially true—that the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo makes the same movie over and over. His protagonists belong to a particular milieu, which happens to be his: they work in the arts, usually in film, sometimes as novelists or painters. They are maladroit, at times in professional settings, always in personal matters. His plots revolve around romantic anguish and complication. Failures of communication abound. Characters are driven by libidinal urges and petty vanity. Action tends to be displaced to the realm of talk. Awkward conversations unfold over many drinks, alcohol serving as disinhibitor and spur to philosophical rumination. No one ever learns from their mistakes. But to accuse Hong of repeating himself misses the point. Repetition in his films is both subject and structuring device, and, like any artist who works with this formal strategy, Hong finds meaning in the subtlest variations, coaxing compelling moral dramas from prosaic scenarios.”

I like Hong’s films a lot, but In Water is especially challenging in a weird way. For its entire 61 minute running time the picture is out of focus to varying degrees. This is clearly deliberate, as the subtitles are in sharp focus throughout. It’s hard for me to tell what, if anything, this means or why he would do it. Maybe Hong just wanted to try something new, or maybe he wanted to make the audience work harder. Whatever his reasons, possibly passive aggressive, In Water definitely challenges what we expect when we see a film. One of those expectations is that the subject of any scene will be in focus. Excepting experimental or avant-garde films, that’s how it’s always been. In struggling to briefly describe this, I realize Hong has made me consider something I’ve always taken as a given in motion pictures.

In Water opens at the Metrograph theater in NYC on December 1.

_____________________________________________________

Thursday, October 5. The Pigeon Tunnel (Errol Morris, director)

The Pigeon Tunnel gives us John le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell) in an extended interview/interrogation by filmmaker Erroll Morris. Le Carré is fascinating to listen to as he talks about his life and work. Much of  what he says about his life — his early years, certainly — involve his father Ronnie, a career con man. I’d known nothing about this, so it was interesting to learn how heavily this abusive relationship influenced Le Carré’s life and the themes of his spy novels. Seeing the film I had to get past my aversion to Erroll Morris, going back to 1988 when I saw his film The Thin Blue Line. That film leaned heavily on re-enactments, which I don’t like. I realize this practice goes back to pioneering documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty who used staged scenes in Nanook of the North (1922), so there’s a precedent. In my possibly cranky opinion, it’s not a real documentary if re-enactments are used, but something else. For me, Fred Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert & David Maysles are true documentary filmmakers. Sure, they carefully structure their films through editing, but they don’t make stuff up. That said, if you have an interest in John le Carré and how he came to be what he became, The Pigeon Tunnel is definitely worth seeing. And I have to admit, the re-enactments scattered throughout don’t really get in the way.

The Pigeon Tunnel is currently available for streaming on Apple TV.

_________________________________________________

Thursday, October 5. The Taste of Things (Tran Ahn Hung, director/writer)   Nancy and I loved this film. This is my second-favorite film from the festival. The preparation of food and cooking has never been more sensual. You can practically smell the food cooking and taste it. I felt wrapped up in the warmth of this film.

From the New York Times review by Beatrice Loayza:

“The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.”

From the NYFF 61 description:

“Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture, and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel (married, decades ago, in real life) as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmet chef she has been working with for 20 years. As they reach middle age, they can no longer deny their mutual romantic feelings, which have so long been concentrated in their passionate professionalism. This simple narrative—based upon Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel La passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet—sets the table for a sublime, sense-heightening exploration of pleasure, in which the play of sunlight across a late-afternoon kitchen is as meaningful as the image of a perfectly poached pear or the crisp of a buoyant vol-au-vent. Director Trân Anh Hùng (The Scent of Green Papaya, NYFF31) won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema.

The Taste of Things opens for a limited run on December 13, with a wide release on February 9, 2024. The film is France’s official submission in the Best International Feature category of the 96th Academy Awards in 2024.

______________________________________________

Friday, October 6. The Woman on the Beach (Jean Renoir, director, 1947)  Shown in the Revivals section of the festival. After leaving France in 1940 when Germany invaded, Renoir came to Hollywood, where he made five features, of which this was the last. It was a troubled production, to say the least. Renoir had initially been promised complete freedom, but after poor preview screenings, new executives at RKO demanded extensive edits and re-shoots. I knew this beforehand, but wanted to see it because of Renoir’s involvement and Robert Ryan in the cast. The story is a love triangle between Ryan, Joan Bennett, and Charles Bickford as Bennett’s embittered husband, a blind painter. It’s not very good, but the participants made it worth seeing for me.

_______________________________________________

Saturday, October 7. Menus-Plaisirs Les Troigros (Frederick Wiseman, director)  The Taste of Things set us up perfectly to see this 4-hour documentary about a French restaurant. Since Titicut Follies in 1967, Fred Wiseman has made a career out of examining institutions of all kinds, often at lengths of three to four hours (or more), without identifying titles, narration, or talking-head interviews. Nothing fancy; we’re just there. This is immersive, in-the-moment filmmaking (though carefully edited and structured). Wiseman is one of the greatest living filmmakers. With the deaths of Al Maysles (age 89) in 2015 and D. A. Pennebaker (age 94) in 2019, he’s probably the last one standing of his generation. At age 93 he does not appear to be slowing down, which is great for the rest of us.

Film Forum, where this film is currently playing, has this description:

“Frederick Wiseman’s 44th documentary takes us to Central France and Troisgros — a Michelin 3-star restaurant owned and operated by the same family for four generations, and destination for gastronomes from around the world. Behind the scenes, we are privy to passionate debates among the head chefs (a father and his two sons) about texture, color, and depth of flavors; visits to a bounteous produce farm, a local vineyard, and a massive cheese cave (where “each cheese has its moment of truth”); and waitstaff meetings focused on individualized customer preferences and food plating at a performance-art level. In his trademark style, Wiseman patiently illuminates the restless creativity of this culinary family as they experiment with dishes, methods, and ingredients — keeping their haute cuisine anchored in tradition while brilliantly evolving.”

Menus-Plaisirs Les Troigros opened at Film Forum on November 22.

__________________________________________________

Sunday, October 8. Janet Planet (Annie Baker, director/writer)

Description per A24:

“In rural Western Massachusetts, 11-year-old Lacy spends the summer of 1991 at home, enthralled by her own imagination and the attention of her mother, Janet. As the months pass, three visitors enter their orbit, all captivated by Janet and her spellbinding nature. In her solitary moments, Lacy inhabits an inner world so extraordinarily detailed that it begins to seep into the outside world. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker captures a child’s experience of time passing, and the ineffability of a daughter falling out of love with her mother, in this singularly sublime film debut.”

This is a delicate coming-of-age story, sharply observed. Zoe Ziegler is excellent as Lacy, as is Julianne Nicholson as her mother, Janet. I hadn’t checked who was in it beforehand and was very pleasantly surprised to see Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo, and Elias Koteas in the cast.

No release date has been announced as yet, but per A24 it will be sometime in 2024. Watch for it. It’s good.

_________________________________________________

Monday, October 9. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson, director/writer)

Per the NYFF 61 description:

“One of the most visually striking, profoundly moving American moviemaking debuts in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an arresting immersion into a young woman’s inner world, filmed and edited with an extraordinary tactility and attention to the tiniest detail. This impressionistic journey skips ahead and back through decades to tell the story of Mack, whose upbringing in rural Mississippi is touched by grace, dotted with heartbreak, and always carried aloft by the surrounding natural beauty. As she ages, she loses loved ones and gains others, while making decisions that change the course of her life, and that of her beloved sister. Relying on sounds and images to tell her story, and employing minimal dialogue, Jackson has created something breathtakingly quiet and ultimately transporting—a spiritual tribute to the moments, feelings, and connections that make a life. An A24 release.”

Unfortunately, I found it difficult to relate to or even follow this film. I don’t need to see things in a straight line, but the frequent shifts in time both backwards and forwards, plus different actors playing the same character at different ages and not knowing who was who kept me at a distance. Too great a distance to try to work harder to understand what I was seeing. Many people really like the film, so I probably should take another run at it. As a former film teacher of mine once said, “Sometimes you get on the ride and sometimes you don’t.”

This film opened on November 3 and is still in theaters.

___________________________________________________

Wednesday, October 11. In Our Day (Hong Sangsoo, director/writer)  The second Hong Sangsoo film at the festival. I liked it, and not just because it was in focus! Here’s the NYFF 61 description:

“For his 30th feature film, Hong Sangsoo has crafted a slippery yet captivating inquiry into the search for meaning, connection, and artistic satisfaction. In Our Day alternates two seemingly unrelated stories: in the first, a disillusioned former actress named Sangwon (Hong regular Kim Minhee) who has left her profession behind and is recharging at the apartment of her longtime friend Jung-soo (Song Sunmi); in the second, a middle-aged poet, Hong Uiji (Ki Joo-bong), who has become a cult figure for a new generation of young readers, is being visited by a student (Park Miso) making a documentary about him and a young man (Ha Seong-guk) drilling him with questions about the meaning of it all—which makes it difficult for the artist to refrain from drinking, even though his doctors have sworn him off alcohol. From these two disparate strands, Hong delightfully evokes a world rich with enigma and possibility, in which the most seemingly minute detail (the whereabouts of a cat, the spiciness of a noodle dish) has outsized repercussions and asking life’s big questions often brings us back to square one.”

Hong Sangsoo

No U.S. release date as yet, but should be sometime next year. He has a big following in this country.

__________________________________________________

Thursday, October 12. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, director/co-writer)  A wonderful film about a man, Hirayama, who cleans and services public toilets in Tokyo and how his precise routine is upset by the appearance of the teenage daughter of his estranged sister who shows up unannounced on his doorstep one day.Wenders was initially hired to do a short-film project celebrating Tokyo’s state-of-the-art public toilets, but decided to do something a bit more interesting. Filming in Japan with Japanese actors speaking Japanese, Wenders has made one of his most satisfying and quite moving films. Plus there’s a lot of great music. He listens to the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” on his drive to work, and later, Patti Smith and others, including, of course, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”

Here’s the NYFF 61 description:

“As in his finest movies, Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, NYFF22) here locates the magnificence in the everyday, casting the incomparable Koji Yakusho as the taciturn, good-natured Hirayama, who goes about his solitary hours working as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Interacting on his rounds with a variety of city denizens whose eccentricities put his gentle nature into even more delightful relief, the middle-aged Hirayama becomes the quiet hero of his own story, doing his menial work without complaint, bemused yet often enchanted at the younger folk orbiting him, and delighted by the natural wonders poking out from the corners of the always changing cityscape. Hirayama is a creature very much of the present, devoted to a daily routine that is nearly monastic—until it is disrupted by someone from his past. Working in concert with Wenders’s documentarian eye, Yakusho, who won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, makes his character’s every movement magnetic.”

From what I’ve been able to find, Perfect Days will be released sometime early in 2024.

_______________________________________________

Friday, October 13. Close Your Eyes (Victor Enrice, director/co-writer)

From the NYFF 61 description:

“Spanish director Víctor Erice’s fourth film in 50 years, Close Your Eyes is the culmination of one of the most legendary careers in modern cinema, following the masterpieces The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and The Quince Tree Sun (NYFF30). In this elegiac personal epic about time, memory, and, of course, the movies, an aging filmmaker named Miguel (Manolo Solo) is reluctantly pulled back into a decades-old mystery connected to his final, unfinished work, titled The Farewell Gaze. During production, his leading actor and close friend, Julio (Jose Coronado), vanished and was never heard from again; in the process of trying to track him down so many years later, Miguel must come to terms with his own past, his present life, and the irrevocably changed processes of his art form. Featuring captivating performances from a cast that also includes Ana Torrent (Beehive’s unforgettable child star) in a moving role as Julio’s grown daughter, Close Your Eyes is a poignant, summative work that finds original ways to remind viewers of the moving image’s ability to reach across time.”

Compelling and mysterious. Plus any film that a shot like the one below has my attention. Slow moving, but rewarding all the same. It’s a slow burn that pays off. And it’s about movies, too. At one point, Miguel finds a flip-book of the Lumiere Brothers 1896 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. It’s a very neat moment as he flips through it and the image comes alive. So far it doesn’t have a U.S. release date. Definite art house material. I liked it.

_________________________________________________

Saturday, October 14. May December  (Todd Haynes, director)  While I prefer Carol (2015) and the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce, this is excellent nonetheless. Natalie Portman is Elizabeth, an actor who has come to Savannah, GA to get to know Gracie (Julianne Moore), who she’s going to play in a film about the scandal that erupted 23 years before when Gracie had sex with her 13 year-old employee Joe (Charles Melton) in a pet shop, got pregnant, went to prison, married Joe, and had more kids. This was a huge tabloid story at the time and people in the community still remember and resent it. Lots of layers get peeled back, but there’s never the explosion I was expecting and probably hoping for. This is fairly tricky material, since Gracie and Joe have stayed together and raised a family, and aren’t the least bit apologetic about any of it, despite the initial circumstances.

May December opened on November 17, is still in theaters and will be available for streaming on Netflix on December 1.

_______________________________________________

Sunday, October 15. Ferrari (Michael Mann, director)  Michael Mann is one of my favorite directors. There’s a physical weight that you feel on the screen in his films. I’m thinking of a scene in Public Enemies (2009) when a steam engine slowly comes to a stop in a train station. There’s something in the combination of image and sound effects that makes be feel the physicality of what’s on the screen. It felt very real. I think you don’t get that with CGI. I especially value Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995), and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). So I was greatly anticipating Ferrari. I don’t think it’s one of his best, but the racing footage is amazing. Even at the beginning, when we’re just seeing cars being tested on the track, the physicality I mentioned is there in spades, especially in the roar of the engines. There are two major crashes in the film that are extremely intense, overwhelming. I also hadn’t realized how lethal auto racing was in the ’50s. The drivers seem totally unprotected in open cars at speeds in which the slightest error gets you airborne and probably dead. Adam Driver is excellent as Enzo Ferrari, as is Penelope Cruz as his wife Laura. Their frequent blowout arguments are intense. Shailene Woodley has less to do as Ferrari’s mistress Lina, but does as well as the part allows. I think I’m wanting to like Ferrari more than I actually did, but I don’t want to dissuade anyone from seeing it (as though I actually could). I definitely plan to see it again, and on as big a screen as possible with great sound.

Ferrari opens on December 25.

_________________________________________________

We’ve since seen the following three films, which we wanted to catch at the festival, but for various reasons did not.

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, director/co-writer)  Loved it! It’s great. Totally deserved the top prize at Cannes this year.

Priscilla (Sofia Coppola, director/co-writer)  Didn’t much like it. Cailee Spaeny is excellent in the title role,  but otherwise it left me cold.

Maestro (Bradley Cooper, director/co-writer) Very good and quite ambitious. Carey Mulligan is just great as Bernstein’s wife. Some stunning sequences.

I’m also quite anxious to see the following two films from the festival.

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, director/co-writer)  Stars Sandra Hüller, who is great in Anatomy of a Fall.

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, director/co-writer)  From the director of Drive My Car (2021).

_______________________________________________

That’s a wrap for this one. Stay tuned for supplemental material for some of the films in this post. See you next time. — Ted Hicks

___________________________________________

__________________________________________________