Introduction
When I attend the New York Film Festival, as I have five times now—plus once remotely—I don’t expect people in my life to care that much. I don’t mean that in a way that dismisses the work I do, the films I watch, or what I subsequently write. I mean it in the sense that to attend a film festival is a privilege unto itself, and that even my most devout and film-loving friends get a little annoyed seeing film festival tweets all the time. What good is it—for anyone, really—that I got to see the new David Cronenberg film six months before it came out? Seriously. I’m asking.
Each year that I’ve attended the festival, the platonic interest from those close to me waned to a point of forgetting. That was, of course, until this year, when every other day I got a text from someone I knew, sometimes a cinephile, but also sometimes someone I didn’t even realize cared about movies, let alone liked them. The text would always ask the same question: “Did you see The Brutalist yet?”
The Brutalist is actor-turned-director Brady Corbet’s third feature film—his much-anticipated follow-up to the bizarre and endearing disaster Vox Lux—which is purportedly three-and-a-half hours long with an intermission. The Brutalist won Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, during which Corbet gave a deeply heartfelt, teary speech. I would love to tell you what The Brutalist is about, or whether star Adrien Brody is “back” after spending time on Peaky Blinders and walking around New York City. I would love to tell you what Joe Alwyn’s voice sounds like in the movie. Unfortunately, as I must tell readers as well as everyone who texted me, I didn’t get to see The Brutalist. The theater filled up with about thirty people before me in line, and because Corbet shot it on Vista Vision, there was only one copy of the movie to watch. I had the chance to see it later in the festival, but I got tired. I will see The Brutalist eventually, not at the now-over New York Film Festival, and then I can finally respond to my texts.
Last Gasp
There were an overwhelming number of feature films playing at the New York Film Festival this year that may be their filmmakers’ final film, the most notable and loudest of which was Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a movie he has been working on for more than twenty years, which he funded himself, and is loosely worthy of just about any kind of rating or review someone wants to give it. Megalopolis was not an official selection in this year’s festival as it was Cannes; instead, the movie played in IMAX with a Q&A prior featuring Coppola in conversation with Spike Lee and Robert De Niro along with NYFF programmer Dennis Lim. I liked Megalopolis. I often really liked Megalopolis. It is a unique and sometimes shocking film, both frustratingly ugly and occasionally beautiful. It tells the story of America’s collapse through Ancient Roman allegory, coming to the conclusion that the way of the future is that of moving walkways and having children. I’m inclined to basically agree. Megalopolis stars Adam Driver in a rare performance that utilizes his stature, charm, and menace simultaneously, the likes of which hasn’t been done since Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021).
By the time of this writing, Megalopolis has descended into a The Room-style reputation, a so-bad-it’s-good type of film that you need to laugh and jeer at in order to feel in on the joke. Though I did laugh and gasp and sometimes groan at what was on screen, I feel like this is largely disrespectful behavior. Perhaps what I’m forgetting is that by nature of watching Coppola in conversation with Lee and De Niro, I was reminded of what it was like to speak with an octogenarian, something I’ve not done with frequency in about ten years. The intentions—largely well-meaning; the coherency—well, who can say? It’s the thought (whatever it is) that counts.
There were three films at this year’s festival that grappled quite directly with the nature of death and dying: Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. Schrader’s was, per my estimation, the weakest of these three, a rambling, cinematic last rites of a fake documentary filmmaker, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere—doing a Schrader impression). Fife defected from America out of protest to the Vietnam War, moving to Canada to make increasingly political documentaries. Oh, Canada, which is based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks, is far less interested in Fife’s politics than it is the women with whom he slept. There’s something to be said about shifting societal expectations, about aging lotharios, and generational discomfort; I unfortunately have no idea what is being said by Schrader’s film, which abandons his “man in a room journaling” style of late to something that feels tedious and unfocused. I like Schrader’s work, though, and for that reason, I’m hopeful this won’t be his last.
While Oh, Canada sits uneasily in the past and present, David Cronenberg presents us with a vision of the future. Starring Vincent Cassel—who, like Gere, seems to be doing kind of an impression of the filmmaker—as Karsh (#VincentCasselIsKarsh), a start-up founder who has found a way for people to watch their loved ones disintegrate in the grave through a technology he calls—what else—“the shroud.” Karsh, like Cronenberg, is mourning the loss of his wife, and though others are horrified at the idea of watching their loved ones melt into the earth, he’s comforted by the knowledge that he knows exactly what is happening. Cassel is flanked by Diane Kruger (who plays both Karsh’s deceased wife in dream sequences and his sister-in-law Becca) and Guy Pearce (who plays Maury, his brother-in-law), both of whom add to the intrigue around the film’s central plot, which has far more to do with international conspiracy than one might expect on the surface. The Shrouds has perhaps the perfect tone for a film: a bit silly, sometimes funny on purpose, and ultimately and profoundly moving. Cronenberg’s work is long affiliated with the body and what horrors can happen to it; in The Shrouds, he crafted an ode to that body—the human one, which will one day rot like fruit, no matter who we are or what we do.
If Oh, Canada shows us death as we know it and The Shrouds shows us death as it one day may be, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door presents a fantasy of death: what if you could go away “upstate” to die in the most beautiful house with your most beautiful friend while still looking mostly beautiful? Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What You Are Going Through, Almodóvar’s latest tells the story of two long-lost friends, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton), who reconnect later in life when the former learns the latter is suffering from cancer. Martha is uneager to die in a hospital, wasting away from cancer treatment, and proposes an alternative: what if the two of them go away together for a month so that Martha can take a cyanide pill and die on her own terms? What follows is staggeringly beautiful: a fantasy of demise. This is a movie where money does not matter, where the practicalities have gone out the window. It’s not that it’s wrong for dying to feel gorgeous; it’s that maybe—maybe!––it ought to be possible for anyone, everyone, who wants to, to leave this world with dignity and grace. And besides, don’t you want to see two great actresses laugh and cry together? In the Q&A after the film, a member of the audience asked about the privilege of these characters, and what we are supposed to make of their laissez-faire attitude towards the cost of living (and dying). “Not to compare myself to Hitchcock,” Almodóvar said, “but no one is asking how she affords those dresses in Rear Window.”
There was a rumor going around in the months leading up to the fall festival season that Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths was maybe not very good—it didn’t get into Cannes, or Venice—and maybe Peterloo (2018) was not the daring epic he’d set out to make; perhaps the English humanist director had lost some great quality to his work, or was past his prime. Respectfully: fuck that. Mike Leigh returned to the festival with a film so staggering and devastating that it made me cry so hard the headache I went into the movie with went away. I know, I know, anecdotal evidence is maybe not proof of quality; instead, what I can say about Leigh’s latest—his new collaboration with Secrets & Lies (1996) muse Marianne Jean-Baptiste—is that it is one of his most stirring and urgent films of the new millennium, a searing and furious work about grief and anger, about the ways in which none of us recovered from the past decade with little hope moving forward. It is not so much “evil Happy-Go-Lucky” as it is akin to Another Year (2010), Leigh’s other portrait of loneliness and unhappiness in the face of a world that is just trying to get by.
End of an era
The end of life is one thing; the end of the world—or a world—is quite another. There were four films dealing, in some ways, with a form of the apocalypse. Two of those films—Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest—focus, specifically, on very bad weeks: the former about the life of an OBGYN in Georgia (the country, not the state—though the reproductive rights may have you confused) and the latter about a serf, for lack of a better word, on an English-speaking estate some time ago. Kulumbegashvili’s film argues against an old way of living, of retrograde gender dynamics and the pain endured by a person willing to challenge them. It’s Vera Drake by way of Michel Haneke, set against fields of wildflowers and shifting clouds. So too does Tsangari’s Harvest make the most of its environment, depicting Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) sitting and playing in fields and lakes, the white of his ass gleaming in the sun. He lives on the precipice of society; “the British are coming!”—yes, but so is capitalism.
Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour was one of my most anticipated titles after his film The Tsugua Diaries stood out amidst the 2021 selections. The Tsugua Diaries was a COVID movie disguised as a pastoral farce. In Grand Tour, Gomes travels through colonized Southeast Asia in the late 1910s, where Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) evades his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) for reasons he does not entirely understand. He doesn’t want to get married; maybe it’s that simple. Grand Tour does something ingenious with its limited budget: the scenes between Molly and Edward are set on a soundstage, meticulously designed but certainly “fake” (as in “movie magic”). But any establishing shot—all of the b-roll of the film, which comprises the majority of what we see—is set in the present day, the lingering impact of Western colonialism still apparent in the countries he chooses to film: Thailand, Singapore, China. It is a beautiful film, if not slow-going. Escape is not always frantic, nor thrilling.
On the topic of pacing, I’d be remiss not to mention Carson Lund’s Eephus—a movie that imagines “what if Everybody Wants Some!! but they’re all 50 year old guys?” Eephus is a baseball movie that moves at the pace of baseball: the film tells the story of the final rec league game on a New England diamond before the baseball field gets torn down to become a school. The guys are altogether regular, some funny, some less so. Are they good at baseball? Well, kind of! Just when you start to write them off, something magical happens. That’s baseball, isn’t it? Or, rather, that’s baseball for the first six innings, and then it slows to a screeching halt, the night stretching on into the ninth.
Social Studies
Luca Guadagnino’s Queer was one of the larger disappointments of the festival—a busy, overstuffed ramble based on a William S. Burroughs novel of the same name. Starring Daniel Craig as William and relative newcomer Drew Starkey as Eugene, the two tumble in and out of bed and Mexico City and the jungle, in search of something the other can’t give them. I loved Challengers, Guadagnino’s tennis throuple flick, written—as was Queer—by Justin Kuritzkes, but I can’t discount that Challengers was full of needless tricks: corny slow-motion, wacky POV shots, and haphazard editing. The same problems plague Queer, only this is a significantly less enjoyable experience (by design, but still). Here it felt as though Guadagnino’s indulgences got the better of him—which is a shame, as he ought to know better than anyone how much richer it feels to withhold.
Rumours, a film by Guy Maddin, as well as Evan and Galen Johnson, might be the most mainstream of Maddin’s work—combining his love of pastiche and satire with that of a “normal movie,” albeit also anything but. Set during the G7 conference (I’m already laughing), a group of world leaders gather to put out a vague statement full of platitudes to let the people of various democratic, capitalist nations know that the people in power care about them. The jokes are easy, but they are fun. A few actors—Cate Blanchett, namely, as well as Charles Dance—are doing impersonations of leaders we know well (Angela Merkel, Joe Biden); a few others are going their own way—the best of whom is Denis Ménochet as the French Prime Minister, though the heart and soul lies with Roy Dupuis, a Canadian hunk clearly intended as a send-up of Justin Trudeau. Think: Triangle of Sadness by way of No Exit (the former and Rumours both share Zlatko Burić, for one). Think: maybe it’s not such a bad idea to leave all the people in power in the woods. Maybe something would get done for once.
Around the midpoint of Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, I wondered if I might have been better off watching a documentary about the disappearance and aftermath of former Brazilian congressman Rubens Paiva, who was taken from his house by the military in 1971 and never came home. Salles’s film focuses on Paiva’s family, led in the absence of her husband by Eunice (Fernanda Torres) to care for the house and their five children, as well as to determine what happened to her spouse. It’s the most “Hollywood” type of film I saw at the festival—which I don’t mean in a bad way, like a “Marvel Studios” sort of thing. I’m Still Here felt like a Sidney Lumet film: a hazy, determined thriller from the 1990s, equally political and tragic. When the film jumps ahead in time, however, it becomes clear that the Paiva family is, perhaps, more compelling to consider as adults: the ways in which this tragedy shaped the lives of the children as they started their own families, rather than the torrent of pain they felt as teenagers. Still: Salles’s film is searing and occasionally lovely, a tribute to what was lost just as much as what was built in the aftermath.
Docu-something
I struggled with all of the documentaries I saw this year, many of which paled in comparison to the hybrid forms apparent in some of the feature presentations (Grand Tour, Caught by the Tides). Mati Diop’s Dahomey, the follow-up to her dazzling and idiosyncratic feature Atlantics (2019), was the strongest entry in this year’s programming—a searing and spooky look at the return of 26 royal treasures from France to the Republic of Benin, formerly the Kingdom of Dahomey. The film shares a haunting undercurrent with Atlantics but soon dissolves into more overt social commentary: what is the point of museums? What is the point of countries having their artwork back? Does it lessen the work to have it returned? Forgive me—these are important conversations, many of which I felt lessened the sharp visual appeal of the work. Show me the art: their faces speak for themselves.
The three other documentaries of note this year were Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, and Jem Cohen’s Little, Big, and Far. Perry and Cohen’s films play with the documentary form, inserting fictional elements into otherwise true stories. Perry’s feature, his first since 2019’s outstanding Her Smell, imagines what would happen if a slacker band like Pavement became IP? The answer to the question is probably more interesting if you’re familiar with Pavement, which, embarrassingly, I’m not. Likewise, Cohen explores the world of astrophysics through the lens of an aging astronomist, his former student, and her new beau, traveling to Greece to find a dark patch of sky through which to observe the cosmos. Watching Cohen’s sleepy film, I longed for the days of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things (2023), a bold, funny, engaging documentary about rocks.
Suburban Fury tells the story of Sara Jane Moore—the would-be assassin of Gerald Ford, if only she hadn’t missed. Moore is a fascinating subject, and she’s aware of this fact about herself. She agreed to speak to Devor and his collaborators on the stipulation that she’s the only person they talk to. What makes up the rest of the film is a far more engaging collection of archival footage, much of which answers the question: why would someone want to kill Gerald Ford? Moore, to her credit, is a wily and seductive subject, but the whole endeavor winds up falling short of anything remarkable. Still, it’s a miracle anyone got through the 1970s alive.
Unlikely double feature
I lied: there was one other documentary I saw this year and that was Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land. The nature of scheduling means that often critics and filmgoers alike are forced to engage in unlikely or sometimes thematically adjacent double features. That is to say: it gave me profound whiplash to go from the four-person-directed documentary about home destruction in the West Bank to Jesse Eisenberg’s David Sedaris-esque musing on the modern Holocaust tourism industry in A Real Pain.
A Real Pain tells the story of David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), cousins reuniting after some time apart to travel to Poland to go on a Holocaust tour, eager to pay final respects to their grandmother who survived the camps. Part of what drives at the tension between David and Benji’s relationship—outside of the fact that they’re two of the most different people of all time—is that they have no real connection to contemporary Judaism. They’re not especially observant, if at all, and they have no idea what to do with this part of their lineage other than to acknowledge it tacitly. Their trip is full of little modern observations, but these characters read as vague and broad to me. Their pain felt prescribed and unnatural. The movie will be distributed by Fox Searchlight—owned by Disney.
No Other Land, however, has no distributor. It is not necessarily a better movie than A Real Pain. It may be of equal quality. Both share a sort of Sundance-y patina—more eager to tell than to show. What No Other Land is able to show, outside of scenes in which director and subject Basel Adra runs with a handheld through the desert, are houses and schools bulldozed by IDF tanks. It is not enough to see one house go down. You see it several more times. This footage—a construction vehicle driving over an elementary school—is enough to make one see blood, to say nothing of the footage with actual blood in it. That the film must be told through the lens of a budding friendship between Adra and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, lends the movie an instructive quality: see what can happen if we all talk to each other? I am seeing what is happening if Israelis and Palestinians talk to each other: the houses are getting razed, the schools are toppling over, Gaza burns and burns and burns.
New Frontier
Okay: I lied again. There were two more films I saw, not exactly documentary, but not traditional fiction feature films either: RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys and Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides. When his film was introduced on opening night, Ross—who directed Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)—corrected the programmer who said this was his first fiction film. The plot of the film is fictional, adapted from a novel by Colson Whitehead, but the subject matter of the film might as well have been documentary. The film tells the story of an unlikely pair of friends, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who meet as teenagers at a reform school in Florida. Elwood is a geeky introvert; Turner is a cynical extrovert. They are essentially indentured servants: sometimes learning, but mostly working, abused and disavowed with little means of contacting their loved ones. The plot is largely straight-forward, but the remarkable quality of the film—and Ross’s signature—is the point of view: the film is presented in first-person, resembling, maybe, a little, the nature of a video game, though the impact of this stylistic choice shocks the nerves again and again. He is not forcing you to sympathize, or empathize, with the boys so much as he is putting you within them, allowing you to see as they do. The world is stunning—this might be the best-looking film of the year—if only they got to experience it.
Zhangke’s work shares a similarly unique point of view; if you asked me whose perspective the film takes, I’d say, “Well, time’s, I guess.” With Caught by the Tides, Zhangke picks up where he left off with Still Life (2006) and Unknown Pleasures (2002), incorporating b-roll and deleted scenes from those films, as well as giving his characters Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao—Zhangke’s wife) and Guao Bin (Li Zhubin) yet another ending to their story. The film is reminiscent of both Kristen Johnson’s Cameraperson as well as Linklater’s Before trilogy, though neither of those feels like an apt comparison deep down. Though I had high hopes for Zhangke’s film, Caught by the Tides still blew me away: it is fascinating, curious, funny, and wonderful to watch, with incredible music throughout. What emerges on screen doesn’t feel like what I’ve seen before: a timelapse, fictional and otherwise, slipping out of our hands. What feels incredible and nigh-impossible is that Zhangke’s camera does not often judge: he observes, he wonders, he wanders. These characters exist in our world, the real world, as much as they do up on the screen. Life is, in fact, not still; something is always being washed away.