Every fall, the New York Film Festival arrives to remind you of the pleasures of sitting in the dark with a community of movie nuts as new worlds and visions open your mind and blow it. This year’s edition — 153 movies, two dozen talks, assorted free events — offers plenty of chances for mind-and-spirit expansion with new and old movies, short and long. If you’ve never seen Bela Tarr’s seven-hour masterwork, “Satantango,” now’s your chance. The opening-night title — Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” — is comparatively fleet at three hours, 29 minutes.
Scorsese’s latest revisits the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the combative Teamster boss who went missing in 1975. It has its world premiere Friday (there will be 10 screenings!) and is, as you would expect, the most frantically anticipated movie at the festival, which runs through Oct. 13. Every new Scorsese movie is an event, this one more than most given that it finds the director again exploring crime in America with some of his legendary, career-defining collaborators: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel. All the showings are sold out, but the standby lines might answer your prayers. The movie opens theatrically Nov. 1 and starts streaming on Netflix on Nov. 27. (Our review will follow the opening-night showing.)
Ideally, though, try to watch “The Irishman” on the largest, brightest movie screen you can find, advice that holds true for much of the rest of the selections at the festival. As the new name of its parent organization suggests — it’s now Film at Lincoln Center, having dropped the charming if fusty “society” — the event remains committed to film as an art and a visually driven medium. Even when the image nearly floods over with talking and at times shouting heads, as in Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” a festival high point about two people’s agonized, self-conscious uncoupling, these are movies to see and to see big.
Like some of the other titles in the main slate, “Marriage Story” (another Netflix release) is passing through New York in the middle of a festival run — it has played at Venice, Telluride and Toronto — that sometimes feeds right into the long road to the Academy Awards. Don’t hold its awards chances against the movie and its stars, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver. In its prickliness and insistence on the messiness and ineluctable pain of life, this is very different from the pandering, gold-grubbing titles that tend to hit theaters starting around now.
In the past, the New York Film Festival presented work that might not open theatrically in the near-present if at all. Changes in distribution mean that’s less true now. These days the festival’s exceptionalism stems not just from Lincoln Center and the city itself but also from its longevity (this is the 57th edition) and ethos of selective programming. Curation is crucial, and is the main reason that while other fests appear overly eager to be part of the Oscar race, New York still seems to hover above the fray, even with its photo calls and red carpet. I don’t always agree with its selections — the main slate’s soporific “Liberté” and “Motherless Brooklyn,” oof — but these are choices rather than just opportunistically checked boxes.
The main slate predictably attracts the bulk of attention, which is to be expected given it showcases some of the world’s leading filmmakers. Some are working at the height of their powers, including Pedro Almodóvar, whose “Pain and Glory” begins as a portrait of a filmmaker as a near-burnout — a superb Antonio Banderas — and evolves into an exploration of artistic vision and process. Banderas deservedly won the best actor award at Cannes in May, where Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne picked up the best director prize for “Young Ahmed,” a sympathetic if undernourished drama about a Muslim teenager who embraces violence.
Other highlights in New York’s first half are “Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho’s biliously funny, progressively more ferocious tale of South Korean haves and have-nots, which won the top prize at Cannes, and “Bacurau,” from Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, a wonderfully eccentric, surprising story about a Brazilian village forced to fight for its existence. Also screening in the first half are “Sibyl,” Justine Triet’s sly, playful story about women whose lives cross; “The Wild Goose Lake,” Diao Yinan’s gorgeous genre pastiche; and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” a 19th-century love story from Céline Sciamma about a painter and her fleeting muse. (My colleague A.O. Scott will have more about the festival’s second half next week.)
Navigating the festival can seem overwhelming. Perseverance helps as well as wearing sturdy shoes for long lines, signing up for the daily newsletter and following the festival on social media. Although many selections in the main slate are sold out — tickets tend to be gobbled up early by the organization’s members — it’s always worth checking out the standby and rush lines. If there are no-shows, standby tickets are released on a first-come, first-served basis. Rush tickets are cheaper than regular ones and are made available one hour before show time. As of this writing, tickets, including for newly added screenings, were available for almost every section of the festival.
You can have a satisfying festival experience without ever dipping into the main slate and instead venturing into the side programs. This year’s include Projections (experimental work of varying lengths); Revivals (among the restorations are 1950s shorts from the Italian director Vittorio De Seta); and Retrospective (“Dead Man,” “The Grapes of Wrath”). The revivals and retrospectives don’t feature enough work from women, but some do pop up in Spotlight on Documentary. That’s where you can find Alla Kovgan’s “Cunningham,” which uses 3-D to make the choreographer and his dances jump off the screen. One don’t-miss is Sergei Loznitsa’s “State Funeral,” which uses astonishing archival material taken after Stalin’s death (people mass as loudspeakers mournfully bleat) to create a meditation on national identity, authoritarianism and a terrifying cult of personality.
But if you are set on sampling the main slate, don’t overlook the less starry selections. Kelly Reichardt’s elegiac “First Cow” is this authentically independent filmmaker’s best work since her 2008 drama “Wendy and Lucy.” Set largely in the Pacific Northwest wilderness during the early 18th century, “First Cow” is based on the work of Reichardt’s frequent collaborator and co-writer, Jonathan Raymond (in this case his novel “The Half-Life”). It tells the story of strangers turned friends (John Magaro and Orion Lee, delivering sensitive, contrapuntal performances), whose lives change when a wealthy landowner (Toby Jones) brings the first dairy cow to the territory.
Although some other recognizable faces (Scott Shepherd, Gary Farmer, René Auberjonois) appear now and then, adding texture and jolts of personality, the movie belongs to Magaro and Lee, whose characters first meet in the woods. After some misadventures — including a narrow escape that shows Reichardt gently flexing her action muscles — the two men reunite and set up house together, cooking, sewing, philosophizing. As she did in “Old Joy,” Reichardt is exploring the tensions and tenderness of a male friendship. Here, though, the men’s relationship, with its kindness, virtues and mutual dependences, also offers a vision of an American dream not yet wholly corrupted by unbridled self-interest.
But spiky, troubled Yoav is a man alone. Having left Israel in disgust — he refuses to speak Hebrew — he tries to fit into a France that remains out of reach, at least to him. As Yoav restlessly pounds the streets, practicing his rough French, the movie circles questions of identity, nation and hypermasculinity. At first, the title “Synonyms” seems to be a reference only to Yoav’s vocabulary drills and his habit of spitting out words that express the same idea: “nasty, abominable, odious, lamentable.” But as Yoav keeps going and going, walking and talking, it seems all too clear that there’s no place and perhaps no peace for him in this variation on the country he has fled.
New York Film Festival
Running Sept. 27-Oct. 13 at Lincoln Center; filmlinc.org/nyff2019.
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