NYFF Opening Acts
Tickets
September 19 – 25
With the 52nd annual New York Film Festival on the horizon (September 26 – October 12), with its rich lineup comprising many of the brightest lights in world cinema, the Film Society invites you to whet your appetite with a sampling of past triumph from these luminaries. Before you see Paul Thomas Anderson tackle Pynchon with Inherent Vice, watch him take on vice of a different nature in Boogie Nights. Before David Fincher debuts his enigmatic new thriller Gone Girl, catch his true-crime tour de force, Zodiac. And before Alain Resnais takes his final bow with Life of Riley, see him grapple with questions of mortality in Love Unto Death. Whether you’re an auteurist, a completist, or simply an enthusiast, NYFF Opening Acts takes you deep into the back catalogs of today’s foremost talents.
All Is Forgiven
Mia Hansen-Løve made her feature debut with this sensitive chronicle of estrangement, redemption, and the indissoluble parent-child bond, in which a man’s self-loathing and addiction take their toll on his wife and young daughter.
Biggie and Tupac
Tabloid investigative journalist Nick Broomfield uses tactics that beggar description to score interviews with key figures in the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.
Bleak Moments
An eloquent study of unexamined lives, Mike Leigh’s debut remains as nuanced and humanistic as his best later efforts, combining kitchen sink realism with the emotional incisiveness of Cassavetes.
Body Snatchers
The most underappreciated of all the body-snatcher movies, Ferrara’s idiosyncratic reworking of Don Siegel’s Cold War–era classic brilliantly applies the original’s critique of conformity to the sacrosanct institutions of the American nuclear family and the American military.
Boogie Nights
A sprawling mosaic of life in the adult-film industry, Boogie Nights rides high in the late 1970s before changing tides and technologies render them has-beens in Reagan’s America. Starring Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. An NYFF35 selection.
Cold Water
Writer/director Olivier Assayas culls this evocative tale of rebellion and rootlessness in the early ’70s from his own autobiography, as two troubled teens face an uncertain future.
The Color Wheel
Q&A with director Alex Ross Perry
Alex Ross Perry’s second feature is an astonishing work of pathos and cynical vitriol, following sad-sack Colin and his irrepressible narcissist sister JR as they hit the road and plunge headfirst into a world that is somehow even crueler than they are.
Corpo Celeste
Alice Rohrwacher’s extraordinarily impressive debut feature chronicles 13-year-old Marta’s private duel with the Church in the small seaside Calabrian town to which she, her mother, and older sister have just moved from Switzerland.
Love Unto Death
An atheist couple come to grips with a near-death experience in Resnais’s searching and heartfelt rumination on love, death, and what awaits us on “the other side.”
Zodiac
David Fincher invokes palpable dread and sustains it for nearly three hours in this meticulous account of the Zodiac killings and the cost of unsolved crimes to the souls of dedicated crime fighters.