We are four days into the festival now and the critics can’t stop buzzing about all there is to see at NYFF this year! Here's a quick roundup:
Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter picks a couple of favorites from this year’s line-up:
“The two that stand out the most in hindsight: A Separation, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's film about domestic strife in Tehran that won the Golden Bear (the top prize) at February's Berlin Film Festival and then played at Telluride and Toronto before coming to New York, which is absolutely riveting and a sure-fire best foreign language film Oscar contender; and The Skin I Live In, the latest whacky film from the great Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, which is campy but irresistable nonetheless. Antonio Banderas, whose international career took off after his last collaboration with Almodovar 20 years ago, stars as a Dr. Frankenstein-type whose beautiful “Monster” — per one of Almodovar's oldest fetishes — starts out as one gender and ends up as another.”
indieWIRE's blog The Playlist keeps the coverage coming with their review of Corpo celeste:
”It’s a testament to first time writer/director Alice Rohrwacher’s humanistic eye, which is unadorned but nevertheless totally beautiful – the sun draped landscapes and unblinking attention to half-formed urban sprawl have their own unique gorgeousness. But nothing feels affected or forced. It feels real without being kinetically “real” – the camera doesn’t jitter and jump with every step and it doesn’t wallow in unpleasant detail (a moment when Marta gets her first period is a great example, restrained but no less forceful). The film is a tiny slice of a very young life, but we get to experience it fully and without pretense. It may be one of the less flashy entries in this year’s New York Film Festival, but it’s one that should not be missed.”
More love for A Separation, from Joe Bendel of The Epoch Times:
“A Separation is also smart and scrupulously realistic on the micro level as well. The relationship dynamic between Simin and Nader is particularly insightful, rendered with great sensitivity by leads Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi.”
indieWIRE also has an interview with Crazy Horse director Frederick Wiseman:
”Created over a career that spans six decades, Frederick Wiseman’s brand of non-fiction filmmaking is notable for both its breadth of subject and its disciplined style; no interviews, no narration, just a strict mandate to capture human interactions and then craft them into dramatic stories in the editing suite. If you were looking for a map of human activity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, you could do much worse than looking at Wiseman’s portraits of our social institutions.”
Stay tuned throughout the NYFF for more of what the critics are saying about festival films.
