29 of the most exciting new feature films from around the world.
Opening Selection · World Premiere · Intros by Martin Scorsese & Cast on Sept. 27
This richly textured epic of American crime, a dense, complex story told with astonishing fluidity, stars Joe Pesci as Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino; Al Pacino as Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa; and Robert De Niro as their right-hand man, Frank Sheeran, each working in the closest harmony imaginable with the film’s incomparable creator, Martin Scorsese.
Centerpiece Selection · New York Premiere · Introduction by Noah Baumbach and cast at the 6pm screening at Alice Tully Hall on Oct. 4
Noah Baumbach’s new film is about the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple—played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson—negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. It’s as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving.
Closing Night Selection · New York Premiere · Introductions by Edward Norton & cast at the Alice Tully Hall screenings on Oct. 11
Writer-director-producer Edward Norton has transplanted the main character of Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel Motherless Brooklyn from modern Brooklyn into an entirely new, richly woven neo-noir narrative: a multilayered conspiracy that expands to encompass the city’s ever-growing racial divide, set in 1950s New York.
U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Mati Diop on Oct. 9
Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Mati Diop’s gripping, hallucinatory Senegal-set drama skirts the line between realism and fantasy, romance and horror, and, in its crystalline empathy, humanity, and political outrage, confirms the arrival of a major talent.
New York Premiere · Q&As with Kantemir Balagov on Oct. 6 & 8
In this richly burnished, occasionally harrowing rendering of the persistent scars of war, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), attempt to readjust to a haunted post-WWII Leningrad.
U.S. Premiere
The beauties and terrors of nature—human and otherwise—drive the extraordinary, elemental new film from Oliver Laxe, in which the verdant Galician landscape becomes the setting for the powerful story of Amador, who has recently served time in prison for arson and has come home to live with his elderly mother.
U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Federico Veiroj on Oct. 9 & 10
Leading light of contemporary Uruguayan cinema Federico Veiroj’s new film is his most ambitious, political, and forceful yet, starring Daniel Hendler as Humberto Brause, who takes advantage of Uruguay’s poor economy by specializing in shady offshore investing.
North American Premiere · Q&As with Arnaud Desplechin on Sept. 30 & Oct. 2
Arnaud Desplechin shows a different and no less impressive side of his mastery with this taut policier, based on a true murder case in his hometown of Roubaix, where, during a somber Christmas season, a French-Algerian detective is investigating the fatal strangulation of a poor, elderly woman in her apartment, with suspicion falling on her next-door neighbors.
New York Premiere · Q&As with Pedro Almodóvar on Sept. 28 (joined by Antonio Banderas) & Sept. 29
Pedro Almodóvar taps into new reservoirs of introspection and emotional warmth with this miraculous, internalized portrayal of Salvador Mallo, a director not too subtly modeled on Almodóvar himself and played by Antonio Banderas, who deservedly won Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
New York Premiere
In Bong Joon Ho’s exhilarating, Palme d’Or–winning film, a threadbare family of four struggling to make ends meet gradually hatches a scheme to work for, and as a result infiltrate, the wealthy household of an entrepreneur, his seemingly frivolous wife, and their troubled kids.
New York Premiere · Film Comment Presents · Q&As with Céline Sciamma, Adèle Haenel, and Noémie Merlant on Sept. 29 & 30
On the cusp of the 19th century, young painter Marianne travels to a rugged, rocky island off the coast of Brittany to create a wedding portrait of the wealthy yet free-spirited Héloise. An emotional and erotic bond develops between the women in Céline Sciamma’s Cannes-awarded subversion of the story of an artist and “his” muse.
U.S. Premiere
The incomparable Gong Li (Raise the Red Lantern) gives a mesmerizing, take-no-prisoners performance in Saturday Fiction, a slow-burn spy thriller set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai on the cusp of World War II, directed by Lou Ye.
The New York Times Critic's Pick
Disillusioned Israeli Yoav (Tom Mercier), who has absconded to Paris following his military training and has disavowed Hebrew, falls into an emotional and intellectual triangle with a wealthy bohemian couple in Nadav Lapid’s powerful film about language and physicality, masculinity and nationhood.
U.S. Premiere
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s penetrating depiction of the alienation and anxiety experienced by a young reality TV host—played by former J-pop idol Atsuko Maeda—while traveling for work in Uzbekistan pushes the director’s craft into new, mysterious, and enormously emotional realms.
The New York Times Critic's Pick · Italy's Oscar Entry
In Marco Bellocchio’s compelling, decades-spanning drama, Pierfrancesco Favino commands the screen as real-life figure Tommaso Buscetta, the mafia boss turned informant who helped take down a large swath of organized crime leaders in Sicily in the eighties.
The New York Times Critic's Pick
In her final work, partially constructed of onstage interviews and lectures, interspersed with a wealth of clips and archival footage, Agnès Varda guides us through her career, from her movies to her remarkable still photography to the delightful and creative installation work. An NYFF57 selection.
U.S. Premiere
In the early nineties, a small group of Cuban defectors in Miami established a spy web to infiltrate anti-Castroist terrorist groups carrying out violent attacks on Cuban soil. Olivier Assayas brings his customary style and urgency to this unexpected subject in an epic saga starring Penélope Cruz, Édgar Ramírez, and Gael García Bernal.
U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Diao Yinan on Sept. 29 & Oct. 1
Small-time mob boss Zhou Zenong (the charismatic Hu Ge) is desperate to stay alive after he mistakenly kills a cop and a dead-or-alive reward is put on his head. Chinese director Diao Yinan deftly keeps multiple characters and chronologies spinning, all the while creating an atmosphere thick with eroticism and danger.
North American Premiere · Q&As with Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne on Sept. 30 & Oct. 2
The Dardenne Brothers won this year’s Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for this brave new work, another intimate portrayal-in-furious-motion, about a Muslim teenager in a small Belgian town who is gradually being radicalized into extremism.
The New York Times Critic's Pick
Bertrand Bonello injects urgency and history into the well-worn walking-dead genre with this unconventional plunge into horror-fantasy, moving fluidly between 1962 Haiti, where a young man known as Clairvius Narcisse is made into a zombie by his resentful brother, and a contemporary Paris girls’ boarding school attended by Clairvius’s direct descendant.
