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Spotlight

NYFF’s showcase of the season’s most anticipated and significant films.

Belle

  • Mamoru Hosoda
  • 2021
  • Japan
  • 121 minutes
  • Japanese with English subtitles
In his densely beautiful, eye-popping animated spectacle, Mirai director Mamoru Hosoda tells the exhilarating story of a shy teenager who becomes an online sensation as a magical pop star named Belle in a parallel virtual universe known as the “U."

C’mon C’mon

  • Mike Mills
  • 2021
  • 108 minutes

Q&A with Mike Mills, Joaquin Phoenix, and Molly Webster on Oct. 4

A soulful Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a kindhearted radio journalist taking care of his sister’s troubled young son while trying to complete a project in writer-director Mike Mills’s latest effort, another warm, insightful, and gratifyingly askew portrait of American family life.

Dune

  • Denis Villeneuve
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 155 minutes

Q&A with Denis Villeneuve and Hans Zimmer on Oct. 7 and an extended intro from Villeneuve on Oct. 8

A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding in visionary filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel.

The French Dispatch

  • Wes Anderson
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 107 minutes
  • English and French with English subtitles

North American Premiere · Q&A at October 2 screening

As brimming with finely tuned texture as a juicy issue of a vintage magazine, The French Dispatch features precision work from a full masthead of collaborators, with director Wes Anderson’s deadpan whimsy complementing the film’s palpable sense of nostalgia.

Jane by Charlotte

  • Charlotte Gainsbourg
  • 2021
  • France
  • 86 minutes
  • French with English subtitles

North American Premiere

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s wise and wondrous film about her legendary mother, Jane Birkin, consists of several intimate conversations between parent and child, affording a spare, loving window into the emotional lives of two women as they talk about subject matter that ranges from the delightful to the difficult.

The Lost Daughter

  • Maggie Gyllenhaal
  • 2021
  • USA/Greece
  • 121 minutes

Q&A with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jessie Buckley, Olivia Colman, Ed Harris, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal, Peter Sarsgaard, and Dagmara Dominczyk on Sept. 29

In her striking feature directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts a 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante about Leda (brilliantly played by Oscar-winner Olivia Colman), a divorced professor on a solitary summer vacation who becomes intrigued and then oddly involved in the lives of another family she meets there.

Marx Can Wait

  • Marco Bellocchio
  • 2021
  • Italy
  • 95 minutes
  • Italian with English subtitles

North American Premiere

In his most achingly personal film to date, legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio uses the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the suicide his twin brother Camillo.

Red Rocket

  • Sean Baker
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 128 minutes

Q&A with Sean Baker, Bree Elrod, Judy Hill, Simon Rex, Brittney Rodriguez, and Suzanna Son on Sept. 29

Adding to his gallery of jet-fueled portraits of economic hardship within marginalized pockets of the U.S., director Sean Baker trains his restless camera on Mikey, a wildly narcissistic former porn star who has returned from L.A. to his depressed, postindustrial hometown of Texas City.

The Souvenir

  • Joanna Hogg
  • 2019
  • UK/USA
  • 119 minutes
Joanna Hogg mines her own autobiography to craft a portrait of the artist as a young woman in early 1980s London. An eminently refined and moving bildungsroman about the ties that inexplicably bind, The Souvenir—as its title suggests—is also an absorbing evocation of a time, place, and national mood.