by vogue
A highlight of the city’s cultural calendar each year, the New York Film Festival returns to Lincoln Center in all its glory this fall, with a thrilling lineup to boot. From the toasts of Cannes and Venice—films like The Worst Person in the World and The Power of the Dog—to the much-anticipated world premiere of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, NYFF59 should make for an endlessly entertaining two weeks.
Below, Vogue editors and writers round up some of the films they’ve seen so far—and ones they still look forward to catching—at this year’s festival.
The Power of the Dog, dir. Jane Campion
The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s ardently awaited return to feature filmmaking (after a decade-plus hiatus), arrives at the NYFF on a tide of expectation—and it more than delivers. Ravishingly filmed, this period piece, set in lonesome Montana in 1925, tells the story of a wealthy pair of cattle-ranching brothers (played by Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch) who cope with the solitude of their work in very different ways. George (Plemons) is buttoned up to an extreme and only just manages to romance a local widow, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), into marrying him. Phil (Cumberbatch, in a bravura performance which will surely win him an Oscar) is unbridled and terrifyingly intelligent—and wants nothing to do with his brother’s conventionality. George’s bride arrives with a teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose graceful mannerisms and quiet confidence unbalance the film in unexpected ways. Loaded with tension, both violent and sexual, The Power of the Dog is strikingly observed portrait of human yearning. —Taylor Antrim
Benedetta, dir. Paul Verhoeven
Lesbian nuns! Stigmata! Masturbation! The Black Death! Benedetta, the gloriously blasphemous new film from Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Paul Verhoeven, set in a 17th-century convent, is certainly not for everyone. But if you like to mix your high with your low, and if your embarrassment-tolerance will permit some rather outré sex scenes, give Benedetta a try. At my NYFF screening, the packed audience had a terrific time, laughing at the outrageous and unashamed-of-itself script (co-written by David Birke, who also wrote Verhoeven’s 2016 thriller Elle). Starring Virginie Efira and Daphne Patakia as two amorous young nuns who have no interest in Catholic strictures—and Charlotte Rampling as their censorious abbess—Benedetta is so uninhibited, and so committed to immodesty, that you can’t help but give into it. —T.A.
The Velvet Underground, dir. Todd Haynes
The Velvet Underground, filmmaker Todd Haynes’s first full-length documentary, is less a biopic of the legendary band—fronted by Lou Reed and, at least for a time, managed and produced by Andy Warhol—than it is an atmospheric immersion into the post-beatnik and proto-counter-culture New York of the mid-and-late-1960s from which the band emerged. The film features a nearly constant collage of multiple moving images on the screen (most consistently, a Warhol Screen Test of whoever the film is focusing on at the moment)—which either adds texture or prevents you from focusing on the matter more directly at hand. If you’re coming to the band for the first time here, it might be worth reading a quick thumbnail of highlights beforehand—Haynes doesn’t hold your hand so much as he gives you a contact high. —Corey Seymour
More from the festival:
The Tragedy of Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s first feature film without his brother, Ethan, also at the helm—unites Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as Lord and Lady Macbeth, two of the most fascinatingly drawn characters in all of Shakespeare. (As a refresher, the Bard’s play follows Macbeth’s bloody usurpation of the Scottish throne—aided and abetted by his wife—after three witches prophesize that he will be king.) In a recent interview with Deadline, McDormand recalled first reading and performing Macbeth as a middle schooler. “I did the sleepwalking scene and a couple of the witches’ scenes. Literally, now I know that was when the hook went in and it’s never gone out, in terms of wanting to be an actor,” she said. “And I just kind of pursued that my entire life.” She added that Coen’s adaptation, shot in brooding black and white, would have a slightly different bent to it, given the lead actors’ ages. (McDormand is 64 and Washington is 66.) “I’m really glad I waited [to play Lady Macbeth] because it also led us to this interpretation that I think is really fascinating,” McDormand said. “That is one of an older couple who is at the end of their ambition rather than at the beginning.”
The Worst Person in the World
A big hit at Cannes this year, where star Renate Reinsve won best actress, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World follows a young woman named Julie as she tries (and often fails) to make sense of her place in the world—professionally, romantically, and otherwise. Wrote Variety’s Guy Lodge in July: “As this melancholic romantic comedy faithfully follows its capricious protagonist through thick, thin and (mostly) somewhere in between, it turns into something lovely and wise: a gentle, unhurried paean to unrest and indecision, to making life wait, for better and worse.”
The Lost Daughter
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Claiming the prize for best screenplay at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sultry and suspenseful directorial debut, stars Olivia Colman as Leda, a professor whose idyllic vacation in Greece is interrupted by a loud American family. (The film is based on Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel of the same name.) IndieWire’s Jessica Kiang gave it a glowing review, writing, “Gyllenhaal’s film…is made with such alertness to the power of cinematic language—particularly that of performance—that even as you feel your stomach slowly drop at the implications of what you’re watching, you cannot break its spreading sinister spell.” Jessie Buckley (as Leda’s younger self), Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Mescal, and Dagmara Dominczyk co-star.
The Souvenir Part II
New York Film Festival 2021 What Weve Seen—and Cant Wait to See
Photo: Josh Barratt
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A sequel to The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s moving (and deeply personal) 2019 film about a film student (Honor Swinton Byrne) in a sometimes suffocating, sometime scary, sometimes sublime relationship with an older man (the wonderful Tom Burke), The Souvenir Part II sees Swinton Byrne’s Julie attempt to turn that experience into a film. Tilda Swinton, Swinton Byrne’s mother and Hogg’s longtime friend, reprises her role as Julie’s mother, Rosalind. While Hogg has acknowledged the strong autobiographical undertones in The Souvenir, its follow-up’s focus on the creative endeavor makes it quite a distinct (and occasionally surreal) story. “This entire project was always about remembering as much as possible from that time,” she says in the new film’s press notes. “But Part II became more about invention and my imagination than about remembering, and because of that, it came to feel like a completely different film.”
Bergman Island
In Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, a filmmaking couple—Tim Roth’s Tony and Vicky Krieps’s Chris—visits Fårö, Ingmar Bergman’s longtime home, for creative inspiration one summer, and the facts and fictions of their personal and professional lives become hopelessly confused. As the film progresses, two parallel narratives emerge: Tony/Chris’s and Amy/Joseph’s (Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie), the characters in Chris’s screenplay whose story somewhat mirrors her own. Says Hansen-Løve, “Bergman Island is probably my first film that somehow got written ‘all by itself,’ without the pain I usually feel during the writing process.” (Her last film to appear at NYFF was 2016’s affecting Things to Come.) She continues: “I felt like doors that had been locked so far were opening and that the island made it possible. For the first time, I felt I had the freedom to move playfully between different dimensions—past, present, reality within fiction or fiction within reality.”
Drive My Car
New York Film Festival 2021 What Weve Seen—and Cant Wait to See
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Based on Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name, Drive My Car—the latest from Japanese auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi—centers on a theater director, Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and his knotty relationships with three different people: Oto (Reika Kirishima), his writer wife; Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), the handsome actor with whom Oto has an affair; and Misaki (Tôko Miura), the woman hired as his chauffeur while he mounts a production of Uncle Vanya. “Drive My Car is an expansion of a short story, and perhaps it’s true to say that Hamaguchi’s storytelling aesthetic here, as in his other films, is a mosaic or choreography of short stories, an archipelago of lives,” observed Peter Bradshaw in his review in the Guardian.
C’mon C’mon
In C’mon C’mon—Mike Mills’s first feature film since 20th Century Women in 2016—Joaquin Phoenix is Johnny, a radio journalist tasked with watching his young nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman). Together, the pair road-trips across the country—Johnny is on assignment, interviewing young people about the state of the world—and grows ever closer in the process. “We’ve seen plenty of films in which an independent person is suddenly saddled with a child; it’s become a hoary film trope, sometimes used effectively, but very often in service of the most basic themes,” Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson noted when the film premiered at Telluride. “Mills makes this genre feel new and insightful.” Gaby Hoffmann co-stars as Viv, Johnny’s sister and Jesse’s mother.
The 59th New York Film Festival runs from September 24 to October 10. For ticketing information, visit here.
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