Festival poster by Pedro Almodóvar and Juan Gatti.
Below you will find an index of our coverage of films showing at the 2019 57th New York Film Festival, which runs September 27–October 13, 2019:
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)
In a tale whose ending is essentially telegraphed from the first few minutes, Marriage Story thrums with the energy of some pulsating organ. It’s a deeply personal journey that ultimately transcends the couple at its center, precisely because it understands both halves down to their innermost quirks. Baumbach (here again on double writer-director duty) has possibly never penned anything this stellar, a script where screwball comedy chuckles teem with tragedy. But it is the perfect symbiosis between writing, directing, and Jennifer Lame’s work in the editing room that allows the plot to shift tones in the time that lasts an hairsbreadth, with scenes that carom off excruciatingly funny segments to others of lacerating sadness.
—Review by Leonardo Goi
Atlantics (Mati Diop)
The story may sound complex, but in fact Diop is swimming easily among archetypes and conventions—traditional values vs. modern, the desire to stay home and the yearning the leave, religion and consumerism—and sometimes Atlantics feels like a short film well-elaborated. But in its modesty and its details it is sweet and exquisite. Told in a gentle poetic realism, the film makes swift and precise observations about Ada, her two sets of friends (devout and partiers), the two men on her life, and her limited options, evoking her emotional tenor with ease and sensitivity. [...] Ada’s anguish rends softly and the film feels caught in a dream that hazes between despair and yearning. This in-betweenness is Atlantics' great triumph, refusing to side with one part of Ada’s world or the other, or indeed with the sea’s forever promise of a different life beyond it. Whether leaving or staying, the sea will always be there.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles)
Bacurau is a constant, mutating surprise. Despite an introductory scene of young female doctor returning to her village to deliver supplies that quickly sketches a region in Brazil “a few years from now” whose water supply has been cut off, whose roads are inoperable, where a local bandit seems to be at large, and where the government presence is limited to a shilling mayor hated by the population, the exact situation in Bacurau or indeed in Brazil is cryptic and suggestive. Clearly it is analogous to now, although in what specific way it is hard to say. But its state can be read in the town’s needs: food, medicine...and coffins.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
[...] You hear stories about films and about how people work [with locals] and we wanted to avoid some of the mistakes that we know are made. We never changed anyone, we never made them say anything that they would never say or would not feel natural saying. We just fell in love with the way they were, and they’re in the film. Sometimes somebody was so amazing that we even developed a scene just for him to be in the scene. It was a very special moment, and I can tell you also that some of these people, they were normally—in their lives—they were outcasts of their communities. Sometimes some gay woman or some gay man was an outcast, and for three months they were… this is something they told us, that they were respected in a way they had never been respected.
—Kleber Mendonça Filho, in an interview with Daniel Kasman
Beanpole (Kantemir Balegov)
Despite the historical setting, Beanpole lacks the social denseness of Balagov’s first film, so rooted in its claustrophobic, fraught relationship between the city of Nalchik’s Kabardian population and its Jewish minority. This thinness renders the melodrama of the new film more abstract: Its power games of intimacy and fulfillment take place in a world rebooted, with lives rebuilt from memory, longing, and hope for the future. Such is its intense intimacy and Balagov's expressive use of colors, textures, and Stalin-era close-quarters housing that Beanpole, despite its wider canvas, often feels like a chamber drama or kammerspiel. Both women have damaged minds, damaged psyches, damaged bodies—the extent of which we grow to discover, but never to fully comprehend. What either of these women want from each other or from themselves refuses to be pinned down: identity, desires, and yearning remain a post-war confusion, but the heartache is never less than vivid.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
I Was At Home, But... (Angela Schanalec)
[...] Schanalec’s cinema is as uncompromising as ever—and as expressive. Bookended by metaphoric scenes of a dog chasing a hare and then devouring it under the benign, watchful eye of a donkey, I Was at Home, But… then moves to Berlin to elliptically tell a story of a young widow and mother of two who quivers on the edge of a breakdown after her teenage son runs away. Told in the more fragmented style the director used in The Dreamed Path—the donkey is a rather obvious reference to Bresson, whose ellipses and isolation of unexpected but pertinent images are very much an inspiration here—the film skips over much conventional exposition in order to pinpoint and expose a very raw emotional nerve and general disconsolation that runs through all the film’s characters, and not only the fraught mother (Maren Eggert).
—Review by Daniel Kasman
Liberté (Albert Serra)
While the premise of the film is theoretical and abstract, what follows throughout this chilled out viewing experience is very simple: immersing us in indolent atmosphere of fetid sexuality, evoked through Serra’s typically beautiful and unique quality of digital photography, here mottled in dark shadows and the knubbily textures of foliage and 18th century embroidery. Mostly men (mostly elderly, mostly ugly) touch themselves over their clothing or watching others do it, and some women (all young and beautiful, as well as more exposed) are fondled, licked, and whipped in a slow escalation to more extreme acts that makes up the film’s only sense of narrative movement or time passing. [...] The post-1990s trends of extreme minimalism in art-cinema often has a problem of distinguishing the difference between a subject and form slender enough for a short film and one robust enough for a feature film, and this is a problem that besets Liberté. Despite its vulgarity, the film never feels as audacious or daring as I sense Serra thinks it is.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
The film is about a utopia of sexual liberation, with no difference between people: no women or men, servants or masters, handsome or ugly people. A perfect, yet strange, dark utopia: a total fraternity of bodies. [...] The implicit subject, this play of hiding/showing, of what is seen, dreamed or imagined, like an unconscious optic: what you have really seen and what you think you have. Between the concrete and the strange, psychological. It's like when you start to dream: you're not exactly asleep, but you start to feel that you are entering another world. You are suddenly part in reality, part in the reality of the dream. I feel the film is in this middle, but then again, it's violent, it's dark, it's about frustration and the impossibility of this utopia of sexual freedom, sexual fraternity.
—Albert Serra, in an interview with Flavia Dima
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)
Times are a-changing; a palpable tension bursts across the city’s stuccoed villas down to its peripheries; new political movements are on the rise, and the air is packed with the sound of strikes and protests. That Martin Eden should sponge up so much of that effervescent zeitgeist and pivot so heavily on its politics is hardly a surprise. This is not quite simply a writer’s Bildungsroman, it’s portrait of an artist-cum-militant as a young man. Penned by Marcello and Maurizio Braucci, Martin Eden unfolds as an intellectual battleground, where characters meander through History, and conflict springs out their irreconcilable worldviews. It’s a film of disquisitions, of debates and arguments, of struggles over theories and beliefs. It’s a jazzy, sophisticated, sometimes hermetic journey, but all its weighty intellectualism is cleverly reined in by Marcello's mesmeric blurring of past and present, and by an outstanding performance from Luca Marinelli as lead, pouring rage and energy into a timeless anti-hero.
—Review by Leonardo Goi
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho)
Parasite, by contrast, is a film of virtuosity: Bong Joon-ho directs each scene, sequence, and the film itself with a precision, dexterity, and effectiveness as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. It is not. I wrote in my festival introduction lamenting where a filmmaker like John Carpenter could be found at Cannes in this day and age, and lo and behold, Bong has not just raised his hand but leapt up eager to prove himself one of the master storytellers of popular cinema. Parasite is thrilling in its deft ingenuity and razor sharp in its critique, the perfect buffer in Cannes’ competition against more strained examples of art and prestige cinema.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)
Portrait may well zero in on two characters, but there is nothing minimalistic about it. There is a whole life in every small gesture that brings the two girls closer, a whole cauldron of hopes and expectations in that terrified “do all lovers feel as though they’re inventing something?” Héloïse asks Marianne—the first lover she’s ever had. Gorgeously shot by Claire Mathon, alternating glacial daytime hues with a candlelit palette that don faces the sensual beauty of some Caravaggio paintings, and enriched by Dorothée Guiraud’s costumes, Portrait is a joy for the eyes. It is a film of quiet pleasures that percolates with the sadness of an inevitable goodbye—telegraphed from the opening shot, and still devastatingly powerful when it is finally conjured up.
—Review by Leonardo Goi
Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye)
Opening on a duly Pirandellian note of characters playing characters, Lou Ye’s espionage thriller unfolds in the “isolated island” of Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1941, where the return of a famous movie and theater star (Gong Li) serves as the center of a welter of overlapping intrigues. Spinning like plates in the air are the old flame director (Mark Chao), the jailed ex-husband (Zhang Songwen), the adoring fan with a whiff of All About Eve (Huang Xiangli), the weaselly producer (Wang Chuanjun), and the paternal French agent with a treasured first copy of Goethe (Pascal Greggory), just to name a few. To this congested ensemble Lou adds performances within performances (scenes from a play are repeatedly woven into the narrative) and a busy soundscape of clashing languages, eavesdropping recorders, and clattering decoders. Yet for all the perpetual motion and clamor, there’s no concealing the static void at the center of a film that mistakes clutter and muddle for complexity and profundity.
—Review by Fernando F. Croce
Synonyms (Nadav Lapid)
Let’s say the demon he’s running away from is an Israeli demon. Maybe it could have been a different demon? But in the film it’s an Israeli demon, or Israeli politics, or an Israeli soul. When I think about it, he’s not running away, it’s not political in the narrow sense of the term, because it’s not like if tomorrow there would have been a different prime minister and he had done this, this and this, that he would have said: “oh, great!” He’s running away, I think, from the existential melody of Israel, the music from its soul. And this soul, I think, is characterized by strong men with muscular bodies and unlimited devotion and love for the country. And he’s an extremely athletic man who has an unlimited hate for his country, attracted also by these strong [Israeli] men [living in Paris] who love their country, and at the same time, hating them. So I think the body is the contradiction inside this project, and it’s not an accident that he’s trying to annihilate his own body throughout the movie.
—Nadav Lapid, in an interview with Daniel Kasman
To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
For TV show host Yoko (Atsuko Maeda), a trip to Uzbekistan becomes a transformative journey that illuminates dividing lines between occupations and passions, labor and leisure. Accompanied by a small crew and guide, she endures tourist activities (including a terrifying amusement park ride and an uncooked dish of food) that, through repeated takes and dissatisfied shouts of "Cut!", are overwhelmingly alienating. On camera, she must always perform enjoyment as a vessel for the audience's projection. Kurosawa's transition between the on-screen smile and off-screen sigh, however, should not be confused for a disparagement of television. There are demands of the content; but these do not diminish the significance of a life constructed by and comprehended through media. And in the number of cameras it uses in a single scene, To the Ends of the Earth at times invokes the meta-narrative of William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. Rather, the central production (a rocky affair, but nothing unusual for its genre) serves as a means of comparison to Yoko's own picture of Uzbekistan.
—Review by Kelley Dong
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
Vitalina Varela is far and away the best new film at the festival, taking the most risk, running the most difficult course of existence, devoted with every ounce of its being to the compassionate transmission of another’s experience. The Portuguese filmmaker’s last feature, Horse Money, won the Best Director award in Locarno in 2014, and while this new film doesn’t have the imaginative range of that masterpiece—which was rendered in a remarkable pulses of memories, dreams, nightmares, and history—and feels somewhat uneven in its editing despite its compellingly singular subject, Vitalina Varela is nevertheless a film of fierce determination and paramount resonance.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas)
An agile problem-solver like Steven Soderbergh, Assayas is also a cine-sensualist à la Michael Mann: Linking his dot-like characters across continents, he luxuriates in vast swathes of sky and ocean and jets whooshing across the screen. Too often, however, Wasp Network feels diaphanous, incomplete, like a mini-series compressed into two hours. (There is an information-dump montage midway through, scored to “Wipeout” and pockmarked with freeze-frames, that in all honesty feels like the director stepped out for a smoke and handed the camera to the first person he bumped into.) As I write this, I learn that Assayas will be presenting a different edit of the film for its showing at the New York Film Festival. I’m very interested in the version—possibly tighter, possibly more elliptical—that will emerge.
—Review by Fernando F. Croce
The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan)
It’s a largely nocturnal world, Diao’s China, a welter of leaky basements and motels and noddle shops or, in an uncanny moment, simply a darkened road where headlights briefly appear, tantalizingly weave, and vanish. (Seen under pale sunlight, a beach seems like a perverse travesty of the site of relaxation it’s supposed to be, the way nightclubs pop up like mirages in Edgar G. Ulmer’s films.) Diao sets up scenes languidly only to splinter them with violent flurries, a meeting between gangs giving way to a kaleidoscopic rumble or a terse confrontation in a closed zoo punctuated by abrupt views of a pensive caged tiger or an elephant’s darting eyeball. Equally strikingly, he draws parallels between characters on opposite sides of the law—hoods gathered for lessons in thievery are rhymed with cops being briefed on a dragnet, and again with laborers running a lottery to see who gets to work. Moody and muscular, The Wild Goose Lake posits connection only in its characters’ shades of fatalistic desperation.
—Review by Fernando F. Croce
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
Zombi Child is not a horror film—unless one perhaps rightfully sees the faint consciousness of colonial legacies in new generations horrific, at least intellectually. The film takes a bold and mostly earned gambit in so juxtaposing past and present, Haiti and boarding school, black and white, man and woman, and the struggle to return to life with the struggle of first love. [...] The film daringly asks what could this young white French woman of today, with her passionate adolescent love, have to do with Haiti, with the island’s traditions, and with its history of exploitation and misery, and with its ultimate independence. In a bravura finale, shifting cuts between all parts and thereby inextricably syncing them across times, countries, desires, and histories, the film convincingly suggests that people can change and things can get better.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
I like the age of the characters, it’s very… they’re not bad girls, they’re just ignorant, and very naive and very into their little stuff. Of course at first I was a little scared to compare slavery and a boyfriend that leaves you, but it was the risk, and I hope we understand both stuff. At one moment the girl says, "is my pain not good because I’m white and healthy?" And she’s right to question that. It’s OK that her pain is very painful. But she has to be aware of other things.
—Bertrand Bonello, in an interview with Daniel Kasman
Joker (Todd Phillips)
The Gotham City where Phillips stages the Joker’s ascent has the gritty looks of a 1970s-era New York, a crime-ridden turf where garbage strikes and “super-rats” invasions echo the grim aura of scum-infested streets De Niro’s Travis Bickle’s drove around in Taxi Driver. In a movie that’s so indebted to Scorsese’s vision—where nods of Taxi Driver, Mean Streets and King of Comedy abound—the references strike less as a cinephile’s homages and more as cinematic detritus amassed to strengthen the film’s credentials. Joker begs to be taken seriously, and if the drama thrives on Phoenix’s performance (far more convincing when he improvises off his character’s insanity than when he seems to resuscitate his Freddie Quell from The Master), it is when it tosses some social commentary and lays bare a clumsily sketched political subtext that all its self-importance feels all the more troublesome.
—Review by Leonardo Goi
Endless Night (Eloy Enciso)
Eloy Enciso’s Endless Night pointedly blurs the line between past and present to evoke the continuity between today’s Spain—economically unstable, politically uneasy, historically blinkered—and Galicia of the Franco dictatorship following the Civil War. [...] Following the films of Straub-Huillet and Pedro Costa, Enciso is using non-professional actors reciting pre-existing texts in order to re-interpret the ideologies, class and economic disparity, anger, and trauma of older times into a new work of today. The costumes and mise-en-scène could be from now or any time in the 20th century, as Enciso pointedly hangs his film in a nebulous region whose somber shadows stretch across the decades, suggesting the legacy of Franco’s era, of its violence and repression, and of its rationalization and valorization, is hardly over and done with or indeed separate from contemporary neoliberal Spain. No: One lives within the other, the repercussions of the past echo and sound in the present.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
The connection between our grandparent's generation and my own experience was more and more evident to me, between the failure of the ones who lose the war and the need to assume the lie behind the maxim my generation grow up with: "we need to forget to move on." The film is an attempt to re-link them, but not from an historic interest, not to show what happened (facts from the past) but how it happened. Getting close to this idea that [Jean-Marie] Straub often says: "to make a revolution also means to put back into place things that are ancient but forgotten." The feeling that sometimes the past is a better mirror to understand today's reality than the actual present because the way things happen, "the method" as one character says in the film, is the same and it is easier to see that from a distance.
—Eloy Enciso, in an interview with Gustavo Beck
Heimat is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise)
A majestic essay film whose scope is national and historical but whose address is deeply personal, Heimat Is a Space in Time tells the 20th century family history of the director through letters and diary entries. These remarkable documents, deeply evocative and wonderfully written, narrate in their own way the 20th century history of Germany, starting before the First World War and moving into the economic catastrophe of Weimar Republic, the increasingly terrifying and oppressive policies under the Nazis, and then segueing into life in East Germany, where Heise’s father was a notable philosopher. These convulsive historical epochs breath in every word of the correspondence and entries that Heise himself reads, but the first encounter with the texts are individual first and foremost. They tell of love (and love affairs), of the yearning for family across borders (some family members are in Vienna while others are in Germany), of fear, of socialist ideals, of children—in short, of the whole gamut of human life on the personal level, emotive, dramatic, confessional, posturing, placating, and brutally honest.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
The Tree House (Truong Minh Quý)
A collage between diary film, ethnography, and experimental portrait, Truong mixes 16mm shooting of forest hills, old habitations in caves, and ethnic mausoleums, with archive footage and interviews with adults remembering their upbringing outside modern society in order to create an evocative but purposefully inconclusive essay on a precarious indigenous existence. [...] We are introduced to details and echoes of older, marginalized, and isolated traditions and cultures already in the process of being sanded down, losing their original ways of living, their languages, and possibly their memories. The Tree House isn’t aiming to preserve these things, but rather to reveal fragments of what remains and pay homage to their fragile present. While the film’s shape is a bit of a hodgepodge, it admits to the open-ended nature of its project and the sense that a great deal of this human culture and experience is already beyond the reach of the cinema.
—Review by Daniel Kasman
Amusement Ride (Tomonari Nishikawa)
Amusement Ride only seems to move in one direction, since Nishikawa's clipped editing only provides the upward gestures (or takes the downward shots and includes them upside down—a distinct possibility). This takes the ordinary, vernacular movements of the Ferris wheel and defamiliarizes them, turns them into criss-crossed metallic "flips" of a Rolodex. In a way, Amusement Ride differs from many of Nishikawa's recent films, such as Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, 45 7 Broadway, or Shibuya-Tokyo, in that it doesn't foreground technique so dramatically. It is more about direct perception than process.
—Review by Michael Sicinski
Who is Afraid of Ideology? (Marwa Arsanios)
As topical and interesting as Ideology’s subject may be, there is very little formal innovation in it, or at least in Part 2. What is strange is that, in Part 1, Arsanios spends 18 minutes exploring the philosophical and theoretical connections between human beings and nature—the humanist notion the earth is a space we merely occupy, versus more radical-materialist ecological concepts of stewardship and connectedness. In addition, she manipulates the sound/image relationship, denaturalizing cinematic realism. This prologue certainly complicates the straightforward quality of Part 2. Why the festival couldn’t find the time to program the whole thing is rather mysterious. Maybe someone is afraid of ideology after all.
—Review by Michael Sicinski
SaF05 (Charlotte Prodger)
As conceptually rich as SaF05 undoubtedly is, there are ways in which it falls short. I tend to think this may pertain to Prodger's translation of the work from an installation—it was Scotland's entry at the Venice Biennale—to a single channel work. There are moments of abstraction—a flaring light bulb, a Paul Sharits-like color flicker—that seem out of place, and the landscape material tends to feel a bit disorganized. Nevertheless, SaF05 is a work of sensitivity and wisdom, a timely butch roar.
—Review by Michael Sicinski
The Bite (Pedro Neves Marques)
The Bite is a film that, in truth, might have been better suited to the international section of Short Cuts than Wavelengths. Marques is indeed a talented filmmaker with a languid, atmospheric style that is still under construction. He achieves some complex tonal structures in his sound design, creating more continuity than one might expect between the laboratory space and the mosquito-tented countryside where three lovers share a home environment. And the film is refreshingly nonchalant in its depiction of queer sexuality and trans bodies. Nevertheless, The Bite feels a bit truncated, like a demonstration of ideas that might operate more satisfactorily at feature length. With its Apichatpong-like approach to spatial relations and an ambiance reminiscent of João Pedro Rodrigues, The Bite clearly shows that its maker is onto something. But what we're seeing are just early symptoms of a syndrome that is still in the process of metastasizing.
—Review by Michael Sicinski
Hrvoji, Look at You From the Tower (Ryan Ferko)
Ferko is in a sense playing with the coupling and disunion of the former republics, cutting them together through montage (and through his travels) but arranging them in a way that emphasizes discontinuity. Sound design works to underscore this, with tracking shots matched with the noise of table tennis, or roving landscapes combined with a man talking about his love for the music of Leslie West and Mountain. In terms of shot composition and organization, Ferko displays an influence from certain key modernist masters, such as Cy Twombly, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr. But there's a bold, original voice that comes through in Hrvoji, perhaps more clearly than in any of his previous films. This is a work that feels so exacting that even the hand-held trembling of the image seems to bolster the overall formal agenda of the work. An impressive achievement.
—Review by Michael Sicinski
(tourism studies) (Joshua Gen Solondz)
(tourism studies) ultimately asks us to reflect on the epistemology for a unifying film form, one that assigns all images an equal value, making of them a kind of crypto-currency. (It is notable that Solondz alters the pattern at the end, focusing on a young woman's face. This signals a personal relationship to the person envisaged, even if none really exists.) From the news media to the Internet, an all-encompassing, unified form tends to flatten existential differences, turning everything around us into a consumable sight. How can we live this way, Solondz seems to ask, forever up in the air, perpetually at sea?
—Review by Michael Sicinski
A Topography of Memory (Burak Çevik)
Topography of Memory is actually a bit slier and more disturbing in its presentation of recent history. There is a disphasure in Çevik's presentation of sound and image: while the audio is from the day of the election, the images are from the evening of the day after, when Erdogan's victory has been sealed. What does Istanbul look like? There are no celebrations, to be sure. But more significantly, there is virtually no public existence, no sense of the freedom of movement. All of the city is "under his eye."
—Review by Michael Sicinski