This year's New York Film Festival seems to have fulfilled its brief so well you have to wonder what the programmers will come up with for its 50th anniversary edition next year. 2012 will also mark Richard Peña's 25th year as programming director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and chairman of the NYFF selection committee — and, as he's just announced, his last. "It's been a terrific ride," he told the New York Times' Larry Rohter on Saturday, "but I've had other interests, and it got to the point where I got to thinking about what I want to do with the rest of my working life. It's a good thing for me personally, and also for the organization, because change is good, and it will be good for the organization to have fresh eyes and ideas and new ways of doing things."
For now, though, the 49th edition. Each of the roundups listed here as well as the straggling items below the index will be updated for as long as seems reasonable.
GALAS
Opening Night: Roman Polanski's Carnage. Roundup.
Closing Night: Alexander Payne's The Descendants. Roundup.
Centerpiece: Simon Curtis's My Week with Marilyn. Roundup.
Gala Screenings: Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (roundup) and David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (roundup).
MAIN SLATE
Joseph Cedar's Footnote. Roundup.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Roundup.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Kid with a Bike. Roundup.
Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene. Roundup.
Asghar Farhadi's A Separation. Roundup.
Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth. Roundup.
Mia Hansen-Løve's Goodbye First Love. Roundup.
Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist. Roundup.
Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre. Roundup.
Ulrich Köhler's Sleeping Sickness. Roundup.
Nadav Lapid's Policeman. Roundup.
Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet. Roundup.
Steve McQueen's Shame. Roundup.
Santiago Mitre's The Student. Roundup. Michael Guillén's interview with Mitre.
Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala. Roundup.
Ruben Östlund's Play. Roundup.
Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's This Is Not a Film. Roundup.
Alice Rohrwacher's Corpo celeste. Roundup.
Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Roundup.
Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky's The Turin Horse. Roundup. Daniel Kasman and David Phelps.
Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Roundup.
Wim Wenders's Pina. Roundup.
VIEWS FROM THE AVANT-GARDE
Besides the overall roundup, we've had one on Ben Rivers, another on James Benning's Twenty Cigarettes — see, too, Darren Hughes's interview with Benning — and, as a follow-up to Michael Sicinski's piece, another on Nathaniel Dorsky's The Return.
MASTERWORKS
Along with a roundup on the 37-film series Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses: Celebrating the Nikkatsu Centennial, there's also Daniel Kasman and Doug Dibbern on Tomotaka Tasaka's Mud and Soldiers (1939) and Dan Sallitt on Tomu Uchida's Earth (1939).
Sara Driver's You Are Not I (1981). Roundup.
Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again (1972-2011). Roundup and David Phelps.
SPECIAL EVENTS
"When conceiving Andrew Bird: Fever Year, director Xan Aranda rejected the idea of a biographical film about the folk-rocker," notes Ian Erickson-Kery in the L. "'That is what the internet is for,' said the newly minted director at a post-screening Q&A…. Instead, Aranda sought to 'give the viewer a chance to spend time with [Bird]' through a gently meandering series of live performance clips, interviews, and scenes of Bird rehearsing and living." According to David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, the result is "an affectionate portrait of the Chicagoan multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter as a man both defined and consumed by his craft."
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. Roundup.
Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald). A brief roundup.
Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler's Dreileben. Roundup and Daniel Kasman.
Alex Stapleton's Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel: see the Sundance roundup.
A week into the festival, Cinespect's Ryan Wells spoke with Peter Von Bagh about Sodankylä Forever, his four-part documentary on the Midnight Sun Film Festival, which Von Bagh co-founded with Aki and Mika Kaurismäki. Alt Screen's posted a roundup.
Frederick Wiseman's Crazy Horse. See the Venice/Toronto roundup.
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