New York Film Festival 58 Review Feature
For fifty-eight years, the New York Film Festival has been a bellwether for cinema. For years, it has illuminated films from across the globe and shaped how we perceive film. Despite the coronavirus preventing the traditional in-person event, the resilient team at Lincoln Center still managed to put on this year’s iteration with stunning success and continuing to be one of the gold standards in film festivals. The combination of drive-ins and, more importantly, a well-executed virtual cinema made this year’s incarnation more accessible than ever before, including for us.
From the safety of our homes and on the other side of the country, we were able to watch selections from the 58th New York Film Festival and provide coverage for a handful of films. Below you’ll find all our coverage in one place with links to our full reviews. Scroll through, find some films of interest to add to your watchlist, and be on the look out for their releases later this year!
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On the Rocks
“Wrap all this in the sheen of New York. With all its verticality and sprawl, its concrete and glass, its vibrancy and flare, Coppola’s camera sets her characters against their environment in a similar manor to that of Tokyo in Lost in Translation. The city is alive, complete with the hustle and bustle you would expect from The Big Apple, but while the city that never sleeps moves around Laura, you feel an even greater sense of her stagnation, a desire to feel like you’re moving in sync with the city, but constantly falling out of pace; New York is place where something’s always happening, but for Laura, it doesn’t quite feel that way.
Maybe it’s the routine of motherhood taking its toll after its twelfth year. Or maybe the inability to strike up a second act in her writing career. Or maybe it’s a slowing love life that fails to spark. Most of Coppola’s oeuvre centers around perspective of young women — think The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, even Somewhere to some degree — but On the Rocks is now taking that perspective and aging it, engaging with a more mature perspective that comes when you turn the corner on 39. While Lost in Translation may be the go to connection because of the presence of Bill Murray (and make no mistake there are valid parallels to draw) Somewhere is the true compliment, both in thematic connection and evolution.
Both are mid-life crisis films, but this feels more immediate to Coppola now. While Somewhere spotlighted a waning celebrity father figure who’s lurid view of women shapes how he sees his daughter, On the Rocks is as if that narrative advanced thirty years and shifted focus to the daughter. Now in her late thirties, the ongoing conversations and experiences Laura shares with her father ends up shaping how she now sees other male figures in her life. Is it possible that Laura’s husband is cheating on her in the same way that her own father cheated on her mother, disrupting the family unit and generating domestic trauma in the process? Perhaps, but her relationship with Felix has distorted the way she sees her husband. Without being reductive, it is classic “daddy issues” manifesting themselves in the present.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Greg Arietta
Nomadland
“After Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider, writer/director Chloé Zhao continues to take her camera into the rarest of places in Nomadland. Simultaneously turning the lens out wide over the vast American West and also inwards on the human spirit, she manages to capture great swaths of emotion. Pulling from Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century,” the film is a loosely structured character study of Fern, a widow in her sixties living in a camper van. Portrayed by Frances McDormand, Fern forges her own path across the country in a way that feels almost more documented than scripted.
“I’m not homeless. I’m just… houseless,” her reasoning is confidently put, but barely conceals her melancholy. “Not the same thing, right?”
Fern has left the last possessions of a previous existence in a freezing storage unit, and is setting off on a drive. She coasts through seasonal work across the United States harvesting beets, scooping chili, and cleaning rest stop bathrooms. She is entirely alone, and very purposefully so. Her relationships with others are fleeting, but she’s never without a wry smile and a humble generosity that’s effortlessly conjured by McDormand. Through subtle moments, Fern is characterized as a fastidious and capable individual, outfitting her unassuming vehicle, “Vanguard,” to serve as her entire home. It is quickly apparent that her traveling is no vacation road trip but rather a weary roving with no set destination. At times it is extremely daunting to watch her navigate the bleak desolation she has chosen for herself. Nestled beneath a pile of blankets in only the glow of a Christmas Santa lamp, she has no choice but to wait out a snowstorm, until a gas station attendant shouts that she must move the van. With the knowledge that a flat tire or stalled engine could have severe bodily consequences, the grave concern with which others regard her feels all the more authentic.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Megan Bernovich
Lover’s Rock
“Finally, the right needle drop arrives with Kay’s ‘Silly Games’ making a dramatic reappearance. The discrete groups of dancers intermingle as individuals pair off, McQueen’s camera going in tight to find bodies in arms. The living room feels like an entire universe unto itself, an oasis of locked eyes, swaying hips, and whispers in ears. Through the haze of the constant smoke, the hypnotically scanning camera finds snippets of each member’s own story of the night. For Martha, it means accepting Franklyn’s (Micheal Ward) invitation to dance, finding rhythm with someone else before the morning comes.
Lovers Rock, named for the style of reggae music that comprises the soundtrack, gives us a 70’s and 80’s aesthetic feast. The textured burgundy and amber textiles of the time-period accompany McQueen’s crystal clear camera aim to transport us back decades. But Lovers Rock is at its most potent when the music cuts. When the last flanging guitar of ‘Silly Games’ fades, the crowd takes it upon themselves to sing it again without accompaniment— not wanting the moment to end. Here, Steve McQueen’s patented long takes take center stage as the entirety of the a cappella rendition is shown in real time. In his past works, McQueen’s extended sequences in Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave have frequently been utilized to highlight the most pernicious moments. Here, we bask in joy, in delight, and in the powerful community as they escape with music, the pairs on the dance floor crooning in unison, ‘I’ve been wanting you. For so long, it's a shame.’”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Kevin Conner
The Human Voice
“‘These are the rules of the game… the law of desire.’ Like a hammer, in a flurry of appeals, a nameless woman states an inherent universal truth to romance: to experience love also means to know of its heartbreak. Dumped by her five-year lover who left her for another flame, we find our lead on an evening of despair. Love has come and gone, and now, as like the rules dictate, it is time for the heartache to begin.
Within the confines of Pedro Almodóvar’s adaption of The Human Voice, we find an exploration of this period. Based on Jean Cocteau’s single-act play, La Voix humaine, we are given thirty minutes to see this vulnerable state through and observe the headspace created by the absence of love. Like the play, the short (largely) takes place within the woman’s apartment as she makes her final case to her ex-lover over the phone. You cannot hear the man on the other end, only the words of woman, staging a form of voyeuristic eavesdropping not unlike that of a loud phone conversation out in public. It is a messy and taxing conversation, full of daggers and harsh words, but Almodóvar seems in to be interested in exploring the folds of this romantic void — a void that, as our nameless woman will learn, is not easily filled nor navigated with rational grace.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Greg Arietta
The French Exit
“It only takes one visit from her financial advisor to turn Frances Price’s (Michelle Pfeiffer) life upside down. For years, she’s been living off the fortune of her deceased husband where the spoils of New York high society have become standard. But now at sixty-five years old, Frances is flat broke. She doesn’t know exactly when it happened, but truthfully, the last several years were one big haze of regressive decline so it’s no surprise she finds herself here.
What’s left are a lot of expensive things. Things that fill her New York home, but fall short of any real significance. So she sells it all, taking what she can pull together and making her swift exit to France with the hopes that life across the Atlantic will yield something new and different for her flailing senior years. Accompanying her on this escape is her despondent son Malcom (Lucas Hedges), a floating twenty-something who’s dodging commitments to his fiancé (Imogen Poots), and their sour black cat who just so happens to be the physical incarnation of her six-feet under husband Frank (voiced by Tracy Letts). Together the trio form a petulant bunch, unable to find immediate resolve from the plights carried over from New York. But Frances has a contingency plan: when the money runs out, she will kill herself, and that will be that.
Unchecked, the plights of these aristocrats would be something to scoff at. After all, this isn’t the 1940s and 50s where wealth is romanticized on screen. This is 2020, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It would be rather difficult, nay impossible, to sympathize with characters based on the 1% if there weren’t a pervading cognizance that rightful debases their privilege. In accordance with that sentiment, Azazel Jacobs’ imbues The French Exit with the same absurdism found in the novel it’s adapted from, creating an offbeat, oddball comedy that doesn’t ask for sympathy for the riches to rags scenario Frances find herself in, but rather to observe a person facing long-term emotional trauma within that scenario. Unfortunately, how it all plays out is anything but sympathetic.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Greg Arietta
Night of the Kings
“Where Night of Kings stands out is in the grounded reenactments of the Zama King tale. Inmates interrupt Roman’s story with diversions of their own spurred by the spectacles generated in their imaginations. They coalesce into group dances mimicking fabled creatures and impromptu repetition of turn-of-phrases. Roman’s story bursts from his lips and into the very beings of the inmates, unable to contain the power the words hold. It’s a captivating look at the art of storytelling more akin to sitting around a campfire as legends are told than watching a narrative unfold on the silver screen.
Night of King’s effectiveness is laid bare in the power of storytelling. It doesn’t matter if Roman’s story of the mystical Zama King is true or not. The story he’s telling is one that stimulates the senses of the inmates and allows them a mental freedom they might not otherwise have. When Roman’s tale inevitably concludes, the walls of La MACA return and the battle for the Dangoro reemerges. But for the time being, we understand that sometimes the stories that unite us in whatever manner hold the greatest power: the power to ease life’s unpleasantries and transport us somewhere else.”
Full Review Can Be Here
-Kevin Conner
Gunda
“Kossakovsky packages this with a fine tuned delicacy, avoiding any formal guide rails to direct the viewer. For more than an hour, you’re left exclusively to your own thoughts, influenced solely by long takes of the animals in tack-sharp black and white photography and the sounds they make. One moment you might elate at the image of a piglet discovering rain water, and the next your mind might slip into pondering how natural evolution reduced dinosaurs into the current composition of a chicken. As a primarily unimposing documentary, the take aways are largely ambiguous.
In fact, it’s not until about seventy minutes in that you pick up on the film’s intention. When a tractor breaks the frame and disturbs the natural image, an image that has been well maintained for over an hour at this point, you know full well that this industrious intervention is intentional. There for but a moment, the tractor comes and goes, taking with it Gunda’s piglets and leaving her frantic as she searches her stye for her children. Within these final moments Kossakovsky suggests a relationship between these farm animals and us humans. If any prescription is provided by Kossakovsky its that the industrial nature of animal farming is cruel and inhumane, but again, this notions only tracks so long as it does in your head. What you take away is a matter of engagement with the material as the film surely won’t do the heavy lifting for you, and in this sense, your mileage may vary with Gunda.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Greg Arietta
Mangrove
“As the “Mangrove 9,” Barbara Beese, Rupert Boyce, Frank Crichlow, Rhodan Gordon, Darcus Howe, Anthony Innis, Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Rothwell Kentish, and Godfrey Millett face a decision to make: do they fight the charges and risk the full punishment if they lose or plead guilty and hope for a more lenient sentencing? Nothing in their life so far has given them any indication that the British justice system will be impartial in their trial, no matter their decision. In fact, the phrase “faith in the British justice system” is met with near unanimous laughter in Mangrove. Perhaps they laugh because they know the police harass their friends and family while simply walking back from the grocery store. Or maybe it’s that when community members disappear, the local jail is where they usually can be found, suspiciously abused and released with no charges. Or maybe every attempt of escalating these issues to local law enforcement, national law enforcement, and local representatives is met with disbelief. Whatever it may be, they seem to laugh because they tire of perpetual injustice.
Director and co-writer Steve McQueen imbues his retelling of the Mangrove 9 with a central dilemma of choice. Do we always have the ability to choose when we take a stand against injustice? Or does history choose for us? Frank does not decide for the Mangrove restaurant to be the home-away-from-home it clearly is for so many. That is decided for him. But the Mangrove is just a place for gathering, surely Frank can walk away anytime he pleases.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Kevin Conner
City Hall
“Rounding out at 4 hours and 35 minutes, City Hall isn’t a casual encounter. It is residential, familiarizing the viewer with the personalities of the city, and the problems they face. Governing a population of almost 700,000 is not easily condensed for a commercial runtime, nor can it be summarized by a neat linear story. Wiseman deliberately details how complicated public policy is to enact, and how outcome of implementing specific programs may never manifest as expected. Within a single city budget presentation, the film swiftly summarizes how transparency must come at a forfeit of traditional entertainment paradigms. There is monotony no doubt but, as the characteristic density of Wiseman’s work demands patience and thoughtfulness from us, the effort of witnessing soon becomes its own reward.
Amidst some more flashier features and awards buzz, this is the film that I return to in my head most often, especially when consuming the news. On a national level, democracy is being smothered by the Trump administration, and power hungry capitalists are feeding off our cynicism as they pretend what they do is leadership. While it feels that the United States is slipping backwards and many fear for their hard-won rights, there is also proof that governance can be a way forward. Seeing action on a community level is a reminder that we can be one of the countless people working to improve our lives every day. We are waking up to it, and taking the wheel back. City Hall can be our city hall.”
Full Review Out of TIFF 2020 Can Be Found Here
-Megan Bernovich