Tag: nyff

New York 2025 Review: TWO PROSECUTORS, Hell Is Legal Evil

Sergei Loznitsa's film stars Alexander Kuznetsov.

New York 2025 Review: JAY KELLY, Underwhelming Tale of the Existential Woes of Stardom

George Clooney stars, with Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, and Emily Mortimer, who wrote the script with director Noah Baumbach.

New York 2025 Review: SOUND OF FALLING, Girls, Interrupted

Mascha Schilinski’s second feature, Sound of Falling, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, where it won the Jury Prize, is one of those films, the charm of which is very hard to articulate clearly to an unsuspecting potential viewer...

New York 2025 Review: PETER HUJAR'S DAY, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in 1970s NYC

Ira Sachs' newest film stars Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall.

New York 2025 Review: LATE FAME, Tender, Bittersweet Dramedy About Horrors of Needing Validation

Willem DaFoe, Edmund Donovan, and Greta Lee star in Kent Jones' sophomore feature.

New York 2024 Review: PAVEMENTS Has Great Fun Selling Out

In the romanticizing of 90s indie music, it's oft said that no band better epitomized the rock & roll slacker ethos of rebelling against establishment/commercialism/‘whatever else ya got’/etc. than Pavement. If true enough, then how exactly do you make a...

New York 2024 Review: A TRAVELER'S NEEDS, Living Life Truthfully

The second collaboration of Hong Sangsoo and Isabelle Huppert is a delight.

New York 2020 Review: ON THE ROCKS, Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray Reunite

Sofia Coppola’s films are imbued with a bratty strained independent punk rock aesthetic that often riffs on generic genres and themes with a strong focus on characters that refuse to conform. On The Rocks is a distant memory of this...

Interview: Zoe Kazan Talks THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS

In the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Zoe Kazan plays Ms. Alice Longabaugh, the title character of ‘Chapter V. The Gal Who Got Rattled’. Alice is the vulnerable young sister of Gilbert, a business failure whose latest hair-brained...

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS Interview: Tim Blake Nelson

In the days after I first saw the highly anticipated, long time coming anthology Western from the brothers Coen at The New York Film Festival, the most common thing I’d overhear when eavesdropping on the many Scruggs conversations ensuing around...

New York 2018 Interview: Jim Jarmusch, Eleanor Friedberger, and Rick & Cindy Talk CARMINE STREET GUITARS

I cannot rave enough about Ron Mann's new film, Carmine Street Guitars. I first fell in love with the film when I caught it at the Vancouver Film Festival, where I had the pleasure of hanging out with Ron for...

New York 2018 Interview: Jonah Hill Looks Back on MID90S

Jonah Hill’s directorial debut may be called Mid90s, but that doesn’t mean you need to consider the decade the object of your specific nostalgia to feel this film deeply. As it happens, the film does speak to my exact zeitgeist,...

Interview: Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy On Adapting CAROL

Two years before Patricia Highsmith would earn acclaim with the release of her 1950 suspense novel, Strangers on a Train, she was working as a shopgirl selling dolls at a department store. Legend goes that one day an elegant, beautiful...

New York 2015 Review: BRIDGE OF SPIES, A Thrilling Throwback To An Earlier Era

The New York Film Festival's transition in the past few years from being more or less purely a showcase for the crème-de-la-crème of world cinema (which it still largely is) to being an increasingly prominent stop on the way to...

New York 2015 Review: The Tranquil Insanity of JUNUN

Paul Thomas Anderson has finally given the world a film that won't send its audiences into fits of over-thought analysis. By no means is this meant to imply that ruminating on PTA films isn't a source of great cinematic joy,...

New York 2015 Review: MIA MADRE Is An Elegant And Deeply Personal Film

Nanni Moretti's latest film, Mia Madre, is elegant, understated, and discreetly moving. A personal, if not autobiographical film, Mia Madre chronicles the slow death of a filmmaker's mother as the director struggles to complete her movie. Moretti experienced the hospitalization...

New York 2015 Review: LES COWBOYS, Wild West Tensions In Modern France

Thomas Bidegain's film, Les Cowboys, begins in a strange key, with a nuclear French family spending the day at an American Western-themed rodeo (not that there's any other real kind). It's clearly no casual affair for them, but a practiced...

New York 2014 Review: BIRDMAN, A Visual and Comedic Feast For The Eyes and Mind

This year's New York Film Festival came to a satisfying conclusion with one of its best selections, Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), the oddly titled (and punctuated) fifth feature by acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Returning in...