NYFF Dispatch 1: First Days of the Fest
Notes on ten movies, from Nickel Boys to Anora to Megalopolis.
Every night, sitting (or standing) on a long-ish train ride back home, I remind myself: it’s a marathon, not a sprint. While I’m not new to watching three or four movies a day, this is the first time I’m sustaining that over the course of three weeks. This is something that I literally signed up for, but the prospect of writing about all of the movies I’ve been seeing has become frightening. It’s a good reminder that when you’re reading film reviews out of festivals, that critic is in the middle of an arthouse binge and probably running on very little sleep.
During the festival’s first weekend, the Criterion Collection set up a mobile version of their famed “Criterion Closet.” People waited over six hours in the pouring rain so that they spend three minutes inside a simulacrum of the famous disc dorm. With a line wrapped well around the corner, the Criterion truck was the cinephile equivalent of a Yayoi Kusama infinity room. It’ll be back this weekend; if you want a chance to make it inside, get there very early!
I’ve been spending too much time watching movies and keeping up a social life to be able to write about them (evergreen statement for this newsletter 😅). Accordingly, most of these reviews are all fairly off the cuff, along with food/drink pairings when applicable. I have some catching up to do with writing, having already seen 25 films at the festival as of press time! More to come!!
Nickel Boys
Opens December 13 in NY and December 20 in LA, with wider expansion in January.
Innovative and artful while staying within the bounds of the mainstream, Nickel Boys is a brilliantly conceived adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel. The story tracks the friendship between two young Black boys who meet at a segregated reform school in the Jim Crow South, and the decades-spanning reverberations from the horrific abuse inflicted upon them by the school’s superiors. Director RaMell Ross brings us inside the perspectives of Elwood and Turner: every shot in this movie is from one of their points of view, and usually in the first person. (Scenes with an older Elwood show the back of his head.) It’s not as avant-garde as it seems; you pretty quickly get the hang of the cinematic language.
With actors operating cameras and camera operators standing in for actors, the first person shots could have been a gimmick, akin to projecting an Oculus Rift video game onto a cinema screen1. But cinematographer Jomo Fray utilizes a shallow focus and a roving camera that brings the viewer into the character’s subjective experience. It was painful once I realized that we never got a good view of the white authority figures — the cop, the headmaster, and so on — because Elwood would keep his head down.
The first person perspective also avoids us from having to see exploitative imagery of racial violence. It’s still hard to watch, especially knowing that the novel was inspired by true events: there was an actual school in Florida that only recently exhumed the bodies of children who were killed there. Many of the bodies remain unidentified, their stories forever unknown. The film’s director cited Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” as a key inspiration when writing the screenplay with co-writer Joslyn Barnes. Where both Whitehead and Ross step in is to create a fictional story that can speak to the truth of what happened at that school — and many other places like it — in the absence of historical record.
On its own, the story is strong enough to make a conventionally conceived movie adaptation. But in addition to the point of view cinematography, Ross, who until now has worked in documentary films and photography, also employs the language of non-fiction filmmaking to deepen the material. In between some scenes, there are clips of archival footage spanning the twentieth century. There’s a particular focus on the Space Race, which was heating up in 1968, when this film is set. Early in the film, we see Elwood is especially interested in astronomy, and at one point we see an image of our planet. “The view of Earth from 240,000 miles in space,” intones the narrator. After experiencing Elwood’s world from 240 millimeters away, it becomes clear why he has such a fascination with how to escape it.
Nickel Academy has both white and Black children, but they are segregated. When the populations do interact, the racial hierarchy takes precedence over any potential class or youth solidarity. Interspersed throughout Nickel Boys are clips from The Defiant Ones, a landmark classic in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis are escaped convicts who must befriend each other to survive. But that movie, which was released in 1958, was a Hollywood fantasy. Such a friendship between white and Black might have been possible in California, or here in New York. But not in Florida, even ten years after that picture premiered. Not then.
★★★★½
Dahomey
Opens October 25 in limited release.
Tracking the journey of 26 statues and artifacts that were repatriated from France to Benin, this new documentary from Mati Diop presents interesting debates on the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade. But I thought that Dahomey was dry and slow for most of its brief runtime. There are a lot of scenes where we just see museum workers packing up the artifacts, which were plundered from the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892. The film gets more interesting when we’re in the room with a group of beninois who debate the meaning of these objects’ return. Is this just a PR exercise to make a former colonizer look better? Are these 26 artifacts a good start, or an insult? Why is it that everyone in Benin is speaking French, and not one of the nation’s indigenous languages? These questions, of course, are unanswerable, but they are insightful to explore. The film makes a strong case that this is just the beginning of undoing colonialism. But besides an artistic intervention that falls flat — one of the objects ruminates in a voice that seems to come from the depths of the earth — this could have been a magazine article.
★★½☆☆
Anora
Opens October 18 in limited release.
Think Uncut Gems, but wacky instead of stressful, and with the Diamond District Jews replaced with the Russians and Armenians in Brighton Beach. Mikey Madison is terrific as the titular character, a stripper and escort who prefers to go by Ani. She gains a steady client in Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch. He lives in his parent’s mansion in Mill Basin, with a luxurious view of the marina. During a weeklong girlfriend experience, Ani and Vanya take a private jet for a Vegas trip that culminates in a shotgun wedding. Marriage license secured, the two passionately embrace, and fireworks go off in the background. But the explosions are not real; it’s an LED screen installed on the ceiling. The union between rich kid and escort has ramifications that travel halfway around the globe. What happens in Vegas, as we well know by now, never stays there.
Where the story goes, I’ll leave unspoiled, but I will say it involves frumpy, put-upon Russian and Armenian mafia underlings, a journey into the depths of Brighton Beach, and a plethora of both F-words. It is very, very funny, and at times reminiscent of the mile-a-minute hijinks of something like His Girl Friday, but if it starred Gena Rowlands. Yura Borisov is a clear highlight of an excellent ensemble. He plays the stocky, sensitive Igor, a gopnik who slowly becomes the film’s other emotional heart alongside Ani. (Borisov has this film’s most explicit reference to classic Hollywood, with a scene that quotes Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes at once in Now, Voyager.) The Palme d’Or winner is a fun crowd-pleaser, an R-rated riff on the screwball comedy, until it suddenly isn’t. It’s the inverse of Baker’s usual plot arc: instead of a realistic drama that ends with a flight into fantasy, Anora shows us what happens when the dream is over, and the protagonist comes down to earth.
★★★★☆
Eating the movie: A day spent at Coney Island and Brighton Beach, capped off with a visit to Tatiana, could replicate some of the experience of this film. Tatiana is a legendary restaurant that gets clubby at night. A co-worker of mine who hails from Bay Ridge told me, “last time I was there, I’m pretty sure there was a man on a trapeze. But I was really drunk.”
I had an idea for a wild “From Manhattan Tatiana to Brooklyn Tatiana” night, in which I would go to both Kwame Onwuachi’s swanky neo-African-American hotspot in Lincoln Center as well as the older, Russian restaurant that shares the same name. But it’s impossible to get a reservation at the former, and honestly the latter kind of scares me. (That said, if you snag an early reservation at the Manhattan Tatiana, please get in touch.)
Some other Russian clubs in the Brighton Beach area, some of which are probably seen in Anora: Cafe Gallery, Caspiy, Vis a Vis, Cave, WISE Bar & Grill.
And the strip club where Ani works is HQ Kony on 38th Street, pretty much the only time the movie takes us to Manhattan.
Hellraiser
Two more screenings at NYFF on October 5 & 7. 4K Blu-Ray from Arrow Films on October 22.
The Revivals section of the lineup is severely underrated, by both the public and the press (there were only a couple dozen people at my pre-festival screening). It showcases familiar classics and recent discoveries, all in new restorations, and frankly most of these titles are more artistically and culturally significant, than the new films that play at NYFF. And yes, Hellraiser is artistically and culturally significant, and I had fun. Gloriously over the top and campy, but at heart, this is a marriage melodrama with an AIDS metaphor that happens to have a lot of gore. There are two more screenings of Hellraiser during the festival. When will you have another opportunity to see the Cenobites grace the big screen?
★★★★☆
Stranger Eyes
Currently seeking distribution.
A twisting, winding tale about voyeurism in the age of surveillance. Initially, the film has the trappings of a police procedural, but surprising connections are revealed between a young married couple and the man suspected of kidnapping their baby. In a time where we are so used to being watched by an invisible system, maybe it just feels nice to know who is doing the watching. Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua treats his script without any humor and verve, leaving the viewer with a dry, ruminative character study that lacks a lasting impact.
★★☆☆☆
Happyend
To be released in 2025 by Metrograph Pictures.
Backsliding civil liberties, resurging nativism, and cynical exploitation of natural disasters are a timely backdrop for a timeless story about a group of teenagers who come together and fall apart during their last year of high school. Neo Sora’s neo-dystopian film has the essence of a “kids aren’t alright” movie, with its barely future Tokyo setting imbuing it with political salience. Sora confidently reveals Japan’s institutional xenophobia and successfully makes a movie with leftist politics without falling back on blunt polemical statements.
So far, this is my favorite movie of the festival, despite the brevity of this review. Wish I had time to have written more, but will soon put up the longer review that this movie deserves. This is a special one.
★★★★½
Eating the movie: there’s a climactic showdown that involves a luxe sushi platter and convenience store kimbap. You can replicate this near the Lincoln Center with a $1,000 omakase at Masa, followed by heading up to the new H Mart on 70th Street and Columbia Avenue. I know which side I’d choose.
Misericordia
Acquired by Sideshow/Janus Films; release date TBA but I’m guessing Spring 2025.
Initially, this seems like a rather dry French movie from longtime filmmaker Alain Guiraudie. After the death of the local boulanger, a young man named Jérémie, who once apprenticed under the baker, returns to his hometown for the funeral and decides to stick around for a few more days. His reappearance destabilizes everyone around him: his former best friend, the widow of the dead man, the local priest. At first, we’re not quite sure why their interactions with Jérémie are so charged, but the film (whose title translates to “mercy”) sneakily becomes a very fun romp. At first, my audience wasn't sure if we were supposed to be laughing, and there would be nervous titters. By the end, they turned into full-on guffaws. Guiraudie’s dry, understated direction matches the droll humor (the French word for “funny” is drôle).
★★★★☆
Eating the movie: the commune of Saint-Martial, where Guiraudie grew up, is in a forest full of wild mushrooms. Porcinis and morels are plentiful, and a simple omelette that showcases one of those fungi would be a natural dish for this film: deceptively simple, but actually quite chaotic once you bite into it.
There’s also a lot of wine and spirits being consumed, including pastis, an anise-laced apéritif that is commonly consumed in Southern France by diluting it with water. I’ve had pastis, both uncut and watered down, and adding that extra liquid turns a decent liqueur into badly flavored water.
Maria
Opens November 27 in limited release and on Netflix December 11.
Of Pablo Larraín’s three movies about famous women trapped in a prison of the mind, this is the third best. Angelina Jolie stars as the legendary soprano Maria Callas, who has retired from singing, and possibly in the twilight of her life. What made both Jackie and Spencer compelling were that their titular characters may have been privileged and rich and beautiful, but their struggles were relatable to the average person. Most of us weren’t married into a royal family (literal or rhetorical), but we can connect to someone grieving the death of her husband, or being smothered by societal and familial expectations. Maria’s problem is that she can no longer sing as well as she used to, and that she’s an imperious, annoying diva. There are many one-liners and withering remarks that Jolie capably delivers, but the script gives her little depth to work with. While the makings of a good movie can be found, this prestige biopic is beautiful to look at, but rather dull and staid underneath.
Jolie is very impressive, having spent seven months studying opera singing. In a post-screening Q&A, she encouraged everyone to take an opera class, as it’s one of the only times you’re told to sing as loud as you can, pumping every bit of emotion in you to the outside world. She obliquely mentioned that she’s been going through a lot lately, which is an understatement.
★½☆☆☆
Eating the movie: this is the second movie written up here that prominently features an omelette. Alba Rohrwacher, who plays Maria’s put-upon maid, had to learn how to flip an omelette for this role. Apparently, Maria Callas’s favorite foods were oysters and beef.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Opens November 27 in limited release.
Shot clandestinely in Iran by director Mohammad Rasoulof, who recently fled his country to escape persecution. He presents us with a story about a family whose tight-knit bonds become frayed when women’s rights protests are violently suppressed by the government. Iman, the family’s patriarch, is a longtime civil servant who is promoted to the role of investigator in Iran’s hardline Revolutionary Court, which oversees criminal cases of those accused of subverting the government. At first, Iman seems to be the film’s protagonist, but focus quickly shifts to his more liberal daughters, Rezvan and Sana, and their mother Najmeh, who stands by her husband while being pressured by her children to be more independent.
This domestic unit becomes a microcosm of Iranian society. Rasoulof shows how repression breeds rebellion, and in oppressive environments, family becomes strangers, and strangers become suspects. Moral complexity falls away as Iman becomes suspicious of his wife and daughters, and reveals himself to be an intimidating presence. His job is to interrogate prisoners and recommend sentences (including the death penalty), and soon takes his work home with him. Sometimes there is no "moderate" position to take when working within an unjust system. If you work for the bad guys, you’re a bad guy too.
I saw this 2.5 hour movie at 8:30 PM on Monday night. When introducing his film, Rasoulof remarked that had he known it would play so late, he would have made a shorter movie. No matter what time of day you watch it, he could have trimmed it a bit and retained its power.
★★★½☆
Megalopolis
Currently in wide release but probably not for long!
Francis Ford Coppola’s now-infamous magnum opus was sort of in the festival, with a private screening hosted a few days before Opening Night. I was not influential enough to score an invite, but last Friday afternoon, after a double bill of Nickel Boys and Dahomey, I walked across the street to the AMC to experience Megalopolis in all its IMAX glory.
This is the Star Wars prequels of the 2020s. You truly have to see it to believe it. It’s so bad it’s good, and also just so bad. When the credits rolled, the audience ironically applauded. (I don’t know how I can tell, but I could just feel the sarcasm.) This is the movie that Coppola financed by selling part of his winery business. Good for him! More rich people should do stuff like this.
★★★☆☆
Below are some of the notes I took during the movie, which were mostly just me jotting down the moments where I was wholly baffled.
Adam Driver’s Roman bowl cut looks stupid
He just does Hamlet all of a sudden
Like the ENTIRE To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy
Shia LaBeouf in drag (see above photo for proof)
Surprise Grace Vanderwaal music video
“Do you know about string theory”
“If it’s a boy it’ll be named Francis”
These collage/composite shots are pretty sick tbh
“Yes it’s beautiful Auntie Wow” omg
“I wanna fuck you so bad Auntie Wow” OMG
Jon Voight surprise boner bow and arrow. This unironically rocks.
Suddenly Megalopolis is built? Like magic? Where Hudson Yards is? Is Hudson Yards our Megalopolis?
The architecture of Megalopolis looks a lot like the suicide beehive in Hudson Yards
Ends with a pledge of allegiance to the human race bahaha what the fuck audience are all laughing.
Then a dedication to Eleanor Coppola, who passed away earlier this year. We stopped laughing REAL QUICK.
I’m glad this exists but also it sucks but also it’s visionary?
Please see this movie.
Worse, the POV element could be low-hanging fruit for critics to write about.