Ranking All 33 Movies I Saw at NYFF
The final New York Film Festival report!
Over the course of three weeks, I watched 33 movies in the NYFF lineup plus a short film program, which is an insane number by any objective measure. I’ve written a lot about this year’s New York Film Festival, and if you mostly subscribe to Buttered Popcorn for the food and lifestyle content, thanks for putting up with this. Rest easy that the next thing I publish will be a cocktail recipe!
I’ve attended NYFF for several years, but never with a press badge until this year. Surrounded by actual professionals, I really felt the imposter syndrome! But I met a bunch of friendly writers and critics, and it felt a lot like summer camp, seeing the same faces at screening after screening. It was super easy to strike up a conversation: just talk about movies. (Sometimes I’d get a thoughtful yet multi-paragraph response to an innocuous question about a director’s prior work. Loved it!)
To wrap this all up, here’s my ranking of every feature film I saw at NYFF this year, plus an analysis of how my ratings compare to the average scores on Metacritic and Letterboxd.
The List
This ranking is further organized by star rating. If I previously published a review, clicking on the film’s title will take you there. Otherwise, I’ve written some brief thoughts, and a longer review might come out in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release.
★★★★½
1. Happyend
One of the first movies I saw at the festival, and it remains my personal favorite. Really hoping to write a longer review of this at some point.
2. All We Imagine As Light
A quietly moving portrait of women in contemporary India. It centers on two nurses, Prabha and Anu, who hail from Kerala and share an apartment in Mumbai, and how their friendship is tested by desire and longing (not for each other!!). There are no heavy plot arcs or dramatics. Just life going on, people subtly changing each other and helping each other out. These characters are portrayed with the dignity they deserve without shying away from the realities of being a migrant in a gentrifying metropolis. Much as we can call a film a “New York movie,” this is a Mumbai movie. The movie looks beautiful, thanks to cinematographer Ranabir Das turning the cool hues of fluorescent tube lights into luminous blues.
This is such a lovely, magical film from Payal Kapadia. Although this is only her second feature, she should be considered a major world filmmaker, as Devika Girish noted when introducing the screening.
3. Nickel Boys
4. The Shrouds
Yes, it's a tender meditation on grief mixed with body horror, as only David Cronenberg could do. But it also deftly comments on The Way We Live Now, particularly with how cyberspace's encroachment into our lives has turned us into mistrustful, paranoid loners. There's a few scenes in this movie that are basically dramatizations of a normal person trying to talk to a conspiracy theorist on Twitter or Reddit.
Very much like Cronenberg's most recent film, Crimes of the Future, everyone speaks and behaves one full step away from normal, which makes The Shrouds ever more compelling. They all act like disaffected cyborgs, which helped me stomach the bonkers premise and pretentious dialogue. Guy Pearce is excellent here as a neckbeard hacker. He plays the complete opposite character in The Brutalist and he's just as great in that one. Acting! It's crazy.
★★★★☆
5. Hellraiser (1987)
6. Anora
7. Misericordia
8. Oh, Canada
9. Compensation (1996)
10. The Room Next Door
11. Caught by the Tides
Somewhat amusingly, the NYFF screening of this film was sponsored by Rolex. (Jia Zhangke, the film’s director, is apparently a Rolex ambassador). In the VIP Lounge, representatives for the watch brand handed out gift bags. I was hoping there would be a watch inside, but instead there was a box of Swiss chocolates. The bag and box are very cool.
Caught By the Tides is yet another rich text from one of China’s greatest filmmakers. To tell a story that spans two decades, this film repurposes unused footage from the productions of Jia’s earlier movies that were released in 2002 and 2006. It’s not necessary to see either in advance; the pleasures of Unknown Pleasures currently remain unknown to me, and I saw Still Life a couple years ago but don’t remember much of it for whatever reason. After assembling the first two parts of this film, Jia then wrote the third act, which captures the alienation and emptiness of COVID-era China. This last section is the best part of the film, but it wouldn’t have worked as well if we hadn’t seen the cities and villages that used to exist, but have now disappeared.
Zhao Tao, who has starred in nearly all of Jia’s films, has repeatedly proven herself to be one of China’s most formidable actresses. She doesn’t utter a single word throughout the entire movie, and spends most of the last act wearing a surgical mask. And somehow, she conveys her character’s unmoveable presence.
12. Pavements
Before seeing this movie, I had never intentionally listened to a song from the 90s alt-rock band. So the morning before the screening, I listened to a few Pavement albums, and all of their songs kind of sound the same? If I were in a brewery and this was playing, I wouldn’t be mad, but nothing particularly stood out to me. So that was my context going in.
Pavements is a four-pronged, unconventional documentary from Alex Ross Perry that reveals the sincerity beneath the sarcasm of "The World's Most Important and Influential Band." At first I was supremely annoyed by all the surface-level irony. But I came around to it. There are four threads to this film:
The making of a Pavement biopic, with Joe Keery losing himself in the role of frontman Stephen Malkmus. (It doesn’t take long to realize that the biopic is a parody of dreck like Bohemian Rhapsody)
The staging of a jukebox musical (think American Idiot crossed with Spring Awakening) with bonafide Broadway talent in the company
Footage of the band preparing for their comeback tour
A rather dull, basic rock doc that tells the band’s story from cradle to (close to the) grave
Perry is a perfect match for a movie about Pavement, as both share a similar elder millennial irony and a refusal to conform to convention. Terrific editing by Robert Greene to weave everything together; sometimes all four aspects of the movie will play out simultaneously in a multi-view collage.
Which got me thinking: I feel like the fullest realization of this project would be a four-channel video installation, where on each wall, a different element of this film would be projected simultaneously: the making of the fake biopic, the staging of the fake-ish jukebox musical, the story of Pavement, and live concert recordings. Alex Ross Perry, if you're reading this, you can have this idea for free!
13. The Brutalist
A part of me feels that films like The Brutalist are so effusively praised because when people watch a 3.5 hour movie, they really want to justify the time investment. There’s so much about this film that guarantees critical acclaim, sight unseen. It’s handsomely shot on a bygone film format. It is a period epic that recalls the works of Bernardo Bertolucci and James Gray, with a primary theme of art corrupted by commerce and capital, and a brilliant leading performance from an actor who hasn’t had such a high-profile role in some time. It’s cinephile catnip!
Without a doubt, The Brutalist is an achievement in filmmaking. Brady Corbet put together a lengthy, period epic with an A-list cast for $6 million without compromising his vision. And during the film’s perfect first half, I thought I was watching the next Great American Movie, one that lives up to all the breathless hype that began upon the film’s world premiere in Venice. I also love that there’s an intermission! But as the second set of reels unspools, the movie becomes rushed, as if there wasn’t enough time and money to see this story all the way through. The script (written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold) eventually relies on worn out clichés to explain character motivations, making the film shallower as it goes on. This is a movie that actually needed to be longer.
The coda saves this movie, with a sudden change in space and time that complicates everything that came before. I’m quite surprised that nearly all published writing on The Brutalist omits a very prominent subplot that unlocks what this whole movie is “about.” Perhaps it's in deference to not give away this central revelation (it’s not obvious until the final scene), or writers not wanting to touch this subject with a ten foot pole. This movie is gonna be a massive test in media literacy, and many will fail.
★★★½☆
14. Grand Tour
15. Youth (Hard Times)
16. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
17. Eephus
To promote the NYFF premiere of the movie, the cast and crew played a pickup game of baseball in East River Park. That field is slated to be demolished pretty soon, which is ironic because that’s the same fate that befalls the beloved diamond in Eephus. On a crisp autumn day in Massachusetts, two rec teams pull up for one last game of ball. The day after, the field will be paved over to build a new middle school.
Watching this film is like watching an actual baseball game: nothing really happens, but it's still meaningful, even if it really starts to drag as the sun goes down. (Because these guys aren’t particularly good at the sport, the ninth inning doesn’t begin until well after nightfall). Especially for the small town dudes to whom this film is a tribute. Very funny, salt of the earth humor: there is a LOT of just shooting the shit over the course of the day and guys being dudes, which is this movie’s charm.
18. Viêt and Nam
★★★☆☆
19. Youth (Homecoming)
20. I’m Still Here
As conventional as Walter Salles's biographical drama can be, one must admit that the basic structure makes for an effective emotional template. Set amidst Brazil's military dictatorship, Salles sets up the portrait of an idyllic domestic life that's ruptured when the patriarch, a former congressman turned architect, is whisked away to a military prison. His family, and particularly his wife, must learn to cope with his absence while fighting for justice. The script is very point A to point B to point C, which doesn't leave room to explore the characters on a deep enough level. It's a decent movie most of the way, even if it's not the best angle on the real-life tale that inspired it. The most interesting stuff happens in between the movie's time jumps.
Formally, the film is uninspiring, but it's well made. In other words, a classic Sony Pictures Classic.
21. Megalopolis
22. April
This was a tough movie to watch (not just because of its subject), but sometimes movies exist better in memory than as an immediate experience. I was sporadically entranced by Dea Kulumbegashvili's first film, Beginning, and the same applies to her sophomore effort. The film is a deep reaching character study of a rural OB-GYN who is suspected of performing illegal abortions. Although the subject matter is relevant to Georgia, the country (where this was made) and elsewhere (such as Georgia, the US state), Kulumbegashvili makes some baffling directing choices. She goes for bold shot choices and scene constructions, but sometimes it lands within incoherence. April is brutally slow at times, but there were enough fantastic moments to signal that although Kulumbegashvili will eventually be one of the great filmmakers of our time, we'll have to wait until her next film to realize that potential.
23. Universal Language
A cross between the quirkiness of Kaurismäki, the surrealism of Buñuel, and the childlike perspective of early Kiarostami. It's set in an alt-Winnipeg where instead of English, people speak Farsi and most people seem to be of Iranian descent. (One wonders if this were a timeline where Iran, and not England, became a global colonial empire, but that's a history that is thankfully left unexplained.) Tim Horton's is decorated like a Persian cafe, serving tea instead of coffee. They still have donuts, though. Despite the striking imagery and commitment to its world, I couldn't really get into this. Matthew Rankin's film has its charms, but I dare say that Universal Language won't be universally beloved. While I was not a fan, others I spoke with were enchanted.
24. Emilia Pérez
Of the two recent unconventional musicals starring A-listers from notable French directors, this will be far less divisive, but also far less interesting. When Emilia Pérez ended, I thought "that was a decent piece of content," and that's the worst thing I can say about a purportedly auteurist film. It belongs with Netflix, which is releasing the film in November.
25. Blitz
★★½☆☆
26. Hard Truths
27. Dahomey
28. The Friend
29. By the Stream
The Hong heads tell me that he actually breaks form (a little) with By the Stream, which touches on contemporary issues and has a more discernible plot. I couldn't tell the difference. You're either a Hong Sang-soo fan or you're not. His films just haven't really worked for me. I've liked some, found others intolerable. I think it just depends on my mood, and I was very tired on this particular day.
Booze tracker: I counted twelve bottles of soju fully consumed, plus a decent amount of beer and wine.
★★☆☆☆
30. Stranger Eyes
31. Queer
★½☆☆☆
32. Maria
33. TWST - Things We Said Today
A hybrid of animated & archival documentary that uses the Beatles' landmark concert at Shea Stadium to tell a story about being a young American in 1965. That narrative (which is taken from actual memoirs and diaries) is delivered via voiceover narration and animated characters drawn on top of the frame. These interventions feel more like an imposition, and it frankly gets very annoying.
Excise the yapping and the drawings, and you could have an interesting document of how pop culture and social upheavals co-exist. The Beatles-related material is charming, with young fans arguing about which one of the Fab Four is the best one. (They really were the One Direction of their time.) There are occasional interjections with footage of the Watts Riots in LA, happening three thousand miles away from the fun Fab Four frenzy. Wanted to like this one, but the filmmakers bit off far more than they could chew.
Not included in rankings: a review of a couple short films I really liked, which I published last week. And there were a lot of movies in the lineup that I just did not have time to see.
Some Data Analysis
Because I am professionally a data nerd, I compared my ratings of all 33 of these films to the average scores on Metacritic and Letterboxd1.
I think of myself as an easy grader, but compared to the professionals whose reviews feed into Metacritic, my rating was the same or higher just 29% of the time, whereas nearly half (47%) of my ratings are higher than that of the Letterboxd hivemind2.
Here’s a chart of my NYFF film ratings, compared to Letterboxd and Metacritic.
It’s cluttered, but this version of the chart labels each individual film:
My biggest differences of opinion with the critics were for Hard Truths and By the Stream (1.8 stars lower than Metacritic’s average) and The Shrouds (1.6 stars higher). Compared to my fellow Letterboxd users, I disliked Maria more than most (1.9 stars lower than the Letterboxd average) and loved The Shrouds (1.7 stars higher) almost equally more.
I’ve long had this idea for a tool to compare your own Letterboxd ratings to individual scores on Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic so that you could “match” yourself with like-minded critics. (This could also be used to compare critics to each other, to see who is and isn’t the most heterodox.) Letterboxd doesn’t have a public API so it’s not a scalable app, but could be something I do for myself and friends. If I ever end up with free time, that will be my project!
Scores from Metacritic and Letterboxd compiled on October 14. Some films didn’t have an average rating on Letterboxd and/or Metacritic and are omitted from this analysis. In this house, we do not speak of Rotten Tomatoes.
My star ratings are limited to half-star increments. Both Metacritic and Letterboxd use a more continuous scale when calculating their averages (to one-decimal precision), so the comparison should hold nonetheless.
wow, love the data