A film festival architected from a premise of curatorial excellence rather than red carpet cachet, the New York Film Festival annually arrives with fewer expectations of first-glimpse prestige than of centralized access to the year’s on-offer best. That being the case, it also means we’ve usually already caught up with a sizable chunk of NYFF’s lineup prior to the fest’s commencement — product of the excellent sourcing from earlier-year premieres.
That’s no different in 2025, but all the more reason to check out the program’s exceptional selection. We’ve already reckoned with 23 features currently slotted to play NYFF 2025, and a staggering percentage are top-tier recommendations. We’ll be digging into the other exciting titles we haven’t yet tackled over the fest’s next couple weeks, but as the festival proper kicks off tomorrow, check in on what we’ve already talked — loved, liked, and otherwise — at length. Back soon with more, pinky promise.
To the avid film festival observer, the gargantuan, Odyssean works of Filipino director Lav Diaz competing or winning an award is something of a staple.…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
A visual motif that reoccurs throughout Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, is a spiral staircase. Beyond being chic and Parisian in the way…
“Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The question is posed from one beleaguered raver to another, on a school bus somewhere…
Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk seems likely to be the most important film to screen at the 2025…
Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome…
Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker…
Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts with his…
Delicately unfurling as an introductory vocabulary lesson, one informed by the portraiture at the film’s core — that of the formidable Thi Hau Cao, a…
If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of…
One would be hard-pressed to identify a film director on the world stage who has done a better job of articulating our historical moment than…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…
A white person adrift in an “exotic” land, losing themselves in order to find themselves in the perceived primitiveness, peculiarity, or freedom of their strange…
In Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature, Evidence, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, the conspiracy theory adopts a progressive slant. With Schmitt’s characteristic…
Comments are closed.