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.
Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of…
No matter how common the surroundings or how ordinary the story may be, a Christian Petzold film always catches the viewer by surprise. His films…
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…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
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 former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies…
“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…
In Sentimental Value, there’s a scene where the veteran filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, explains to his newly discovered lead actress, Rachel Kemp,…
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 an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how so few contemporary filmmakers…
A woman, beautiful and a touch removed, travels to Switzerland from Argentina to accept an award. She throws the glass statuette in the bathroom trash,…
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…
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…
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…
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