For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.





For the 2014 NYFF Main Slate list with the festival blurbs, see below. Or see Noel Murray's more thought-through descriptions for The Dissolve. I'll be covering the festival here and on Filmleaf.

For preview comments on the selections see below.

For the FSLC's site for all info on NYFF52 click on the image above.

The 52nd New York Film Festival (2014) Main Slate

GONE GIRL
Director: David Fincher
Opening Nigh 145 mins.
World Premiere
David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, an intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a depiction of celebrity/media culture.

INHERENT VICE
Centerpiece
World Premiere 148 mins.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
The first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a time machine placing viewers in the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s.

BIRDMAN OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Closing Night 119 mins.
One-time action hero Riggan Thomson (a jaw-dropping Michael Keaton) stages his own adaptation of Raymond Carver’s "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" while contending with a scene-hogging narcissist, a vulnerable actress, and an unhinged girlfriend for co-stars; a resentful daughter; a manager who’s about to come undone... and his ego, the inner demon of the superhero that made him famous, Birdman.

BELOVED SISTERS (Die geliebten Schwestern)
Director: Dominik Graf
North Armerican Premiere 170 mins.
Romantic sentiment runs high but aristocratic decorum holds sway in this beautiful and thoroughly modern rendering of the real-life 18th-century love triangle involving German poet Friedrich Schiller and two sisters of noble birth, Charlotte and Caroline, whose strikingly intense relationship and profound mutual devotion verge on symbiosis.


malric shows Simenon novella "La chambre bleue"

THE BLUE ROOM (La chambre bleue)
Director: Mathieu Amalric
North American Premiere 76 mins.
A perfectly twisted, timeless adaptation of a Georges Simenon domestic crime novel in which an adulterous man (Mathieu Amalric) and woman (Stéphanie Cléau) meet in a country hotel’s blue room... but have very different visions of their futur

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
Director: Olivier Assayas
U.S. Premiere 124 mins.
Juliette Binoche plays an aging actress and Kristen Stewart her personal assistant in Olivier Assayas’s brilliant new film, a close meditation on the passage of time.

EDEN
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve
U.S. Premiere 131 mins.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature is based on the experiences of her brother (and co-writer) Sven—one of the pioneering DJs of the French rave scene in the early 1990s—and plays in the mind as a swirl of beautiful faces and bodies, impulsive movements, rushes of cascading light and color, and music, music, and more music.

FOXCATCHER
Director: Bennett Miller 133 mins.
'A vivid portrait of a side of American life that has never been touched in movies, Bennett Miller’s meticulously crafted new film deals with the tragic story of the the fatally dissociated billionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell) and the brothers and championship wrestlers (played by Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum) recruited by du Pont to create a national wrestling team on his family’s sprawling property in Pennsylvania.

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (Adieu au langage)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard 70 ins.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 43rd feature, shot in 3-D and “starring” his beloved dog Roxy, is a work of the greatest freedom and joy, as impossible to summarize as a poem by Wallace Stevens or a Messiaen quartet.

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT
Directors: Josh & Benny Safdie
U.S. Premiere 94 mins.
Harley is madly in love with Ilya. She’s sure he loves her just as much, if only he could express it. Both of them are heroin addicts, kids who wander around New York trying to scare up money for a fix. The Safdie Brothers’ toughest movie, it’s not romantic but it will break your heart.

HILL OF FREEDOM (Jayuui Eondeok)
Director: Hong Sang-soo
U.S. Premiere 66 mins.
Kwon is given a packet of undated letters from Mori, who has come to Seoul to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, they are dropped and scattered. While reading them, she must make sense of the chronology… and so must we, in Hong Sang-soo’s daring new film, made up of a series of disordered scenes based on the letters.

HORSE MONEY (Cavalo Dinheiro)
Director: Pedro Costa
U.S. Premiere 103 mins.
Pedro Costa’s astonishing new film, which “takes place” in the soul-space of Costa regular Ventura, is a self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, and a great and piercingly beautiful work of cinema.


Lisandro Alonso at Cannes

JUAJA
Director: Lisandro Alonso
U.S. Premiere 108 mins.
A work of tremendous beauty and a source of continual surprise, Alonso’s first period piece stars Viggo Mortensen as a Danish military engineer who traverses a visually stunning variety of Patagonian shrub, rock, grass, and desert on horseback and on foot in search of his teenage daughter.

LIFE OF RILEY(Aimer, boire et chanter)
Director: Alain Resnais
U.S. Premiere 108 mins.
The final work from Alain Resnais, based on British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, is a moving, graceful, and surprisingly affirmative farewell to life from a truly great artist.

LISTEN UP PHILIP
Director: Alex Ross Perry 108 mins.
or his sly, very funny portrait of artistic egomania, Alex Ross Perry draws on literary models (mainly Philip Roth and William Gaddis) to achieve a brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos.

MAPS TO THE STARS
Director: David Cronenberg
U.S. Premiere 111 mins.
Cronenberg takes Bruce Wagner’s script—a pitch-black Hollywood satire—chills it down, and gives it a near-tragic spin. The terrible loneliness of narcissism afflicts every character from the fading star Havana (Julianne Moore) to the available-for-anything chauffeur (Robert Pattinson) to the entire Weiss family, played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird, and Mia Wasikowska.


Asia Argento at Cannes

MISUNDERSTOOD (Incompresa)
Director: Asia Argento
North American Premiere 103 mins.
As preteen Aria shuttles between the well-appointed homes of her divorced showbiz parents, a large affectionate cat her only companion, she elaborates her walks into sometimes life-threatening adventures. Blurring the line between imagination and actuality, Asia Argento’s irrepressible projection of young female subjectivity is ingenious, direct, and utterly real

MR. TURNER
Director: Mike Leigh 149 mins.
A portrait of the great painter J.M.W. Turner and his time, but also an extremely clear-eyed film about art and its creation, and the great human problem of sharing a life with other people. Featuring a remarkable performance from director Mike Leigh’s frequent collaborator, Timothy Spall.
Read more

PASOLINI
Director: Abel Ferrara 87 mins.
U.S. Premiere 87 mins
Abel Ferrara’s new film compresses the many contradictory aspects of his subject’s life and work into a distilled, prismatic portrait, with a brilliant Willem Dafoe in the title role.

THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE (La Princesa de Francia)
Director: Matías Piñeiro
U.S. Premiere 70 mins.
Matías Piñeiro’s dazzling fifth feature, which follows a group of young people involved in a radio production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, doesn’t transplant Shakespeare to the present day so much as summon the spirit of his polymorphous comedies.

SAINT LAURENT
Director: Bertrand Bonello
North American Premiere 146 mins.
Focusing on a dark, hedonistic, wildly creative decade in Yves Saint Laurent’s life and career, Bertrand Bonello toys deliriously with biopic rules and limitations.

LA SAPIENZA
Director: Eugne Green
U.S. Premiere 100 mins.
In Eugène Green’s exquisite new film, an unhappy married couple travel to Italy so that the husband can research the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. There they encounter a brother and sister, whose friendship helps to restore their own sense of inner balance.

'71
Director: Yann Demange
A riveting thriller set in the mean streets of Belfast over the course of 24 hours, ’71 brings the grim reality of the Troubles to vivid, shocking life as a squaddie (Jack O’Connell) finds himself trapped and unarmed in hostile territory and the lines between friend and foe become increasingly blurred.

TALES OF THE GRIM SPEEPER
Director: Nick Broomfield 105 mins.
Four years after the arrest of the Grim Sleeper serial killer in South Central Los Angeles, filmmaker Nick Broomfield interviews friends, neighbors, and community activists to unravel the chilling story, while giving voice to his victims and illuminating the racial divide that still exists.

TIMBUKTU
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
U.S. Premiere 97 mins.
A serenely composed vision of the humiliation and terror wrought by foreign Islamic jihadists who occupy the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu. A film by turns wondrous and terrifying


Richard Gere playing a homeless person

TIME OUT OF MIND
Director: Oren Moverman
U.S. Premiere 117 mins.
As George, a man forced onto the streets, Richard Gere may be the “star” of Oren Moverman’s haunting new film, but he allows the world around him to take center stage, and himself to simply be.

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Deux jours, une nuit)
Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne 95 mins.
A factory worker on the verge of being laid off (Marion Cotillard) has 48 hours to convince her co-workers to forego their bonuses so that she might keep her job. At once an unforgettable drama and a tough ethical inquiry, from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

TWO SHOTS FIRED (Dos Disparos)
Director: Martn Rejtman
U.S. Premiere 105 mins.
Martín Rejtman’s seventh feature, about a family’s curious methods of coping with their 16-year-old son’s inexplicable suicide attempt, is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel.

WHIPLASH
Director: Damien Chazelle 106 mins.
A pedagogical thriller and an emotional S&M two-hander, Whiplash is brilliantly acted by Miles Teller as an eager jazz drummer at an unnamed New York music academy and J.K. Simmons as the teacher whose method of terrorizing his students is beyond questionable, even when it gets

THE WONDERS (Le meraviglie)
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
North American Premiere 110 mins.
Alice Rohrwacher’s sophomore feature, a vivid yet mysterious story of teenage yearning and confusion, conjures a richly concrete world that is subject to the magical thinking of adolescence

2nd NYFF SELECTION COMMITTEE: Kent Jones, chair, with Dennis Lim (FSLC Director of Programming), Marian Masone (FSLC Senior Programming Advisor), Gavin Smith (Film Comment Editor), and Amy Taubin (Film Comment and Sight & Sound Contributing Editor).

PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS. These run from September 15th through October 11trh 2014. Reviews will be appearing on my website and along the Filmleaf 2014 NYFF Festival Coverage thread regularly during this time.



Main Slate. Comments on the selections.

The NYFF remains an elite festival, its Main Slate containing carefully honed choices without a distribution of prizes and awards, inclusion in the list being distinction enough. To a significant extent, as usual, a third of the total this time, the Slate constitutes a Best Of (and Other Interesting Items From) Cannes (Two Days, One Night; The Wonders; Foxcatcher; Mr. Turner, Clouds Of Sils Maria, Goodbye To Language, Saint Laurent, Maps to the Stars, Juaja, The Blue Room), plus a few very top as yet unreleased titles from Sundance (Whiplash, Listen Up Philip).

The rest of the 2014 Main Slate includes some new films from longtime Lincoln Center favorites such as Abel Ferrara, Hong Sang-soo, Pedro Costa, Alain Resnais, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Asia Argento. Eden and Pasolini will come out first at Toronto and Venice, two important festivals that introduce films before the Lincoln Center festival. I am a fan of precocious French talent Mia Hansen-Løve, and the FSLC has featured every one of her previous films in one series or another.

It's always worth seeing the best of Cannes, a category that includes many of the year's finest films. The Dardennes and Mike Leigh have never disappointed me and Assayas rarely has. I liked Rorhwacher's first feature more than most did. Whiplash sounded like the must-see of the festival when I was following Sundance.

The featured American film premieres, David Fincher for the opening night film and Paul Thomas Anderson for the centerpiece, look very interesting, and PTA's offering will draw cinephiles hot to see a December release (Gone Girl comes out October 3rd). Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance in the closing night slot sounds more doubtful. I'm pleased they're including Bonello's Saint Laurent. The French at Cannes appreciated it more than English-language writers; and I like Bonello and Ulliel and want to compare this with the earlier-released tamer Bergé-approved YSL biopic with Pierre Niney. Bonello's will come out in France around this time so we can see how it does critically there.

Nick Bloomfield's Battle for Haditha (2007) was the best film about the Iraq war. His new one, a documentary, returns to a topic he has filmed before, a serial killer. Oren Moverman has been good and I'm interested in new German film: Dominik Graf did one of the Dreileben films of several years ago, a bit disappointing then but we'll see. Amalric hasn't seemed as good a director as actor and at Cannes the Variety wasn't impressed. Alonso's Juaja is an atmospheric headscratcher and period Viggo Mortensen vehicle enthusiastically received at Un Certain Regard.

Every year the NYFF selection committee lately has edged up the number of selections a bit. It was 28, then 29, then 30. This time though, last year's raft of somewhat dubious English comedies is missing, and the selection is more international. It looks like a good year.

There doesn't appear to be much torturous or long-slog material here, and what may be hidden between the lines will be from distinguished sources (Costa, Godard). Farewell to Language, buy the way, is in 3D.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.