King of New York

"TONY" finds much to crow about at the 45th New York Film Festival.

Every year, it seems, New York hosts more and more film festivals, whether linked by borough, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, age or any other arbitrary rubric. But each September, both the most rabid cinephiles and the most casual filmgoers anticipate the announcement of the lineup of the New York Film Festival, still the premier movie event of our celluloid-saturated city. And unlike the overwhelming, nearly unmanageable festivals at Cannes and Toronto, the New York Film Festival is a beautifully curated boutique affair. The official selection consists of 28 films; below we spotlight our top dozen from one of the strongest lineups in recent memory (for a review of The Darjeeling Limited, the opening-night film, see page 100). All screenings, except where noted, take place at the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall. Although most films are nominally sold out, it’s often possible to get tickets right before showtime.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
We’ve long prayed for Sidney Lumet’s comeback—perhaps not to Dog Day Afternoon or Network levels, but at least The Verdict. Asking too much? Apparently not: Lumet’s latest is the kind of unvarnished crime story that earned him his stripes back in the ’70s. Two brothers, arrogant Philip Seymour Hoffman and vain Ethan Hawke, decide to rob the family’s Westchester jewelry store. Naturally, things go wrong. Lumet gets dynamite work from the whole cast, including Albert Finney, Michael Shannon and an impressively vacant Marisa Tomei.—JR (Oct 12 at 6pm; Oct 13 at 12:45pm)

Flight of the Red Balloon
Leave it to Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, in this remake (sort of) of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic The Red Balloon, to craft an absolutely treacle-free film with a saucer-eyed Parisian moppet, puppets (no surprise there, coming from the director of The Puppetmaster) and a peroxided Juliette Binoche, giving her best performances in years. Hou’s central theme is alienation: of children by the fickle rules of adults, of a Chinese baby-sitter (wonderful newcomer Fang Song) by her new language, and of an artist (Binoche) by the instability of her life.—MA (Oct 7 at 1pm; Oct 8 at 9pm)

Go Go Tales
From the minute you hear the horns in Archie Bell and the Drells’ groovy soul nugget “Tighten Up,” you’re swept up in Abel Ferrara’s strip-club saga, one of the most fiercely vibrant movies you’ll see all year. Ferrara’s film is 8 1/2 by way of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Showgirls as stage-managed by Kiki & Herb. But not even those canonical works can boast scenes of Asia Argento having a quick moment of intimacy with a pooch or Willem Dafoe crooning his heart out. And Sylvia Miles hasn’t been this good since Heat.—MA (Oct 5 midnight, Walter Reade Theater; Oct 7 at 4:15pm)

I’m Not There
Aware that Bob Dylan needs no introduction, the great Todd Haynes (Safe, Far from Heaven) fashions a daringly impressionistic take on the folksinger’s legend, and in the process comes breathtakingly close to achieving an imaginative feat worthy of his subject. You’ll see more literal biopics, but none as true.—JR (Oct 4 at 8:30pm; Oct 6 at 10am)

The Last Mistress
Recovering from both the almost-unanimous raspberries received by her last film, 2004’s Anatomy of Hell, and a near-fatal stroke, French provocateur Catherine Breillat reinvents herself and the costume drama in this slinky, sultry adaptation of an 1851 novel. Apparently Breillat and star Asia Argento, in the title role, feuded constantly on set. Yet it just may have been that animosity that pushed the actor into such magnificent surges of ferociousness, refusing to relinquish her soon-to-be-married lover (the obscenely beautiful Fu’ad Ait Aattou). Anointed the queen of Cannes in May, Argento still wears the crown in New York.—MA (Oct 7 at 9:30pm; Oct 8 at 6pm)

Margot at the Wedding
Writer-director Noah Baumbach follows up his winning The Squid and the Whale with a movie that’s darker, more neurotic and ultimately superior as a study of family dysfunction. This time, the center is held by two squabbling sisters: clipped, bitter Margot (Nicole Kidman) and earthy, freewheeling Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, a revelation). The latter is headed for an impulsive marriage to a slacker, spurring the former to intervene at the family’s Long Island beach house. Baumbach triggers the fireworks with great precision. Remember when people eulogized the actorcentric spirit of Ingmar Bergman? Margot has it in spades.—JR (Oct 7 at 7pm; Oct 8 at 12:30pm)

Married Life
We’re not exactly ruining Ira Sachs’s absorbing, late-1940s-set domestic drama by revealing that married life has its drawbacks. Sexual frustrations take their toll on a tight group of friends (Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, cock-of-the-walk Pierce Brosnan) fortified with more martinis and lit cigarettes than an entire season of Mad Men. But the underlying grace of the film, adapted from a John Bingham novel, comes from its revision of stock scenarios into honest emotional material. There’s frank talk, a little poisonous revenge, even forgiveness. Maybe married life ain’t that bad.—JR (Sat 29 at 3:30pm; Sun 30 at 6:45pm)

No Country for Old Men
The Coen brothers have fashioned Cormac McCarthy’s crime novel into a lean, mean eulogy for old-school frontier justice; their faithful adaptation is to pulp fiction what Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was to Nam-era Westerns. Josh Brolin’s resourceful hero with stolen loot supplies the grit, Tommy Lee Jones’s weary sheriff provides the gravitas, Javier Bardem’s badass superassassin rocks a bizarre pageboy ’do. The directors, returning to the scorched Texas earth of Blood Simple, deliver what can be described only as a masterpiece.—DF (Oct 6 at 9pm; Oct 7 at 10am)

Paranoid Park
Since his radical career revision with 2002’s po-faced Gerry, Gus Van Sant seems to be plunging ever deeper into laconic, lost-generation territory (his abstract Columbine memorial, Elephant; the Kurt Cobain eulogy Last Days). But the director’s latest is easily the most heartfelt of the quartet, grounded in an undeniable sympathy for its Portland, Oregon, skate rats—one of whom accidentally commits an unspeakable act. Does the dude care? A MySpace-era murder mystery loaded with style and fashionable obliqueness, Paranoid Park will disappoint those who require rigorous plotting. Behaviorally, however, it’s top-notch.—JR (Oct 8 at 3pm; Oct 9 at 9:15pm)

Persepolis
Bringing the bold visual style of her trenchant autobiographical graphic novels to the screen, Marjane Satrapi, who codirects and cowrites (with Vincent Paronnaud), shows us that even girls growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution knew the words to “Eye of the Tiger.” The voice casting is a felicitous family affair: Chiara Mastroianni and her real-life maman, Catherine Deneuve, play Marjane and her mother; grande dame Danielle Darrieux, who’s portrayed Deneuve’s mom at least twice onscreen, tops the cast as Marjane’s sage granny.—MA (Oct 14 at 8:30pm, Avery Fisher Hall)

Secret Sunshine
Both a supreme examination of grief and one of the gentlest yet undeniably damning critiques of Christianity, the latest by Lee Chang-dong (Peppermint Candy) is all the more powerful thanks to Jeon Do-yeon’s astounding performance as Shin-ae, a young widow who moves from Seoul with her six-year-old son to the small town where her husband grew up. After Shin-ae suffers yet another horrific loss, Jeon transforms the wailing-woman character into something approaching grace. And where lesser writer-directors would choose maudlin routes, Lee opts for unexpected humor.—MA (Mon 1 at 6pm; Tue 2 at 9:15pm)

Silent Light
Those who had written off Carlos Reygadas’s last film, Battle in Heaven, as a noxious, chilly exercise in corpulent copulation will find themselves awestruck by not only the sheer beauty of his tale of a Mennonite family in Chihuahua, Mexico, but also the profoundly mature seriousness with which Reygadas conveys the clan’s emotions. An homage to Dreyer’s Ordet, Silent Light is the first film to be spoken in the medieval German dialect Plautdietsch. The language may be unfamiliar, but the questions of faith, love and reconciliation are anything but.—MA (Tue 2 at 6pm; Wed 3 at 9:15pm)


The New York Film Festival runs Fri 28 through Oct 14. See Art-house & indie cinema for additional titles and events.

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