Starting in August, when the fall film festival season kicks off, tens of thousands of movie lovers — stars, executives, programmers, journalists and cinephiles — begin their annual mass migration across the globe. They dust off the summer’s sand with some headed off to Venice while others journey to Telluride, Toronto and New York, crisscrossing continents to watch the latest films. The luckiest movie lovers are the locals. Like many who flock to the New York Film Festival, they only need to travel short distances to experience new worlds.
The flagship event of Film at Lincoln Center, this year’s strong edition incorporates the usual mix of new and older movies, feature length and short, from around the globe. There are dramas, essay films, biopics, horror movies and selections that defy easy classification, like Kahlil Joseph’s “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions,” a heady exploration of Black life that leaps across time, space and genres. Other selections that will light up screens and minds include “A House of Dynamite,” Kathryn Bigelow’s nail-biter about an errant missile; “Sentimental Value,” a tender, tough family story from Joachim Trier (last here with “The Worst Person in the World”); and the giddy thriller “No Other Choice,” from Park Chan-wook.
In addition, among this year’s 74 features are two from the always unexpected Romanian director Radu Jude (“Dracula” and “Kontinental ’25”); a shambling lark from the Italian filmmaker Francesco Sossai (“The Last One for the Road”); and a sui generis chronicle of the bloodstained life and times of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan from the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz (“Magellan”). You may need to recalibrate your bodily rhythms for Diaz’s epic, which moves more leisurely than a Hollywood movie. Yet changing things up, including your ideas about what movies can and should do, is a reason festivals like this exist.
In “Below the Clouds,” the Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi narrows in on Naples and its surroundings, which regularly tremble and shake from nearby volcanoes. With gentle rhythms and exquisite black-and-white images, Rosi dips into the past while taking the pulse of the contemporary region, where citizens routinely call emergency services worrying about earthquakes and eruptions. Every so often, Rosi cuts to a derelict cinema, an image of a lost world that he poignantly connects both to those who died in A.D. 79 when Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii and to Roberto Rossellini’s devastating “Journey to Italy” (1954). It’s a title that works for this lovely, thoughtful movie, too.
Like Rosi’s movie, a number of selections in the lineup have made splashes at earlier festivals. Among these is Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which recently won top honors at Venice. With calm, delicacy, a steady eye and Jarmusch’s characteristic deadpan, the movie charts the inner and outer lives of different families, creating distinct pointillist group portraits through smiles, gestures, silences, ritualistic pleasantries and stinging asides. In one, a sly cool cat of a father (Tom Waits) receives a visit from his normie twins (the equally bespectacled Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik); in another, an aloof mother (Charlotte Rampling) serves tea to her nervously needy daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps); in the third, twins (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) mourn what they’ve lost.
The family in “Is This Thing On?,” from the actor turned director Bradley Cooper, has already begun imploding when the movie opens. With their children, dogs and suburban house, Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess (Laura Dern) have an outwardly nice life, but they’re unhappy and soon call it quits. The movie is more interested in Alex, who’s soon working through his pain by doing standup. He’s not really funny (and knows it), but his new pursuit is therapeutic and it expands his horizons, much as Cooper’s shift into directing presumably did his. In moments, the movie plays like an optimistic riff on Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” and not just because Dern is in both.
Baumbach is back in the festival with “Jay Kelly,” about a movie star who, ta-da, is played by George Clooney. Both the director and the actor are scheduled to attend Q&As at several screenings, in-person appearances being one festival dividend. Baumbach is also slated to engage in a conversation with Trier in one of a handful of free events. You will have to pony up, however, to see Martin Scorsese chatting with the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who spent years in prison and will appear in person with his latest, “It Was Just an Accident.” In May, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; it’s a sure bet for many year-end best-of lists.
Established in 1963, the New York Film Festival has been an essential part of the city’s film scene since its founding and its importance has only grown. Like other arts events, it has weathered doubts about its purpose, political storms, religious boycotts, economic pressures and internal strife. It’s also emerged from the pandemic with renewed vigor because of new and younger audiences. Nearly a third of the audience in 2024 were first-time attendees, explained the festival’s artistic director, Dennis Lim. Equally notable, 62 percent of all the festival attendees were between 21 and 44, a crucial demographic for any organization, though especially one that relies as heavily on its patrons as Film at Lincoln Center does.
Lim, who has written about culture for The New York Times, agreed that the pandemic might help explain the uptick in the number of younger festivalgoers, who seem eager to get off the couch and out of the house. Lim had noted an appreciable shift in 2021, he wrote in an email. “I remember being struck that year by the relative youthfulness of the audience, by the number of young cinephiles and filmmakers who came up to me eager to talk about films they’d seen.”
He was particularly hit by the “intensity of interest” that certain filmmakers received. Some, like Park Chan-wook and Bi Gan (who’s on the program with “Resurrection,” a delirious ode to cinema), are almost treated like rock stars, to the point that “they can barely walk down Broadway without being mobbed.”
Lim’s observations find echoes throughout off-Hollywoodland, including inside the mobile Criterion Closet; on the platform Letterboxd; in the aims of new distributors that are pointedly targeting this demographic; at other festivals; and in art-house theaters. A 2024 report from the Art House Convergence, a coalition of indie exhibitors, found that art houses are bringing in new customers who skew younger than traditional ones. That’s crucial given concerns in the prepandemic ecosystem that the art house audience was graying but not regenerating. It’s unclear if the young cinephiles flocking to events like the New York Film Festival are part of a new movement, but it’s very welcome news. Not everyone, it seems, wants to keep settling for the moldy leftovers that the big studios insist on serving.
So hallelujah and congratulations, New York, even if I didn’t warm to the opening-night selection, “After the Hunt.” It will probably stir up debate, but I wonder if it will divide the audience generationally. Directed by Luca Guadagnino (here in 2024 with “Queer”), “After the Hunt” is a would-be provocation about so-called cancel culture. That it’s up to something is signaled by its opening credits, which look like those for a Woody Allen movie. Set at Yale, it hinges on Alma (Julia Roberts, nice and spiky), a tenure-track philosophy professor who nurtures a cult of personality and whose cosseted world is upended after her Black mentee student (Ayo Edebiri) accuses a white instructor (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault.
“After the Hunt” uses the allegation to gin up mild suspense and coyly dances around race; it only really pops when its older characters gripe and sometimes rage about kids these days, what with their fragile feelings and trigger warnings. The performances are weaker than usual for Guadagnino, though everyone and everything looks nice. Alma and her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg), seem to have used the same interior decorator who did the villa that Stuhlbarg’s character in “Call Me by Your Name” lives in. This movie’s idea of the life of the mind and academia is glib, as is its take on the #MeToo movement. Given the Trump administration’s assault on elite universities the movie is already dated. Too bad.
The New York Film Festival runs Sept. 26-Oct. 13. For more information, go to filmlinc.org.