New York Film Festival Roundup: 5 Films We Loved at The Festival
America is right in the thick of film festival season as entries, both foreign and domestic, stuff themselves into theaters in cities around the world, clamoring for awards season attention. One of the biggest stateside fests is the New York Film Festival, which currently runs until October 15th at New York City's fabled Lincoln Center.
There, audiences can see independent darlings, challenging arthouse works, pitch-black social satires, and animated masterpieces. (Not to mention middlebrow thrillers that might come to a streaming service in a couple weeks' time.) Though the combined WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes have made it difficult for talent to attend film festivals this season, the recent end of the WGA strike means writers can join directors for Q&As after many of the films shown at NYFF this year.
Every year, NYFF features its usual roster of smaller, artsier films in its Current Programs and also features reams of shorts and Revivals of underseen classics. But it's the Main Slate and Spotlight Programs that offer some of the most interesting entries in the festival's sizable roster – everything from gritty Chilean Westerns to off-kilter tales of love, loss, food, and philosophy.
Here are five films screened at the fest that have grabbed our attention at Wealth of Geeks. (Get your tickets now for upcoming screenings of some of these festival faves.)
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World
Romanian agent provocateur Radu Jude relishes in the wacky, wild, and confrontational: his works poke and prod at the alienated misery of the age of social media, pandemics, and corporate malfeasance. His last film, 2021's Bad Luck Banging, riotously skewered the post-COVID collapse of our remaining social fabric; his latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, dances in the rubble.
At nearly three hours long, it's punishing but hilariously, purposefully so. Its first two hours link an overworked PA for an Austrian production company (Ilinca Manolache) driving around the countryside for 16-hour days with footage from a 1981 film called Angela Moves On. Her only respite from the tedium is to film outrageous TikToks as a coarse, offensive character using a crude filter of manosphere creep Andrew Tate. Its final fifty minutes constitute a one-shot corporate farce in which a wheelchair-bound construction worker (Ovidiu Pîrșan) sees his testimonial of corporate negligence whittled down into a sanitized nothing by the company paying him to give it. It's hilarious, painful, and deeply provocative; it also features infamous critic-boxing director Uwe Boll in a cameo. What's not to love?
RATING: 8/10 SPECS
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, hot off the back of his Best Picture and Director nominations for last year's Drive My Car, returns with a sensitive, probing look at a small rural community suddenly faced with the prospect of a “glamping” site being built in their area. It starts simply; he relishes in the crunch of snow, the snap of a twig, the zenlike process by which village handyman Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) breaks down trees into firewood. Then, as in many of Hamaguchi's best works, the film shifts perspectives and tones so imperceptibly as to be invisible: a contentious town hall meeting sees Takumi intersecting with two corporate reps (Ryuji Kosakaz and Ayaka Shibutani) who actually listen to the townspeople's warnings and feel stuck between doing the right thing and doing the bidding of their greedy boss. Even after that, Hamaguchi's film surprises — not just with late-film turns that upend our expectations of stories like these, but with its quiet exploration of the way we relate to each other and the world around us.
RATING: 7/10 SPECS
Fallen Leaves
Legendary Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki delivers another droll charmer in Fallen Leaves, an anti-romantic comedy for all the messed up thirtysomethings out there. His twentieth film(!) concerns the chance meeting of two flawed, lonely people at a Helsinki karaoke joint: Ansa (Alma Pöysti), a grocery store stockgirl, and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a construction worker who barely hides his penchant for drinking on the job.
Kaurismäki has a droll and deeply deadpan approach: the working-class Helsinki setting makes for a surprising setting for such an unexpected love story, with its unassuming, cramped apartments and crumbling decades-old architecture. Stories of the Ukraine War burst out through the radio to drape a heavier coat over Ansa and Holappa's dreary world. But even so, Fallen Leaves finds beams of light among all the drabness, whether it's a drunk friend blustering about his karaoke prowess while singing nationalistic folk songs or wordlessly taking in a matinee screening of Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die. And, of course, the simmering passion that sits between the two lovers' ironic detachment. At 81 minutes, it threatens to feel insubstantial, but its considerable charms shine through nonetheless. After all, it comes to us courtesy of one of Finland's greatest filmmakers.
Oh, and the film features a Very Good Dog in its final act, so an extra star for that.
RATING: 7/10 SPECS
The Settlers
Sitting somewhere between The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, Felipe Gálvez's brutal, sizzling debut The Settlers channels the story of Chilean colonialism through the rhythms of a Western. Tasked by infamous landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) to rid the Patagonia region of its indigenous population — to make way for his sheep run, of course — an unlikely trio of frontiersmen make their way across the countryside: former British Army officer MacLennan (Mark Stanley), amoral Texan cowpoke Bill (Benjamin Westfall), and, crucially, Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a mixed-race guide whose aim is as sharp as his guilt over what he's asked to do.
Over the course of Gálvez's grim epic, shot among the beautiful, desolate plains and mountains of Tierra del Fuego, the audience is confronted with all manner of atrocities committed with a smile: murder, extermination, assault, indignity. It's a disquieting experience, deeply concerned with the dirty work of building “civilization” and the heaps of bodies strewn along the way. And its tone-shifting final act condemns both the brutes who participated in such extermination and the decorum-focused politicians who'd rather sweep it under the rug to construct a more palatable national identity.
RATING: 9/10 SPECS
The Taste of Things
Film, like food, is a sensory experience: You eat, like you watch, with your eyes. Tran Anh Hung's The Taste of Things is thin on story but heavy on sensation, following the tragic romance between longtime culinary partners Dodin (Benoît Magimel) and Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) in 19th-century France. The former is a legendary gourmet, “the Napoleon of the culinary arts”; the latter, his dedicated chef and muse for over twenty years. But the more they cook for one another, the deeper their feelings grow — even as fate conspires to complicate their culinary love story.
Binoche and Magimel give delightfully subtle performances, weaving through The Taste of Things‘ loping story with chemistry as tangible as their culinary creations. The real star here is the food, Hung lovingly lingering over simmering copper pots and obsessive plating with the help of Jonathan Ricquebourg's honeyed cinematography. Eugénie and Dodin explore their love for each other via food, and in so doing, it becomes the film's central appeal. In an age where everyone films their food, and social media is replete with time-lapsed instructional cooking videos, there's something so satisfying about simply sitting back and patiently watching a meal come together — not just for the purity of the ingredients, but the depth of feeling that goes into preparing them.
RATING: 8/10 SPECS
