For two and a half weeks, from Sept. 27 through Oct. 14, Christmas arrived early for cinephiles: Film at Lincoln Center’s 62nd New York Film Festival.
On top of being a little starstruck by the exclusive post-screening appearances from actors and directors, as I sat in the comfort of some of the best theaters New York City has to offer: Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater. Part of what makes the New York Film Festival unique is it’s a hand-picked culmination of the films that took the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals by storm. If a film is screening there, chances are it’s the crème de la crème of what global cinema has to offer. I had the privilege of seeing eight of the many films selected for the festival, so here’s a brief rundown.
“A Real Pain” (2024, Jesse Eisenberg)
Stories about generational trauma aren’t particularly new. Films like “Hereditary” (2018) and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022) take relatively universal concepts and transform them into uber-maximalist audio-visual spectacles. However, few films tackle trauma through the premise of something as deceptively nonchalant as a meandering tour of another country. In Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” we follow two polar opposite, seemingly-incompatible cousins: David Kaplan, played by Eisenberg, is a reclusive-to-a-fault father while Benji Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin, is a directionless and emotionally erratic drifter.
For the duration of the tour, David and Benji’s trip to Poland isn’t just an opportunity to reflect on their Jewish heritage; it inadvertently resurfaces this deeply bitter, complicated resentment the two have for each other. The most uncomfortable aspects of their characters — whether it’s Benji’s unhinged, confrontational honesty or David’s overpowering social anxiety and awkwardness — just so happen to resurface at the worst possible times and embroil the rest of the tour group in their clashings. That might be a turn-off for some viewers. How many people are willing to sit through 90 minutes of people constantly exhibiting their faults and imperfections? However, to juxtapose and smoothen these characters’ rough edges, the moments of heartfelt warmth won me over.
Culkin might be playing Benji as a slightly re-modulated rendition of Roman Roy in “Succession” (2018-2023), but he convincingly highlights the more pleasant sides of this character. His erraticness might give you second-hand embarrassment, but he displays immense observational intelligence; it’s unmistakably clear that much of his personality is a front to hide something much sadder. All this sounds great — and it is — but so much of my love and frustration for “A Real Pain” comes from what it could’ve been. As much as I love a 90-minute movie, the runtime wasn’t remotely enough to fully realize a premise like this. It’s a real shame because I could’ve sat through at least another hour of this otherwise skilled Richard Linklater imitation.
Rating: 7/10. Currently in theaters.
“Blitz” (2024, Steve McQueen)
Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” peaks early with an opening that’s nothing short of deafening: an extended sequence of London firefighters desperately trying to quench the thousands of homes smoldering by a merciless Nazi bombing campaign. That sounds gripping enough, but what makes its opening truly arresting is when things go wrong — frankly, it’s a horrible understatement to say “things go wrong.” When a group of firefighters lose grasp of their firehose and unleash it at its full power, McQueen frames the sequence like a monster rising from the ashes. The hose clatters with its surroundings and refuses to be controlled, with its brashness amplified ten-fold by the blistering noise of burning houses. It must be heard to be understood, just like experiencing My Bloody Valentine live for a fleeting five minutes as I impulsively wince at the music’s abrasiveness.
Then, to my despair, it stops being interesting. Perhaps that’s a tad harsh — the spectacle’s horror is always discerning — but the narrative that intends to intertwine overlooked humanism with the backdrop of tragedy is skeletal at best. To preface, McQueen’s recent work, especially the “Small Axe” (2020) anthology, aims to capture the experiences of British minorities undergoing and partaking in a sociopolitical revolution. Several elements and motifs from the anthology carry over into “Blitz.” McQueen’s fascination with the escapism of dance and music is reminiscent of his work in “Lovers Rock” (2020), but part of what makes the anthology so potent is that it’s a miniseries: the subject has room to breathe. Here, however, subjects of racism and the deprivation of unity in a broken country are confined to monologues. It functions like classic British Oscar-bait, which is bewildering for an auteur who, with films like “Shame” (2011) or “Hunger” (2008), has otherwise been fearlessly avant-garde.
Rating: 7/10. Available to stream on Apple TV+.
“The Brutalist” (2024, Brady Corbet)
Revelatory cinematic experiences aren’t all that common for me these days, but I’ll never forget the full-body chill I felt watching the opening minutes of “The Brutalist.” The film’s first shot has director Brady Corbet immediately positioning the viewer in near-pitch-black darkness. As the details crystallize, there’s a genuine awe-striking quality to witnessing the screen’s ill-lit obfuscation subside; the radiant sky blinds your eyes while the orchestral score floods your eardrums with its momentous swelling. That’s the moment I knew I was in good hands. Corbet had unwavering confidence in what he was showcasing. Not a single minute of its staggering 215-minute runtime is filler material.
There’s arguably no better course of displaying such formal self-assuredness than having the opening’s visual climax be an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty: a peculiar image that adequately encapsulates its grand thesis. László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect embodied by a towering tour-de-force performance from Adrien Brody, emigrates to the United States to escape the Holocaust. “Welcome to America,” László’s cousin says, as Brody so cogently expresses a sense of relief and ambition. As he escapes the confines of fascism, László is entrapped in the deceptively inviting façade of capitalism.
Much of “The Brutalist” operates under the framework of immigrants not-so-truthfully being introduced to the American Dream by an establishment that merely tolerates them. Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, an industrialist who becomes László’s client, looms like a shadow — especially post-intermission. Even Van Buren’s willingness to finance László’s work is fundamentally disingenuous, only recognizing László’s architectural genius when it benefits him; this cunningly reveals him to be the human embodiment of a sinister social hierarchy. I’d argue that some of its symbolism registers too repetitive for my liking — using rape as imagery for social order is, for better or worse, a unique choice — but none of its minor missteps take away from an otherwise staggering cinematic character study.
Rating: 9/10. Scheduled for a theatrical release on Dec. 20.
“Emilia Pérez” (2024, Jacques Audiard)
I could only imagine how ridiculous Jacques Audiard’s elevator pitch for “Emilia Pérez” must’ve sounded: “Give me €25 million, and I’ll make a Mexico-set Shakespearian tragedy about a lawyer getting a once-in-a-lifetime offer from a drug cartel kingpin who wants to transition to a woman. Oh, yeah, and it’s a musical, too.” An overbearing amount of discourse has already been generated about whether Audiard is treading his sociopolitical talking points lightly, either coming across as a man trying his hardest to avoid stepping on eggshells or if he’s your stereotypical French arthouse provocateur. Frankly, I’m unsure if he found the right angles to confront the plethora of issues “Emilia Pérez” touches upon. It’s a tonal mishmash of the highest order, and I can sympathize with viewers who find a transgender-centric story operating under the framework of narrative cataclysm to be problematic and culturally voyeuristic. But, I do sense genuine empathy and an arresting audaciousness that makes me want to give the movie the benefit of the doubt.
Rating: 6.5/10. Currently in theaters, and streaming on Netflix.
“Nickel Boys” (2024, RaMell Ross)
Of the many singular formal elements in “Nickel Boys,” whether it’s shooting the film exclusively in a first-person point of view or the narrative’s delicately constructed nonlinearity, RaMell Ross’ implementation of period-appropriate archival footage is the movie’s most striking piece of experimentation. Set in 1960s Jim Crow-era Florida, we follow two young men, Elwood and Turner, and their abusive incarceration at a corrupt, segregated reform school named Nickel Academy. Juxtaposing the coming-of-age narrative, the archival footage places a heavy fixation on the technological advancements of Western society: While humans are reaching for the moon and the universe’s unknowns, these young men are stuck in a world that is regressive by nature. It’s as if they’re going backward in time, alienated from the collective power of humanity.
The endeavor of depicting the systematic atrocities committed against Black people is also a tricky one — think McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” (2013) or any movie that deals with subject matters of slavery or police brutality — because, while unflinching visualizations can be undeniably informative to audiences, it’s equally vulnerable to making an exploitative spectacle of such violence. It’s a balancing act that’s reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” (2023) and its attempt at virtuously characterizing the apathetic evil of the Holocaust. Like Glazer, Ross rejects traditional forms of cinematic language and veers to the abstract, creating images and sounds that somehow trigger an indescribable, unparalleled and visceral feeling of genuine fear.
Rating: 9.5/10 Scheduled for a theatrical release on Dec. 13.
“Oh, Canada” (2024, Paul Schrader)
After being floored by much of writer-director Paul Schrader’s work, whether that’s “First Reformed” (2017), “Affliction” (1997) or his screenwriting contributions in “Taxi Driver” (1976), it’s strange watching a Schrader film that’s direction is unmistakably better than the screenplay itself. Then again, the premise, adapted from Russell Banks’ novel “Foregone,” is deliberately incoherent, distorted and incomplete in its reckoning with mortality. After all, this is the story of a documentary filmmaker, amidst his terminal illness and failing memory, attempting to find closure by unraveling his life of carefully constructed lies. As the film continues to straddle in its cozy, meditative exploration of myth and reality, it becomes apparent that Schrader isn’t all that interested in retrospection. As the movie took its abrupt final breath, I left this screening feeling somewhat cold.
Rating: 7/10. Scheduled for a theatrical release on Dec. 6.
“Pavements” (2024, Alex Ross Perry)
How do you accurately showcase the appeal of Pavement, a slacker-esque band that intentionally rejects musical polish by playing songs out of key, tune or time? That’s a challenge director Alex Ross Perry seeks to answer with this multi-genre metatextual, pseudo-biopic-slash-documentary-slash-mockumentary (yes, that’s a mouthful). “Pavements” incorporates four plotlines: a semi-chronological account of the band, the creation of “Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum” exhibit, a biopic hilariously starring Joe Keery and the behind-the-scenes footage from the “Slanted! Enchanted!” musical. Weirdly, the messy presentation of the film aptly encapsulates the band’s appeal: as someone who has grown to love the band, I found its emotional sincerity buried beneath the artful postmodernism surprisingly touching.
Rating: 7.5/10. Not yet scheduled for a theatrical release.
“The Shrouds” (2024, David Cronenberg)
As much as David Cronenberg wants to deny it, there’s no denying that the titular character of “The Shrouds” is a directorial self-insert. Continuing Cronenberg’s never-ending, low-key demented obsession with body deformation, sex and technology, Vincent Cassel’s Karsh — who sports a haircut and attire eerily similar to the director’s — is a businessman who invents technology that allows the living to monitor the decaying corpses of their loved ones in real-time. Karsh uses this invention as a coping mechanism of sorts to process the death of his wife, who lost her battle with breast cancer. Such grieving is rooted in the director’s life, referencing Cronenberg’s wife and occasional collaborator, Carolyn Zeifman, who passed away from an undisclosed illness in 2017.
Subtextually, for better or worse, this parallel reframes and rationalizes many of the film’s severe shortcomings. What’s otherwise a very talkative, surprisingly bloated and unhurried film about grief transforms into a narrative that positions the viewer as a cinematic voyeur, witnessing first hand a storyteller actively processing their tragedy in real-time. “The Shrouds” enraptures the “Cronenberg-heads,” fans who are well-informed and obsessed with the relationship between art and artist. Personally, I can’t help but feel distanced by its unrestrained yet underdeveloped ideas. While reading Richard Brody’s review of Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” (2022) — which brought the director out of his eight-year-long hiatus — I couldn’t help but steal this line in particular: “It’s a movie to have seen rather than to see.”
Rating: 5/10. Scheduled for a theatrical release on Jan. 22, 2025.
Especially in today’s climate of political division, films — like any creative medium — must capture human empathy from a perspective that can only be expressed through art. This year’s slate accomplished just that. While I didn’t mention films such as “No Other Land” (2024) and “Anora” (2024), both are visually riveting must-watches. I can only hope that Film at Lincoln Center continues to deliver on its obligation of showcasing the human condition through cinema.
