New York City is a town of devoted cinephiles, and the New York Film Festival is the most anticipated event on the year’s movie calendar. Hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the NYFF includes world and New York premieres alongside films that made waves at the year’s most important festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and Toronto. It’s one of the longest-running and most prestigious festivals in the United States.
The 56th edition of the festival takes place September 28-October 14, 2018. It will open with Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite and close with Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, with Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma as centerpiece. The main slate includes films like Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, Claire Denis’s High Life, Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters.
The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos on why his films aren’t as mean as people say
Yorgos Lanthimos directing Emma Stone in The Favourite. Fox Searchlight PicturesThe Favourite is a wickedly delightful stew of palace intrigue, sex, skeet shooting, revenge, and duck-racing. The latest film from Greek writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos, it’s less stylistically off-putting than some of his grimmer, more mannered fare — like The Lobster or Dogtooth, both of which netted him Oscar nominations. But The Favourite’s soul feels Lanthimosian to the core, with a dim view of human nature and the sense that human relationships are always, at root, about power.
It’s also the first of his films that he didn’t write himself, although he worked closely with screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara to develop the project. The Favourite is based, very loosely, on the story of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), the 18th-century English queen who ruled while her country was at war with France.
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