For New York City’s movie lovers, the annual New York Film Festival is a highly anticipated chance to watch some of the year’s best films, listen to Q&As with filmmakers and stars, and enjoy the company of other cinephiles. Hosted by Film at Lincoln Center, the NYFF includes world and New York premieres along with 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 57th edition of the festival takes place September 27-October 13, 2019. It will open with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and close with Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, with Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story as centerpiece. The main slate includes films like Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole, Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Mati Diop’s Atlantics, and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Parasite.
Mobsters, Teamsters, guilt, and salvation: Martin Scorsese’s terrific The Irishman
Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in The Irishman. Niko Tavernise / NETFLIXLate in The Irishman, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) says that “you don’t know how fast time goes by until you get there,” and there’s just a twinkle of irony mixed into the melancholy. After all, by then, the movie is past the three-hour mark. (It ultimately tops out at 209 minutes.)
But that’s sort of the point. Time telescopes in Martin Scorsese’s newest movie, shifting back and forth through decades as old, wistful Frank narrates the tale of his life as a hitman for crime syndicate boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and then for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino, who has somehow never worked with Scorsese before now). Which of course means the film rightfully will be compared to earlier Scorsese movies, like 1973’s Mean Streets and 1990’s Goodfellas, and not just because of the subject matter; in The Irishman, the director reunites with some of his longest-running collaborators from those films, including De Niro, Pesci, and Harvey Keitel.
Read Article >The ferocious, chilling Parasite is an essential thrill ride about social inequality
Park So-dam and Choi Woo-sik in Parasite. Courtesy of TIFFThe upstairs-downstairs construct — in which the literal levels of a house demarcate the differences between the wealthy and those who serve them — has long worked as shorthand for class division and struggle. (See: every British period drama, ever.) The “upstairs” people are comfortable, happy, and prefer to be oblivious to what’s going on “downstairs” with the hired help, who do their work and live their lives invisibly alongside.
In Parasite, Korean horror master Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) draws on that visual metaphor for a twisty, pummeling thriller that’s among his best work. It’s thematically familiar territory for Bong; his films always pair heart-stopping and imaginative terror with humor and a healthy dose of raging at inequality. Parasite feels in many ways like the culmination.
Read Article >Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver are devastating in the brilliant, brutal Marriage Story
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in Marriage Story. Courtesy of TIFFEvery marriage harbors the seeds of its own destruction. People who stay married just figure out how to keep those seeds from blooming into chokeweeds. But maybe the reverse is true, too: Every divorce contains, in microcosm, what made the pair get together in the first place.
Which is why the seemingly ironic title of Marriage Story is sincere, even affectionate. Noah Baumbach is America’s foremost chronicler of rough-hewn and disintegrating family units, and in Marriage Story, he pries open one divorce to find the beating heart inside. It’s a showcase for stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as much as a triumph for Baumbach, recalling the wry humor and perfect pitch of Woody Allen’s best work, albeit with a touch less self-obsession (even though the couple seems at least partly, and probably inevitably, modeled on Baumbach’s divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2013).
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