2013 NY Film Festival

[tavernier]

35 Main Slate films:

ABOUT TIME (2013) 123min
Director: Richard Curtis
Country: UK
Richard Curtis adds a touch of time-travel to this hilarious romantic comedy, a perfect vehicle for the comic talents of Bill Nighy, Rachel McAdams, Lindsay Duncan, and emerging star Domhnall Gleeson. A Universal Pictures release.

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS (Abus de Faiblesse) (2013) 105min
Director: Catherine Breillat
Country: France
Catherine Breillat’s haunting film about her 2004 stroke and subsequent self-destructive relationship with star swindler Christophe Rocancourt, starring Isabelle Huppert.

ALAN PARTRIDGE (2013) 90min
Director: Declan Lowney
Country: UK/France
In the long-awaited big-screen debut of Steve Coogan’s singular comic creation, the vain and obliviously tactless Alan Partridge must serve as an intermediary when North Norfolk Digital is seized at gunpoint by a down-sized DJ.

ALL IS LOST (2013) 107min
Director: J.C. Chandor
Country: USA
Robert Redford as you’ve never seen him before, gives a near-wordless all-action performance as a lone sailor trying to keep his yacht afloat after a collision with a discarded shipping container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. A Roadside Attractions release.

AMERICAN PROMISE (2013) 135min
Directors: Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson
Country: USA
Two Brooklyn filmmakers follow their son Idris and his friend Suen from their enrollment in the Dalton School as children through their high school graduations in this devastating, years-in-the-making documentary that takes a hard look at race and class in America.

AT BERKELEY (2013) 244min
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Country: USA
Another masterfully constructed documentary from Frederick Wiseman, examining the University of California, Berkeley from multiple angles - the administrators, the students, the surrounding community - to arrive at a portrait that is as rich in detail as it is epic in scope.

BASTARDS (Les Salauds) (2013) 100min
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France/Germany
Claire Denis’s jagged, daringly fragmented and deeply unsettling film inspired by recent French sex ring scandals is the rarest of cinematic narratives—a contemporary film noir, perfect in substance as well as style.

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (La Vie d’Adèle) (2013) 179min
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Country: France
The sensation of this year’s Cannes Film Festival is an intimate - and sexually explicit - epic of emotional transformation, featuring two astonishing performances from Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. A Sundance Selects release.
Please be advised that this film has scenes of a sexually explicit nature.

BURNING BUSH (Hořicí Keř) (2013) 234min
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Country: Czech Republic
A passionately brilliant Czech mini-series from Agnieska Holland about the events that followed student Jan Palach’s public self-immolation in protest against the Soviet invasion after Prague Spring.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (2013) 143min
Director: Paul Greengrass
Country: USA
Paul Greengrass has crafted an edge-of-your-seat thriller based on the true story of the seizure of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship in 2009 by four Somali pirates, with remarkable performances from Tom Hanks and four first-time actors, Barkhad Abdi, Faysal Ahmed, Barkhad Abdirahman and Mahet M. Ali. A Sony Pictures release.

CHILD OF GOD (2013) 104min
Director: James Franco
Country: USA
James Franco’s uncompromising excursion into American Gothic, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel, about an unstable sociopath in early 60s rural Tennessee who descends into an animal-like state - not for the faint-hearted.

GLORIA (2013) 110min
Director: Sebastián Lelio
Countries: Chile/Spain
A wise, funny, liberating movie from Chile, about a middle-aged woman who finds romance but whose new partner finds it painfully difficult to abandon his old habits.

HER (2013)
Director: Spike Jonze
Country: USA
In Spike Jonze’s magical, melancholy comedy of the near future, lonely Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his new all-purpose operating system (the voice of Scarlett Johansson), leading to romantic and existential complications. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.

THE IMMIGRANT (2013) 120min
Director: James Gray
Country: USA
In James Gray’s richly detailed period tragedy, set in a dusty, sepia-toned 1920s Manhattan, a young Polish immigrant (Marion Cotillard) is caught in a dangerous battle of wills with a shady burlesque manager (Joaquin Phoenix). A Radius-TWC release.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013) 105min
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Country: USA/France
Joel and Ethan Coen’s picaresque, panoramic and wryly funny story of a singer/songwriter is set in the New York folk scene of the early 60s and features a terrific array of larger-than-life characters and a glorious score of folk standards. A CBS Films release.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (2013) 111min
Director: Ralph Fiennes
Country: UK
Ralph Fiennes directs and stars as Charles Dickens in this adaptation of Claire Tomalin’s revelatory 1992 biography, which brought the upright Victorian author’s secret 13-year affair with a young actress to light. A Sony Pictures Classics Release.

JEALOUSY (La Jalousie) (2013) 77min
Director: Philippe Garrel
Country: France
Another intimate, handcrafted work of poetic autobiographical cinema from French director Philippe Garrel, in which his son Louis and Anna Mouglalis star as actors and lovers trying to reconcile their professional and personal lives.

JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN (2013) 114min
Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Country: France
In Arnaud Desplechin’s intelligent and moving depiction of a successful “Talking Cure,” the encounters between patient (Benicio del Toro) and therapist (Mathieu Amalric) are electric with discovery.

THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (Le Dernier des injustes) (2013) 218min
Director: Claude Lanzmann
Countries: France/Austria
This moral and cinematic tour de force from the creator of SHOAH will cause you to reconsider your understanding of Adolph Eichmann and of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of Theresienstadt and the film’s central figure.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (Soshite Chichi ni Naru) (2013) 120min
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Country: Japan
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sensitive drama takes a close look at two families’ radically different approaches to the horribly painful realization that the sons they have raised as their own were switched at birth. A Sundance Selects release.

THE MISSING PICTURE (L’image manquante) (2013) 92min
Director: Rithy Panh
Country: Cambodia
Filmmaker Rithy Panh’s brave new film revisits his memories of four years spent under the Khmer Rouge and the destruction of his family and his culture; without a single memento left behind, he creates his “missing images” with narration and painstakingly executed dioramas. A Strand release.

MY NAME IS HMMM… (Je m’appelle Hmmm…) (2013) 121min
Director: agnès B
Country: France
In this deeply personal, incandescent first feature from designer agnès B, a young girl holding her family together and bearing the weight of sexual abuse runs away from home and enjoys a carefree idyll with a kindly Scottish trucker.

NEBRASKA (2013) 115min
Director: Alexander Payne
Country: USA
This masterful film from Alexander Payne, about a quiet old man (Bruce Dern) whose mild-mannered son (Will Forte) agrees to drive him from Montana to Nebraska to claim a non-existent prize, shades from the comic to multiple hues of melancholy and regret. A Paramount Pictures release.

NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon) (2013) 90min
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Country: South Korea
A young student at loose ends after her mother moves to America tries to define herself one encounter and experience at a time, in reality and in dreams, in another deceptively simple chamber-piece from South Korean master Hong Sang-soo.

NORTH, THE END OF HISTORY (Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan) (2013) 250min
Director: Lav Diaz
Country: Philippines
Filipino director Lav Diaz’s twelfth feature - at four-plus hours, one of his shortest - is a careful rethinking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with a tortured anti-hero who is a haunting embodiment of the dead ends of ideology.

OMAR (2013) 96min
Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Country: Palestinian Territories
A tense, gripping, ticking clock thriller about betrayal, suspected and real, in the Occupied Territories, from Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now).

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013) 123min
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Country: USA
Jim Jarmusch’s wry, tender and moving take on the vampire genre features Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as a centuries-old couple who watch time go by from separate continents as they reflect on the ever-changing world around them. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (2013)
Director: Ben Stiller
Country: USA
Ben Stiller stars in and directs this sweet, globe-trotting (but New York-based) comic fable about an up-to-the-minute everyman, co-starring Kristen Wiig as the woman of his dreams, Sean Penn as a legendary photographer and Shirley MacLaine as Walter’s mother. A Twentieth Century Fox release.

THE SQUARE (2013) 104min
Director: Jehane Noujaim
Country: USA/Egypt
Jehane Noujaim’s tense, vivid verité portrait of events as they unfolded in Tahrir Square through Arab Spring and beyond, in a newly revised, up-to-the-minute version.

STRANGER BY THE LAKE (L’Inconnu du lac) (2013) 97min
Director: Alain Guiraudie
Country: France
Alain Guiraudie’s lethally precise, sexually explicit film, which unfolds entirely in the vicinity of a gay cruising ground, is both a no-holds-barred depiction of a hedonistic subculture and a perverse and unnerving tale of amour fou. A Strand release.
Please be advised that this film has scenes of a sexually explicit nature.

STRAY DOGS (Jiao You) (2013) 138min
Director: Tsai Ming-liang
Country: Taiwan/France
Tsai Ming-liang’s fable of a homeless family living the cruelest of existences on the ragged edges of the modern world is bracingly pure in its anger and its compassion, and as visually powerful as it is emotionally overwhelming.

A TOUCH OF SIN (Tian Zhu Ding) (2013) 133min
Director: Jia Zhangke
Country: China
Jia Zhangke’s bloody, bitter new film builds a portrait of modern-day China in the midst of rapid and convulsive change through four overlapping stories of marginalized and oppressed citizens pushed to murderous rage. A Kino Lorber release.

LE WEEK-END (2013) 93min
Director: Roger Michell
Country: UK
A magically buoyant, bittersweet comedy drama about a middle-aged and middle class English couple who go to Paris for a weekend holiday, starring two of Britain’s national treasures, Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan. A Music Box Films release.

WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM (2013) 89min
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Countries: Romania/France
A rigorously structured and fascinatingly oblique new film from Corneliu Porumboiu that examines the life of a film director during the moments on a shoot when the camera isn’t rolling.

THE WIND RISES (Kaze Tachinu) (2013) 126min
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Country: Japan
The great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s new film is based on the life of Jiro Hirokoshi, the man who designed the Zero fighter. An elliptical historical narrative, THE WIND RISES is also a visionary cinematic poem about the fragility of humanity.

[ianungstad]

God I hate Harvey Weinstein. He pre-bought the rights to The Immigrant based off a sizzle reel and now that it doesn't have much awards traction he's dumping it to Radius. (Their VOD label)

Grandmasters and Snowpiercer are also being edited for North American release. Boo!

[Luke M]

I've never done the NY Film Festival so what are the odds of securing a single ticket for a specific show and then securing a seat? I've heard at Sundance, people who still buy tickets often lose their seats to the VIP holders.

[hearthesilence]

I don't think that happens at the NYFF, I've never heard of it happening.

[tavernier]

^All seats for Alice Tully Hall screenings are reserved, so that's not a problem.

[hearthesilence]

Yeah, I've never heard of them bumping someone from an assigned seat, and Alice Tully is huge. Plenty of seats.

FWIW, except for the opening, closing and centerpiece films, every film will usually have a few seats available in the closing minutes. Basically unsold tickets and tickets that were never picked up (the former less likely for high profile films). The downside, the seats can really suck. The worst is anything in the front 4 or 5 rows where you're almost looking straight up at the screen and you can't see the whole thing at once. Great for the recitals they hold there, not great at all for films.

[Luke M]

Thanks for the information.

[tavernier]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Real has been added to the Main Slate lineup

[tavernier]

11 "restored" screenings announced

Revivals continues the NYFF tradition (formerly under the heading of “Masterworks”) of celebrating and re-visiting classic and important films by filmmakers, auteurs, producers and studios that helped shape world cinema. The section will feature and celebrate eleven films made between 1946 and 2000 that have recently been restored. Those films are Martin Scorsese’s modern-day classic THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993); two films each by Hollywood renegade Nicholas Ray (THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948) and THE LUSTY MEN (1952)) and French filmmaking iconoclast Leos Carax (BOY MEETS GIRL (1984) and MAUVAIS SANG (1986), film noir gems (Arthur Ripley’s THE CHASE (1946) with Robert Cummings and Peter Lorre and Cy Endfield’s TRY AND GET ME (1950) with Lloyd Bridges and Frank Lovejoy), Alain Resnais’s English-language PROVIDENCE (1977) with Sir John Gielgud; Luchino Visconti’s SANDRA (1965), Apichatpong Weerasetakhul’s MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON (2000), and Lino Brocka’s Philippine melodrama, MANILA IN THE CLAWS OF LIGHT (1975).

[ellipsis7]

Visconti's SANDRA is in a new resto by Sony Pictures, giving hope it may make it to a new BR/DVD...

[hearthesilence]

Thrilled they restored The Age of Innocence, though it's amazing that it's in actual need of restoration, it's not that old and it came out at a time when people were more mindful about film preservation. (It was definitely being dealt with on an industry-wide level.)

[Professor Wagstaff]

Great evidence to support that discussion that "The Age of Innocence" might be imminent for a Criterion release. Christ, I hope I can see that restoration in theatres.

[zedz]

The Lusty Men, Providence and Sandra are all way overdue for any kind of decent release, so this is terrific news.

[Luke M]

Per their website, 12 Years a Slave will have its U.S. debut

[felipe]

What's the price range for tickets to the festival? Does it depend on the movie?

[Black Hat]

Almost everything is about 25, the revivals 15 and the big premiers 50.

[AlexHansen]

Bummed I won't be in town for the Diaz or Hong screenings, but Views plus Tsai, Weerasethakul, Denis, and Mauvais Sang should ease things a bit.

[htshell]

The Views press release schedule is a whole bunch of gibberish but there looks like some good stuff as usual.

[FerdinandGriffon]

I'm trying to figure out what I'll be seeing this festival now, and was wondering if anyone knew whether any of the following films already have US distribution in place. If they do, I'll skip them.

Nobody's Daughter Haewon
Real
Stranger by the Lake
Stray Dogs
Bastards
Norte, the End of History

[ianungstad]

Strand Releasing has Stranger by the Lake. IFC has Bastards. IFC is releasing Bastards theatrically later this year.

[FerdinandGriffon]

Thanks, that's very helpful.

[hearthesilence]

Only Lovers Left Alive reportedly will open in late March or early April 2014. A long wait, so catch it at NYFF if you can!

[tavernier]

This lists all distributor info.

[Black Hat]

Does anybody know the name of the film at the 38 second mark (the blue people) of the festival trailer? It's been driving me crazy.

[hearthesilence]

Have no idea - I looked at the Main Slate and from what I can recall about all of them, none of them seem to match.