NYFF
NYFF Review: Noah Baumbach Delightfully Skewers Our Fear of Death in White Noise
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: Dom LeLillo’s White Noise is one of those “great American novels” long thought to be unfilmable, a scattered, acerbic takedown of late American capitalism and its incessant need to distract from the inevitability of death with movies, culture, conversation, stuff. And honestly, it’s oddly fitting that the filmmaker who’d finally tackle it would be Indie Darling Noah Baumbach himself: Like DeLillo, he too is concerned with the fits and foibles of academia, the crumbling nature of the family unit, the ways we cling to ephemera just to keep ourselves from falling apart. And so it is with this three-part tale of the Gladney clan, a nuclear family about to go metaphorically (and in some ways litera...
NYFF Review: Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Is Spectacular — And Spectacularly Underwhelming
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel Dune gets its second big-screen treatment. The first was a notorious misfire directed by David Lynch, who famously disowned the final film; the newer version is from Denis Villeneuve, who has experience with sci-fi both emotionally intimate (Arrival) and storied in its nerdy history (Blade Runner 2049). Though the politics and world-building of the Dune world can seem obtuse — the names alone present a challenge for the less sci-fi-inclined — its story will also have a familiar ring for anyone who’s absorbed a few of the many works the novel influenced. Advertisement Related Video In other words, yes, it’s a chosen-one narrative: Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a young...
NYFF Review: Joaquin Phoenix Gets Avuncular for the Warm, Low-Key C’mon C’mon
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: Every five years or so, Mike Mills — not the one from R.E.M., though, confusingly, he is a music video director and graphic designer for some of their contemporaries — releases a sensitive, heartfelt drama about delicate but deceptively strong family ties. C’mon C’mon is the 2021 model, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a documentarian who must unexpectedly spend several weeks taking care of his nine-year-old nephew. I’ll Figure It Out: “Nobody knows what they’re doing. You just have to keep doing it.” That’s advice given late in C’mon C’mon by Viv (Gaby Hoffman) to her brother Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) as he struggles to figure out how to substitute-parent her nine-year-old son Jesse (Woody Norman). Viv has been c...
NYFF Review: Benedict Cumberbatch is a Macho, Petulant Cowboy in The Power of the Dog
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: Acclaimed writer-director Jane Campion adapts the semi-obscure 1967 novel The Power of the Dog into a feature of the same name. It’s a Western of sorts about Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a self-consciously macho cowboy who hassles his more reserved brother George (Jesse Plemons) on the ranch they own and operate together. When George marries the widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), Phil turns his cruelty toward her, as well as her teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), in spite of — or is it because of? — some unexpected common ground they share. Not So Old West: The Power of the Dog takes place in rural Montana in 1925, which amounts to a sort of netherworld between Old West imagery and the well-past-d...
NYFF Review: Todd Haynes Turns Up the Volume for His Engaging Velvet Underground Doc
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: The Velvet Underground might have been the best American rock band of all time, and Todd Haynes has made a documentary about their relatively short but extremely influential career, which means covering not just core members Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker, but collaborators and contemporaries like Nico, Andy Warhol, and Jonas Mekas. Started Shaking to That Fine, Fine Music: Todd Haynes obviously loves rock and roll, which makes it all the more impressive that he’s spent his career making movies about key figures in its history while avoiding the usual lionizing cliches. Starting with Superstar, his doll-acted Karen Carpenter biopic that’s not commercially available, and continuing wit...
NYFF Review: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is a Star-Packed Issue Worth Picking Up
The Pitch: Wes Anderson returns with his first live-action movie since 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, crafting another group of stories within stories (and aspect ratios within aspect ratios). Here, he presents a 1975 issue of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, a fictional New Yorker-ish magazine, featuring dramatizations of three major stories: a profile of an imprisoned artist (Benicio del Toro); a chronicle of youthful social revolution, led by Timothée Chalamet; and a combination crime story and food piece narrated by a jack-of-all-trades writer (Jeffrey Wright). That’s just a fraction of the sprawling cast, which includes Anderson mainstays like Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Edward Norton alongside newbies like Chalamet, del Toro, Wright, and Léa S...
NYFF Review: Simon Rex Gets a Surprising A24 Showcase in Sean Baker’s Red Rocket
The Pitch: Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) rolls back into his hometown on a bus, bruised and nearly penniless. His career as an adult film performer has seemingly dried up some time ago, so he shows up at the doorstep of his not-quite-ex-wife Lexi (Bree Elrod), another porn-industry castoff. With few job prospects and no car — he tools around on a one-speed bike — Mikey attempts to rebuild his life. This might sound like a kitchen-sink recovery drama, but Mikey’s interest in self-improvement is questionable and filmmaker Sean Baker’s interest in misery-wallowing is, as ever, minimal. Instead, Red Rocket is a queasily hilarious chronicle of misdirected American hustle. Sunshine States: After exploring the streets of Los Angeles in Tangerine and the outskirts of Orlando in The Florida Project, Bake...
NYFF Review: Joel Coen Goes Solo in Style with The Tragedy of Macbeth
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: The Coen Brothers plus Shakespeare — whaddaya need, a roadmap? Actually, you might; or at least a program note to explain why The Tragedy of Macbeth has only one Coen on hand. It’s not a retro affectation that Joel Coen is taking sole director credit, as he used to on the joint Coen projects (until 2004’s The Ladykillers, Joel took “director” and Ethan handled “producer,” even though they were always really doing both). Ethan is taking a break from making movies, while Joel has mounted a black-and-white version of Shakespeare’s famous (and fleetest?) tragedy, with Denzel Washington as Lord Macbeth, who becomes convinced he must take bloody action to fulfill his destiny and become king of Scotland, and France...
