All the Standout Movies We’ve Seen at New York Film Festival This Year

The 61st New York Film Festival is underway (through October 15), and with it come some of the year’s most anticipated high-brow cinematic offerings. These include the Cannes hit Anatomy of a Fall, the upcoming Netflix portrait of a scandal May December (featuring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman), Hayao Miyazaki’s new (and once-suspected last) animated marvel The Boy and the Heron, and Andrew Haigh’s devastating All of Us Strangers. I’ve been keeping up with the fest and have capsule reviews of some of the lineup that has caught my eye and captured my imagination. They’re in rough descending order of preference within this slideshow, which will be updated as I attend more screenings.

The Zone of Interest, the first feature by Jonathan Glazer since 2013’s Under the Skin, is a tricky thing to recommend. A portrait of Auschwitz unlike any you’ve seen before, it’s massively disturbing while being really calm about it. As a result, the movie’s tone is in harmony with the affect of its principal character Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who’s based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz of the same name—in the film he calmly discusses the camps’ “yield” and the practicals of exterminating 400 to 500 Jews in one go. Höss, who adopted the pesticide Zyklon B for use in the gas chambers and at one point claimed to have overseen the deaths of some 3 million Jews, was not named in the 2014 Martin Amis novel Glazer’s movie is based on, though he is widely believed to have inspired Amis’ character of Paul Doll. In his adaptation of Amis’ adaptation of real life, Glazer renames the character after its inspiration.

The murders are relegated the background of Zone. We see a train’s steam on the horizon, over the gate of Höss’ mansion whose in-ground pool shares a wall with the concentration camp; we hear ambient screams during closeups on flowers in Höss’ perfectly manicured garden. The context, so big and terrible that it’s a struggle to wrap your head around it, is everything here, a rotted backdrop to the pseudo-domestic bliss of Höss and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, whose big year also includes starring in the Cannes winner Anatomy of a Fall). “Rudolf calls me the Queen of Auschwitz,” she brags. She buys a full-length fur stolen from an imprisoned Jew, and her friend (presumably another military wife) boasts about finding a diamond in her toothpaste. When Höss receives word of his imminent transfer to another camp, Hedwig throws a fit, causing him to write a letter begging that his family be allowed to stay in their beautiful home that is within spitting distance of mass human extermination. “I must stress what a wonderful environment Hedda is creating for the children,” he writes with no seeming irony.

The Zone of Interest manages to be simultaneously still and nauseating, and is even more nauseating for its stillness. It’s the type of punishing viewing that Michael Haneke likes to exact on his viewers, and in fact, Zone’s effective use of mundanity as a method of underscoring despair brought nothing as much as Haneke’s debut, The Seventh Continent, to mind. Zone is a Holocaust movie through and through, but its modern analogies are impossible to ignore. It reflects back at us the familiar disparity that occurs when luxury rubs elbows with poverty in the close-quarters living within major cities. It reminded me a bit of home. Devastating.

Adapted from my full-length review:

Andrew Haigh’s deeply moving story largely takes place in its protagonist Adam’s (Fleabag’s Andrew Scott) head—he’s a writer in contemporary London, working on a screenplay set in 1987. (The screenplay, which Haigh wrote, is loosely based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada.) As Adam writes, he travels back to the home where he was raised to visit with his parents, whom we find out died in a car accident when he was 12. They receive him as a middle-aged man—as a result, son and parents are basically the same age—and a series of conversations takes place about Adam’s life, including his sexuality; like many of Haigh’s protagonists and Haigh himself, Adam is gay. Through this device, Haigh shows the writing process in addition to his character’s internal journey, two of the hardest things to capture on film in any way that doesn’t bore viewers to death. That they live and breathe here is a feat in itself.

Adam’s relationship with a man who lives in his building named Harry (Paul Mescal) is less fraught. The relationship is a refuge, a home away from the home in Adam’s head. It’s a source of unconditional love beyond that which he feels coming with reservations from his parents. It makes the past suffering worth it. It’s, in many ways, a prototypical healing gay relationship. Haigh takes a risk by repeating a lot of the topes we’ve witnessed to death in gay stories, but the holistic picture he paints about pain and healing is a fresh structure. It speaks to the universality of some experiences—gay canon events, if you will—among the highly varied lives that we all live.

Hopefully Emma Stone’s Oscar for La La Land isn’t too recent to allow her a real shot for Best Actress this year, because so far, she’s more deserving than anyone else in her potential category. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, she plays Bella, a Victorian woman who plunged to her death only to be reanimated via a brain transplant from the baby she was carrying. And so, we watch her learn to move, talk, and interact with the world. It requires nothing less than a whole-hog physicality that Stone throws herself into, jerking and grunting and adult-babying her way across the screen. I don’t want to compare her work to Chaplin’s…but I kind of want to compare her work to Chaplin’s.

Bella is initially raised by the Frankenstein-esque surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whose facial seams let us know early on that he’s been stitched together himself, as well as his student, Max (Ramy Youssef). But it’s Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) who really shows her what life is about by introducing her to sex (“furious jumping,” as she puts it via her developing, idiosyncratic speech pattern). He’s a creep, for sure, though the movie doesn’t involve itself much in worrying about the age of Bella’s brain in terms of consent. Duncan whisks her away on a cruise, and they end up bankrupt after Bella learns of economic disparity in Alexandria and donates Duncan’s gambling winnings (or thinks she donates them–in her naïveté she passes along the money to ship hands who promise they’ll give it to the poor). They land in Paris, and there Bella takes up sex work, figuring that she needs both money and sex and so this is a practical choice.

Like Goran Stolevski’s more thoughtful 2022 film You Won’t Be Alone, Poor Things shows us the world through the eyes of someone who is treated as an adult but hasn’t had the socialization time to have the sense of fairness crushed out of her or a sense of shame instilled. Bella’s pragmatism makes her a model for sex positivity—sex feels good, so she does it. In her brothel, she introduces the concept of workers’ rights when she points out how much better their system would be if the women got to choose who they had sex with; she’s shot down, but she ends up figuring out a way to maximize her pleasure from her job. Of course, Lanthimos is speaking out of both sides of his mouth a bit, by drenching his movie in explicit depictions of sex and arguing that the character he’s directing is empowered, but Stone’s performance is enough to make me a believer. Overall, a delight.

In 2044, a not-so-distant future controlled by A.I., to compete in the workforce humans must have their emotions ironed out of them through a DNA-cleaning process. We follow Gabrielle (a multivalent Léa Seydoux) as she undergoes the procedure that requires her to recount her two previous lives—one lived in 1910 in Paris, around the time of the flood, and one lived in 2014 in Los Angeles as she attempts to break into Hollywood—in Bertrand Bonello’s arresting, often funny The Beast. The jumps back and forth between the present (that is to say 2044) and Gabrielle’s past lives sometimes confuse (Bonello attempts to mitigate it by framing the present in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and the past in widescreen), though they make for an alluring confusion. The movie has been rightly compared to the work of David Lynch.