Best Actress Watch: Kent Jones “Taken Aback” by Bening in 20th Century Women, the NYFF Centerpiece

Just announced, Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women will be the Centerpiece Gala at the New York Film Festival September 30 through October 16, 2016.

Says Committee Chair Kent Jones, “It’s made with an extraordinarily unusual level of craft and attention to detail, human and visual, which is now all but extinct. As someone who actually lived through 1979 in middle-class America, I will testify to the fact that Mike Mills and his remarkable cast approach the level of the uncanny. I felt like I was back there, with all the shared behaviors and worries, the divisions, the look and feel and smell of the world as it was.”

Bening’s performance, one of her best, says the press release:

“Mills’s texturally and behaviorally rich new comedy keeps redefining itself as it goes along, creating a moving group portrait of particular people in a particular place (Santa Barbara) at a particular moment in the 20th century (1979), one lovingly attended detail at a time. The great Annette Bening, in one of her very best performances, is a single mother raising her teenage son (newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann) in a sprawling bohemian house, shared by an itinerant carpenter (Billy Crudup) and a punk artist with a Bowie haircut (Greta Gerwig), and frequented by her son’s rebellious friend (Elle Fanning). 20th Century Women is warm, funny, and a work of passionate artistry.”

Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th is the first non-fiction pic to open the festival.

Mike Mills has two features to his name so far, Thumbsucker and Beginners.