62nd Annual New York Film Festival Announces Lineup – Nickel Boys Opens

It’s quite a lineup for the NYFF. We’re starting to get a complete picture of what our Oscar race is going to look like, minus the Big Oscar Movies that will be opening theatrically. Here you go. I will list films I haven’t heard much about but might have some Oscar potential below. You can check out the full list here.

62nd New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night
Nickel Boys
Dir. RaMell Ross

Centerpiece
The Room Next Door
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Closing Night
Blitz
Dir. Steve McQueen

All We Imagine as Light
Dir. Payal Kapadia

Anora
Dir. Sean Baker

April
Dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili

The Brutalist
Dir. Brady Corbet

By the Stream
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

Caught by the Tides
Dir. Jia Zhangke

Dahomey
Dir. Mati Diop

The Damned
Dir. Roberto Minervini

Eephus
Dir. Carson Lund

Grand Tour
Dir. Miguel Gomes

Happyend
Dir. Neo Sora

Hard Truths
Dir. Mike Leigh

Harvest
Dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari

Misericordia
Dir. Alain Guiraudie

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow
Dir. Julia Loktev

No Other Land
Dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor

Oh, Canada
Dir. Paul Schrader

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Dir. Rungano Nyoni

Pepe
Dir. Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias

The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof

The Shrouds
Dir. David Cronenberg

Stranger Eyes
Dir. Yeo Siew Hua

Suburban Fury
Dir. Robinson Devor

Transamazonia
Dir. Pia Marais

A Traveler’s Needs
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

​​Việt and Nam
Dir. Trương Minh Quý

Who by Fire
Dir. Philippe Lesage

Youth (Hard Times)
Dir. Wang Bing

Youth (Homecoming)
Dir. Wang Bing

In this towering vision from American director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux), an accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor named László Toth (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in America, reconnecting with family in Pennsylvania. While awaiting news of his wife’s relocation from Budapest, fate leads the Bauhaus-instructed genius into the orbit of the volatile Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an obscenely wealthy captain of industry, who leads him to both professional success and personal chaos. Co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, this richly detailed recreation of postwar America is alternately hopeful and nightmarish in its portrayal of immigrant living, accruing in meaning and power as it builds to its overwhelming final passages. Interweaving a provocative tapestry of ideas around privilege, money, religious identity, architectural aesthetics, and the persistence of historical trauma, The Brutalist is an absorbing, brilliantly acted American epic that reminds us the past is always present. Also starring Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Isaach De Bankolé, Stacy Martin, and Alessandro Nivola. 

The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous Caught by the Tides. Assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years—a beguiling mix of fiction and documentary, featuring a cascade of images taken from previous movies, unused scenes, and newly shot dramatic sequences—Caught by the Tides is a free-flowing work of unspoken longing, carried along more by music than dialogue as it looms around the edges of a poignant love story. The film mostly adheres to the perspective of Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao) as she wanders an increasingly unrecognizable country in search of long-lost lover Bin (Li Zhubin), who left their home city of Datong seeking new financial prospects. The always captivating Zhao carries the film with her delicate expressiveness, while Jia constantly evokes cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change: of people, landscapes, cities, politics, ideas. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

A regiment of battle-fatigued Union soldiers makes its way west, forging ahead to survey the forbidding landscape of the Northwest frontier, in this transporting, existential Civil War drama from Italian-born director Roberto Minervini. The maker of What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (NYFF56) and Stop the Pounding Heart (New Directors/New Films 2014), gripping, idiosyncratic portraits of struggle on the margins of American life, Minervini applies his accomplished minimalist naturalism to the period war film, forgoing genre markers for an absorbing plunge into undying questions of morality and American identity. Punctuated by images of jarring violence and eerie beauty, and effectively cast with a troupe of compelling non-professional performers with weather-beaten faces, The Damned engages in the emotional and moral quandaries of fighting a homeland war whose purpose grows hazier as it trudges on. Winner of the Best Director Award in the 2024 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section.

For his gracefully accomplished debut feature, Carson Lund has fashioned perhaps the most elegiac baseball movie yet, a poignant celebration of a recent American past that already feels as though it has slipped away. Against an autumnal Massachusetts backdrop, sometime in the 1990s, the film lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down and paved over for the construction of a middle school. An afternoon of brilliant blue sky quietly fades into October twilight as the players battle and bond, trade barbs and memories, stretching their game out to extra innings, in no hurry to leave this hallowed space. Lund’s tranquil souvenir of a film captures the singular beauty of the sport itself. Recalling the work of Robert Altman and Richard Linklater, but with a touch of Tsai Ming-liang, Eephus (its title referring to a curveball so slow it confuses the batter) is a film about the passage of time—both the hours of the day and one era fading into another.

Totally into this one:

Contemporary global anxieties over the gradual slide into governmental totalitarianism find an original and touching outlet in this resonant drama about youth culture in Japan. Neo Sora, making his fiction feature debut following his elegant music tribute Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (NYFF61), sets his film in a Tokyo high school sometime in the near future. Here, two best friends since childhood, Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system after being the target of an elaborate prank. As the boys try to figure out how to align themselves within the increasingly oppressive education system, larger external forces summon further threats, including constant looming natural disasters. Sora’s absorbing and humane film tackles universal political fears, the tenuous bonds of friendship, and questions of individual will.

Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year (NYFF48) for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, NYFF34) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister, Chantelle (a magnificent, gracious Michele Austin). Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. A Bleecker Street release.

In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, The Shrouds is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite.

In the eerie quiet of the vast, verdant Amazon jungle, a young girl stirs to life. Rescued by a member of the local Indigenous tribe, the child, Rebecca, is the only survivor of a plane crash. Years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) has become something of a local celebrity after her father (Jeremy Xido), an American missionary, has cast the teenager as a faith healer capable of miracles. Just as Rebecca is beginning to have a will of her own, doubting her father and the role in which she’s been cast, another crisis emerges when illegal loggers encroach on the land, threatening the livelihoods of the local tribe, and forcing emotional, familial, and racial reckonings. South Africa–born director Pia Marais has fashioned a mesmerizing, entrancingly photographed moral tale with no easy answers that is also a singular coming-of-age fable.

Two young men emerge from the stygian darkness of a cave. They are in the bowels of the earth working as coal miners, but Việt and Nam are also lovers, enjoying moments of physical embrace kept secret from the rest of the world, before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to Laos. From this personal drama, captured with sensual detail and mesmeric eroticism, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs even deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation. Set at the turn of the 21st century, Trương’s film resounds with echoes of the country’s war decades earlier, as Nam’s mother takes them on a pilgrimage to try and discover where his father was killed as a soldier. Shot in a hypnotic style on 16mm film—and banned in its home country—Việt and Nam is a remarkable work of quiet expressivity about two men with unsettled pasts and indeterminate futures. A Strand Releasing release.

Those the titles that stood out for me. You can see the rest of them here.