August 19, 2013–The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the Main Slate of the 51st New York Film Festival and, with 35 highly anticipated features films, it is the biggest Main Slate the festival has ever seen.
Familiar faces abound in the lineup, which features over 20 filmmakers making a return to NYFF, some of them for the seventh time. Repeat returnees include Catherine Breillat (Abuse of Weakness), the Coen brothers (Inside Llewyn Davis), Claire Denis (Bastards), Arnaud Desplechin (Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Agnieska Holland (Burning Bush), Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive), Alexander Payne (Nebraska), and Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Sin).
“Cinema is a vast terrain with a complex ecology, encompassing a mind-bending array of species and habitats,” commented NYFF Director of Programming Kent Jones. “I love the level of diversity in the main slate selections, which includes documentaries, biographies, comedies, adventures, epics, chamber pieces, elegies, explorations and affirmations. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.”
Diversity is, indeed, another watchword of this year’s Main Slate, and not just with respect to the films’ genres. Entries arrive in New York after celebrated debuts at Cannes (where they took home a whopping six awards), Locarno, Berlin, and Sundance. They come from 15 countries and represent filmmaking debuts and the returns of long-loved masters.
Main Slate lineup for the 51st New York Film Festival:
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
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)
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.
107 Minutes
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)
Running time: 244 min
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)
100 Minutes
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France
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, in substance as well as style.
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (La Vie d’Adèle) (2013)
179 Minutes
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.
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)
134 min
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, 2013
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 release.
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013)
Running time: 105min
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Country: USA
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
An 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)
218 Minutes
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)
Running time: 92 Minutes
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 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 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)
Running time: 90 Minutes
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 who made the Oscar-winning, 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)
Director: Jehane Noujaim
Country: USA/Egypt
Jehane Noujaim’s tense, vivid verité portrait of events as they unfolded in Tahrir Square through Arab Spring, 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.
STRAY DOGS (Jiao You) (2013)
138min
Director: Tsai Ming-liang
Country: Taiwan
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)
Running time: 133 Minutes
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 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.
