NYFF 2017 Index
“Every year around this time,” New York Film Festival director Kent Jones tells poet Peter Gizzi in BOMB, “I do a few interviews, and this question always comes up: what themes did you pursue? My answer is always the same: none. We choose the films that mean the most to us and offer them and let people react to them and form their own impressions and judgments.”
For Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice, for example, “looking over this lineup, I sense a new idea emerging, a related one: the concept of community, of finding your people, the radical notion that maybe, despite what the assholes say, we’re not each alone.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis points out, perhaps admiringly, perhaps in bewilderment, that the event “retains a near-holy belief in cinema as art.” What’s more, “it’s notable that the 2017 edition includes a substantial number of female directors—a third of the main slate—which can be read as a political statement, but is fundamentally an acknowledgment of excellent work.”
This year’s NYFF, the fifty-fifth, opens and closes with the world premieres of Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying and Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel. Between these gala events, nearly a hundred features and almost seventy short films are scheduled for the eighteen days from September 28 through October 15. Links from the titles below will take you to roundups of reviews appearing shortly before, during, and probably for a considerable time after NYFF 2017. And, to state the obvious, the links in parentheses following the titles lead to entries that took shape during these films’ premieres. Check back now and then, as this index will be growing over the coming weeks.
MAIN SLATE
Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel
Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (Cannes)
Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (Cannes)
Serge Bozon’s Mrs. Hyde (Locarno)
Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute) (Cannes)
Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (Cannes)
Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts (Cannes)
Philippe Garrel’s Lover for a Day (Cannes)
Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (Telluride and Toronto)
Alain Gomis’s Félicité
Valeska Grisebach’s Western (Cannes)
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name
Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck (Cannes)
Hong Sang-soo’s The Day After (Cannes)
Hong Sang-soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone
Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Before We Vanish (Cannes)
Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying
Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (Venice and Toronto)
Ruben Östlund’s The Square (Cannes)
Dee Rees’s Mudbound (Toronto)
Joachim Trier’s Thelma
Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places (Cannes)
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider (Cannes)
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY
Nancy Buirski’s The Rape of Recy Taylor
Denis Côté’s A Skin So Soft (Locarno and Toronto)
Sara Driver’s BOOM FOR REAL: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Griffin Dunne’s Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur
Vanessa Redgrave’s Sea Sorrow (Cannes)
Travis Wilkerson’s Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Tony Zierra’s Filmworker (Cannes)
PROJECTIONS
Neïl Beloufa’s Occidental
Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Caniba (Venice and Toronto)
Ben Russell’s Good Luck
Overview of the entire program
SPECIAL EVENTS
Susan Lacy’s Spielberg
Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature (Cannes)
RETROSPECTIVE
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