Directors’ Fortnight Extended 2025

The fifth feature from the Israeli director, who won the Golden Bear in Berlin for Synonyms (2019) and the Jury Prize in Cannes for Ahed’s Knee (2021), Yes is “bound to offend on a wide scale, but also exhilarate with its sheer rage and ebullient aggression,” writes Jonathan Romney for Screen. Lapid began writing Yes before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, but his country’s response seemed to have lit a fire he incorporated into his screenplay.

As Guy Lodge writes in Variety, Yes “startles with the sheer, spitting intensity of its rage against the state, projected onto its amoral blank-slate protagonist: a self-abasing musician commissioned to compose a rousing new national anthem, explicitly celebrating the demolition of Palestine. A whirling, maximalist satire at once despairing and exuberant, subtle as a cannonball in its evisceration of the ruling classes and those who obey them, it’s both absurdist comedy and serious-as-cancer polemic: as grave as any film with an extended dance break to 2000s novelty hit ‘The Ketchup Song’ can possibly be.”

The Roxy Cinema will top off Thursday with a Q&A with Sean Price Williams and Talia Ryder, the director and star of The Sweet East, a highlight of the Fortnight’s 2023 program. “Williams’s punky directorial debut boasts both the cinematographer’s signature aesthetic (grainy, shaky, full of lovely pastels and close-ups) and [cowriter Nick] Pinkerton’s idiosyncratic, roguish worldview,” wrote Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage.

On Friday, Rejl and Cronk will introduce Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done at L’Alliance New York. On a farm in rural France, twenty-year-old Nawojka (Maria Wróbel) believes that the curse that did her mother in now hangs over her own head. In Variety, Jessica Kiang finds Kowalski’s second feature to be an “intriguing mix of heady and earthy, in which folk-horror eeriness fuses with provincial narrow-mindedness, and mysticism oozes through the muck.” Friday’s screening will naturally be followed by a Halloween party.

On Saturday, it’s back to the Roxy Cinema for Prïncia Car’s debut feature, The Girls We Want, which traces the turbulent dynamic of a group of adolescents on the outskirts of Marseille, and Indomptables, starring director Thomas Ngijol as a chief of police investigating the murder of a fellow officer in the Cameroonian capital of Yaoundé. Sunday brings Anne Émond’s Amour apocalypse (Peak Everything), which for Savina Petkova at Hammer to Nail is a “charming dramedy” that plays like “an amorous preamble to the end of times.”

The evening wraps with Paul Schrader taking questions about Dog Eat Dog (2016). Starring Willem Dafoe, Nicolas Cage, and Christopher Matthew Cook, the film is “an unhinged, jocular, devil-may-care yarn about three two-time losers who hope one big final payday will be their ticket to easy street,” wrote Todd McCarthy for the Hollywood Reporter. Dog Eat Dog “positively swills in its disreputability and all-around low-budgetness; sporting a healthy disregard for respectability, Schrader has just gone for it here with a highly focused recklessness that he turns to his creative advantage.”

L’Alliance will screen Valéry Carnoy’s Wild Foxes on November 6. Starring Samuel Kircher (Last Summer), Carnoy’s debut feature is a boxing movie that for the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer stands “apart from your typical testosterone-fueled slugfest.” From November 7 through 9, Acropolis Cinema will present seven films at the DGA Theater Complex in Los Angeles, including Wild Foxes, Her Will Be Done, The Girls We Want, and Yes.

The LA series opens with Lucky Lu, the first feature from Lloyd Lee Choi, whose short films have been winning awards at festivals around the world for more than a decade. Chang Chen stars as a delivery rider in New York’s Chinatown. He hasn’t seen his wife and child in five years, and the day before they’re set to arrive, his bike is stolen. Introducing his interview with Choi for Filmmaker, Leonardo Goi notes that “once young Queenie (Carabelle Manna Wei) volunteers to follow her dad across the city, the film changes tone, trading some of the breakneck, angst-inducing energy of its first half for more contemplative and cumulatively engrossing moments.”

Choi will attend his screening, and so too will Yuiga Danzuka, who was twenty-six when his first feature, Brand New Landscape, premiered in the Fortnight in May. “Similar to others of his generational cohort, including Hiroshi Okuyama (My Sunshine), Yoko Yamanaka (Desert of Namibia), and Neo Sora (Happyend), Danzuka brings a fresh perspective to well-trod genres, in his case the dysfunctional family drama,” writes Mark Schilling in the Japan Times. “Working from his own script, Danzuka avoids the histrionics endemic to this sort of Japanese drama. Eruptions are loud but brief and seem more real for it. Despite the characters’ long-simmering grievances, the action stays firmly in the living moment.”

Lee Sang-il’s Kabuki drama Kokuho has become a massive hit in Japan and has been selected to represent the country in the race for the Oscar for Best International Feature. As Naman Ramachandran points out in Variety, the film is “the culmination of a fifteen-year creative journey, bringing to life a sweeping tale of artistry, rivalry, and tradition spanning five decades of Japanese theater.”