A familiar fall chill greeted film lovers at Lincoln Center Friday night for screenings of "White Noise," Noah Baumbach's adaptation for Netflix and opening night premiere of the New York Film Festival.
Film at Lincoln Center, which puts on the annual festival, launched the two week affair with the hometown filmmaker taking to the stage at Alice Tully hall.
Baumbach, a New York native, has a long history with the New York Film Festival, which he regularly attended as a kid. Six of his previous films have played in NYFF's main slate, from 1995's “Kicking and Screaming” to 2019's “Marriage Story,” which was the festival's centerpiece selection that year.
The Netflix-bound film, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, adapts Don DeLillo's classic 1985 novel about a toxic event in a suburban college town.
“In 1985 my father and I drove from Brooklyn to see Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’ open the 23rd NYFF, the same year that he brought home the hardback of Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise,’” Baumbach said ahead of the festival. “Opening the 60th NYFF with ‘White Noise’ is truly special for me. This festival was part of my film education and has been a home for me and many of my movies over the years."
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Along with premieres at Lincoln Center, the festival will host screenings throughout New York, at Staten Island's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema; Brooklyn Academy of Music; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens; and the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem.
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NYFF Lineup
The 60th NYFF emphasizes New York connections with a series of galas for hometown filmmakers. Those include the opening night with Baumbach; a centerpiece for Laura Poitras' Nan Goldin documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed"; closing night with Elegance Bratton's semi-autobiographical “The Inspection”; and an anniversary celebration featuring James Gray's “Armageddon Time,” based on his childhood in Queens.
Another high-profile New York story, “She Said," a drama about The New York Times investigative journalists who helped expose Harvey Weinstein, is also one of the festival's top world premieres.
Other entries include Todd Field's anticipated “TÁR,” starring Cate Blanchett as a world-renown composer; Paul Schrader's “Master Gardner,” starring Joel Edgerton as a horticulturist; Joanna Hogg's “The Eternal Daughter,” with Tilda Swinton; master documentarian Frederick Wiseman's “A Couple,” a monologue drama based on the letters of Leo Tolstoy and wife Countess Sophia Behrs.
The festival's centerpiece will be “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” in which the “Citizenfour” filmmaker chronicles Goldin's fight to stem the opioid crisis and the pharmaceutical companies that benefitted from it.
Elegance Bratton, who drew from his own experiences in his documentary about homeless queer and transgender young people in New York in his documentary “Pier Kids," will close out the festival with his semi-autobiographical fiction film “The Inspection,” starring Jeremy Pope as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training.
Gray's “Armageddon Time” will screen as part of the festival's 60th anniversary celebration. The film, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, draws from Gray's own childhood in 1980s Queens. It co-stars Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway.
Several standouts from this year's Cannes will play at the festival including Charlotte Wells' feature debut “Aftersun”; Park Chan-wook's “Decision to Leave”; Mia Hansen-Løve's “One Fine Morning”; Kelly Reichardt's “Showing Up”; Cristian Mungiu's “R.M.N."; and Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or-winner “Triangle of Sadness.”
Also among New York's selections is the latest from Iranian director Jafar Panahi, “No Bears.” In July, Panahi, one of Iran's leading filmmakers, was sent to prison for a six-year sentence related to a 2011 charge of producing antigovernment propaganda. His imprisonment has been widely decried internationally and in the film community.
Festival Turns 60
In the last six decades, the Lincoln Center festival has been arguably the premier American nexus of cinema, bringing together a teeming portrait of a movie year with films from around the globe, anticipated fall titles and restored classics. It's a festival that's traditionally more stocked with questions than answers.
“One question we ask ourselves is: What is a New York Film Festival main-slate film? It shouldn’t be something expected,” says Dennis Lim, artistic director of the festival. “It shouldn’t be something that automatically seems like it should belong in the pantheon.”
“We honor those 60 years of the festival by continuing to be true to its mission, why it was created, what it was intended to serve and the relationship, first and foremost, that it has had with the city of New York,” says Eugene Hernandez, executive director. “It’s a bridge between artists and audiences, and has been for 60 years now.”
In the last two years, Lim and Hernandez have sought to reconnect the festival with New York, expanding its footprint around the city. But the pandemic made that difficult. The 2020 festival was held virtually and in drive-ins around the city. Last year's festival brought audiences back, although with considerable COVID-19 precautions. “It's been a three-year journey to get to this moment,” says Hernandez, who departs after this festival to lead the Sundance Film Festival.
NYFF, which gives no awards and offers no industry marketplace, is strictly defined as a showcase of what programmers consider the best.
