What’s at NYFF? Paul Mescal (Times Two), Erotic Sci-fi, and a Curse

All festival season long, Vulture’s film writers have ventured all over the world — Cannes! Venice! Toronto! — to bring you fresh-off-the-circuit dispatches from the buzziest premieres of the year. Lots of those movies are now finally coming to Vulture’s home base, playing the 61st New York Film Festival. You’ve read our review of the Opening Night title, Todd Haynes’ darkly fascinating May December, along with our reactions to many of the other big films: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, and Michael Mann’s Ferrari, which will close out the fest. We’ve covered the Sandra Hüller-starring double-whammy of The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, along with Agnieszka Holland’s unmissable Green Border and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. We’d recommend every single one. But there’s always more to discover. Here are the NYFF movies we’re excited about this year — ones you maybe haven’t heard quite so much about yet.

Close Your Eyes

Spanish master Victor Erice’s first feature in 31 years was supposed to be one of the big tickets at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but its relegation to an Out of Competition slot wound up diminishing some of the interest in the picture (and caused some controversy). It’s a transcendent movie — all three hours of it. And clearly a very personal one, as it follows the efforts of a filmmaker who had to abandon a movie decades ago and is now trying to find out what happened to his lead actor, who disappeared mysteriously. Frankly, more should be made of this film, but it feels like it’s about to slip through the cracks. It still doesn’t have U.S. distribution. There was some hope that it would be Spain’s submission for the Best International Film Oscar, but that didn’t pan out, either. It might not be one of the big hitters at this year’s New York Film Festival, but it should be. And who knows when we might get another chance to see such a magnificent film on a huge screen? —Bilge Ebiri

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

A weird, clever comedy about contemporary millennial confusion, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the feature debut of Brooklyn-based multitasking talent Joanna Arnow, whose past short movie, Bad at Dancing, won a Silver Bear at Berlinale. Arnow directed and edited this film, and plays its lead character, Ann, a 30-something Jewish woman who finds herself in restless exchanges with “sex friends.” Her longest relationship is with a guy named Allen (Scott Cohen) who can’t even remember where she went to college. Some have drawn obvious comparisons between Arnow’s work and Lena Dunham’s, but there’s enough space in the cinematic landscape for more comedies about bullshit jobs and kinky dates, with Arnow’s own signature neuroticism and humor. —Marlene Knobloch

The Curse 

The credits list for Showtime’s new series, The Curse, reads less like an IMDb page and more like a Film Twitter Darlings bingo card: Nathan Fielder. Emma Stone. Benny Safdie. A24. With that team, individually known for stressful masterpieces like The Rehearsal, Poor Things, and Uncut Gems, this show simply must deliver on its promise to be extremely bizarre. Fielder and Stone star as a married couple who host an HGTV show about their attempts to “ethically gentrify” their New Mexico town. The title hints at something more sinister going on, though, and knowing Safdie, it’s sure to get pretty fucked-up pretty quickly. The first three episodes of the “genre-bending” comedy will premiere at NYFF and debut November 10 on Paramount. —Emily Heller

Janet Planet

Annie Baker’s 2013 play, The Flick, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and her Infinite Life is currently playing to sold-out audiences in New York. She excels at turning the ordinary — working at a movie theater, taking an acting class — into something extraordinary. Now, she’s entering the film world in typically unassuming fashion. Written and directed by Baker, Janet Planet follows a young girl, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), in western Massachusetts over her summer vacation in 1991, and her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), an acupuncturist everybody (including Janet) is drawn to. The film is structured like a triptych, with each section following one adult who comes into Lacy and Janet’s life, promising lots of opportunity to show off Baker’s penchant for exquisitely rendered mundanity. —Jason Frank

All of Us Strangers

Andrew Haigh (Looking, Weekend) knows his way around a charged gay romance. His latest looks particularly intense and erotic, a melancholy sci-fi starring Andrew Scott (of Hot Priest fame) and Paul Mescal (of Paul Mescal fame) as lonely neighbors in London who fall madly in love while experiencing supernatural encounters with dead family members. Adapted from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel of the same name, All Of Us Strangers promises to be equal parts devastating and horny — in other words, the perfect Christmas release (it’s in theaters December 22). —Rachel Handler

Foe

Paul Mescal is not in one but two spooky, speculative sci-fi romances adapted from novels this New York Film Festival. In this one, based on the book by Iain Reid, he’s opposite fellow Irish export Saoirse Ronan, both of whom are mysteriously doing American accents in a movie filmed in director Garth Davis’s native Australia. They play a couple living in an isolated farmhouse in 2065 when they’re approached by a stranger (Aaron Pierre) who offers Mescal’s character a “surprising proposal” that would require him to be replaced in his home life by a robot; Ronan is understandably upset enough about this to dramatically cut her own hair, among other things. —R.H.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Raven Jackson’s impressionistic first feature is a series of fleeting vignettes that tell the story of one Black woman’s life. The Barry Jenkins–produced film depicts Mackenzie, Mack for short, as she comes of age in a rural Mississippi town, doing the task of growing up and enduring love, tragedy, and family in the 1970s and ’80s. Jackson has a taste for natural beauty and minimal dialogue, making the 97-minute feature either frustrating or contemplative, depending on your vibe. The result is a visual poem that has no regard to time, jumping back and forth between memories, coloring in the empty spaces. —Zoe Guy

The Delinquents

In just three easy steps, you too can break out of your dead-end job. (1) Grab a duffel. (2) Fill it with cash from your workplace’s vault. (3) Walk out. Morán (Daniel Elías) is a middle manager at a bank who follows those steps, hoping to retire off the cash he stole from his banking gig and live in complete idyll. He’s no idiot — he knows the camera caught his theft in 4K, so he gives the money to his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) for safekeeping until he gets out of jail. Rodrigo Moreno directed this meandering heist film that follows the two men’s now-intertwined lives. —Z.G.

Don’t Expect Too Much From the End of the World

I can’t wait to see Radu Jude’s new black comedy because it looks uncomfortable, absurd, and stars Nina Hoss. There’s a time and place in every film festival for a sci-fi drama or a period piece or a biopic, but sometimes you just need to watch a movie in which a young woman impersonates Andrew Tate on TikTok while hating her job as a production assistant for a film and video company in Bucharest. —Morgan Baila

More From Us on the New York Film Festival

• Pedro Almodóvar’s Queer Cowboy Short Is Too Sumptuous for Its Own Good
• Todd Haynes’s May December Is a Deeply Uncomfortable Movie
• All Your Burning Questions About The Curse, Answered

See All