Starting in August, when the fall film festival season kicks off, tens of thousands of movie lovers — stars, executives, programmers, journalists and cinephiles — begin their annual mass migration across the globe. They dust off the summer’s sand with some headed off to Venice while others journey to Telluride, Toronto and New York, crisscrossing continents to watch the latest films. The luckiest movie lovers are the locals. Like many who flock to the New York Film Festival, they only need to travel short distances to experience new worlds.
The flagship event of Film at Lincoln Center, this year’s strong edition incorporates the usual mix of new and older movies, feature length and short, from around the globe. There are dramas, essay films, biopics, horror movies and selections that defy easy classification, like Kahlil Joseph’s “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions,” a heady exploration of Black life that leaps across time, space and genres. Other selections that will light up screens and minds include “A House of Dynamite,” Kathryn Bigelow’s nail-biter about an errant missile; “Sentimental Value,” a tender, tough family story from Joachim Trier (last here with “The Worst Person in the World”); and the giddy thriller “No Other Choice,” from Park Chan-wook.
In addition, among this year’s 74 features are two from the always unexpected Romanian director Radu Jude (“Dracula” and “Kontinental ’25”); a shambling lark from the Italian filmmaker Francesco Sossai (“The Last One for the Road”); and a sui generis chronicle of the bloodstained life and times of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan from the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz (“Magellan”). You may need to recalibrate your bodily rhythms for Diaz’s epic, which moves more leisurely than a Hollywood movie. Yet changing things up, including your ideas about what movies can and should do, is a reason festivals like this exist.
In “Below the Clouds,” the Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi narrows in on Naples and its surroundings, which regularly tremble and shake from nearby volcanoes. With gentle rhythms and exquisite black-and-white images, Rosi dips into the past while taking the pulse of the contemporary region, where citizens routinely call emergency services worrying about earthquakes and eruptions. Every so often, Rosi cuts to a derelict cinema, an image of a lost world that he poignantly connects both to those who died in A.D. 79 when Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii and to Roberto Rossellini’s devastating “Journey to Italy” (1954). It’s a title that works for this lovely, thoughtful movie, too.
Like Rosi’s movie, a number of selections in the lineup have made splashes at earlier festivals. Among these is Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which recently won top honors at Venice. With calm, delicacy, a steady eye and Jarmusch’s characteristic deadpan, the movie charts the inner and outer lives of different families, creating distinct pointillist group portraits through smiles, gestures, silences, ritualistic pleasantries and stinging asides. In one, a sly cool cat of a father (Tom Waits) receives a visit from his normie twins (the equally bespectacled Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik); in another, an aloof mother (Charlotte Rampling) serves tea to her nervously needy daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps); in the third, twins (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) mourn what they’ve lost.
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