A highlight of the city’s cultural calendar each year, the New York Film Festival returns to Lincoln Center in all its glory this fall, with a thrilling lineup to boot. From the toasts of Cannes and Venice—films like The Worst Person in the World and The Power of the Dog—to the much-anticipated world premiere of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, NYFF59 should make for an endlessly entertaining two weeks.
Below, Vogue editors and writers round up some of the films they’ve seen so far—and ones they still look forward to catching—at this year’s festival.
The Power of the Dog, dir. Jane Campion
The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s ardently awaited return to feature filmmaking (after a decade-plus hiatus), arrives at the NYFF on a tide of expectation—and it more than delivers. Ravishingly filmed, this period piece, set in lonesome Montana in 1925, tells the story of a wealthy pair of cattle-ranching brothers (played by Jessie Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch) who cope with the solitude of their work in very different ways. George (Plemons) is buttoned up to an extreme and only just manages to romance a local widow, Rose (Kirsten Dunst) into marrying him. Phil (Cumberbatch, in a bravura performance which will surely win him an Oscar) is unbridled and terrifyingly intelligent—and wants nothing to do with his brother’s conventionality. George’s bride arrives with a teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose graceful mannerisms and quiet confidence unbalance the film in unexpected ways. Loaded with tension, both violent and sexual, The Power of the Dog is strikingly observed portrait of human yearning. —Taylor Antrim
Benedetta, dir. Paul Verhoeven
Lesbian nuns! Stigmata! Masturbation! The Black Death! Benedetta, the gloriously blasphemous new film from Dutch filmmaker/provocateur Paul Verhoeven, set in a 17th-century convent, is certainly not for everyone. But if you like to mix your high with your low, and if your embarrassment-tolerance will permit some rather outré sex scenes, give Benedetta a try. At my NYFF screening, the packed audience had a terrific time, laughing at the outrageous and unashamed-of-itself script (by Verhoeven’s collaborator, screenwriter David Birke, who wrote Verhoeven’s 2016 thriller Elle). Starring Virginie Efira and Daphne Patakia as two amorous young nuns who have no interest in Catholic strictures—and Charlotte Rampling as their censorious abbess—Benedetta is so uninhibited, and so committed to immodesty, that you can’t help but give into it. —T.A.
The Velvet Underground, dir. Todd Haynes
The Velvet Underground, filmmaker Todd Haynes’s first documentary, is less a biopic of the legendary band—fronted by Lou Reed and, at least for a time, managed and produced by Andy Warhol—than it is an atmospheric immersion into the post-beatnik and proto-counter-culture New York of the mid-and-late-1960s from which the band emerged. The film features a nearly constant collage of multiple moving images on the screen (most consistently, a Warhol screen test of whoever the film is focusing on at the moment)—which either adds texture or prevents you from focusing on the matter more directly at hand. If you’re coming to the band for the first time here, it might be worth reading a quick thumbnail of highlights beforehand—Haynes doesn’t hold your hand so much as he gives you a contact high. —Corey Seymour
More from the festival:
The Tragedy of Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s first feature film without his brother, Ethan, also at the helm—unites Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as Lord and Lady Macbeth, two of the most fascinatingly drawn characters in all of Shakespeare. (As a refresher, the Bard’s play follows Macbeth’s bloody usurpation of the Scottish throne—aided and abetted by his wife—after three witches prophesize that he will be king.) In a recent interview with Deadline, McDormand recalled first reading and performing Macbeth as a middle schooler. “I did the sleepwalking scene and a couple of the witches’ scenes. Literally, now I know that was when the hook went in and it’s never gone out, in terms of wanting to be an actor,” she said. “And I just kind of pursued that my entire life.” She added that Coen’s adaptation, shot in brooding black and white, would have a slightly different bent to it, given the lead actors’ ages. (McDormand is 64 and Washington is 66.) “I’m really glad I waited [to play Lady Macbeth] because it also led us to this interpretation that I think is really fascinating,” McDormand said. “That is one of an older couple who is at the end of their ambition rather than at the beginning.”
The Worst Person in the World
A big hit at Cannes this year, where star Renate Reinsve won best actress, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World follows a Norwegian 29-year-old named Julie as she tries (and often fails) to make sense of her place in the world—professionally, romantically, and otherwise. Wrote Variety’s Guy Lodge in July: “As this melancholic romantic comedy faithfully follows its capricious protagonist through thick, thin and (mostly) somewhere in between, it turns into something lovely and wise: a gentle, unhurried paean to unrest and indecision, to making life wait, for better and worse.”
The Lost Daughter
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