NYFF 64: "My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile" is as vivid as its predecessor

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

Forget spectacle, forget box office, forget IP and star power. Digger? I hardly know her! The biggest, most epic movie of the year is Julia Loktev’s six-hour documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile, a continuation of last year’s Part I, subtitled Last Air in Moscow. That film followed roughly a dozen journalists, most of them women, at the independent reporting outfit known as TV Rain. These folks had already spent years operating as “undesirables” or “foreign agents” (ie, folks not mindlessly repeating government propaganda), and worked to undermine the dictums coming from the Kremlin despite constant surveillance and the imprisonment of several colleagues. Last Air in Moscow concluded with a huge chunk of TV Rain’s reporters fleeing Russia following the start of their invasion into Ukraine in February 2022.

The military operation led Putin’s government to immediately crack down on independent media, meaning these journalists had to get the fuck out of dodge or risk being jailed. Last Air in Moscow filmed across a span of several months in 2021-2022, and Exile takes up right where that film left off, seeing those same faces (and a few new ones) all the way to March 2026...

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NYFF 64: Currents Program #4 - "The Real World" Confronts Reality Head-On

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

We’re coming to you live from the 64th New York Film Festival with the hottest ticket of the whole event: The Currents short film programs! Program #4 is cheekily subtitled “The Real World”, bringing to you four films with unique narrative and stylistic understanding to one very fair question: How many realities does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Especially at a moment in time where “reality” has become so easy to manufacture, and memories created and destroyed at a moment’s notice for no reason other than capitalist convenience, that’s an important question to ask, whether the goal is to speculate on the future or reclaim a past. There’s no easy answer, but the human creativity and inventiveness these directors bring show how rewarding it can be to wrestle with such topics...

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NYFF 64: “Clarissa” is the best “Mrs. Dalloway” adaptation you’ll ever see

by Cláudio Alves

Between Wuthering Heights and The Odyssey, much has been said this year about the merits and demerits of film adaptations straying from their source material. Most of the time, I’m a defender of unfaithfulness in the transformation of a text between mediums. Indeed, some of the most interesting aspects of both those box office success stories are precisely the dialogues established between them and their literary origins, deviation as conversation. Moreover, the general public’s idea of fidelity to a text can be superficial, to say the least, and believe me, I’m trying to be diplomatic in my choice of words here. Some would say Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa is a wild re-imagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, unfaithful as can be in its transposition of a narrative set in post-WWI England to contemporary Nigeria.

They would be wrong. Not because the Esiri brothers don’t do what I’ve just described, but because, in this gesture, they have managed to capture the essence of Mrs. Dalloway in ways no other cineaste has to this day. Step aside, Gorris and Daldry, for there are new masters of putting Woolf on screen to join Sally Potter in her tiny pantheon. And it’s precisely through their changes to the classic novel that they manage to make Clarissa the best Mrs. Dalloway we’re likely to see in the annals of film history, yesteryear’s and those to come, purists be damned…

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NYFF63: Lucio Castro brings sexy back again and again with "Drunken Noodles"

by Nick Taylor

He’s done it again, folks. Lucio Castro, the writer/director/editor behind 2019’s metaphysical tryst End of the Century, is continuing his hot streak with his latest release, entitled Drunken Noodles. The film debuted at this year’s Cannes ACID sidebar and has been casually cruising its way through the festival circuit before an unspecified US release date next year. If it comes to your town, haul ass and see it. If you can’t yet, may this review sate your appetite until it comes your way . . . .

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NYFF 63: Currents Program #4 - Model Behaviors

by Nick Taylor

FICTION CONTRACT, Carolyn Lazard

As always, the names for these NYFF shorts programs are creatively apt. Here, Model Behaviors encompasses practical applications of technology across very different fields. How do these machines recognize human beings, and how do they in turn shape us? Broad perceptions of reality, filtered through a digital intermediate, are taken to specific extremes as these filmmakers explore the unique applications of technology happening across fields of labor and care…

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