NYFF: The Lost City of Z

Here's Jason reporting from NYFF on the Closing Night film from James Gray.

Most of us aren't fortunate enough to have our lives live themselves in a perfect three-act structure. "Here I was born, and there I died," says the ghostly Madelaine in Vertigo, with an entire lifetime intuited by a comma - that's just second-act stuff, after all. Colonel Percival "Percy" Fawcett -- the real-world explorer whose explorations formed the basis first for David Grann's book The Lost City of Z and now the movie from The Immigrant director James Gray -- made three trips into the Amazonian jungle searching for his El Dorado, lending his life-story the perfect apparatus for yarn-spinning. A beginning, a wandering middle, and something approaching an end...

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A Brief Jog Right Past "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk." Get Me Outta Here!

a belated finale NYFF moment with your host, Nathaniel R

Before the world premiere of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk the great director Ang Lee appeared and asked the crowd at the NYFF screening to "keep an open mind." He was speaking about the new technology he used to shoot the 3D movie about a Texas soldier named Billy Lynn (played by talented newcomer Joe Alwyn) on leave from Iraq who is used as a patriotic prop at a football game's halftime show. The movie is shot in 4K (much higher clarity than usual) with a "revolutionary" 140 frames per second as opposed to the standard for decades upon decades now which is 24. As a cinephile without much technical savvy and who doesn't get too caught up in aspect ratios or film stocks or whatnot, I thought "no problem, Ang!"  I always attend movies with eyes wide open and the mind ready to join the party should the movie engage it.

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NYFF: "Things To Come" with Isabelle Huppert

Jason reporting from the NYFF on the new film from director Mia Hansen-Løve, currently scheduled to open in limited release on December 2nd

At about the midpoint of Things to Come Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) says to a friend that she's "found freedom" but we know better. We've been watching freedom thrust upon her in disorienting spasms, as her husband's left her and her publishing house has tossed her old-fashioned intellectualism aside (one of them hurls out the word "classy" like it's going to burn her hands). And in truth Nathalie doesn't quite know what to make of it, this "found" freedom of hers. "Extraordinary," is what she calls it, and that approaches the thing, but not quite the way she's selling it at that moment...

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"Moonlight" in Three Acts

Since Barry Jenkins' new film Moonlight is told in triptych style, we've opted to bring you our NYFF review in the same way with three of us writing it! - Editor

"Little" by Murtada Elfadl
Moonlight is a patient movie that takes its time to give us a full portrait of what goes on in a young man’s mind. Long beautifully rendered scenes provide us pivotal snippets of days in a life. The economy of the scenes mixed with the patience in storytelling means that every gesture and word counts. Barry Jenkins takes Tarell McCraney’s unproduced play "In Moonlight Black Boys Boys Look Blue" and paints it on screen, using his actors’ faces and bodies to deliver singular poetic images.

The languid melancholic tone fits the inner monologue of the main character Chiron (who is called "Little" in this first of three segments),  who is struggling to understand himself...

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NYFF: Jackie, Natalie, Peter and Pablo

Murtada reporting from NYFF.

Thursday night marked the first New York public screening of Jackie. Pablo Larraín’s film about the former first lady in the few days after JFK’s assassination, took Venice and TIFF by storm and now it's NYFF’s turn...

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