Starting September 26, New York City’s most dedicated cinephiles have been migrating up to Alice Tully Hall to celebrate the 63rd New York Film Festival. This year’s fest features favorites from across the globe — highlights from Cannes, Venice, and Toronto — along with some surprising world premieres, like a new Bradley Cooper movie about stand-up comedy and Daniel Day-Lewis’s coming-out-of-fake-retirement film he made with his son, Ronan. Whether you’re making the trek up on the A train or experiencing it vicariously from elsewhere, here are all the highlights from this year’s NYFF.
A stacked slate
Vulture’s moviegoers put together a list of their most anticipated films at this year’s fest. Bilge Ebiri shouted out Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, one of his favorites out of Venice. Alison Willmore is looking forward to the Radu Jude double feature of Kontinental ’25 and Dracula. Rachel Handler wants you to see Kelly Reichardt’s anti-heist film, The Mastermind, starring a very in-over-his-head Josh O’Connor. Joe Reid is big on Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, especially if you get a chance to see it with a crowd that’s game to laugh. Eric Vilas-Boas is eager to catch Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet. And I’m telling you that Lav Diaz’s globe-spanning epic, Magellan, more than earns its lengthy run time. But if that’s not enough movies for you, there are another 20 we recommend (and twice as many more at the fest). — Fran Hoepfner
➼Read more about the films we can’t wait to see here.
A very Luca Opening Night: After the Hunt
Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt opened the festival following its premiere at Venice Film Festival. Ahead of the film, Vulture caught up with the main trio — Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edibiri — to ask them “What’s My Line?” The stars of the psychological thriller (are we calling it that since it’s not a Me Too movie?) were cozy on the carpet, but the film itself is all about the cold and icy exterior of two professors at Yale within hand’s reach of tenure (Roberts and Garfield) and an eager student (Edibiri) who makes them question their own expectations of students who admire them. Anyone will tell you that the real stand-out of the film, though, is Michael Stuhlbarg, reuniting with the director after 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, who plays Roberts’s therapist husband. After the film screened, Stuhlberg described the film as “a slow-motion trainwreck, but you feel something’s coming,” emphasizing its ambiguous themes and ending. Generously, too, he says his character is “present and watching” the wreck, even if he doesn’t know what’s going on. — Morgan Baila
A groovy interview: Father Mother Sister Brother
A callback to his earlier career as a director, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, which took home the Golden Lion in Venice, is a Centerpiece film at this year’s NYFF. To hear more about minimal film, critic Bilge Ebiri spoke to Jarmusch. His questions about how an indie filmmaker gets by these days were ones that fans have longed asked themselves, and they finally got an answer.
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