All the Standout Movies We've Seen at New York Film Festival This Year

The Zone of Interest, the first feature by Jonathan Glazer since 2013’s Under the Skin, is a tricky thing to recommend. A portrait of Auschwitz unlike any you’ve seen before, it’s massively disturbing while being really calm about it. As a result, the movie’s tone is in harmony with the affect of its principal character Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who’s based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz of the same name—in the film he calmly discusses the camps’ “yield” and the practicals of exterminating 400 to 500 Jews in one go. Höss, who adopted the pesticide Zyklon B for use in the gas chambers and at one point claimed to have overseen the deaths of some 3 million Jews, was not named in the 2014 Martin Amis novel Glazer’s movie is based on, though he is widely believed to have inspired Amis’ character of Paul Doll. In his adaptation of Amis’ adaptation of real life, Glazer renames the character after its inspiration.

The murders are relegated the background of Zone. We see a train’s steam on the horizon, over the gate of Höss’ mansion whose in-ground pool shares a wall with the concentration camp; we hear ambient screams during closeups on flowers in Höss’ perfectly manicured garden. The context, so big and terrible that it’s a struggle to wrap your head around it, is everything here, a rotted backdrop to the pseudo-domestic bliss of Höss and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, whose big year also includes starring in the Cannes winner Anatomy of a Fall). “Rudolf calls me the Queen of Auschwitz,” she brags. She buys a full-length fur stolen from an imprisoned Jew, and her friend (presumably another military wife) boasts about finding a diamond in her toothpaste. When Höss receives word of his imminent transfer to another camp, Hedwig throws a fit, causing him to write a letter begging that his family be allowed to stay in their beautiful home that is within spitting distance of mass human extermination. “I must stress what a wonderful environment Hedda is creating for the children,” he writes with no seeming irony.

The Zone of Interest manages to be simultaneously still and nauseating, and is even more nauseating for its stillness. It’s the type of punishing viewing that Michael Haneke likes to exact on his viewers, and in fact, Zone’s effective use of mundanity as a method of underscoring despair brought nothing as much as Haneke’s debut, The Seventh Continent, to mind. Zone is a Holocaust movie through and through, but its modern analogies are impossible to ignore. It reflects back at us the familiar disparity that occurs when luxury rubs elbows with poverty in the close-quarters living within major cities. It reminded me a bit of home. Devastating.

Adapted from my full-length review:

Andrew Haigh’s deeply moving story largely takes place in its protagonist Adam’s (Fleabag’s Andrew Scott) head—he’s a writer in contemporary London, working on a screenplay set in 1987. (The screenplay, which Haigh wrote, is loosely based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada.) As Adam writes, he travels back to the home where he was raised to visit with his parents, whom we find out died in a car accident when he was 12. They receive him as a middle-aged man—as a result, son and parents are basically the same age—and a series of conversations takes place about Adam’s life, including his sexuality; like many of Haigh’s protagonists and Haigh himself, Adam is gay. Through this device, Haigh shows the writing process in addition to his character’s internal journey, two of the hardest things to capture on film in any way that doesn’t bore viewers to death. That they live and breathe here is a feat in itself.

Adam’s relationship with a man who lives in his building named Harry (Paul Mescal) is less fraught. The relationship is a refuge, a home away from the home in Adam’s head. It’s a source of unconditional love beyond that which he feels coming with reservations from his parents. It makes the past suffering worth it. It’s, in many ways, a prototypical healing gay relationship. Haigh takes a risk by repeating a lot of the topes we’ve witnessed to death in gay stories, but the holistic picture he paints about pain and healing is a fresh structure. It speaks to the universality of some experiences—gay canon events, if you will—among the highly varied lives that we all live.

Hopefully Emma Stone’s Oscar for La La Land isn’t too recent to allow her a real shot for Best Actress this year, because so far, she’s more deserving than anyone else in her potential category. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, she plays Bella, a Victorian woman who plunged to her death only to be reanimated via a brain transplant from the baby she was carrying. And so, we watch her learn to move, talk, and interact with the world. It requires nothing less than a whole-hog physicality that Stone throws herself into, jerking and grunting and adult-babying her way across the screen. I don’t want to compare her work to Chaplin’s…but I kind of want to compare her work to Chaplin’s.

Bella is initially raised by the Frankenstein-esque surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whose facial seams let us know early on that he’s been stitched together himself, as well as his student, Max (Ramy Youssef). But it’s Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) who really shows her what life is about by introducing her to sex (“furious jumping,” as she puts it via her developing, idiosyncratic speech pattern). He’s a creep, for sure, though the movie doesn’t involve itself much in worrying about the age of Bella’s brain in terms of consent. Duncan whisks her away on a cruise, and they end up bankrupt after Bella learns of economic disparity in Alexandria and donates Duncan’s gambling winnings (or thinks she donates them–in her naïveté she passes along the money to ship hands who promise they’ll give it to the poor). They land in Paris, and there Bella takes up sex work, figuring that she needs both money and sex and so this is a practical choice.

Like Goran Stolevski’s more thoughtful 2022 film You Won’t Be Alone, Poor Things shows us the world through the eyes of someone who is treated as an adult but hasn’t had the socialization time to have the sense of fairness crushed out of her or a sense of shame instilled. Bella’s pragmatism makes her a model for sex positivity—sex feels good, so she does it. In her brothel, she introduces the concept of workers’ rights when she points out how much better their system would be if the women got to choose who they had sex with; she’s shot down, but she ends up figuring out a way to maximize her pleasure from her job. Of course, Lanthimos is speaking out of both sides of his mouth a bit, by drenching his movie in explicit depictions of sex and arguing that the character he’s directing is empowered, but Stone’s performance is enough to make me a believer. Overall, a delight.

In 2044, a not-so-distant future controlled by A.I., to compete in the workforce humans must have their emotions ironed out of them through a DNA-cleaning process. We follow Gabrielle (a multivalent Léa Seydoux) as she undergoes the procedure that requires her to recount her two previous lives—one lived in 1910 in Paris, around the time of the flood, and one lived in 2014 in Los Angeles as she attempts to break into Hollywood—in Bertrand Bonello’s arresting, often funny The Beast. The jumps back and forth between the present (that is to say 2044) and Gabrielle’s past lives sometimes confuse (Bonello attempts to mitigate it by framing the present in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and the past in widescreen), though they make for an alluring confusion. The movie has been rightly compared to the work of David Lynch.

Gabrielle lives with the existential fear that one day something will obliterate her (the title is an abstract allusion). Each of her timelines intertwines with Louis (George MacKay) though in never the same way (in 2044, they speak French to each other; in their other lives they speak English). They have a rather dignified affair in 1910 and end up running a doll factory together; when the movie shifts to 2014, Louis is an incel stalking Gabrielle and the movie takes on a slasher tone. His deplorability is simultaneously funny and scary, and Bonello takes every turn with confidence. Gabrielle and Louis once again meet up in 2044 (she notices him at a 1972-themed club and says, “I left my husband for that man once”), and their lives that once were so magnetized are now kept at a distance as a result of the emotion-letting procedures they’re both undergoing. The operatic ending felt slightly unearned to me, but roping in such an unwieldy narrative was always going to be an issue. Like its title says, this thing is a beast.

Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s borderline-abstract fantasy would probably be more poignant if it were his actual last picture. It was, for a time, touted as such, though that was shot down at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Too bad—the story feels in sync with retirement as it does concern a passing of the torch of sorts. Protagonist Mahito’s great-uncle offers him the opportunity to control an alternate universe in his charge (via some hand-held blocks), accessible through a mysterious tower that is near the countryside house of his father’s new wife (and dead wife’s sister). If that sounds convoluted, it’s barely scratching the surface. Mahito is lured into the tower by a heron (who turns out to be a rather bulbous man hiding in a heron’s body), where he must overcome an army of human-sized parakeets. He is faced with similar hordes of regular-sized frogs and maybe slightly bigger-than-usual pelicans. In the real world, his stepmother’s estate is run by a roster of wrinkled geriatrics. Eyes, eyes, everywhere eyes look back at Mahito—I wondered if the beloved Miyazaki was making a statement about what it felt like to be so watched.

It takes Mahito about 45 minutes to get to the alternate world (too long—imagine if The Wizard of Oz or Miyazaki’s own Spirited Away dragged its feet in mundanity for the time it takes to bake cake) as he struggles with adapting to his move and the death of his mother. (If he’s pissed that his father married her sister, he doesn’t say.) Once there, the movie hits a dream-like flow of one scene to the next, our hero rarely ending up where the last scene left off. There’s an invitation to just go with it, trying to keep up with what we assume is an undisclosed internal logic and being fine about failing. Visually, we get an incredible stream of colors and weird animals acting in surprising ways. Storywise, this felt lost in translation or maybe just too vast to absorb in a single morning viewing. It left me a bit cold, I’m sad to say, but oh well, there’s always next time.

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi gave us Drive My Car in 2021; now he’s taking us on a traipse through the woods. Evil Does Not Exist focuses on the anxieties of the residents of rural Harasawa when a glamping project is announced to infiltrate their insular lifestyle and, as a result of ill-conceived plans for the placement and capacity of a septic tank, their land-based living. Hamaguchi really wants you to feel what it is to live slowly in Harasawa—not a word is spoken for some 10 minutes after Evil Does Not Exist begins. Its opening shot pans trees from below for minutes on end. We watch a character split no fewer than six logs for firewood, stack them, and then light a cigarette. It’s kind of amazing that it happens all in one, unbroken shot.

There’s a truly incredible 20-minute scene depicting a meeting between actors representing the glamping company and the anxious residents, who articulate their concerns, one by one. It reminded me of something out of a Frederick Wiseman movie. But it was kind of downhill from there (and as lifelike as that central scene is, it’s still a fairly dry depiction of process). The manager of the glamping project is cartoonishly capitalistic—actual, albeit translated, lines include, “A little pollution won’t hurt the water,” and, “You can’t get a head start if you aim for perfection”—and the movie begins to meander even by its established snail-like standards. It leads up to a somewhat surprising ending predicated on the idea that water always flows downhill. You may glean something from it if you can withstand the narrative trickle.

Todd Haynes’ new movie focuses on a Mary Kay Letourneau-esque scandal magnet who forged a relationship at 36 with a 13-year-old boy, had his children (at least one in prison), and stayed with him after her release. It acknowledges its seedy TV-movie roots in its text, as Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, an actor on a cheesy TV show about a veterinarian called Nora’s Arc, who travels to Georgia to spend time with the Letourneau-like Gracie (Julianne Moore). Elizabeth is playing Gracie in an upcoming movie. Naturally, Elizabeth also spends time with Joe (Charles Melton), who seemingly never before questioned the nature of his relationship with Gracie or his ability to consent as a kid. In a Q&A after a NYFF screening, screenwriter Samy Burch said the screenplay came from probing Joe’s condition/situation, and he does have the biggest journey here. But that’s not saying much. There’s something really slight about the entire affair, which is weird for a movie about a relationship predicated on statutory rape. The beginning of the film flirts with camp (Gracie preps for a party, and melodramatic music blares suddenly as she approaches the fridge and says in a gasp, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs”), but it swerves an all out affair.

The performances aren’t as strong as they should be, given the caliber of talent. Moore dons a lisp that was also inspired by Letourneau, though it is frustratingly inconsistent, flickering in and out, sometimes over the course of a single sentence (“Ith it all right if Joe drops us off first?”). Portman is quietly diabolical, researching her role like an investigator and showing little regard for anyone who could be affected by her behavior. The best scene features her visiting the local high school, from which Gracie and Joe’s twins are about to graduate. During a guest talk with students, one asks if she’s performed sex scenes, and she goes into the conflicting experience of arousal and professional decorum of doing so with a decidedly not-for-kids explicitness. Meanwhile, Joe raises butterflies in an attempt to boost the population, and there are lots of close-up shots on them and their caterpillar forms, a visual metaphor of metamorphosis that feels extremely remedial for a filmmaker as talented as Haynes.

There’s not quite enough in May December to sink your teeth into, though that’s not a product of subtlety—it feels more half-baked and wishy washy. The movie is generally explicit in its portrayals, but the ending is so vague that it makes you wonder if anyone involved had anything to say about such a fraught situation or if they were just going through the motions, like an actor in a cheesy TV movie. A missed opportunity.

Justine Triet’s French courtroom drama is as handsome and well-acted as you’d expect from a Cannes Palme d’Or winner. Anatomy of a Fall concerns writer Sandra (Sandra Hüller), who is suspected of murdering her 50 Cent-blasting husband after he falls from the top floor of their home in the Alps. A very long and rarely satisfying series of courtroom scenes dominates the movie’s back half. I didn’t pick up on much insight or soul in the tedious probing of whether or not she did it. This ultimately struck me as elevated Law & Order.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s second English-language short, Strange Way of Life, is just a concept that treads water for 30 minutes. It asks, “Wouldn’t it be cute if Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke played queer cowboys who hooked up but then found themselves divided in a Shakespearean-lite predicament?”—and then it struggles to muster a yes. We get a fairly long shot of Pascal’s round ass, if that interests you, but otherwise, it feels like cosplay. Everyone here knows how silly and disposable it is, and no one seems pressed to commit because, hey, it’s a short movie and it’ll be over soon no matter where you are in it. Everything in this bro melodrama is contrived, but no one will care much about that when they’re memeing it.