If we don’t go or aren’t accepted as press for the Toronto Film Festival, which is looking more and more as a probability these days, there’s always the nearby New York Film Festival. However, much like we predicted and wrote in — “The New York Film Festival is excellent, but generally skews artier, lots of Cannes pictures” — the 2009 NYFF line-up is very Cannes-heavy and unfortunately for us, top-heavy with many of the Cannes films we’ve already seen. Still, it’s a good line-up for those that didn’t get a chance to fly to France this past May (most people), but it is heavy on the arty foreign films and may have somewhat limited or non-mainstream appeal.
First and foremost highlights to us are the films we haven’t seen.
– Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime” – (once seemingly titled “Forgiveness,” a sort of quasi-sequel to his 1998 film “Happiness,” with many of the same characters, only this time played by different actors like Charlotte Rampling, Michael Kenneth Williams , and Ciaran Hinds in an ensemble cast.
– Michael Haneke’s 2009 Palme d’Or winning, “The White Ribbon”
– Bruno Dumont’s “Hadewijch”
– Lee Daniels’ Sundance hit, “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire”
– Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Police Adjective”
– Claire Denis’ “White Material”
Films we’ve already seen:
– Lars Von Trier’s scabrous and controversial “Antichrist” starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling
– Pedro Almodovar’s neo-noir mystery romance, “Broken Embrace” starring Penelope Cruz
– Boon Jong-Ho’s Hitchcockian murder procedural, “Mother”
– Alain Resnais’ “Wild Grass”
– Marco Bellocchio’s secret-marriage-of-Mussolini film, “Vincere”
Perhaps most exciting is a 70th anniversary screening of “The Wizard of Oz.” The biggest glaring omission seems to be Gasper Noe’s “Enter The Void,” but then again, no fall film festival has slated it yet. The film received some pretty polarizing and negative reviews during Cannes. The festival includes 29 films in total and runs September 25 – October 11, 2009. [IndieWire]