The New York Film Festival will celebrate its 60th anniversary with a robust 32-film main slate and a number of hometown tales, including James Gray's Queens coming-of-age drama “Armageddon Time" and Laura Poitras' documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” about artist Nan Goldin's battle against the Sackler family.
Film at Lincoln Center, which puts on the annual festival, announced this year's lineup Tuesday. The gala screenings are notably New York-centric, beginning with the previously announced opening night film, from longtime New Yorker and New York Film Festival regular Noah Baumbach. He'll debut his Don DeLillo adaption “White Noise” shortly after it also opens the Venice Film Festival.
The festival's centerpiece will be “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” in which the “Citizenfour” filmmaker chronicles Goldin's fight to stem the opioid crisis and the pharmaceutical companies that benefitted from it.
Elegance Bratton, who drew from his own experiences in his documentary about homeless queer and transgender young people in New York in his documentary “Pier Kids," will close out the festival with his semi-autobiographical fiction film “The Inspection,” starring Jeremy Pope as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training.
Gray's “Armageddon Time” will screen as part of the festival's 60th anniversary celebration. The film, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, draws from Gray's own childhood in 1980s Queens. It co-stars Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway.
Other entries include Todd Field's anticipated “TÁR,” starring Cate Blanchett as a world-renown composer; Paul Schrader's “Master Gardner,” starring Joel Edgerton as a horticulturist; Joanna Hogg's “The Eternal Daughter,” with Tilda Swinton; master documentarian Frederick Wiseman's “A Couple,” a monologue drama based on the letters of Leo Tolstoy and wife Countess Sophia Behrs.
Several standouts from this year's Cannes will play at the festival including Charlotte Wells' feature debut “Aftersun”; Park Chan-wook's “Decision to Leave”; Mia Hansen-Løve's “One Fine Morning”; Kelly Reichardt's “Showing Up”; Cristian Mungiu's “R.M.N."; and Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or-winner “Triangle of Sadness.”
Also among New York's selections is the latest from Iranian director Jafar Panahi, “No Bears.” In July, Panahi, one of Iran's leading filmmakers, was sent to prison for a six-year sentence related to a 2011 charge of producing antigovernment propaganda. His imprisonment has been widely decried internationally and in the film community.
The New York Film Festival runs Sept. 30-Oct. 16. Along with premieres at Lincoln Center, the festival will host screenings throughout New York's five boroughs, at Staten Island's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema; Brooklyn Academy of Music; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens; and the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem.
