The 46th annual New York Film Festival starts proper today for the public and we’ve got to say, the line-up is stellar. It might not have gigantic names attached to it, but so what, we’ve some of the best films of the year at the festival.
Our top picks so far are Kyoshi Kurosawa’s jaw-droppingly good, “Tokyo Sonata,” Gerardo Naranjo magnetically-charged Mexican new-wave film, “Voy A Explotar,” and the Cannes Palm d’Or winner, “The Class” (“Entres Les Murs”) by Laurent Cantet. And that’s just the A+ material.
Other awe-inspiring films include, visual artist Steven McQueen’s impressionistic, but harrowing, “Hunger,” Michelle Williams’ devastatingly quiet performance in the minimalist, “Wendy & Lucy,” and the odd, but resonating, “Tony Manero,” about a 50-year-old Chilean obsessed with John Travolta and “Saturday Night Fever.” We’ll be seeing many more as in the next two weeks.
Also at the festival of course, are heavy weight films like Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling,” Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour epic “Che” and Darren Aronofksy’s “The Wrestler,” with an arresting performance by Mickey Rourke. We saw “Che” parts 1 and 2 at the Toronto Film Festival as well as Aronofsky’s raw and honest wrestling drama.
So far, this festival has been aces, so kudos to those that programmed it and took some excellent smaller risk films over big-named spectacles we’ll all eventually see anyhow.