The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the main selections for the 2018 New York Film Festival, and it won’t disappoint the city’s cinephile community. It also confirms that barring a last minute addition or secret screening there are no world premieres at this year’s NYFF. Then again, the fest is programming a significant number of Foreign Language Film contenders even if the homegrown selections are slight.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite,” Alfonso Cuarón‘s “Roma“ and Julian Schabel‘s “At Eternity’s Gate“ were previously announced as the opening, centerpiece and closing night films for this year’s fest. All three will also debut at the Venice Film Festival later this month. Joining the awards hopefuls are a number of celebrated Cannes premieres including Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or–winner “Shoplifters”; Jean-Luc Godard’s “The Image Book”; Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Cold War”; Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning”; Christophe Honoré‘s critically divided “Sorry Angel”; Alice Rohrwacher’s “Happy as Lazzaro” and Jafar Panahi’s “3 Faces,” among others. Sundance debuts from Paul Dano, “Wildlife,” and Tamara Jenkins, “Private Life,” are also making their way to the Upper West Side mainstay.
READ MORE: Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Roma’ Will Be NYFF Centerpiece But Not Its World Premiere
Other notable films that will screen after premieres or screenings at Venice, Telluride and Toronto include Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk,” The Coen Bros.’ “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” Claire Denis’ “High Life,” Alex Ross Perry’s “Her Smell” and Olivier Assayas’ “Non-Fiction.”
A complete list of this year’s selections including synopsis provided by FSLC are as follows:
3 Faces
Dir. Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2018, 100m
U.S. Premiere
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth completed feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking is one of his very best. Panahi begins with a smartphone video shot by a young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) who announces to the camera that her parents have forbidden her from realizing her dream of acting and then, by all appearances, takes her own life. The recipient of the video, Behnaz Jafari, as herself, asks Panahi, as himself, to drive her to the woman’s tiny home village near the Turkish border to investigate. From there, 3 Faces builds in narrative, thematic, and visual intricacy to put forth a grand expression of community and solidarity under the eye of oppression.
Asako I & II
Dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan/France, 2018, 119m
U.S. Premiere
A truly original Vertigo riff, based on a novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, Asako I & II is an enchanting, unnerving paean to the notion of love as a trance state. Asako (Erika Karata) and Baku (Masahiro Higashide) share an intense, all-consuming romance—but one day the moody Baku ups and vanishes. Two years later, having moved from Osaka to Tokyo, Asako meets Baku’s exact double. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, who gained plenty of attention for 2015’s five-hour-plus Happy Hour, has returned with a beguiling and mysterious film that traces the trajectory of a love—or, to be accurate, two loves—found, lost, displaced, and regained. A Grasshopper Film release.
Ash Is Purest White
Dir. Jia Zhangke, China, 2018, 142m
U.S. Premiere
Jia Zhangke’s extraordinary body of work has doubled as a record of 21st-century China and its warp-speed transformations. A tragicomedy in the fullest sense, Ash Is Purest White is at once his funniest and saddest film, portraying the passage of time through narrative ellipses and, like his Mountains May Depart (NYFF53), a three-part structure. Despite its jianghu—criminal underworld—setting, Ash is less a gangster movie than a melodrama, beginning by following Qiao and her mobster boyfriend Bin as they stake out their turf against rivals and upstarts in 2001 postindustrial Datong before expanding out into an epic narrative of how abstract forces shape individual lives. As the formidable, quick-witted Qiao, a never better Zhao Tao has fashioned a heroine for the ages. A Cohen Media Group release.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, USA, 2018, 128m
North American Premiere
Here’s something new from the Coen Brothers—an anthology of short films based on a fictional book of “western tales,” featuring Tim Blake Nelson as a murderous, white-hatted singing cowboy; James Franco as a bad luck bank-robber; Liam Neeson as the impresario of a traveling medicine show with increasingly diminishing returns; Tom Waits as a die-hard gold prospector; Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck as two shy people who almost come together on the wagon trail; and Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek, Brendan Gleeson, Chelcie Ross, and Jonjo O’Neill as a motley crew on a stagecoach to nowhere. Each story is distinct, but unified by the thematic thread of mortality. As a whole movie experience, Buster Scruggs is wildly entertaining, and, like all Coen films, endlessly surprising. An Annapurna Production and Netflix release.
Burning
Dir. Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2018, 148m
Expanded from Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning,” the sixth feature from Korean master Lee Chang-dong, known best in the U.S. for such searing, emotional dramas as Secret Sunshine (NYFF45) and Poetry (NYFF48), begins by tracing a romantic triangle of sorts: Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), an aspiring writer, becomes involved with a woman he knew from childhood, Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), who is about to embark on a trip to Africa. She returns some weeks later with a fellow Korean, the Gatsby-esque Ben (Steven Yeun), who has a mysterious source of income and a very unusual hobby. A tense, haunting multiple-character study, the film accumulates a series of unanswered questions and unspoken motivations to conjure a totalizing mood of uncertainty and quietly bends the contours of the thriller genre to brilliant effect. A Well Go USA release.
Cold War
Dir. Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland, 2018, 90m
Academy Award–winner Paweł Pawlikowski follows up his box-office sensation Ida with this bittersweet, exquisitely crafted tale of an impossible love. Set between the late 1940s and early 1960s, Cold War is, as the title implies, a Soviet-era drama, but it stringently and inventively avoids the clichés of many a classical-minded World War II art film, tracking the tempestuous love between pianist (Tomasz Kot) and singer (Joanna Kulig) as they navigate the realities of living in both Poland and Paris, in and outside of the Iron Curtain. Shot in crisp black-and-white and set to a bewitching jazzy score, Pawlikowski’s evocative film consummately depicts an uncompromising passion caught up in the gears of history. An Amazon Studios release.
A Faithful Man/L’Homme fidèle
Dir. Louis Garrel, France, 2018, 75m
U.S. Premiere
Nine years after she left him for his best friend, journalist Abel (Louis Garrel) gets back together with his recently widowed old flame Marianne (Laetitia Casta). It seems to be a beautiful new beginning, but soon the hapless Abel finds himself embroiled in all sorts of dramas: the come-ons of a wily jeune femme (Lily-Rose Depp), the machinations of Marianne’s morbid young son, and some unsavory questions about what exactly happened to his girlfriend’s first husband. Shifting points of view as nimbly as its players switch partners, the sophomore feature from actor/director Louis Garrel—co-written with the legendary Jean-Claude Carrière—is at once a beguiling bedroom farce and a slippery inquiry into truth, subjectivity, and the elusive nature of romantic attraction.
A Family Tour
Dir. Ying Liang, Taiwan/Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia, 2018, 107m
U.S. Premiere
Since his 2012 feature When Night Falls, a stinging critique of state power that the Chinese authorities attempted to suppress, the director Ying Liang has been forced to live in exile in Hong Kong. His return to feature filmmaking is a characteristically precise and powerful work, and, as inspired by his own precarious situation and based on a reunion with his in-laws, an autobiographical one. The film follows a Hong Kong–exiled director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and toddler, while her ailing mother (Nai An) vacations there separately with a tour group. To avoid attracting attention, the family shadows the tour’s sightseeing itinerary, visiting each other during photo stops and mealtimes. An empathetic snapshot of a mother-daughter relationship, this brave, poised film is also a deeply moving testament to the inseparability of the personal and the political.
La Flor
Dir. Mariano Llinás, Argentina, 2018, 807m
North American Premiere
A decade in the making, Mariano Llinás’s follow-up to his 2008 cult classic Extraordinary Stories is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing. The director himself appears at the start to preview the six disparate episodes that await, each starring the same four remarkable actresses: Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. Overflowing with nested subplots and whiplash digressions, La Flor shape-shifts from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller to a category-defying metafiction—all of them without endings—to a remake of a very well-known French classic and, finally, to an enigmatic period piece that lacks a beginning (granted, all notions of beginnings and endings become fuzzy after 14 hours). An adventure in scale and duration, La Flor is a marvelously entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction that lands somewhere close to its outer limits.
Grass
Dir. Hong Sangsoo, South Korea, 2018, 66m
U.S. Premiere
Sitting in a café, typing on a laptop, Areum (Kim Min-hee) eavesdrops on three dramatic situations unfolding in her general vicinity: a young woman bound for Europe and a male friend who erupt in vitriolic accusations, a washed-up actor trying to sweet-talk his way into staying with an old friend, and a narcissistic actor-director (Jung Jin-young) trying to rope a young writer into his next project. Playing out largely in long-take two-shots, these conversations create a kind of never-ending theatrical performance, with Areum as the anchor. With its raw emotions and seeming formal simplicity masking a complex episodic approach, Grass finds Korean master Hong Sangsoo setting up a fascinating narrative problem for himself and solving it as only he can. A Cinema Guild release.
Happy as Lazzaro/Lazzaro felice
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher, Italy, 2018, 128m
North American Premiere
In the transfiguring and transfixing third feature from Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, NYFF52), we find ourselves amid a throng of tobacco farmers living in a state of extreme deprivation on an estate known as Inviolata, with wide-eyed teenager Lazzaro (nonprofessional discovery Adriano Tardiolo) emerging as a focal point. Although this all seems to be taking place in the past (as implied by the warm grain of Hélène Louvart’s 16mm cinematography), a stunning mid-movie leap vaults the narrative squarely into the present day and into the realm of parable. In a fable touching on perennial class struggle with Christian overtones, Rohrwacher summons the spirit of Pasolini, while also nodding to Ermanno Olmi and Visconti. A Netflix release.