(c) The Interested Bystander
Do you smell it? It’s in the air. New York City intelligentsia are descending on the Upper West Side to see all the buzzy films from auteur directors or some projected Oscar nominees for later this year. It’s always fun to be in the lobby of the many theaters in the Film at Lincoln Center complex (as well as select theaters in the other boroughs, like at BAM and MoMI) hearing people’s reaction to films they’ve already seen and the ones they’re looking forward to.
Like most film festivals, New York screenings always have long lines of people either seeing a film or hoping to get the seat of a ticket holder who cancels. The films chosen by the FLC crew, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim this year include many of the top titles shown at other festivals, and a couple of world premieres like the Centerpiece Film, Behemoth, directed by Tony Gilroy and starring Pedro Pascal, and Closing Night Film’s 14th, the documentary follow-up to 13th by Ava DuVernay, about how the 14th Amendment affects African-Americans.
I was able to see a three beforehand, and here are some capsule thought on them, as well as some other films that look interesting this year. Enjoy!
Fatherland (c) MUBI
Film: Fatherland
At the New York Film Festival, in Cinemas on Oct 23
Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski’s first two films, Ida and Cold War, have been embraced by the film community and the Oscars (Ida won Best Foreign Film in 2015), and now we have the third of his historical black and white endeavors (Łukasz Żal is back as his cinematographer) with Fatherland, following the German writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) as he returns to Germany four years after the end of WWII to accept the Goethe Prize, but is seemingly being claimed by both West and East Germany as their writer. He is accompanied by his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), who works as his assistant as his wife is too sick to travel. While nothing major happens, both Mann and his daughter have to confront the past as they visit Frankfurt and Weimar for the first time since they fled Europe for the U.S. The most dramatic moment happens during a confrontation at a party, and even then, it is dropped quickly. But it is Zischler and, especially Hüller who work well off each other when they are confronted by the political machinations of both Germanys. A lot of critics find Pawlikowski’s films beautiful but too emotionally detached. I found Fatherland fascinating, sad and his best work to date.
Rose (c) MUBI
Film: Rose
At the New York Film Festival, in Cinemas on Dec. 11
Sandra Hüller is having a great 2026. Not only is she in one of the bigger box office hits of the year (Project Hail Mary) and the anticipated Alejandro González Iñárritu film starring Tom Cruise (Digger), she’s in two films where is she is the lead and I can see her being nominated for an Oscar for one, if not both (per the new Oscar rule) as Best Actress. She is more likely to be feted for “Fatherland” as it is a quiet and restrained performance, but if the Oscar voters are more daring, the more interesting performance is in Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, where she plays a woman disguised as a man who fought in the Thirty Year War (1618 - 1648), who wants to inherit a farm, which she can’t do as a woman in Germany. Hüller does a lot with very little: a scar on her face, ill-fitting men’s clothing and the habit of putting a bullet hanging on a necklace into her mouth as a nervous tick. But with very little dialogue, Rose exudes a strong will but always with a sad demeanor. Things get complicated when, like in “Yentl,” Rose (her male name is never spoken) has to marry the neighbor’s daughter, Suzanna (an impressive Caro Braun), and there are some intriguing things that happen after that. With a beautiful, stark B+W cinematography by Gerald Kerkletz, Rose is not an easy movie to embrace, but Hüller’s masterful performance is worth the price of admission.
Bitter Christmas (c) Sony Pictures Classics
Film: Bitter Christmas
At the New York Film Festival, in Cinemas on Nov. 13
There are a lot of similarities between Pedro Almodóvar last film, the exquisite The Room Next Door and his latest film, Bitter Christmas, most noticeably two female characters deciding to leave the chaos of the big city to take refuge in the country. Where Room was in English and had big stars (Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore), Almodóvar seems to feel more at home in Spanish with lesser-known actresses. Bitter Christmas, named after a sad Spanish song, mainly focuses on movie director Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), who suffers from crippling migraines but is thankfully nursed by her hot himbo fireman boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Crisado). When she escapes to the country, she invites an old friend she lost touch with, Natalia (Milena Smit), who is suffering emotionally after the death of her child. At the same time, we follow another film director named Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who is artistically blocked and only finds inspiration by plagiarizing his friends’ lives for his script. Unfortunately, when the two storylines intersect, the film sort of loses the narrative and becomes a manifesto about how art should trump truth. Bitter Christmas is a lot of fun and luxuriates in its melodrama. Just expect an ending meant to promote discussion more than providing a conclusion.
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Here are some films I am looking forward to seeing (synopsis from NYFF):
All of a Sudden (c) NEON
All of a Sudden
Director: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Academy Award–winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) expands into even more contemplative, emotional territory with his radiant new film. The newly appointed director of an elder care facility in Paris, Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is promoting a radical new flagship program that prioritizes respect and empathy over profit and aims to treat not just the body but also the mind and soul of patients suffering from dementia and other cognitive disorders. Though she meets some resistance from staff and board, Marie-Lou finds a true kindred spirit in Mari (Tao Okamoto), a theater director from Kyoto with terminal cancer whose latest stage work moves Marie-Lou on a profound level. Efira and Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
Artificial (c) NEON
Artificial
Director: Luca Guadagnino
The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human Artificial, a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. In 2003, Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) began studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey “Godfather of AI” Hinton (Mark Rylance). A decade later, while employed by Google, Sutskever fatefully crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.
A Long Winter (c) MUBI
A Long Winter
Director: Andrew Haigh
High up in the stark Mountain West in the early 1950s, older son Mikey (Fred Hechinger) watches as his family slowly comes undone. After his brother Tommy (Kit Connor) heads off to fight in the Korean War, his mother (Caitríona Balfe) begins to exhibit signs of depression and disenchantment with his coal miner father (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and with her provincial, isolated life. One day, during a blinding snowstorm, she disappears into the wild, leaving her son and husband to both search for her and fend for themselves. Directed. by Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers), adapted from a short story by Colm Tóibín.
Minotaur (c) MUBI
Minotaur
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Set in 2022 Russia, Minotaur centers on middle-aged businessman Gleb (Dmitry Mazurov), a transport company CEO who lives an ultra-comfortable domestic life with his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) and teenage son in a sleek modernist home in a private wooded area. As the film begins, he is tasked by the town’s powerful mayor with drafting a quota of his employees to send to the newly ongoing war in Ukraine; at the same time, he begins to suspect that Galina is having an affair, which leads him to take drastic action. Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Misty Green (c) A24
Misty Green
Director: Chris Rock
In the captivating, star-making performance at the center of writer/director Chris Rock’s L.A. odyssey, Rosalind Eleazar plays Misty Green, an Emmy-winning former actress now struggling to make ends meet in an unforgiving Hollywood of humiliating auditions and fair-weather friends. With seven days to move out of her dead ex-boyfriend’s house, Misty is thrust into a frantic week in which she tries to secure a job and get her life on track—no easy task in any case, but especially complicated by run-ins with a sleazy former colleague (Adam Driver), her brother (Daniel Kaluuya) who’s struggling with mental illness, and an acclaimed movie director (Rock) who might provide Misty’s path to her dream role.
Possible Love (c) Netflix
Possible Love
Director: Lee Chang-dong
In such searing dramas as Secret Sunshine and Burning, the great filmmaker Lee Chang-dong pierces the heart of contemporary South Korea, laying bare the scars of personal trauma and socioeconomic grievance. His extraordinary latest concerns two middle-aged couples from different walks of life who become unlikely acquaintances. Working-class Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), who have been together since middle school and are the parents of a taciturn 10-year-old, are still reckoning with the fallout from Ho-seok’s firing from his factory job after a violently suppressed labor union strike. The well-off Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) are a documentary filmmaker and her businessman husband; Ye-ji has decided to make a movie about job layoffs and wants to make Mi-ok and Ho-seok her main camera subjects.
Tender Loving Care (c) Bleecker Street
Tender Loving Care
Director: Mike Leigh
One of our most steadfast, unflinching chroniclers of the human condition, Mike Leigh has now crafted, along with a customarily brilliant ensemble, a portrayal of overwhelmed, resilient lives in post-Brexit England that should be received as one of his signature works. At its center is Amy (Kate O’Flynn), a government child protection worker who, after a failed relationship, has moved back in with her chipper best friend, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), whose job as a social services officer is a daily confrontation with anger and resentment. Meanwhile, Amy’s aging parents (Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson), concerned with their daughter’s happiness, suddenly have to contend with a crisis of their own.
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