New York Film Festival returns with a post-strike lineup of inventive, queer, star-studded films
After last year’s industrywide strikes rendered cinema-going a bit less exciting, film festivals have been returning in full force the past few months, renewing excitement around filmmaking at large.
After last year’s industrywide strikes rendered cinema-going a bit less exciting, film festivals have been returning in full force the past few months, renewing excitement around filmmaking at large.
Following a summer of star-studded events in Cannes, Venice and Toronto, the 62nd annual New York Film Festival opens at Lincoln Center on Friday for 17 days of lit-up silver screens and sparkling red carpets. And this year, a new and returning collection of creators are showing festival-defining, queer-centric works that reflect the newly enlivened cinematic environment — with Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, and Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, programmed in the prestigious Centerpiece and Spotlight Gala spots.
“It didn’t even occur to me that we had two queer filmmakers in such prominent slots until this piece,” Dennis Lim, the artistic director of NYFF, told NBC News of the selections that, along with the opening- and closing-night picks, set the tone for the festival.
“For these positions, we tend to look for films that are among the most anticipated of the year,” he said. “Our ambition is to make selections that make the case for cinema as a relevant and vital art form at that moment in time.”
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in "Queer."A24Lim, the NYFF’s former longtime director of programming, pointed out that this year’s cornerstone titles also come from creators who have a long relationship with the organization, with Almodóvar showing his first film at NYFF in 1988 (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”) and Guadagnino becoming a regular fixture at Lincoln Center after 2009’s Swinton-starring “I Am Love.”
Rating: 5