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NYFF59: Top 10 Most Anticipated Films Of This Years Festival

The 59th New York Film Festival kicks off this week and yours truly will be covering this year’s festivities. The festival has consistently been one of the most important festivals in regards to the commencement of the Oscar Season.

These are the 10 films I’m most excited to see during the New York Film Festival:

  1. Dune – Denis Villeneueve

A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, who must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence—a commodity capable of unlocking humanity’s greatest potential—only those who can conquer their fear will survive. Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem lead the all-star ensemble in visionary filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel

2. Titane – Julia Ducournau

The winner of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or, Titane is a thrillingly confident vision from Julia Ducournau that deposits the viewer directly into its director’s headspace. Moving with the logic of a dream—and often the force of a nightmare—the film begins as a kind of horror movie, with a series of shocking events perpetrated by Alexia (Agathe Rouselle, in a dynamic and daring breakthrough), a dancer with a titanium plate in her skull following a childhood car accident. However, once Alexia goes into hiding from the police, and is taken in by a grief-stricken firefighter (Vincent Lindon), Ducournau reveals her deployment of genre tropes to be as fluid and destabilizing as her mercurial main character.

3. The Tragedy Of Macbeth – Joel Coen

oel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition. In meticulously world-weary performances, a strikingly inward Denzel Washington is the man who would be king and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand is his Lady, a couple driven to political assassination—and deranged by guilt—after the cunning prognostications of a trio of “weird sisters” (a virtuoso physical inhabitation by Kathryn Hunter)

4. C’mon C’mon – Mike Mills

A soulful Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a kindhearted radio journalist deep into a project in which he interviews children across the U.S. about our world’s uncertain future. His sister, Viv (a marvelously intuitive Gaby Hoffmann), asks him to watch her 9-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman, in one of the most affecting breakout child performances in years), while she tends to the child’s father, who’s suffering from mental health issues. After agreeing, Johnny finds himself connecting with his nephew in ways he hadn’t expected, ultimately taking Jesse with him on a journey from Los Angeles to New York to New Orleans.

5. The French Dispatch – Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson’s unmistakable cinematic style proves delightfully suited to periodical format in this missive from the eponymous expatriate journal, published on behalf of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun from the picturesque French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Brought to press by a corps of idiosyncratic correspondents, the issue includes reports on a criminal artist and his prison guard muse, student revolutionaries, and a memorable dinner with a police commissioner and his personal chef.

6. The Worst Person In The World – Joachim Trier

After dropping out of pre-med, Julie must find new professional and romantic avenues as she navigates her twenties, juggling emotionally heavy relationships with two very different men (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie and engaging newcomer Herbert Nordrum).

7. Parallel Mothers – Pedro Almodovar

Two women, a generation apart, find themselves inextricably linked by their brief time together in a maternity ward. The circumstances that brought them to the Madrid hospital are quite different—one accidental, the other traumatic—and a secret, hiding the truth of the bond that connects these two, is a powerful story that tackles a deep trauma in Spanish history.

8. Berman Island – Mia Hansen-Love

Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth star as Chris and Tony, married filmmakers who venture to the remote Swedish island of Fårö—where director Ingmar Bergman lived and made many of his masterpieces—as a writing retreat for their new projects.

9. Red Rocket – Sean Baker

Mikey, a wildly narcissistic former porn star fallen on hard times, has returned from L.A. to his depressed, postindustrial hometown of Texas City, reconnecting with his skeptical, drug-dependent estranged wife and mother-in-law, and using his wily charms to ingratiate himself into a community of people he couldn’t care less about.

10. The Lost Daughter – Maggie Gyllenhaal

A potent work of psychological interiority that follows Leda, a divorced professor on a solitary summer vacation who becomes intrigued and then oddly involved in the lives of another family she meets there.

 

David Gonzalez
David Gonzalez is the founder and chief film critic of The Cinematic Reel (formally Reel Talk Inc.) and host of the Reel Chronicles and Chop Talk podcasts. As a Cuban American independent film critic, David writes fair and diverse criticism covering movies of all genres and spotlighting minority voices through Reel Talk. David has covered and reviewed films at Tribeca, TIFF, NYFF, Sundance, SXSW, and several other film festivals. He is a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer-Approved Critic and a member of the Latino Entertainment Journalists Association (LEJA), New York Film Critics Online, Hollywood Film Critics Association, the North American Film Critic Association and the International Film Society Critics Association. As an avid film collector and awards watcher, David's finger is always on the industry's pulse. David informs and educates with knowledgeable and exciting content and has become a trusted resource for readers and listeners alike. Email him at david@reeltalkinc.com or follow him on Twitter and Instagram @reeltalkinc.

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