New York Film Festival Announces New Opening Act Series

The hits keep coming and coming as today the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a series called “New York Film Festival: Opening Act,” a showcase of previous films by directors whose work will also be included in the 51^st New York Film Festival. Opening Act will take place during the week leading up to this year’s NYFF that starts on September 27^th, and will serve as a chance to get reacquainted with or introduced to some of the best work by some of the world’s best filmmakers.  Dennis Lim, the Film Society Director of Cinematheque Programming says,”This series, which will continue as an annual event, gives some context to the diverse festival slate but is also an occasion for us to show a wide range of terrific movies, from modern classics to cult favorites to genuine rarities.”

As with many of the titles announced for NYFF51, there are some great Criterion connections among this stellar line up:

ADAPTATION (2002) 114 min
Director: Spike Jonze
Country: USA
“Do I have an original thought in my head?” Charlie Kaufman’s dizzying screenplay concerns, among other things, orchids, neurosis, detachment and passion, “Happy Together,” banana-nut muffins, and a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, who decides during a bout of intense writer’s block to write himself into his own script. Anchored by a go-for-broke comic performance from Nicolas Cage (as both Charlie and his goofball, fictional identical twin brother Donald) and visionary direction from the great Spike Jonze, Adaptation is one of the canonical on-screen depictions of the creative process, and one of the most imaginative American films of the new century.
Spike Jonze’s HER is the Closing Night Gala Selection at this year’s NYFF

BEAU TRAVAIL (1999) 92 min
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France
Claire Denis’s loose retelling of Billy Budd, set among a troop of Foreign Legionnaires stationed in the Gulf of Djibouti, is one of her finest films, an elemental story of misplaced longing and frustrated desire. Under a scorching sun, shirtless young men exercise to the strains of Benjamin Britten under the watchful eye of Denis Lavant’s stone-faced officer Galoup, their obsessively ritualized movements simmering with barely suppressed violence. When a handsome recruit wins the favor of the regiment’s commander, cracks start to appear in Galoup’s fragile composure. In the tense, tightly disciplined atmosphere of military life, Denis found an ideal outlet for two career-long concerns: the quiet agony of repressing one’s emotions, and the terror of finally letting loose.
Claire Denis’s BASTARDS (Les Salauds) screens at this year’s NYFF

GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE (L’Esquive) (2003) 123 min
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Country: France
In Abdellatif Kechiche’s César-sweeping second feature, a group of foul-mouthed teens from the Paris banlieues act out their own romantic roundelay during a school production of Marivaux’s 18^th-century comedy of manners Games of Love and Chance. Shy Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) loves sociable actress Lydia (Sara Forestier), but she has troubles of her own: fending off the jealous threats of a violent ex and the tough-love verbal jabs of an outspoken best friend. Kechiche gives a deft, nimble touch to the kids’ barbed exchanges, without ever letting us forget the social tensions and economic hardships threatening their fragile equilibrium.
Abdellatif Kechiche’s BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR screens at this year’s NYFF.

MABOROSI (1995) 109 min
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Country: Japan
One of Japan’s foremost contemporary filmmakers made his feature debut with this delicate portrait of loss and regeneration. Five years after a young wife and mother loses her husband in an unforeseen tragedy, she re-marries and moves to a small rural fishing village. She adapts gradually, but still finds herself subject to an ache she can’t soothe or name. Like Yasujiro Ozu before him, Hirokazu Kore-eda has a rare sensitivity to the place of individuals within the natural world, a cautious faith in the restorative powers of nature, family and romantic love, and an equally strong conviction, expressed with the lightest of touches, that some things can never be restored.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (Soshite Chichi ni Naru) screens at this year’s NYFF.

PLAYING ‘IN THE COMPANY OF MEN’ (2003) 121 min
Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Country: France
The celebrated playwright Edward Bond wrote In the Company of Men (no relation to Neil Labute’s film of the same title) at the height of his disgust over modern capitalist culture: a young businessman goes to ruin trying to outmaneuver his arms-manufacturer father. Arnaud Desplechin did for Bond’s play what Louis Malle did for Uncle Vanya: the dramatic action itself, shot with a hyperactive handheld camera, alternates with footage of the actors auditioning, rehearsing, and gearing up to perform. Desplechin locates Bond in a high-tragedy tradition stretching from Sophocles to Shakespeare: at one point, deciding the play lacks enough female roles, the cast splice in one of Ophelia’s scenes from Hamlet.
Arnaud Desplechin’s JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN screens at this year’s NYFF.

SOBIBOR, OCT. 14, 1943, 4 P.M. (2001) 95 min
Director: Claude Lanzmann
Country: France
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m. is comprised primarily of an interview Lanzmann conducted in 1979 with a Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Lerner about the uprising at Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp in eastern Poland, the only successful Jewish-prisoner insurrection of the war. This film isn’t just an epilogue toShoah, it’s a rebuttal to the dominant mythology of Jewish acquiescence and martyrdom, and as such, a critique of turning history into the comforts of fiction. It’s historiography with a vengeance. —Manohla Dargis,Film Comment, July/August 2001
Claude Lanzmann’s THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (Le Dernier des injustes) screens at this year’s NYFF.

This new series is a phenomenal added treat to this year’s festivities, and has me somehow more excited when I figured that couldn’t be possible. Aside from a film called Pulse by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa—whose film Cure is on the Criterion Hulu Plus page—there are also some great films by those who aren’t yet in the Collection such as James Gray’s Little Odessa, Paul Greengrass’ Bloody Sunday, Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day, and, of course, Joel Coen’s Miller’s Crossing.

For the complete list of Opening Act films, click here.