NYFF Lines Up Its Main Slate

The answer to that question arrives each year in multiple parts. The Revivals section is a repertory showcase of recent restorations, while Currents checks in on how what we used to call the avant-garde has been faring. Films that land in the Spotlight program can range anywhere from—to take last year as an example—a flashy portrait of Elton John to a pair of short films Jean-Luc Godard completed just before he died. But the core of the entire selection—and of the answer to the question Lim annually poses to himself and his fellow selection committee members—is the Main Slate.

On Tuesday, Film at Lincoln Center, the producer and host of the NYFF, announced that thirty-four films are lined up for the Main Slate of the festival’s sixty-third edition. NYFF 2025 will open on September 26 with Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt and close on October 13 with the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? The Centerpiece presentation will be Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. “It’s not just one of his best,” Lim tells Vincentelli, “but a distillation of so much of what we love about Jarmusch.”

While the bulk of the lineup is adroitly gleaned from other festivals, this year’s NYFF will present one other world premiere besides Is This Thing On?, Ulrich Köhler’s Gavagai. Maren Eggert, known for her work with Angela Schanelec but also as the star of Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man (2021) and Ramon Zürcher’s The Sparrow in the Chimney (2024), costars with Jean-Christophe Folly (Triangle of Sadness) not only in Gavagai but also in the film within the film, a reinterpretation of Euripides’s Medea being shot by a volatile director (Nathalie Richard) in Senegal. Köhler’s film takes a radical tonal swerve on the night of Medea’s premiere in Berlin.

Mary Bronstein’s hard-driving If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was met with strong reviews when it premiered at Sundance before heading to the main competition in Berlin. There, Rose Byrne won a Silver Bear for her leading performance as a therapist whose husband, a sea captain, leaves her to deal alone with a relentless onslaught of borderline surreal challenges.

Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions—which the Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye has called “a kinetic blend of a fictional Afro-futurist narrative, archival research on decades of Black visual and multimedia work, and personal history”—and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, starring Ben Whishaw as one of the most in-demand photographers in 1970s and 80s New York, were also both warmly received at Sundance before screening in Berlin.

The Berlinale launched Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You, which Nicolas Rapold, writing for Deadline, called “a seemingly straightforward story that has a bit of a sting in its tail,” and Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25, the winner of a Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. For Jonathan Romney at Screen, “this story of a guilt-ridden bailiff ostensibly resembles conventional social realism but then broadens its scope fascinatingly, foregrounding satirical intent and a mischievous degree of verbal overload.”

Six winners of top awards in Cannes are heading to New York, and you’ll find notes on all of them here. In Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, the winner of the Palme d’Or, a cluster of former prisoners debate the fate of their captured tormenter. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, starring Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, and Elle Fanning, won the Grand Prix, and Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling shared the Jury Prize.

The Secret Agent, set in 1977 Brazil, scored two awards, Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Wagner Moura. Dispatching to Notebook from Cannes, Leonardo Goi called Bi Gan’s Resurrection, the winner of a Special Award, “a sprawling phantasmagoria spanning a hundred years of film history, a journey split into five chapters (plus a short epilogue), each of which boasts a distinct visual style and narrative technique.”

Three more films premiered in competition in Cannes but won plaudits from critics rather than jurors. Film Comment’s Devika Girish called Kelly Reichardt’s 1970s-set The Mastermind a “delightful caper” starring Josh O’Connor as “an art-school dropout who orchestrates a comically sloppy heist at a Massachusetts museum.” The New Yorker’s Justin Chang placed Sergei Loznitsa’s “superb drama” Two Prosecutors high in his rankings of Cannes contenders, and in Variety, Guy Lodge called Carla Simón’s Romería a “layered, wistfully moving memory piece.”

The NYFF has selected two titles from the noncompetitive Cannes Premiere section. Lav Diaz’s Magellan stars Gael García Bernal, and writing for Artforum, Jordan Cronk admires “the evident care put into every frame of this exquisitely imagined film.” At Screen Slate, David Schwartz calls Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains “a wildly physical film, with rugged landscapes, interjected non-sequitur montages, and dream sequences involving a scarecrow built by the children. It is a shame and a mystery that the film was not in competition,” but now it’s on its way to New York and Toronto.

Cleo Diára won the Un Certain Regard award for Best Actress for her turn in Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, whose “caustic thesis, about the legacy of colonial violence that persists in the development agenda, emerges from scenes of labor, partying, and explicit sex that Pinho, a former documentarian, stages with a verité density,” writes Mark Asch for Film Comment. Francesco Sossai’s UCR entry The Last One for the Road was one of Leonardo Goi’s “greatest discoveries” in Cannes, and Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 was a major draw to the Directors’ Fortnight.

New Yorkers won’t have to wait long to see some of the most-anticipated films slated to premiere at the big fall festivals. Fresh from the main competition in Venice will be Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, starring Lee Byung-hun as a man who will do just about anything to land a job; Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, featuring what Vanity Fair’s David Canfield calls “a stacked ensemble” led by George Clooney and Adam Sandler; Pietro Marcello’s Duse, with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as the famed Italian actor Eleonora Duse; Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, in which a rogue missile sparks a crisis; and Gianfranco Rosi’s homage to Naples, Below the Clouds.

Two nonfiction films head to New York after premiering out of competition in Venice. Lucrecia Martel probes the ramifications of the murder of Argentine activist Javier Chocobar in Landmarks, and Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus profile investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in Cover-Up. From Venice’s Orizzonti program come Kent Jones’s Late Fame—with a screenplay by Samy Burch (May December), Willem Dafoe as a forgotten poet, and Greta Lee as a fan—and Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, the story of the mysterious reappearance of a boat that went missing thirty years ago. Rose was shot on 16 mm and its entire soundscape was constructed in post.

Premiering in Toronto’s Platform competition, Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents explores the psychological transformation of a celebrated Argentine fashion designer following a plunge into the icy waters of a lake in Switzerland. And while Toronto hasn’t announced that it will launch Claire Denis’s The Fence, the NYFF is billing its own presentation as a U.S. premiere. Isaach De Bankolé stars as a worker who approaches the front gate of a white-run construction site in a West African town and insists that he will not budge until the foreman (Matt Dillon) returns the body of his brother, who died in a mysterious, work-related accident.