By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --The 61st New York Film Festival will kick off with Todd Haynes' "May December," a juicy drama starring Natalie Portman as an actor preparing for a film about a years-ago tabloid scandal.
Film at Lincoln Center, which puts on the New York Film Festival, announced Tuesday that "May December" — one of the standouts at this year's Cannes Film Festival — will be the opening night film at this year's edition. The gala will take place Sept. 29 at Alice Tully Hall.
In it, Portman plays a well-known TV star who, to research a role, spends time with Gracie (Julianne Moore) and her much-younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton). They're a seemingly happy suburban family whose initial affair 20 years earlier, when Joe was 13, was a national story. Their backstory is loosely based on the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Washington State schoolteacher convicted of raping her sixth-grade student, Vili Fualaau. They later married.
"'May December' is a tour de force of writing, acting, and directing: a film built on moment-to-moment surprise, as thought-provoking as it is purely pleasurable," said Dennis Lim, the festival's artistic director, in a statement. "It cements Todd Haynes's place as one of American cinema's most brilliant mischief-makers and as an all-time great director of actors."
Following its Cannes premiere, Netflix acquired "May December" and will release it in theaters Nov. 17 and on the streaming platform Dec. 1. The NYFF launch will return Haynes to a festival he's regularly attended over the years. His "Velvet Goldmine," "I'm Not There," "Carol," "Wonderstruck" and "The Velvet Underground" have all previously played at the festival.
"It is a festival that plays a role in my work and life like no other in the world, since it enshrines the cultural life of this city, which is both my creative home as a filmmaker and, as ever, the eternal site of artistic possibility," Haynes said in a statement.
The New York Film Festival runs Sept. 29—Oct. 15.
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More