By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --The New York Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled the main slate for its 62nd edition, with selections including Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anora,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey.”
Thirty-three features will make up the central lineup of the annual festival presented by Film at Lincoln Center. The main slate is particularly international this year, with films hailing from 24 countries, and including 19 directors making their debut in the festival’s most prestigious section.
The festival, as previously announced, will kick off Sept. 27 with RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel. Almodóvar, making his 15th appearance in New York’s main slate, will present “The Room Next Door,” starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, as the festival centerpiece. Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” about the bombing of London in World War II, will be the closing night film.
A number of prize-winners from May’s Cannes Film Festival will be making their U.S. or North American premieres. Along with “Anora,” that includes “Grand Tour,” by Miguel Gomes, winner of Cannes’ best director; Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light,” winner of the Grand Prix; Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” a standout from Un Certain Regard; and “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” from the dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof who fled his home country to unveil his film.
“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” said Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, in a statement. “The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”
Also are tap are Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada,” with Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides” and David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” as well as a pair of highlights from Cannes sidebars: Roberto Minervini’s American Civil War drama “The Damned” and Carson Lund’s baseball elegy “Eephus.”
Also coming to New York: Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” starring Adrien Brody as an architect and Holocaust survivor, and the world premiere of Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” a documentary about independent journalism in Putin’s Russia.
Two filmmakers have a pair of films in the main slate. Both “By the Stream” and “A Traveler’s Needs” from the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo will debut at the festival, while the Chinese documentarian Wang Bing will present the second and third entries in his “Youth” trilogy: “Youth (Hard Times”) and “Youth (“Homecoming”).
The New York Film Festival, running Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, takes place at Lincoln Center and a handful of other venues around the city.
James Earl Jones, Lauded Actor and Voice of Darth Vader, Dies At 93
James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, "The Lion King" and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.
His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York's Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.
The pioneering Jones, who was one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors and was given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.
He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of "The Gin Game" having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work.
"The need to storytell has always been with us," he told The Associated Press then. "I think it first happened around campfires when the man came home and told his family he got the bear, the bear didn't get him."
Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer coaxed back into the spotlight in "Field of Dreams," the boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit "The Great White Hope," the writer Alex Haley in "Roots: The Next Generation" and a South African minister in "Cry, the Beloved Country."
He was also a sought-after voice actor, expressing the villainy of Darth Vader ("No, I am your father," commonly misremembered as "Luke, I am your father"), as... Read More