NYFF Favorites

NYFF Favorites

Explore this collection of fan favorites from over six decades of the New York Film Festival, with work from Jean-Luc Godard, Claire Denis, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, Tsai Ming-liang, Lucrecia Martel, Derek Jarman, Abel Ferrara, and more!

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NYFF Favorites
  • 35 Shots of Rum

    Directed by Claire Denis | 100 mins | 2008
    “It’s the best father-daughter movie I can think of. And it’s one of the greatest romances, too… The dance sequence to 'Night Shift' by the Commodores is not able to be described. We are witness to the most magical thing that can happen between two peopl...

  • The Aviator's Wife

    Directed by Éric Rohmer | 106 mins | 1981
    The inaugural film of Éric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork in following a narrative expression of the opening ...

  • Boyfriends and Girlfriends

    Directed by Éric Rohmer | 103 mins | 1987
    Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the Paris suburbs to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”) in the final episode of his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking an i...

  • Goodbye to Language

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
    An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. ...

  • Hyenas

    Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 110 mins | 1992
    One of the treasures of contemporary cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty made his long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki with this hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit. In Mam...

  • Jauja

    Directed by Lisandro Alonso | 110 mins | 2014
    Viggo Mortensen stars as a Danish engineer who joins the Argentine army at the very ends of the Earth in the 1800s. When his daughter elopes with a soldier, Mortensen’s mercenary heads into the harsh wilderness on a search, which director Alonso rende...

  • Lady Vengeance

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Park Chan Wook | 115 mins | 2005
    The capper of Park’s “Revenge Trilogy” follows a woman wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a six-year-old boy, as she meticulously lays the groundwork for an elaborate plan of retribution, then sets it into merciless mo...

  • Mountains May Depart

    Directed by Jia Zhangke | 126 mins | 2015
    A simple love triangle between three young people living in Fenyang—Jia’s much-revisited and filmed hometown—lays the foundations for an epoch-spanning triptych, describing the past, present, and future of three characters (including leading lady Zhao Tao...

  • Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

    Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan | 157 mins | 2011
    Against the majestic Turkish countryside, a roaming police investigation reveals more about the investigators and the tragicomedies of everyday life than about the foggy facts of the case. Ceylan’s gorgeously shot, masterfully paced story has a nove...

  • Pasolini

    Directed by Abel Ferrara | 87 mins | 2014
    The quotidian Roman life and the imaginary worlds of Pier Paolo Pasolini intermingle in Ferrara’s retelling of the final days in the life of the 50-year-old filmmaker, writer, and public intellectual in a lovely, haunting bricolage that includes text from...

  • Portrait of Jason

    Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
    A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...

  • Sátántangó

    Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
    A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...

  • Stranger by the Lake

    Directed by Alain Guiraudie | 100 mins | 2013
    Lauded and laureled at Cannes, Guiradie’s understated, simmeringly sensual thriller explores the proximity of Eros and Thanatos in an idyllic, lakeside nude beach/cruising spot—shot for maximum pastoral splendor by DP Claire Mathon—where regular Franc...

  • The Girl and the Spider

    Directed by Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher | 98 mins | 2021
    An apartment move-out produces an exquisite ballet of curious personal dramas and fraught relationships (new and old) thanks to the whisker-sensitive filmmaking of the Zürcher brothers. Set amid nosy neighbors, it’s a fine-grained cros...

  • The Headless Woman

    Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 89 mins | 2008
    Martel’s haunting study of self-deception follows Veronica, a beloved but remote mother, after her car hits something in the road—or was it a person? As the stylish “Vero” (the late, great Maria Onetto) drifts in a daze among family and friends, the ur...

  • The Image Book

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 84 mins | 2019
    A cinematic collage, an esoteric essay film, a wide-reaching, freewheeling ontological history of the moving image, and a sorrowful survey of the fallen world at the beginning of the 21st century, Special Palme d’Or winner The Image...

  • The Turin Horse

    Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | 155 mins | 2011
    Tarr’s final feature distills the essence of his cinema with the potency of farmer’s moonshine: a cart driver and his daughter survive harsh lives amid the stark beauty of desolation. With a nearly mood-altering dilation of time, this pr...

  • Totally F***ed Up

    Directed by Gregg Araki | 79 mins | 1993
    The first film of Araki’s “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, which the director once described as a “cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick,” "Totally F***ed Up" focuses on six gay adolescents who, rejected by their families...

  • Tropical Malady

    Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 114 mins | 2004
    Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, this is the movie that gained Apichatpong’s distinctive, dreamy vision a new level of recognition on the international stage. A bifurcated narrative, with no clear connection between the film’s two halves,...

  • Western

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Valeska Grisebach | 121 mins | 2017
    Tensions rise during a work stoppage when a group of German laborers erecting a hydroelectric plant in rural Bulgaria suddenly find themselves with time to get into trouble in Grisebach’s patient, tonally precise, naturalist dram...

  • Zama

    Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 115 mins | 2017
    A scruffy bureaucrat for the Spanish crown hopelessly angles for ways to get ahead in this audacious vision of 18th-century colonial empire, adapted from Antonio de Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Don Diego’s anti-epic progress in a far-flung...