The newly announced main slate of films at the 52nd New York Film Festival features a wide range of work from some of the world’s leading filmmakers.
A further 27 films have been unveiled, joining a trio of previously announced heavy hitters: the opening-night premiere of David Fincher's Gone Girl, the author Gillian Flynn's adaptation of her own psychological thriller starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike; the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice; and the closing-night gala film Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and based on Raymond Carver's story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, starring Michael Keaton as an actor famous for playing an iconic superhero who is struggling to get a Broadway play off the ground.
Other highlights of the main slate that caught my eye include:
the British director Mike Leigh's Mr Turner, starring Timothy Spall as an artist consumed by his work who struggles to relate to the people he encounters in daily life, including his wife and children.
David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, a dark Hollywood satire starring Julianne Moore (who won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance), John Cusack and Robert Pattinson.
Life of Riley / Aimer, boire et chanter is the final film by the French Director Alain Resnais, adapted from the British writer Alan Ayckbourn's 1965 play Relatively Speaking, the story of three couples in the English countryside who discover a mutual friend is terminally ill.
Listen Up Philip, the third film by director Alex Ross Perry, is a portrait of artistic egomania starring Jason Schwartzman as a precocious star writer about to publish his second novel, Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss as his long-suffering photographer girlfriend and Jonathan Pryce as his literary hero.
Pasolini, Abel Ferrara's portrait of the life and work of the influential artist/writer/filmmaker, starring Willem Dafoe in the title role.
Goodbye to Language / Adieu au language, 83-year-old French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's 43rd film, filmed in 3D and "starring" his beloved dog, Roxy.
Tales of the Grim Sleeper by the idiosyncratic British documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield, in which he visits the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Lonnie Franklin Jr, arrested in 2010 after a 20-year police investigation into the deaths of a string of young black women, to uncover the street-level view of the alleged killer and attitudes towards the police and their handling of the case.
Misunderstood, directed by Asia Argento, tells the story of the imaginative life of a pre-teen girl growing up in 1980s Rome in circumstances very similar to those of Argento herself.
For a full list of the films screening during the 52nd New York Film Festival, which is organised by the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and runs from September 26 until October 12, visit filmlinc.com. Check out dates and times of the screenings here.
lcairney@thenational.ae