12 Hot Takes From the 2024 New York Film Festival

The drama here is A-level, and it might remind you of what is was like to watch Uncut Gems, while people who are equally familiar with both Sean Baker and John Cassavetes will continue to draw absolutely-deserved comparisons between the two writer/directors. Mikey Madison leaves it all on the floor in a role that feels like an expansion of her work on in the underrated TV series "Better Things." The role requires her to rage with each inch of her physical body/every ounce of her spirit against a young Russian oligarch, his gross, impulsive lifestyle, and his even grosser parents. I’d buy Baker vodka shots all day and night as a thank-you for casting Madison as Anora and for never letting us forget his characters after the credits roll. I haven’t truly been excited about Oscar nominations in some time, but in a year where you might see films like Anora and The Brutalist nominated in multiple categories, I am starting to feel like the American neorealism movement might actually be a thing, and hope financers and movie studios will continue backing stories about characters who are marginalized and stigmatized in the real world.

When the ayahuasca hits in the third act of Queer, Luca Guadagnino takes us on an ascension journey in South America that finds a semblance of soul in William S. Burroughs' otherwise unembraceable novel. At a late stage in this languishing, lovesick story, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey vomit up their hearts and fuse their bodies in one of the most visually arresting takes on desire I've seen on screen. (The initial sex scene between the two men is a get-it-Daniel-Craig moment for the former 007 that tastes better than bath water.) But the movie doesn't fully escape the restraints of its source material. Burroughs wasn't queer, and personally I’ve never subscribed to the idea of this novel being a realist love story. I was surprised Guadagnino and his Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes chose this as a follow-up to that contemporary, truly queer triumph. The transactional relationship between Craig's sweaty, smack-addled expat living in post-WWII Mexico City and Starkey's 1950s American dream boy turned emotional hustler feels ill-timed when the real world can feel increasingly anti-queer. Guadagnino and Kuritzkes have made this story theirs, but I feel they could have found greater success with an original screenplay.

What hangs heavy over this story is the impermanence of the human body and the unconditional support that can be found in adult friendships as we confront death. Fortunately Pedro Almodóvar's English language debut treats you to colorful interiors of impossibly beautiful homes so you don't have to double up on antis as Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore translate Almodóvar's love language between two women. With my baby Spanish skills I felt like the dialogue might have worked better in Almodóvar's native tongue, it could have found even more nuance in the humor between two old friends as one of them plans their own death. I'd follow all three of these artists into the afterlife, and if Almodóvar’s English language debut introduces his work to younger people, who tend to not flinch in the face of subtitles, I hope he wins some new converts who seek out All About My Mother, Volver, Talk to Her …

All of the superlatives you'll see in the advertising for Brady Corbet's true American epic, his complete arrival as a filmmaker, are deserved. I cannot stop thinking about what he accomplished on 70mm film for under $10 million. The Brutalist got me over my longtime allergy to Adrien Brody because his performance as Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth is more awards-worthy than what he accomplished with The Pianist. Guy Pearce plays Harrison Lee Van Buren, an American tycoon who traps Toth in a gilded cage as they partner on the construction of an architectural marvel designed to lift their respective profiles to international renown. Pearce is so wickedly talented, you’re laughing at his pseudo-intellectual remarks in the first half of the film; in the second, you’ll hope Van Buren’s life and empire crumbles, and his entire bloodline suffers (except for Emma Laird's Audrey, Van Buren's daughter). The movie should inspire more established filmmakers to rebuild their foundations, even if this story's pacing at times felt like watching a monument being constructed in real time.

Nickel Boys will resonate with anyone who gravitates toward slow cinema and impressionistic filmmaking. There will continue to be questions about director RaMell Ross' decision to shoot from first-person point-of-view in his adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel about Elwood Curtis, a young Black man whose life is nearly snuffed out in a prison masquerading as a reform school in 1960s Florida. These critiques should not obscure what he accomplishes in his feature debut, which for me felt like a series of love stories daring to win out against barbaric evil. I did find the perspective challenging, but in a way I'm sure Ross intends; I found myself gripping the armrests and trying to outmaneuver some of the depictions of violence. It's a breakout performance by lead actor Ethan Herisse, who had a role in "When They See Us" with his Nickel Boys co-star, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, whose performance is beyond Oscar caliber. I don't think I've ever seen someone stare down the lens of a camera with her degree of love and devotion.

Pay attention to what Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofía Gascón achieve together on camera, as well as in their individual performances, as director Jacques Audiard slam shifts between genres – camp musical, telenovela drama, high T-level action – with a wildling that will ignite new conversations as the movie hits Netflix in November. It's a gymnastic, career-topping display from Saldana, matched by transgender actress Gascón's revelatory take on trying to reshape a life that has only known violence. I did keep wondering what the story might have been like in the hands of a different director. I don't think a filmmaker needs to directly identify with their story or characters, but the way Audiard steered the third act of Emilia Pérez into a shoot-em-up action and revenge tale felt to me like he was satisfying his own tastes more than his audience's. And an early scene that takes place in an operating room is a total yikes moment; I would have left that musical number on the editing room floor.

Naomi Watts and Bill Murray reunite a decade after St. Vincent with another potential crowd-pleaser that could be a sleeper hit with the right distributor. The story is entirely formulaic and emotionally manipulative, which I welcomed after days of epic dramas with either violent or depressing third acts. I simply didn’t want Watts to lose her apartment after Murray’s character entrusts her with his Great Dane, Apollo. (Best to spare how this happens.) Some story editing could have kept this relationship drama firmly in Manhattan instead of heading off to the beach for a false ending, but I appreciate everything Watts did to recruit her famously hard to reach friend. The movie also features a stealth performance from Sarah Pidgeon as Murray's daughter who is estranged in her father's social and professional circles, and fully embraced by the woman who truly loved him. Indie studio Bleecker Street has picked up the movie in the US and is planning an early 2025 release.

If you're still talking about Stranger by the Lake over a decade after Alain Guiraudie released his dangerous and super erotic queer thriller (in a year that also treated us to Xavier Dolan's brutally hot Tom at the Farm), know that Misericordia broadens his views on sexuality, desire, and death, which are all inextricably linked in Guiraudie's perspective. Film buffs will see direct comparisons to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Vatican-condemned Teorema, but I suggest you wander into this French village not knowing anything about the story. Just be careful in the woods and don't think anyone in town is more or less moral than one another.

In Hard Truths, Mike Leigh returns to the barebones dramatic form he began shaping nearly 40 years ago with a script that reunites him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The story asks his Secrets & Lies star to portray a woman with a depressive disorder who rages at everyone around her, from her husband and son, to her sister and the shop girl who is just wondering if she’s in the market for a new couch. Within her family dynamic there are some subtle acknowledgements of systemic racism and inherited trauma I wish Leigh chose to explore further. Otherwise, he holds back from letting us experience the redemptive nature of forgiveness that can occur within a family, no matter how broken they’ve become. I hope the Academy acknowledges what Jean-Baptiste accomplishes, but this sort of uncompromising European filmmaking might not fully land Stateside.

I wasn't quite sure exactly what Richard Gere's cantakerous documentary filmmaker Leo Fife was confessing on camera in Paul Schrader's fragmented take on Russel Banks' novel Foregone. It was enough to make Uma Thurman cry and leave the room to make sandwiches which never materialized. It caused Gere to appear in key moments of his Fife's younger life, where he was otherwise played by Jacob Elordi, as he escaped the straightjacket of the American South and made his way into Canada. The former draft dodger became a celebrated documentary filmmaker in his chosen country in a path that's never fully cleared of debris. It inspired two of his former students – both Oscar winners – to rub salt into Fife's wounds during the last days of his life by attempting to grill confessions out of him on camera for their new project. I felt the connection between this story and Schrader, a singular and incredibly influential filmmaker who is in declining health, but I thought more about the performances than the script or its hemmed-in, stage-like direction. Elordi is, like Robert Pattinson before him, emerging from his YA era as a fine actor. Someone out there who loves women needs to write Uma Thurman's next great role. I hope the upcoming series "The Agency" suits Gere's talent. But Oh Canada doesn't allow its characters, or its audience, any sense of catharsis.

Pavements has that “Ted Lasso” thing. You don't need to be a fan of the 90s indie music to get into Alex Ross Perry's documentary on the band Pavement that felt as playful and illuminative to me as kids thumbing through their parents' record collection and landing on a worn copy of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. A straight take on the band would have been a snooze – let's just agree there's little chance Stephen Malkmus would've sat still to talk about his lyrics – and Perry's doc translates much better to the screen than his self-conscious, short-lived musical stage play "Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical." Since it's pretty clear the band has gone back into hiding after a one-off concert timed to the movie's New York Film Festival appearance this year, Joe Keery (who plays frontman Malkmus in the doc's dramatized bits) should round up his fictional band mates for a full-on Daisy Jones & the Six moment.

It feels cold to critique David Cronenberg's depiction of the lifelessness he's feeling after losing his wife and collaborator, Carolyn, to an undisclosed illness in 2017. Since then, their two children have emerged as directors in their own right, and watching The Shrouds (an isolating experience) made me feel re-watching both Infinity Pool and Humane through a different lens. I've read both Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger only realized their character connections to Cronenberg during the production — Cassel is, if you'll pardon me, a dead ringer for director, while Kruger came to realize she was playing a version of both his wife and her sister. In studying the decay of the body, Cronenberg offers up a cerebral and meditative side of himself. The Shrouds might best work for Cronenberg completists, but your first take on this film might not be the fairest.