New York Film Festival 2025
FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER, New York, NY
September 26 – October 13, 2025
Drake Stutesman
Some films to see:
BLUE MOON
2025
Richard Linklater
US / Ireland
100 min.
Blue Moon is a tight, penetrating film about one night in the life of songwriter, Lorenz Hart. Hart, in the nineteen-twenties, thirties and forties, wrote famously poignant and joyful songs that became signatures of American culture, songs like “Blue Moon,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “This Can’t Be Love.” Hart partnered early with composer Richard Rogers and their work ignited numerous Broadway hits. Hart’s alcoholism wrecked his career. Rogers left their partnership and, by the early 1940s, began working with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. Rogers and Hammerstein went on to create monumental musicals for the American theater.
The film takes place during one evening, in 1943, where Hart is waiting in the Manhattan restaurant, Sardi’s, which was at that time the place to be seen, especially if you were in the theater world. Hart stays in Sardi’s bar through much of the evening and into the night, talking to various people, as he waits for others to come to Sardi’s at the end of the opening night show of Oklahoma!, the musical that became Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s first Broadway smash and a prelude to decades of legendary success that continues even to today.
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Director Richard Linklater uses the dramatic device of the single night with simplicity and with compactness. It gives the film a theatrical feel, as if the audience is watching a play. Ethan Hawke, as Hart, gives an amazing performance. He plays Hart with restraint. With this, Hawke plays out Hart’s many frailties apparent in his bitterness, lies, manipulations, and delusions, and, also, with subtle understanding, Hawke plays the same man as rife with wit and a deep love of words and life. Hawke never lets Hart down. He never leaves us without the sense of Hart as a person. The film, in the small sophisticated Sardi’s bar and its scene of only one evening, gives us a feel of the night that surrounds Hart and you can feel the weight on him as he slowly shows himself as crushed by what has happened to him and with his loss that he knows will never leave him. But Hart, as played by Hawke, comes across as someone who is neither broken nor towering but as a man who is unable to not be himself.
Must see. An extraordinary film.
TÓC, GIÂY VÀ NƯỚC… / HAIR, PAPER, WATER…
2025
Trương Minh Quý, Nicolas Graux
Vietnam / France / Belgium
71 min.
This soft film floats. As its title tells us, it brings together elements - hair, paper, water - to show them as elements of the full world of space, time, ephemera, continuance and also as elements of the lives that the film unfolds before us, through sound that we know – sound of water; through pictures that we recognize - the image of clear fresh water in forest; the sight of letters on the screen that form words –“ hair,” “ paper,” “water;” and the voice of a woman, who we see is an older woman, who reads the words out loud and we hear her voice. This acts as a trail that we follow and the film cannot simply be broken into parts because it tells a story literally and almost sensually. The film is directed by Vietnamese Trương Minh Quý and Belgium Nicolas Graux and it is about Vietnam and Vietnamese people. We follow a family. The woman says in Vietnamese “I was born in a cave” while the screen lights those words which are written in red letters and in the Vietnamese alphabet. The film creates a fluid ever moving mosaic of these parts. This calm, beautiful unique film is art and it is what art should be - reachable in ways that don’t exactly make a complete sentence in your head.
Must see. This calm, beautiful unique film is art.
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT/ UN SIMPLE ACCIDENT
2025
Jafar Panahi
Iran / France / Luxembourg
103 min.
In this brilliant film, dexterous Iranian director Jafar Panahi creates a plain but ambiguous story about a man who believes he recognizes an officer who tortured him in prison under governmental orders and he then tries to kill him. This sets off a cascade of other events directly connected to the killing attempt. Many people get involved. Panahi uses the ambiguity of the event and situation around the concept of “accident” as a stratagem to reveal the way people make sense of how and why one feels extreme rage, morality, revenge, acceptance, and injustice. Panahi’s films deal with censorship as a condition of Iranian life and as condition of cinema censorship. He makes films where the world seems very straight forward but is actually made up of pieces that don’t quite add up. He uses almost Ionesco-like absurdist techniques, though his content is always very serious. His latest film is mysterious and follows a structure that is like the old drawing game of Exquisite Corpses, where one person would draw on a blank page and then fold the paper at the bottom, obscuring the picture, but leaving only a few lines showing. The next person would draw whatever they wanted but it was connected to the first image by the few visible lines and on and on. The final picture would be unfolded and would have an inscrutable content but one that is connected throughout. To underscore the reality of what he lives in and his country lives in, Panahi creates a real world as a real world connects: an incident is simple but becomes disjointed and seemingly unexplained and the next incident adds to the incident but doesn’t explain it further.
Must see. A brilliant film by Jafar Panahi.
