What to See in the 2025 New York Film Festival’s First Week

The New York Film Festival, the centerpiece of the city’s year in cinephilia, is a victim of its own success. Many of its most noteworthy films are already scheduled for commercial release soon—which is cause for celebration, insofar as they’ll be seen more widely and more affordably and will even make their way to streaming platforms far from where art-houses bloom. But, as a result, the festival screenings do take on the tone of an early-access preview rather than a chance to be seized. Nonetheless, the event’s atmosphere reliably turns Lincoln Center into a hive of cinematic energy, and the impatient desire that draws audiences through the doors provides a sense of like-minded communicants at the movie altar.

My colleague Anthony Lane’s recent piece about the art and science of film restoration is a welcome reminder to pay attention to the N.Y.F.F.’s vigorous Revivals section, which is filled with notable new restorations, including one—Erich von Stroheim’s “Queen Kelly,” from 1929—that’s laced with bitterness both in its subject matter and in its production history. Stroheim’s bilious vision, set amid the pomp and decadence of a fictitious Middle European kingdom, tracks cruel convergences of sex and power among the royal and the downtrodden alike. The movie’s star, Gloria Swanson, plays an orphaned nun-novitiate who, during a convent outing, catches the eye of a suavely flirtatious prince (Walter Byron) who happens to be the kept man and groom-to-be of the kingdom’s madly jealous queen (Seena Owen). The outcome turns violent and leads to exile and degradation in the kingdom’s African colony. Stroheim’s demanding and fulsomely realistic methods provoked the movie’s producer, the potentate and paterfamilias Joseph Kennedy, to pull the plug on the project, thus effectively ending Stroheim’s career as a director. The surviving version, augmented with additional footage, proves the film to be a spectacular, fanatically ornamental, yet harrowing masterwork of erotic ecstasies and horrors.

The modern cinema has altogether different ways of presenting the oppressive rigidity of Old World culture, including intimate documentary filmmaking, as with Nathan Silver’s “Carol & Joy,” which is featured in the festival’s New York Shorts program. The title subjects are the actress Carol Kane and her mother—and Upper West Side roommate—Joy Kane, who’s ninety-eight and full of extraordinary stories. Joy grew up in Cleveland, where her father worked as a psychiatrist. (His parents were, she says, from “the shtetl”; her mother was Austrian.) She was raised, she explains, according to narrow norms that frustrated her free-spiritedly creative temperament and that she tried in vain to resist. Joy recounts a background of chilly order, of threats and insults and betrayals, which took her decades to overcome. Her latter-day accomplishments as a musician are highlighted in the film, along with her trenchant reflections on the spirit of liberation that lies at the heart of the artistic impulse.

Normative family pressures are cultural commonplaces far beyond European borders, and the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo dramatically foregrounds them in “What Does That Nature Say to You,” a tale of young romance subjected to sharp parental scrutiny. The drama begins with a coincidence that rests on a bedrock of design. A thirtysomething poet drives his girlfriend to the house of her parents—whom, despite a three-year relationship, he’s never met—and, in the driveway, he chances to meet her father. The two men hit it off, the poet is invited for dinner, and the inevitable interrogations ensue. Unfortunately, the young man’s father is rich and famous, a topic that the potential in-laws can’t avoid. Amid the alcohol-eased warmth of the gathering, questions regarding financial prospects and artistic ambitions are raised—and raised again and again, ever higher, to a fever pitch. Hong, with pugnacity and consummate art-house refinement, films the dinner from Hell in images of exquisite tightrope-like tension.

Mary Bronstein’s second feature, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” (one of the outstanding premières at Sundance earlier this year), like “Carol & Joy,” is also a mother-and-daughter drama—and a psychotherapeutic one. Rose Byrne stars as Linda, a therapist whose young daughter is chronically ill and whose husband, a sea captain, is away for long stretches, leaving her alone to deal alone with their child’s medical and emotional problems. These demands are throwing her work as a psychologist into turmoil, producing conflict with her therapist—and colleague (Conan O’Brien); meanwhile other aspects of her life are falling apart (including her house, literally). Linda endures a cosmic round of stress, matched by the movie’s hectic jangle of moods and its use of closeups of the overburdened protagonist, whose confines grow smaller as her troubles grow bigger and her fury mounts—a recipe for explosion.

In some other outstanding entries in the festival’s first week, psychological portraiture occurs through extrusion—the inner life is forced out in the form of events of historical, and even historic, significance in the wider world. These period pieces include the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” set mainly in Recife, on Brazil’s Atlantic coast, in 1977, at a time when the country was ruled by a military dictatorship. The main character is a scientist (Wagner Moura) who has run afoul of the regime and seeks out a clandestine network of sympathizers. Learning that he is being targeted by government-connected hitmen, he takes ever more extreme measures of evasion, which play tricks on his very identity. Mendonça, delighting in period artifacts and settings, boldly skips around in chronology and pulls out of the shadows a wide range of characters, most of whom have ruses of their own. The film puts its targeted hero on a teeming public stage, the tumult of the Brazilian Carnival, and also surveys him in the half-light of his own elusive legacy.