The 43rd edition of New Directors/New Films kicks off tonight at MoMA
and continues through March 30th. Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln
Center and MoMA, the event will offer 27 feature films
from around the world — all of which are first or second features.
Indiewire’s team has 10 suggestions for what to take in at the festival
below. For more information, check out the New Directors/New Films website.
“The Babadook”
Australian director Jennifer Kent’s
increasingly frightening portrait a single woman (Essie Davis) whose
husband died years earlier and her young child Sam (Noah Wiseman) is a
haunting psychological horror show. Early on, when the mother reads her
son the titular bedtime story she discovers in their new home, both
become immediately spooked by the possibility of its subject — a
shadowy, monstrous figure called The Babadook — could invade their lives
at any moment. While the characters grow increasingly terrified, it’s
never quite clear if we’re seeing the lonely woman’s version of events
or a bonafide haunted house story. Equal parts “Rosemary’s Mary” and
“Insidious,” Kent’s tense debut delivers on the frights while riddling
them with ambiguity. Ultimately, “The Babadook” refuses to determine
whether we’re watching a monster movie or the perils of an overactive
imagination, which might be worse. Read our full review here.
“Buzzard”
Joel
Potrykus’ nutty debut feature “Ape” followed the exploits of a deranged
standup comedian struggling to make ends meet. “Buzzard” is similarly
focused on a man at the bottom of the economic food chain battling to
get by while stirring up trouble in every direction. It’s also a
genuinely brilliant contemporary satire of workplace frustrations. Like
“Office Space” on crack, the movie revolves around a wry young schemer
(“Ape” star Joshua Burge) who casually steals money from the bank that
employs him while wasting his days with an equally directionless pal
eating chips and playing videogames in a basement lair dubbed “the party
zone.” But when his scams catch up to him, the character gradually
loses his mind in a series of increasingly surreal and surprising
developments that involve — among many other things — a treadmill, a
makeshift Freddy Krueger glove, and one very long take involving pasta.
By the end, like Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” Potrykus’ labyrinthine
farce is so compellingly weird you just have to roll with it and accept
it for what it is: an astute look at what it means to attempt an escape
from the system and wind up devoured by it.
“Dear White People”
A bonafide satire of the Obama age, writer-director Justin Simien’s persistently funny “Dear White People” perceptively skewers virtually every facet of racial confusion in modern American society. While black comedians like Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock have provided searing insight into the absurdities of lingering racial tensions, Simien consolidates much about the paradoxes explored in those acts and many others into a wildly enjoyable and scathing farce. By exploring the heated debates between white and black students at an upscale college, Simmien both mocks and provokes the nature of our seemingly progressive times by illuminating misguided assumptions and fears embedded in forward-thinking discourse. But Simien’s relentless screenplay is never too self-serious or didactic, instead pairing culturally-savvy brains with a goofy grin. Read our full review here.
“The Double”
Following up his wonderful directorial debut “Submarine,” British comedian and filmmaker Richard Ayoade literally doubles up for his darker follow-up, “The Double.” Loosely based on Dostoevsky’s 1846 novella, the film stars Jesse Eisenberg as both miserable introvert Simon James and James Simon, his affable doppelgänger and essential polar opposite. As the relationship between the two men spirals out of control, “The Double” confirms Ayoade as a considerable new voice in comedic cinema. It’s also aided by a remarkable supporting cast, including the likes of Wallace Shawn, Mia Wasikowska, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine, and Chris O’Dowd.
“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”
For centuries, vampires have provided handy metaphors for social and physical dilemma, but in the stylishly muted deadpan romance “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” the threat is personal. Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s stunning debut, produced by Elijah Wood, follows the experiences of a small Iranian town haunted by a vampiric presence who’s just as lonely as the other locals. Shot in gorgeously expressionistic black-and-white and fusing multiple genres into a thoroughly original whole, Amirpour has crafted a beguiling, cryptic and often surprisingly funny look at personal desire that creeps up on you with the nimble powers of its supernatural focus. The director combines elements of film noir and the restraint of Iranian New Wave cinema with the subdued depictions of a bored youth culture found in early Jim Jarmusch…the comparisons go on and on, but the result is wholly original. A hip new discovery in desperate need of the cult attention it deserves. Read our full review here.
“Obvious Child”
The centerpiece selection of the festival, Gillian Robespierre’s insightful, hilarious “Obvious Child” comes to New Directors/New Films after earning raves (and a distribution deal with A24) at Sundance Film Festival back in January. It stars Jenny Slate (in a performance that should leave no question about both her talent and star potential) as a struggling stand-up comic with some considerable issues when it comes to booze and boys. But a one night stand changes everything, and “Obvious Child” evolves into a transgressive and contemporary romantic comedy that unlike its Hollywood genre counterparts, really has something to say.
“Return to Homs”
To anyone outside of Syria, the battle
ranging on between President Bashar Al-Assad’s armed forces and various
rebel factions is mainly an abstraction. That makes director Talal
Derki’s “Return to Homs,” which opened the 25th edition of the
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam before winning
Sundance’s world cinema documentary competition, something of a
revelation: It portrays the struggle from the inside, from about as far
from the filter of mainstream media as one can get, capturing tense
shootouts and the extremes of revolutionary spirit in unnerving detail.
Centered on a handful of fighters in the largely abandoned city of Homs,
with footage smuggled out of the country, Derki’s angry, fragmented
portrait constitutes a lonely shout in the darkness. Read our full
review here.
“Salvation Army”
A semi-autobiographical tale of a young Moroccan man navigating his
sexuality (among many other things), “Salvation Army” is the directorial
debut of Taïa, and is based on his own eponymous novel. Structured in a
diptych, the first half of the film follows a teenaged Abdellah (Said
Mrini) as he struggles with the social codes of Morocco. The second
half, meanwhile, finds a young adult Abdellah (Karim Ait M’hand) on a
scholarship in Switzerland, negotiating a whole new set of codes as a
queer Moroccan man in Geneva. The two halves come together to create a
subtly powerful (and gorgeously shot) film about both what it’s like to
be a queer person in the Arab world, and to be a queer Arab person in
the Western world.
“She’s Lost Control”
From the opening minutes of “She’s Lost Control,” it’s clear that Anja Marquardt’s portrait of a sex surrogate in New York City will take its subject matter seriously, using a studied manner that gives the material fresh context. With Brooke Bloom’s central performance giving the movie its dramatic anchor, “She’s Lost Control” — which premiered in Berlin — strikes a fascinating mood between slow-building angst and cold remove not unlike the Joy Division song that provides its title. As single Manhattanite Ronah, Bloom (last year’s “Swim Little Fish Swim”) initially projects an unsettling degree of confidence about her profession, going through the motions with various clients while Marquardt frames her topic with startling matter-of-factness. With time, however, it becomes evident that this unorthodox way of life can’t possibly sustain the settled quality that Ronah brings to it. Bit by bit, the problems add up: Glimmers of her family issues in upstate New York, her concerns about her future, and a client for whom she might be developing feelings all slowly bear down on her, setting the stage for an alarming climax. The cryptic atmosphere yields an alluring look at the intersection of physical and psychological intimacy. Read our full review here.
“The Story of My Death”
The title of Spanish director Albert Serra’s fourth feature, “Story of My Death,” presents a sardonic riff on 18th century Italian Renaissance man Giacomo Casanova. His memoir, “Story of My Life,” recounts his lively travels across Europe and encounters with fellow luminaries of his era like Voltaire and Rousseau. But Serra sets those recollections aside in favor of a dryly introspective (but certainly macabre) look at Casanova’s dwindling command over his legacy as it starts to fray when faced with changing times, a force manifested in the form of Dracula. Unsurprisingly for the director of “Birdsong” — a black-and-white, digital video depiction of the Three Wise Men that famously includes an eight-minute static shot of nothing but the subjects wandering across an empty desert plane — Serra has made a slow, cryptic work heavy with metaphor and implication but also riddled with details. Yet, it’s oddly Serra’s most accessible work, the first with scripted dialogue and something closer to a conventional plot. Casanova is a vivid character nevertheless rich with metaphor. Serra’s interpretation is something akin to an anti-biopic that turns the characters into symbols of history in flux. Casanova has remained an object of historical fascination for epitomizing the secular convictions of the Enlightenment. An ebullient womanizer who fetishized his high class existence, the Casanova in Serra’s dark, intentionally murky parable (played with an eerie frozen grin by Vincenc Altaló) faces the morbid ramifications of the incoming 19th century Romanticism in the form of a scheming vampire (Eliseu Hertas) who arrives later in the film to upend Casanova’s existence. Yet even as the invader is meant to represent Dracula, “Story of My Death” is far from a traditional bloodsucker drama. Before the supernatural component creeps into the narrative, Serra crafts an undead world in which the aging Casanova has already begun to fade from existence. Read our full review here.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
