2013 NYFF Gala Screenings Premiere Hollywood's Most Anticipated Movies

Details

Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 14 October 2013 23:12

Written by Jack Angstreich

This year's opening night selection at the New York Film Festival is Paul Greengrass's gripping thriller, Captain Phillips, a docudrama about the kidnapping of an American ship captain by Somali pirates in 2009. This director has cultivated a consistent style at least since his Bloody Sunday, deploying a handheld camera and relying on intensive editing — in many respects his technique is representative of current practice in Hollywood but Greengrass has proven himself to be one of the most adept filmmakers working in this mode and has not yet departed from a high standard. Tom Hanks gives one of his strongest and most satisfying performances to date as the film's hero but the picture as a whole is a triumph of casting with hardly any named stars. Captain Phillips is largely shot in bright daylight and given the digital format's inability to reproduce the high-contrast of film stocks, this decision proves to be something of liability even if the gritty texture that results has a certain consonance with the narrative material.

Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, this year's Festival Centerpiece, is a romantic comedy about the travails of a hapless daydreamer as he timidly pursues a co-worker he has a crush on, with the protagonist's daydreams providing a pretext for parodies of contemporary action filmmaking. Based on a classic James Thurber short story — previously filmed in the 1940s with Danny Kaye — this has several very imaginative and beautifully realized comic and visual ideas as well as consistently well-observed dialogue — however, the film too frequently capitulates to clichés, sentimentality and uninspired construction. The actors, on the other hand, are superb, with Stiller himself as the eponymous hero, Kristen Wiig as the object of his affections, and a terrific supporting cast including Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn, Shirley MacLaine, Patton Oswalt, and Sean Penn.

This year's closing night selection is Spike Jonze's clever, often exhilaratingly creative sci-fi comic romance, Her, about a professional letter-writer — touchingly played by Joaquin Phoenix — who, amazingly, falls in love with his computer operating system, an advanced artificial intelligence, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, in one of her best roles to date. The director-writer and his talented cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema — who brilliantly shot the recent version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — achieve one of the most satisfying visual presentations within the digital format to be seen at this festival. (Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin, Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, and James Gray's The Immigrant were also standouts in this respect, although thus far the recent works of David Fincher as well as Francis Ford Coppola's Tetris seem to remain the gold-standards for digital photography in world cinema at present; however, most of the other films here were evidence that the special requirements of digital have not yet been fully absorbed and mastered even by most of the premier cinematographers — and directors — in the world.) This festival has, unsurprisingly, been graced by copious superior acting and Her is no exception, with wonderful support from Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, and, above all, Rooney Mara. (Brian Cox, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader also memorably contribute in brief, voice-only parts.) Her is certainly a worthwhile entry although it falls a little short of fully exploring the implications of its ingenious premise, suffering slightly in comparison with, for example, with Michel Gondry's (and Charlie Kaufman's) moving and dazzling Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the eccentric sensibility of which Her often recalls. 

To learn more, go tohttp://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/

The 51st New York Film Festival
September 27 – October 13, 2013

The Film Society of Lincoln Center

• < Prev
• Next >