Film
Highlights of this year’s New York Film Festival include the powerful blood-and-brocade high seas saga Magellan and the heist drama The Mastermind. By Keva York.
Highlights of the New York Film Festival
Some film festivals engulf the cities that birth them, their branding slicking every public space and surface. At Cannes, for instance, even bus shelter ads are subbed out for candid portraits of the stars who have flocked there over the years. At Locarno, every shopfront breaks out in a rash of leopard print in tribute to the festival’s feline mascot.
Despite a heady concentration of celebrity guests, the New York Film Festival, by contrast, is a model of discretion. It distributes no prizes – there’s no Golden Big Apple – and so cultivates little ceremony. One could well pass an October afternoon in the coolly majestic plaza of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the festival’s primary location, with no inkling it was happening. Because queues swell and dissipate outside its multiple venues daily, they elicit little curiosity.
The six-hectare precinct in Manhattan’s Upper West Side is home to 11 of the city’s most esteemed arts organisations – the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard School among them. It has been the site of NYFF since its first edition in 1963, which showcased 20 features from almost as many countries.
“Rising out of a New York slum, comes a world center for the arts.” Such was the promise made by a 1959 promotional film heralding its construction – a vision made manifest by Robert Moses, the controversial public servant who reshaped the city in his own image through his massive, decades-long campaign of “urban renewal”. Building the Lincoln Center meant razing a densely populated neighbourhood known as San Juan Hill, home to a primarily Puerto Rican and Black community. Moses may not have cared much for art, but he was a passionate protector of the middle class and, it is said, a committed racist. Very little would be offered in the way of assistance to the 7000-plus families summarily displaced.
Though impoverished, its tenements overcrowded and in disrepair, San Juan Hill was a vibrant cultural hub. The Charleston was popularised in its clubs, which were the proving ground for the likes of Josephine Baker and Thelonious Monk. The neighbourhood was Leonard Bernstein’s inspiration in penning West Side Story: its ruins provided the backdrop for the opening of the 1961 film adaptation, before they were laid over with smooth, white travertine slabs – in this context, signifying not so much modernism as mausoleum.
Last year, NYFF screened San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood, a documentary commissioned by the Lincoln Center itself in a gesture of retroactive conciliation. With issues around land rights and their abuses kept front and centre globally by the ongoing atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine, this theme courses again through the 2025 program. Some films take a hyper-localised approach, such as the gonzo Romanian Radu Jude’s moderately anarchic Kontinental ’25 or the police bodycam documentary The Perfect Neighbor, in which disputes over a grimy basement and a patch of grass, respectively, turn lethal – while others embrace a broader geopolitical sweep.
The best of these is the hypnotic, blood-and-brocade high seas saga Magellan, a demythologising portrait of the Portuguese explorer by Filipino auteur Lav Diaz – at 165 minutes, one of the director’s shortest and most accessible works. It stars Gael García Bernal, whose casting was conceived, it was disclosed in a post-film Q&A, while Diaz was having sex with two of his producers – a detail that left his translator temporarily speechless.
Unfolding as a series of pungent tableaux, the film spans its namesake’s final decade, from his participation in the capture of Malacca in 1511 through to his death on the Philippine island of Mactan, slain in an ignoble effort to enforce reverence among the Indigenous population for the Christ Child and by proxy the Spanish crown. He is survived by Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), the slave he bought back in Malacca, whose skill at translation Magellan and his men relied upon in their casualty-strewn quest to circumnavigate the globe. Pointedly, it is to Enrique that Diaz gives his film’s final words.
In its coupling of languid pacing and poisonous precision, Magellan evokes two of the best skewerings of the colonialist project in recent memory: 2022’s Pacifiction, by Albert Serra – the indefatigable Catalan filmmaker and one of Magellan’s aforementioned producers – and Zama, from 2017, by Lucrecia Martel, both selections of NYFFs past.
Martel returns to NYFF with her first documentary, which cuts an alternate route through this same thematic territory. Landmarks – in the original Spanish, Nuestra Tierra, meaning “our land” – is girded by an indignation unusual for the typically elliptical Argentine director. Anchored in the courtroom, it examines the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, a Chuschagasta activist shot in the defence of his ancestral land, as a means of getting at broader, centuries-old patterns of indigenous erasure, both systemic and breathtakingly casual. For all its cruel revelations, however, Landmarks cannot quite conjure the austere aura of Martel’s fictions: at times, it strikes as a little clunky, meandering where it should be measured.
One of the more anticipated films in the festival line-up suffered from something of the opposite issue. Ronan Day-Lewis’s biblically inflected Anemone, which marks the sinewy silver-screen return of Daniel Day-Lewis, emerging from “retirement” to collaborate with his son, feels sculpted but hollow, a grand gesture signifying disappointingly little. Ironically, the film pivots around the idea that a young man in an existential funk might be saved by the intervention of his father, a forest-dwelling recluse played by Day-Lewis Sr.
As the bad dad of The Mastermind, meanwhile, Josh O’Connor tamps his raffish charisma all the way down: his J. B. Mooney is far more interested in staging an art heist than in the needs of his family but is equally hampered in both arenas by his own fundamental fecklessness. Set in a sooty evocation of 1970 Massachusetts, with news of the Vietnam War burbling in the background, the film is a characteristically ultra-dry genre piece from Kelly Reichardt, whose lightness of touch tends to belie her films’ sharp impact.
Jim Jarmusch, another American mainstay, makes a welcome return with Father Mother Sister Brother, Venice’s Golden Lion winner and the NYFF centrepiece. Parents remain somewhat inscrutable to their adult children in each of the film’s three episodes, which are discrete but rhyme in the playful, enigmatic fashion of Coffee and Cigarettes (2003). With a cast made up largely of his repeat players – Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett – the downtown doyen here wisely strives for something short of salvation.
False or half-hearted attempts at connection rebound off high emotional walls in the film’s first two get-togethers. Only in the final section, starring Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat as twins reunited in Paris by tragedy, is there space for mutual tenderness. Sitting on the floor of their parents’ apartment, freshly emptied, they pore over old family photos until interrupted by the landlady: they must leave, she says. The apartment is no longer theirs. When the theatre’s houselights come up, patrons shuffle out accompanied by the autumnal ruminations of “These Days”, as reworked by Jarmusch and sultry post-punk artist Anika. The crowd swiftly dissolves into the big city night. Behind them, the travertine plaza lies deserted.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 1, 2025 as "West Side stories".
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