I was lucky enough to be able to attend NYFF this year and I decided to celebrate a good festival I would count down everything I saw at the festival. While I usually see around 10-20 movies at TIFF, I capped it for NYFF and saw other theatres in New York while I was in the area. I saw seven movies from the festival and overall loved a lot of them. I found a handful of movies from NYFF I liked more than the vast majority of the films I saw at TIFF last year. Let’s talk about some of these films.
7. Behemoth
From a lot of people I talked to at the festival, one of the most buzzed about films coming in, Tony Gilroy’s latest Behemoth was the most disappointing movie of the festival and I unfortunately agree. This movie isn’t awful and contains some terrific sequences. There’s a chase sequence towards the start of the film that is done in a single take that had me in awe from it’s direction. Tony Gilroy is a great filmmaker and is able to elevate this material to make it feel sweeping and cinematic. Unfortunately, he just needed to take another pass at this screenplay, which lacks a lot of narrative cohesion. Tony Gilroy writes elegant dialogue and is able to make individual sequences flourish but as they come together as a whole you discover he didn’t have a satisfying resolution to so much of the set up. The side characters in this film all feel like they are in different movies and it makes the tone of the film feel all over the place. I wish they had contained the film to only star a few central characters that we could get more focus on. As an ensemble, none of the cast get enough time to make much of an impression. Pedro Pascal is excellent as Alex Serian, the composer we follow throughout the film but his character is underwritten. The pathos doesn’t feel earned by the end of the film, making Behemoth feel like a film that could have been excellent if it was fine tuned like the instruments being played throughout.
6. Fatherland
Fatherland has had an interesting journey this year. At the start of the year, people thought this film was going to be a big best picture contender. Director Pawel Pawlikowski has had a lot of critically acclaimed movies in the past that have gotten Oscar nominations (his 2019 film Cold War got him a best director nomination) so people thought his time was here to get nominated for the acclaimed best picture prize. That is until the film premiered at Cannes. Weirdly enough- the film got massive acclaim from the festival (Pawlikowski won best director at the festival and the film is sitting at an 89 on Metacritic) but the film was admittedly slight. With a smaller scale and a runtime of only about eighty minutes long, as well as an esoteric plot that could leave several feeling cold, the film lost it’s prospects of being a huge awards contender. This is a movie you don’t feel as much as you intellectually process and for several that will be a difficult barrier to overcome. I overall liked the movie but felt as though the I wanted a stronger thesis statement to what the film was trying to convey. The black and white cinematography is so crisp, the production design is immaculate. The score helps bring such an Earthy atmosphere to each sequence. The ending scene is haunting- one that will stay with me for quite sometime. I can’t say this is one of my favorite movies of the year but it is one I believe is worth checking out when it comes to theatres.
5. Possible Love
I heard a lot of people from the festival cite Lee-Chang Dong’s latest film Possible Love as their favorite film of the festival- and I don’t quite understand what the massive appeal is. The film is a slow burn three hour drama about a family on the brink of devastation and woman’s desire to capture it on film. The film features some biting dialogue and gorgeous direction. One scene involves a shot through the mirror of a restaurant that I was blown away by- it’s such an evocative way to establish isolation. However, I never found the film emotionally engaging. Dong is known to be very subdued in his films, which I deeply admire but here he always left me at arms distance connecting with any of the characters. I found what the film was saying about capitalism and the desire for the perfect shot to be something that I’ve seen established and explored in much more interesting ways. I couldn’t help but find this film at times to feel a bit redundant at times. It’s a good film but not one I believe could have been a lot stronger.
4. Naza
It feels weird to rank Naza anywhere on this list, this is the most essential movie of the year. I only rank it here due to preference. Naza is one of the most upsetting movies I’ve ever seen and it is wholly effective for what it is conveying. It’s a perfect representation and exploration of the horrors going on in Tel Aviv and how dehumanizing people can leave you in the darkest of echo chambers. We are all human and deserving of peace and love no matter what walk of life we come from. Free Palestine.
3. Fjord
Fjord is a movie I liked more than a lot of my contemporaries. The film gained a lot of discourse since it released at Cannes and won the Palme D’or. The film focuses on the rights of a super conservative and religious family being stripped away as they move to Norway from Romania. The ethics of the different countries are vastly different, while Romania has more conservative views on parents, Norway is a lot more progressive minded. The family ends up having their kids taken away from them when the school is worried maybe they are being physically abused in their home. Cristian Mungiu does a terrific job keeping everything nuanced and pointed in the script. It is daring to make the vocal viewpoint of the film the overtly conservative family and he does a great job establishing their viewpoints and not showing them as awful people. He also does a great job establishing issues with their parenting. It’s a film that doesn’t take any easy answers and instead makes you question authoritarianism on either side. Rather you go into the film on the left or the right this film will make you at times uncomfortable and question your own positions- which is the sign of a thoughtful and nuanced film that can create wonderful dialogue between not like minded people. Individuals will label this as a centrist exercise and I disagree to a certain extent. It’s not forcing you to compromise your own beliefs, it’s just establishing that not everyone shares those same beliefs that shouldn’t mean they are stripped away their rights as humans because the overton window on what is considered ethical and not ethical shifts in time and understanding of the human condition.
2. Cameron Winter Live At Carnegie Hall
When I heard that Geese frontman Cameron Winter performed a sold out show at Carnegie Hall and Paul Thomas Anderson filmed it, I knew I had to see it. The 35mm print presented at NYFF was nothing short of astonishing. This is a concert film for the ages and will go down as one of the best of all time, cementing Cameron Winter as one of the most important artists working today. It’s wild to see his rise in popularity in just the last couple of years and this film feels like a victory lap. The performance is stunning, Winter’s vocal tangibility is remarkable, his placement throughout is even stringer than it was on his solo record Heavy Metal and PTA finds interesting ways to film it throughout. It’s an intimate experience and one I was enamored by. One of the films I’ve seen so far this year I wouldn’t hesitate to call an achievement.
1. All of a Sudden
All of a Sudden was my most anticipated movie of NYFF. This three hour sprawling drama is directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who might be my favorite filmmaker working right now. His 2021 film Drive My Car has become one of my all time favorite films, so I am always interested in seeing what he will do next. All of a Sudden is such a treat. This is a wonderful and human drama filled with fascinating conversations about the healthcare industry, the human struggle to find meaning and how capitalism corrupts finding human meaning vs making money just to survive. This is a movie about finding self fulfillment through art and connection. How the world itself is based around some terrifying precepts but we can inherently find peace despite our cultural surroundings. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto give two of the best performances of the year, bringing to life stimulating conversations with so much to chew on and keeping the pathos of their characters alive. The film is so long that after a while it feels like you’ve spent a life with these characters and I felt myself as the viewer mourning them as I left the theatre. I did not feel drained by the runtime but empowered by it. I felt as though I had experienced cinema and had watched a film that made me reexamine my own role on the planet and how I can contribute to a society. That is in my opinion, the signs of a perfect piece of filmmaking. The film is so far my favorite movie of 2026.
What are some of your favorite movies from NYFF? Comment Below!