Month: May 2025

New York Film Festival 2025 Predictions (Round 1)

Ryan Swen Musings Tags: 1 Comment

Virtual Lock
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Sirât (Óliver Laxe)
What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)

Strong Chance
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)
Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Romería (Carla Simón)
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
Yes! (Nadav Lapid)

Moderate Possibility
Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)
Enzo (Robin Campillo)
Heads or Tails? (Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Living the Land (Huo Meng)
Love on Trial (Fukada Koji)
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Magellan (Lav Diaz)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
Renoir (Hayakawa Chie)
Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

Virtual Lock

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Panahi.

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
Jude fiction film.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Reichardt.

Resurrection (Bi Gan)
Bi.

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Mendonça Filho.

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Trier.

Sirât (Óliver Laxe)
Laxe.

What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)
Hong.

Strong Chance

Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
I feel like one of the Linklater festival competition films will make it into Main Slate and the other could make it to MS, Spotlight, or miss entirely; though this one is much less buzzy and more modest, the reviews were more uniformly positive.

The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)
Lim loved Neon Bull + Berlin Grand Jury Prize.

Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
Maybe should be a Virtual Lock and I’m sure Lim still wishes he could have programmed Afire, but the avowed modesty of this has me just a little less sure.

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The film opens on the same day as NYFF Opening Night and it’s admittedly been a long time since the festival premiered a film on the same day it opened; a special preview Spotlight selection à la Megalopolis last year is more likely if anything happens, but Lim’s greater love of Anderson just might win out.

Romería (Carla Simón)
Considering the variable inclusions of the Golden Bear in NYFF (even during the Chatrian tenure), there might be more enthusiasm for Simón than I realized, and Cannes received this warmly.

Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
A little hesitant on where to put this; it’s certainly a significant breakthrough film but I could see its unsparing approach rubbing the committee the wrong way; Jury Prize and a strong Justin Chang advocacy makes it much more likely than not though.

Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
Lim certainly likes Loznitsa and this is a well-received return to narrative for him; My Joy is his only Main Slate selection though.

Yes! (Nadav Lapid)
Lapid; unless hesitancy over political considerations takes precedence.

Moderate Possibility

Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)
End of the Century was beloved and this seemed to be the highlight of the ACID program, though it would be the first Main Slate entry from there in at minimum a very long time, if not ever.

Enzo (Robin Campillo)
Relatively well-received, a nice tribute to Cantet, and Red Island was an outlier on all counts; 120 BPM might have been a specific alignment of circumstances though.

Heads or Tails? (Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis)
The Tale of King Crab was in Currents and this seems to be bigger in scale.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Still not sure if A24 plans to distribute this before the fall, but this was among the most well-received films of the early year and a long-awaited second film.

Living the Land (Huo Meng)
Berlin Best Director winner, though I don’t know much else about it.

Love on Trial (Fukada Koji)
Despite Venice competition title Love Life missing, I still think it’s possible that he could return to NYFF.

The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Strong reviews, general bafflement over its absence from Cannes Competition, and seems to be a shift away from the more ostentatious tone of Godland.

Magellan (Lav Diaz)
Norte, the End of History was his only NYFF entry and this happens to be his first(?) color film since then; the Albert Serra connection and relative cohesion of this might be an appealing occasion for a return.

Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
This is the less likely of the two Linklaters but it still has a considerable number of defenders (including Justin Chang) and I think it’ll find a place somewhere.

The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
The most beloved of the early-year documentaries, aesthetically inventive, and it hasn’t received a New York premiere yet; David Osit’s Predators is a remote possibility as well.

Renoir (Hayakawa Chie)
Was received modestly but strangely feels a little more probable in its references to Japanese cinema/Somai Shinji than something like Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister, Cannes Best Actress award notwithstanding.

Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
Seems to have been more warmly received than most other recent Dardennes films, though even the Best Screenplay prize is no guarantee.

Henry Fonda for President

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

From its title on down, Henry Fonda for President both follows along and defies the idiosyncratic, sweeping aims it has set for itself. The filmmaking debut of longtime film critic and Austrian Film Museum director Alexander Horwath takes its name from the plot of an episode of the obscure sitcom Maude, and while it’s never meant as a completely sincere political statement, it sums up the aspirational tone of both the actor’s most beloved work and the impossibility of concrete hope. By beginning where Horwath does—circa 1980, where the director’s first exposure to Fonda’s work came on a trip to Paris—and entwining it with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the White House, Fonda’s belated Oscars, and the audio of a revealing interview with Playboy magazine’s Lawrence Grobel, he immediately conjures up the feeling of a paradise lost, a nation set inexorably on an ever-darker path juxtaposed against a last bastion of hope almost faded away.

I was even more primed for Henry Fonda for President than normal, as I was enlisted by Jordan Cronk to transcribe his interview with Horwath for Film Comment. The conversation was much longer than space allowed for, but one tidbit that did make it in was the unavoidable comparison to and inspiration of Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself; indeed, the legendary filmmaker came to the Los Angeles premiere of Horwath’s film. Certainly, there are many similarities to be found: an openly analytical, sociopolitical approach to cinephilia and the essay film, the three-hour runtime, the mix of film clips, footage shot on location at the sites of the former, and voiceover. That last point marks a fascinating point of divergence: Andersen’s is far more openly opinionated, witty, sarcastic, and somehow sincere in all the ways that make Los Angeles Plays Itself among the greatest of films, yet it was given by Encke King. Horwath speaks more neutrally but uses his own voice, and interweaves his own German words with Fonda’s recorded interview that asserts a certain objectivity, even as he makes all the logical assertions expected of an incisive scholar.

Henry Fonda for President is, of course, much closer to a biography of the legendary actor than it is a recounting of American history from the mid-1600s to 1981, but the latter is made possible by the sheer number of noteworthy films the former made that were strewn across time and brought to the forefront by Horwath’s generally chronological progression. Along the way, he makes some astonishing detours, including some brilliant digressions into Taxi Driver and Easy Rider, and while this does not quite possess the dynamism of Los Angeles Plays Itself, the steady, ruminative tone that Horwath establishes privileges the text and the man above all else. It is entirely to his credit that Horwath does not appear to ascribe to the clichéd notion of Fonda as simply an American paragon; his onscreen and personal lives are too multifaceted and anguished to support that kind of reading. Equally importantly, he still fully commits to the image of Fonda being proffered in a given text, incorporating the canonical films while also spending a surprising amount of time on lesser-known works, even giving over some of the most emotional cruxes to films like The Best Man and My Name Is Nobody. It is the kind of film that allows for, if not openly invites, room for extratextual associations: a brief interpolation of footage of elderly Fonda and John Ford revisiting the site of the final shot of Young Mr. Lincoln irresistibly brought to mind David Lynch’s portrayal of the latter in The Fabelmans, and I immediately became emotional in an entirely unexpected way.

Horwath’s own journey through America (mostly filmed at the tail end of the pandemic in 2021) doesn’t aim for the vibrancy of Deborah Stratman’s 16mm images in Los Angeles Plays Itself, but the separate immediacy of his HD digital video makes for a compelling contrast between the often variable sources of these entirely celluloid productions. The gulf in time is even greater, and even though Henry Fonda for President thankfully draws as few parallels to our current, analogous political situation as possible—some choice shots of a Trump impersonator dancing in Times Square, as part of a sequence that weaves together Fonda’s early Broadway success and Hamilton—the impression is of these places that, in some way or another, have largely fallen into a recursive image of themselves, a relatively young history nevertheless committed to a not unreasonable sense of self-preservation. Of course, the same is true of Fonda, and of Hollywood, and this brilliant film sees all of that with an inviting, ever-surprising eye.