Credit: Lance Oppenheim

Credit: Courtesy of Nicolas Pereda/Pragda

Even more than my usual combinations of films within a single film, I acknowledge that this trio is even flimsier than usual, with most of their similarities stretching to only two points on the triangle. Two films are compact films running less than 75 minutes, while the other is longer than their combined runtime by over 40 minutes; two films are shot in Academy ratio while the third is in CinemaScope; two films are resolutely modest and fictional affairs covering, respectively, a day and a month (or so) in the lives of their characters, while the third takes on the form of a documentary sprawling out over the course of three years. But they share a few important things in common, the kind of connection that film festivals thrive on: above all else, they are scabrous comedies about a small group of people, typically thrust together in an enclosed space, trying to figure out each other’s motivations and varying levels of performance.

The first film, Nicolás Pereda’s Main Slate selection Everything Else Is Noise, is the most literal about this concept. Pereda occupies a curious place in the film festival landscape, as prolific as Hong Sang-soo and not far off from matching him in both the reflexivity of his filmmaking and the pleasantness of spending time with his recurring cast of actors—most notably Lázaro Gabino Rodriguez, one of the most expressive eye actors alive—yet never quite breaking through. His most recent “hits” were Fauna (2020) and Lázaro at Night (2024), willfully metafictional affairs involving multiple levels of reality. By contrast, Everything Else Is Noise, which will hopefully introduce Pereda to his widest audience, is straight as an arrow by his standards: a cellist composer enlists the apartment of one of her older colleagues in order to film an interview about her work. Taking place entirely within this domestic space—save for a magnificent overture observing an unplanned traffic jam outside the apartment that rivals Abbas Kiarostami’s “Orderly or Disorderly” in its organized chaos—the relationships that develop between the two women, the older cellist’s daughter, and the director and cinematographer as they deal with various hilarious delays form the crux of the film. In particular, the older composer’s advice to her friend to make up stories to liven up the interview calls into question each line of dialogue, enhanced by the use of two anecdotes thanked in the credits, James N. Kienitz Wilkins-style.

Shooting in CinemaScope in order to catch the five people as they move across the apartment, Pereda nevertheless relies heavily on what cannot be filmed, most notably in a remarkable sequence where the camera stays inside the apartment as the film crew goes out to the café to wait out one of several inexplicable power outages, laying the sounds of their conversation over the three women as they go about their own business. The two scenes of actual performance are entirely offscreen: the older cellist begins practicing close to the end of the traffic jam, while the younger cellist performs a highly modernist piece, asking the apartment’s other occupants to close their eyes. Unlike Alexandre Koberidze or Lois Patiño, Pereda does not ask the viewer to do so as well, and the fundamental unreadability of their reactions, somehow embodying both disgust and pleasure, typifies the experience of watching Everything Else Is Noise, a film of intent observation that earns its unexpectedly lovely and dramatic coda.

While Pereda’s previous film was just last year, Dan Sallitt (full disclosure: a good friend and one of my guiding lights as a critic) has only made six films in a forty-year career as a filmmaker. Coming seven years after his lovely Fourteen (2019), Currents world premiere What Can’t Be Mentioned (2026) operates as an only partially standalone sequel to the epochal The Unspeakable Act (2012), which featured Tallie Medel and Sky Hirschkron (also a friend) as Jackie and Matthew, siblings struggling with his imminent departure to college and her latent incestuous desire. That 91-minute film, while certainly not lacking in humor, was a fairly serious and emotional affair; this 62-minute film jettisons much of that baggage in favor of a fleet, all-out comedy that might be Sallitt’s most accomplished film to date.

Taking after the still never-bettered analysis scenes in The Unspeakable Act, Jackie is now herself a therapist in training—Caroline Luft, playing her therapist in a welcome one-scene Zoom cameo, is the only actor to return from the prior film—and in a sexually dysfunctional relationship with Anthony (Kyle McCormack). After just under half the film explores her attentive but not overly passionate relationship with her job/patients and reluctance to explore couples therapy (using her own profession as a cover), she receives an email from Matthew divulging that his wife Lily—Kit Zauhar, herself the director and star of This Closeness (2023) and Actual People (2021), two of Sallitt’s favorite films of recent years—is pregnant again after a past miscarriage. Jackie impulsively decides to stay with them for a week, and what follows is an extraordinary set of interactions, fueled by Jackie’s increasingly absurd red wine consumption, where Matthew’s ego and Jackie and Lily’s fascination with each other’s quirks only grows.

Medel’s work across their films with Sallitt has only sharpened in its range and expressiveness, and the drinking scenes in this, both in the apartment where all but a few moments of What Can’t Be Mentioned‘s second half have few rivals for the way alcohol blurs the lines between unintentional gaucheness and outright hostility that intentionally clashes with the natural friendliness of Medel’s demeanor and increasingly at-home body language. When the visit inevitably comes to an end, it is with its closest acknowledgment of the eponymous desire, which indeed might not be apparent to those who have not seen The Unspeakable Act, and its final shot is appropriately abrupt, with Jackie not so much accepting her situation as approaching it with a crucial extra bit of grace. Sallitt’s cinema, as with the tough pragmatism of two of his director heroes Maurice Pialat and Howard Hawks, is founded upon those hard-won small victories and changes in temperament, and What Can’t Be Mentioned depicts that crucible with as much vividness as he’s ever conjured.

Another magic act of a film comes with, if not a world premiere, then the closest thing to it: the late announcement of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Spotlight behemoth You Can See Everything, showing for only one night in the first screening actually advertised as such since its secret world premiere in Telluride. By now, most of the film’s twists and turns are common knowledge even those who have not yet experienced it, but I will preserve the precise nature of its surprises. The first half of You Can See Everything acts as a silent tug of war between Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her partner Billy Evans: the thirty-four days that these three people spent together before the disgraced Theranos co-founder went to prison are posited as, in spite of the sunny locale, something akin to Sartre’s No Exit, a shifting tapestry of three unreadable faces often seen in discomfiting close-up, shimmering with uncommon beauty and energy as each attempts to ascertain the intentions of the other. The conduct is outrageous, and the scenarios that Fielder steers the couple into from his very first lurking appearance are even more absurd, but the distillation of his past, more overtly comedic/performative work into caginess forms a mirror to Holmes’s purported attempts at transparency and Evans’s increasing resistance towards the same.

When You Can See Everything rolls into its second half and begins folding in on itself, it is with Fielder and Oppenheim’s acute knowledge that something has been lost that cannot be recovered by traditional means. When Del Mar reappears, it is as a space haunted by the viewer’s memory of their own (mediated) experience there, a temporary domicile etched into the mind, and the uncanniness of the film’s eventual fourth major participant’s presence is only enhanced by her familiarity to many viewers. She acts as no mere co-conspirator, but as the appointed (yet biased) conscience and externalization of what Fielder is incapable of expressing about his subject. Her own complicity in crafting the web of images that forms Elizabeth Holmes—one of her final utterances, whether scripted or not, is almost word for word what Oppenheim’s fictionalization of Chris Hansen says in his other exploration of the mediated image this year, Primetime—is turned against her, against Evans, and even against Fielder and Oppenheim. The second half rapidly expands in its focus and geographical span, incorporating social media and cultural signifiers to capture all that has transpired in the past three years, and yet it might be one or two misremembered words that holds the key to everything. Seeing of course is not believing, but it’s also not even understanding; thus, You Can See Everything provides a canvas large and foreboding enough to allow the viewer to see all of these four people’s flaws and idiosyncrasies that it becomes an abyss of its own.

Credit: Courtesy of Julian Garcia

Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center/NYFF64

Since its seemingly incongruous premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section earlier this year, many (including myself) have thought of Sebastian Brameshuber’s London as existing in a similar vein as David Easteal’s The Plains (2022), which increasingly seems to be one of the signal films of the decade: a three-hour odyssey mostly composed of car rides featuring a man driving home from work. At first, London, which played in Currents, appears to be exactly that: the first shot is from just behind the front windshield of a car, before two profile shots show the passenger, a young soldier, and the driver, an late-middle-aged man named Bobby (Bobby Sommer, the non-professional star of Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours fourteen years ago). But after fifteen minutes, the title card appears, Bobby is seen washing his face by a water pump, and when he is next seen behind the wheel, the other voice is unmistakably female, confirmed by a reverse shot a number of minutes later.

London is not after the kind of exploration of space and time that The Plains undertook, or even the meditations of Kiarostami’s numerous car films, but instead something almost classical: a character study as refracted through the ten passengers, all played by non-actors, that he ferries between Vienna and Salzburg, where he visits a friend with increasing regularity. The reason for this is divulged early, providing a narrative backbone that is reiterated with fascinating little changes over each new encounter, and yet Brameshuber is equally interested in the (mostly metaphorical, occasionally literal) detours that the passengers lead Bobby down, breaking up the three-hour Autobahn trek with discourse about the unintentional Marxist masterpiece Avatar, the anxieties over a first-time job, the experience of migrant Romanians, and, in one of the film’s most pointed moments, a scholar—played by translator and filmmaker Ted Fendt—who requests an additional stop at a soon-to-be demolished bridge dating, like the highway itself, to the Nazi era.

One piece of information I was only vaguely aware of before going in, but which seems increasingly crucial to London‘s potency: with very few exceptions, the film was almost entirely shot in a studio in front of a screen, with enough footage of Sommer on location outside his vehicle to sell the illusion. Its use is not dissimilar to Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s penchant for rear projection, who once said at another NYFF “when I hold the inside of a moving vehicle, the space that characters are occupying is a particular space in which, often, unspoken truths are revealed and the relationship between characters is actually transformed. So, in fact, to the characters inside that space, the scenes outside of them are close to irrelevant, and what’s more important is this particular, unique space, this dramatic space—and that’s what I’m emphasizing.” Brameshuber’s method is more seamless, but the effect is similar, compounded by the continual reconfiguration of Bobby’s relationship to his passengers. London reaches a natural terminus, yet keeps going, finding an appropriate state of suspension that hearkens back to a more unexpected car movie from the past five years, achieving a state of grace within a hard-found unknown territory.

Another film that used non-actors in expressive ways came in the only Revivals film I was able to see at the festival: Allen Fong’s Just Like Weather (1986). One of the most underheralded members of the Hong Kong New Wave, his follow-up to his classics Father and Son (1981) and Ah Ying (1983) was this curio, an openly metafictional portrait of a married couple that seems to have arrived years ahead of its time in its sophisticated, willfully confounding blurring of both reality and cause and effect. Hung and Christine live in Hong Kong with a very cute dog, facing continual yet rarely rancorous struggle over his inconsistent employment, whether to have a child, and whether to move to America. Parallel to this more overtly fictional narrative—albeit based upon their own experiences—is a seemingly documentary thread that shows Fong and his crew interacting with the couple as they eventually go to America, embarking on a road-trip from San Francisco to New York where they plan to stay for an indefinite period with a relative at a Chinese restaurant. Along the way, Fong occasionally interviews the two separately and together about sexuality and relationships, in a manner not dissimilar from what Stanley Kwan would perfect in Center Stage five years later.

Just Like Heaven only gets most fascinating as it goes along, largely because it takes a great deal of time to fully grasp its near-achronological presentation. One of its early scenes, a certainly staged yet intimate conversation between the two, is only definitely shown to take place in the “documentary” section and far into the film; a brief break in relationship during the “narrative” thread is juxtaposed with the couple together in America. There is even a Hong Kong news broadcast in that mentions a snowstorm that stranded many people, something that will only come to pass more than half an hour later as the couple and Fong’s crew experience it themselves. The cumulative effect of all these disjunctions is elusive, and yet the final parting, with director separating himself from these two people embarking on an unknown future, refuses to distinguish itself from “fact” or “fiction”; perhaps the emotion embodied onscreen by these wily, mercurial people is all that truly matters.

Credit: Image courtesy of M+, Hong Kong. © Sil-Metropole Organisation Limited. All rights reserved.