by Ryan Smillie, Staff Writer

The New York Film Festival can be overwhelming. Because the festival is one of the later ones (and a non-competitive one, to boot), most of the films playing at NYFF have debuted elsewhere before making their way to Lincoln Center. What this means is that there’s been buzz about these films since Venice and Toronto, or even Cannes and Berlin. I’ve been excited about seeing many of them for weeks, if not months, but there are a few that I’m particularly looking forward to:

This year, NYFF’s Main Slate includes the winners of the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a pandemic-set satire about a teacher’s leaked sex tape, took top honors at this year’s Berlinale. Director Radu Jude may not have quite the reputation of his fellow Romanians Cristian Mungiu or Cristi Puiu, but this win cements his place as a key figure in still-impressive and still-surprising Romanian New Wave. Fifteen years later, and I’m still looking forward to what this group of innovative directors will come up with next.

Maybe at the top of my list, however, is Titane, director Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning follow-up to her 2016 debut Raw, one of my absolute favorites of the last decade. I wouldn’t have to know anything about Titane to be excited about it, and to be honest, I still don’t know much about it. It’s violent and provocative, people walked out of its Cannes premiere, and yet it still emerged with the festival’s top prize. If it’s half as good as Ducournau’s cannibalistic coming-of-age debut, I’ll be first in line.

Since I saw Asako I & II two years ago, I've been struck by how strong an impression Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's gentle and captivating love story managed to make on me. While I still haven't gone back and watched Happy Hour, we're being treated to not one, but two new Hamaguchi features both making their American debuts. Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story (after Lee Chang-dong's Burning, those are words you want to hear) Drive My Car seems to be the heavier of the two, focused on love, betrayal, and grief, while the three shorts that make up Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy seem to take a lighter approach, billed as both lively and delightful. Knowing Hamaguchi's deft emotional touch, I can't wait to see how he approaches both.

Three of my all-time favorite filmmakers have their new films playing at this year's festival, and if the word from other festivals is to be believed, I won't be disappointed in Céline Sciamma's Petite Maman, her smaller yet just-as-deep follow up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers, for which Penélope Cruz just picked up the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. But of my established faves, I don't think there's anything more exciting than Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, the festival's Centerpiece selection. Campion's return to feature filmmaking after 12 years would be thrilling no matter what it was, but a psychosexual Western prominently featuring Kirsten Dunst? Sign me up! (And though she's not behind the camera herself, I can't pass up an opportunity to see Tilda Swinton, and this year's NYFF gives us three opportunities, with The Souvenir Part II, The French Dispatch, and most excitingly, Memoria, the debut English-language feature from Thai slow cinema master Apichatpong Weerasethakul.)

Looking beyond the Main Slate, I'm really intrigued by Vincent Meessen's Just a Movement and Kiro Russo's El Gran Movimiento. Both seem to blend documentary and French film with a distinct visual style, to tell a politically charged story about a Nigerien Marxist (Movement) or to document a Bolivian miner's mysterious illness (Movimiento). It's easy to get distracted by the flashier titles on the Main Slate, but some of the most interesting work is playing in some of the other sections of the festival.

There are so many films screening at the festival that I won't be able to see every single thing that seems worth seeing, but I can't wait to catch the ones I can. It’s a good problem when there are simply too many good movies to see.