{"id":27730,"date":"2025-10-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=27730"},"modified":"2025-10-19T14:37:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T21:37:17","slug":"nyff-wrap-up-biopics-bio-docs-and-bad-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/nyff-wrap-up-biopics-bio-docs-and-bad-parents\/","title":{"rendered":"NYFF Wrap-Up: Biopics, Bio-Docs, and Bad Parents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I know it sounds like hyperbole to say that I found it personally offensive of the New York Film Festival to not only select Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere<\/em><\/strong>, but to make it their Spotlight Gala \u2014 as if to say, yes, this, this<\/em> is what we\u2019re all about. But it makes my skin crawl, because musical biopics like this are the scourge of middlebrow moviemaking at the moment, the rare mid-budget movies that studios are willing to greenlight because they offer the safety valve of a recognizable figure at their center, what amounts to boomer IP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actors like movies like Deliver Me from Nowhere<\/em> because they allow them to play dress-up, to wow Oscar viewers not with the skill of their acting but with the aptitude of their impersonation. (As Jeremy Allen White and the stand-in E Street Band roar through a full performance of \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.,\u201d I realized what I was watching was less a movie than an expensive episode of Celebrity Lip-Synch Battle<\/em>.) Audiences like movies like this because they don\u2019t ask anything of them; they know the story that\u2019s being told, the fans in its specifics and the casuals in the never-shifting arc of the music biopic, they know the songs that are being sung, and they know exactly how they\u2019re going to make them feel. It\u2019s what passes for moviemaking for adults in 2025, simply because the hot star of the moment is dressed up as a rock star rather than a superhero, but the impulse is the same: people who go to the movies for the experience, memorably defined by @dril<\/a>, as \u201cthinking about shit that i Recognize and smiling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia Roberts has a Big Speech near the end of After the Hunt <\/em><\/strong>that she absolutely refuses to deliver as such, eschewing the acting class theatrics for a flat, matter-of-fact delivery, letting the words do the work. It\u2019s a good example of why her performance is so terrific, and of what\u2019s good about Luca Guadagnino\u2019s latest: it\u2019s a story about cancel culture that refuses the easy cop-outs, and lets everyone be messy. I\u2019m not sure why it still feels like such a subversion when Roberts plays an unlikable, or even merely flawed, character \u2014 that\u2019s just a good long stint as America\u2019s Sweetheart, I guess \u2014 but it\u2019s exhilarating here, so that it\u2019s not a matter of cheering our heroine on as she rails against trigger warnings or they\/them pronouns or whatever. It\u2019s understanding that these are the grievances of a broken person who resents being asked to consider another point-of-view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thankfully, Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett harbor no such resistance, and are willing to see all their characters equally (which means to see them all as messy). Guadagnino indulges his taste for formal experimentation, using unexpected compositions, peculiar framing, zooms that snap a little too fast, and uncomfortably close close-ups, all to keep us off-balance. (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019s score is similarly knotty, taking the customary notes and moods and inverting them.) He\u2019s making a social drama in the visual and aural language of a thriller, and it works \u2014 up until the unnecessary epilogue, which is becoming the scourge of modern screenwriting.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Due to what could, with some understatement, be classified as circumstances beyond his control, Jafar Panahi\u2019s recent films have worked at a necessary but invigorating intersection of narrative and documentary, always informed by the severe limitations of his ability to make movies while under the thumb of the Iranian government. In his new film, the Palme d\u2019Or winner It Was Just an Accident<\/em><\/strong>, he\u2019s finally able to shed that scaffolding entirely and tell a fictional story through an entirely narrative lens \u2014 and the result is arguably his finest work to date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title has a double-meaning; the story opens with an automobile accident that sets the events into motion, but what follows is a series of such coincidences and impossibilities that it\u2019s entirely possible that everyone has made grave mistakes. It hinges on a question of identity, as mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) encounters a man (Ebrahim Azizi) whom he believes is the government agent who tortured him and several acquaintances years earlier. Panahi finds moments of levity even within this dark story (the image of another possible victim, kicking a van and asking where he is while she\u2019s donning nothing more regal than a wedding dress, is a memorable one), but it all culminates in a long, tough scene of confessions and confrontations that contains some of the most gut-wrenching acting of any film in recent memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The early \u201cReporting by Seymour Hirsch\u201d credit in Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus\u2019s Cover-Up<\/em><\/strong> is an early indication that this is no ordinary bio-doc. Though his colorful background gets a modicum of screen time, the filmmakers are less interested in the particulars of Hirsh the person (we\u2019re 90 minutes in before he he talks at any length about his wife of decades<\/em>) than Hirsh the reporter, how he did the job and what drove him to do it; an early stretch, detailing each step of how he reported out his breakthrough story on the My Lai Massacre, is as exciting as any political thriller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the filmmakers let it get sticky in the second half, and he gets crustier and more combative as they get into some of the less triumphant moments of his late career. (\u201cIn case anybody cares, this is less and less fun,\u201d he snorts.) But there\u2019s no denying the power of his work, and the significant stories he covered and, in many cases, shaped. And its closing passages, while abrupt upon first viewing, deepen as one considers the lingering but unasked question: does any of this work even matter?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hey, we have the same baby monitor, <\/em>I thought to myself near the beginning of If I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You<\/em><\/strong>, and suffice it to say it was not the last moment of personal identification within its 113 minutes. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever seen a film so vividly capture the moment-to-moment feeling of living with anxiety (and living around people with it) \u2014 which makes it a nerve-rattling, sometimes harrowing sit. But it\u2019s putting a real state of being on screen, anchored by a jaw-dropping performance by Rose Byrne; writer\/director Mary Bronstein opens with a close-up of Byrne\u2019s face, listening, stressed, already fuming, and as she listens, flinches, and reacts, it pushes in closer, and closer, and somehow closer still. And that\u2019s a pretty apt visual representation of the entire movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The emotional and psychological intensity are matched by the flashes of nightmare imagery, all of our senses assaulted by the trials and tribulations of this woman who is doing what so many do, every single day: caring for her sick kid, being a single parent (her military husband is perpetually out of town), working, and trying to keep her sanity. I overheard people on the way out complaining that it was too<\/em> relentless, too one-note, which is not entirely true; one of Bronstein\u2019s gifts is her ability to capture those milliseconds of silence, the fleeting oases of calm within the storm, before a scream of \u201cMOMMY\u201d jars her back to reality. It\u2019s a tremendous picture, if you\u2019ve got the constitution for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Argentinian director Milagros Mumenthaler\u2019s The Currents <\/em><\/strong>throws you into similar territory \u2014 somewhat literally, as it opens with heroine Lina (Isabel Aim\u00e9 Gonz\u00e1lez Sola) receiving a professional award, quietly throwing it in a bathroom trash can, taking a walk, and hurling herself off a bridge into the freezing water below. It\u2019s a bracing opening, because it\u2019s so unexpected and, for some time, unexplained; it buys Mumenthaler some time, because in the scenes that follow, we\u2019re watching her live a seemingly normal life while fully aware of what\u2019s churning inside her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShould we talk about how weird you\u2019re acting?\u201d asks her husband, and he\u2019s not wrong; she\u2019s suddenly prone to panic attacks and flight-of-fancy daydreams, and is inconveniently afraid of water. She\u2019s trying \u201cnot to feel so ephemeral,\u201d she explains, and truly, whom among us cannot relate? Sola masterfully makes irresponsible behavior sympathetic, while Mumenthaler, like Bronstein, displays a clear gift for putting us into her protagonist\u2019s unsteady shoes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anomone<\/em><\/strong> is Daniel Day-Lewis\u2019s first film appearance in eight years, after starring in Phantom Thread<\/em> and then retiring, presumably (and sensibly) believing that it wasn\u2019t going to get any better than that. It doesn\u2019t here, but he had other motives; Anomone<\/em> is the feature directorial debut of his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, and they wrote the script together. It feels like the kind of role an actor would write to rouse himself out of retirement: lots of long, searching monologues, non-verbal stewing, and enigmatic self-awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s terrific, to be clear \u2014 it\u2019s just that there\u2019s not much else happening. Sean Bean and Samantha Morton don\u2019t have enough to do in their supporting roles, and though the younger Day-Lewis can move the camera well, the deliberate pacing and the slow drip of exposition will drive less patient viewers mad. Anomone <\/em>isn\u2019t a waste, exactly, but I hope it re-lit the fires for Daniel Day-Lewis enough that we\u2019ll see more work yet, perhaps with a fine filmmaker he\u2019s not related to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Father Mother Sister Brother<\/em><\/strong> comes to New York fresh from its triumph at the Venice Film Festival, where it won writer\/director Jim Jarmusch the Golden Lion, and it\u2019s frankly a little puzzling to give him such a major award for such a minor work. It\u2019s a triptych, along the lines of his Mystery Train<\/em>, and maybe that\u2019s a miscalculation; one shouldn\u2019t make it so easy to compare a new movie to a previous masterpiece, especially when it comes up this short. Its vibes are immaculate (any movie that both opens and closes with \u201cSpooky\u201d cannot help it), and Jarmusch and his big-name cast spin what tension and drama they can out of what amounts to a collection of uncomfortable silences and strained small talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no real thread, narratively speaking; he gives us three family reunions, which are connected less by what happens than a series of shared objects, phrases, and peripheral parties. These are people whose conversations are less defined by what they say than what they don\u2019t, and what we can infer from that subtext. Individual moments work, and some of the performances are memorable. But it ultimately doesn\u2019t add up to much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any documentary filmmaker is really making a movie about two things, their subjects and themselves, and finding the balance between them can be the hardest part of the job. Ben Stiller doesn\u2019t quite find that balance in Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost<\/em><\/strong>, and it couldn\u2019t have been an easy job; early on, he indicates that he embarked on the project partly to understand his own life and difficulties by analyzing those of his parents, a successful comedy team who became respected, successful character actors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had truckloads of material to draw from \u2014 his father recorded everything and kept everything \u2014 so maybe that\u2019s why it seems like such a distraction when he spins off into searching conversations with his wife and kids. It\u2019s not that those sections aren\u2019t of interest, and they certainly seem therapeutic. But the archival material, both from their public appearances and of their private interactions, is so rich, and the ups-and-downs of their careers are so fascinating, that I kept waiting impatiently for the younger Stiller to get back to the people in the title of his movie.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the books closed on another New York Film Festival, we take a look at some of the highlights, including \u201cSpringsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,\u201d \u201cIt Was Just an Accident,\u201d \u201cCover-Up,\u201d \u201cAnomone,\u201d and \u201cFather Mother Sister Brother.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":27731,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419],"class_list":["post-27730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27730"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27789,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27730\/revisions\/27789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}