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New York Film Festival 2005

As usual, the festival will be remembered equally for the films left outside its door.

New York Film Festival 2005
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

One year ago, the New York Film Festival starved for a Dogville-style polemic, but the program was nonetheless distinguished by its open cultural arms, with films coming to us from as far as Argentina and Senegal. There isn’t a single Latin American film featured in this year’s edition of the fest, a glaring oversight given some of the strong works featured in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s recent Latinbeat program and the mixed reception works like Manderlay have received in Cannes and Toronto.

This second part of Lars von Trier’s trilogy of life in America is just one of many Cannes carryovers (Caché, Three Times, among others) that make up this year’s typically strong line-up, which also includes new works by Aleksandr Sokurov, Patrice Chéreau, Neil Jordan, Park Chan-wook, and Steven Soderbergh, two knock-out special events (a restoration of Sam Wood’s 1922’s melodrama Beyond the Rocks starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino and Michelangelo Antonioni’s preferred 126-minute cut of The Passenger), and a special presentation in honor of Japan’s 110-year-old Shochiku Company.

As usual, the festival will be remembered equally for the films left outside its door, namely Woody Allen’s Match Point, Tsai Ming Ling’s The Wayward Cloud, and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, but given the embarrassment of riches on display here, not to mention the chance of seeing films that are unlikely to ever get proper U.S. distribution, there’s very little to complain about here.

Beginning September 15, please check back daily as a full review of each festival film will be added to Slant Magazine’s ongoing coverage. The 43rd New York Film Festival will run from September 23 to October 9, 2005. For more information please check the festival’s main program. Ed Gonzalez

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Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (Avi Mograbi)
Breakfast on Pluto (Neil Jordan)
Bubble (Steven Soderbergh)
Caché (Micheal Haneke)
Capote (Bennett Miller)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Gabrielle (Patrice Chéreau)
Good Night and Good Luck. (George Clooney)
I Am (Dorota Kędzierzawska)
Manderlay (Lars von Trier)
Methadonia (Michel Negroponte)
Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad)
The President’s Last Bang (Im Sang-oo)
Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel)
Something Like Happiness (Bohdan Sláma)
The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach)
The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook)
A Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Through the Fores (Jean-Paul Civeyrac)
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom)
Who’s Camus Anyway? (Mitsuo Yanagimachi)
Beyond the Rocks (Sam Wood)
The Green Cockatoo (William Cameron Menzies)
Haze (Shinya Tsukamoto)
Hidden Blade (Yoji Yamada)
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)

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