Good Films at the New York Film Festival? Um, Yeah.

I’m a fan of the [New York Film Festival]. This may strike some people as hypocritical after last week’s [“Have You Ever Been to the New York Film Festival?”](http://nypress.com/21/38/news&columns/feature2.cfm) but it’s true. It’s a classy event that treats its critics right. For many acolytes, if somebody’s going to put film on a pedestal, high ticket prices and a willfully limited audience are an acceptable loss. As one of the self-same proud members of the initiated and well-tended-to, I shouldn’t complain.

And yet, my problem with the festival is that nothing substantial seems to come of it. While the contrary is almost certainly the case, I’m somewhat reluctant to recommend the festival, an event run by a terrific organization that treats both the press and industry with respect and graciousness, but also one where a sad number of the best selections will never be seen afterward.

While the festival almost always champions terrific films that have already attained distribution before their screening—The Orphanage, Persepolis and Redacted made last year’s slate particularly exciting—the disappearance of gems from last year like Carlos Saura’s Fados and Masayuki Suo’s I Just Didn’t Do It may have more to do with the sad reality of U.S. foreign film distribution than the festival’s active duties. But when Lincoln Center, the foremost cultural institution in New York, is the last stop in the city for such brilliant films, something is very, very wrong.

Having said that, there are several films that I can recommend for the adventurous filmgoer at this year’s festival, beginning Sept. 26, though the majority of them will be released later on. First off, if you’re planning on seeing a NYFF title at the Ziegfeld, that movie has to be the restored, re-colorized, re-edited version of Max Ophüls’ [Lola Montès]. The now 53-year-old, two-hour giant was recently restored by the Cinémathèque Française and is easily the most visually sumptuous spectacle you will see at this year’s festival, easily besting both Steve McQueen’s [Hunger](http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/program/films/hunger.html) and Jia ZhangKe’s [24 City](http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/program/films/24city.html), accomplished works where aesthetics overwhelm logic and politics.

For a superior contemporary merger of intellectual and visceral engagement, check out Ari Folman’s [Waltz with Bashir] (2008), an excellent animated tableaux of dream-like images and documentary storytelling. Though its animated protagonists look like slick CGI that jerkily tumble about like shadow puppets, that combination of the new standard of animated “reality” and oneiric physicality is exactly what makes the film both thoughtful and gorgeous. 

Finally, of the eight films I had the good fortune to have seen at this year’s festival slate so far, I cannot recommend highly enough a pair of domestic epics, Arnaud Desplechin’s [A Christmas Tale] and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s [Tokyo Sonata](http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/program/films/tokyosonata.html). Desplechin gives a Dickensian scope to the familial strife that Noah Baumbach has capitalized on of late and rides high on the manic energy of Mathieu Almaric’s scene-stealing performance as the prickly middle child of a family whose neuroses approach the volcanic level of the Sicilian clan in Petro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned. 

Tokyo Sonata is almost as brilliant as A Christmas Tale but like Kurosawa’s last film, Retribution, it nearly collapses in the last 20 minutes. Still, if the festival is for any kind of film, Tokyo Sonata is it because regardless of whose fault it is, it may be the only place you can see it.