The end of the year is an odd time for film releases. In between all the Christmas schlock and bombastic franchise installments, small indie greats are unceremoniously dumped into theaters for a limited time to make the Academy Awards qualifications. They’re easy to miss, and with the sheer number of them, it’s difficult to decide which ones are worth seeing. Lucky for you, I caught a bunch of them at the New York Film Festival earlier this year and now you get my objectively correct counsel for free! Here’s what you should watch (and not watch) this November:
All We Imagine as Light (dir. Payal Kapadia) – SEE IT!
Much hay has been made about romance in other New York Film Festival releases, be it in Sean Baker’s Anora or Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. But one film seems to be shamefully left out of the conversation—Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Kapadia’s fiction feature debut follows two nurses in Mumbai with muddled love lives: Anu (Divya Prabha) is Hindu but in a passionate relationship with a Muslim man, and Prabha (Kani Kurusti) has a kind-hearted doctor in love with her while she yearns for her husband who migrated to Germany alone years before. It would be easy for a film with two star-crossed love stories to feel overly saccharine, but All We Imagine as Light is grounded in its tragedy. There’s an intimacy inherent to the way the film was shot by cinematographer Ranabir Das that makes it feel deeply real, along with clear humanist influence from Kapadia’s previous experience as a documentarian. Kani Kurusti’s performance is far and away one of the best of the year, deftly balancing stoicism with aching tenderness (a scene of her hugging a rice cooker had the audience of my screening sniffing back tears.) All We Imagine as Light is a rare kind of film: its overwhelming love for the human experience radiates through every image. This movie made me grateful I was born into a world with Payal Kapadia in it.
All We Imagine as Light is in limited theaters now.
Emilia Peréz (dir. Jacques Audiard) – SKIP IT!
It seems trite to lament the death of the movie musical given that Wicked is due to release this month, but no film will make you yearn for the times of clown-costumed Gene Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers dancing and jumping around in 1948’s The Pirate as much as Emilia Peréz will. Simultaneously self-serious and ironically detached, clearly embarrassed of its own existence, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Peréz is puzzling to watch. Musicals don’t necessarily need justification to be musicals, but it’s truly confusing as to why Audiard chose this medium: Selena Gomez, noted singer, isn’t given a song until halfway through the movie! The internal politics of the film are also mind-boggling: Audiard’s portrayal of a transgender woman is so regressive it’s impressive to see in 2024, and his Mexico is so caricatural it’s like he just stopped short of adding that classic Yellow Mexican Filter. In a better world, this would be funny-bad, and the grating, off-key musical numbers that start with lyrics like “Hello, very nice to meet you / I’d like to know about sex change operation” would be fun to laugh at—but that’s not what Emilia Peréz is. Instead, the film commits the gravest sin of all: it’s boring.
Emilia Peréz is on Netflix and in limited theaters now.
A Traveler’s Needs (dir. Hong Sang-soo) – SEE IT!
No director’s work ethic is as impressive as Hong Sang-soo’s. A Traveler’s Needs is one of two films he made this year, a schedule he’s stuck to since 2017, barring 2020 (for obvious reasons). Isabelle Huppert stars as Iris, a functional alcoholic with a boyfriend far too young for her, trying to make a meager amount of money giving unorthodox French lessons. The story itself is meandering and aimless, but that’s okay: it reflects the directionlessness of Iris’s life. Like other Sang-soo films, its low production value is immediately obvious—though this is the charm of his style. Multiple shots of A Traveler’s Needs have Huppert out of focus, and there’s one where the camera seems to forget about the narrative, instead zooming into a dog in the background. Isabelle Huppert could give a Volpi-Cup-worthy performance in a cat food commercial, but she’s particularly great in darkly-comedic roles like this one. Hong Sang-soo’s style is a little difficult to get into, but A Traveler’s Needs is a great film, especially with an audience equally as confused as you.
A Traveler’s Needs runs at the Lincoln Center from November 21st to 28th.
A Real Pain (dir. Jesse Eisenberg) – Skip it…
Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature has a great premise: two cousins, one nerdy and rigid (Jesse Eisenberg, obviously), the other quirky and carefree (Kieran Culkin), go on a tour of Poland together, as was their recently-deceased grandmother’s wish. The supporting cast of fellow travelers is fun too, notably Will Sharpe as their scholarly tour guide and Jennifer Grey as a MILF Benji (Culkin) hits on as a running bit. To his credit, Eisenberg gets excellent performances out of them all, with Culkin’s introspectivity stealing the show. It’s the writing itself that drags the movie down: the script is extremely cloying, and odd bits of sickly-sweet sentimentality come from nowhere. There’s a glimmer of a five-star film somewhere in here; Eisenberg definitely needs a co-writer next time. You can skip seeing this one in the theaters, but if you’re movie-less post-Thanksgiving-dinner, it’s a good one to watch with your mom.
A Real Pain is in limited theaters and on digital demand now.
Queer (dir. Luca Guadagnino) – SEE IT!
Before Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, there was only one film based on the notoriously unadaptable work of William S. Burroughs: David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Coincidentally, both Queer and Naked Lunch are some of the best work of both directors. In order to put Burroughs’s paltry 160-page novella to screen, screenwriter Justin Kurtizskes (of Challengers fame) mixed parts of the author’s life with the story of the book itself, turning it into a pseudo-biopic. The film is ostensibly a love story between Lee (Daniel Craig), and the much younger object of his infatuation, Allerton (Drew Starkey). It definitely succeeds in this aspect: Daniel Craig plays Lee’s sweaty longing so effortlessly and expertly he melts into the character completely. Queer, however, transforms into an exploration of Burroughs as a person and a treatise on the concept of love. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (also of Challengers fame, and Memoria, and Call Me By Your Name, and Trap, among others) masterfully oscillates between capturing grounded romance and lofty fantasy sequences with equal reverence, making Queer one of the most beautiful-looking films of the year. Luca Guadagnino often mentions the fact he’s been wanting to adapt Queer since he was 19, though it took until now for it to materialize. But this couldn’t have been made any sooner: it feels as though everything Guadagnino made was leading up to this film.