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Film Review: After the Hunt (STATIC @ NYFF)
We live in a panopticon police state where Yale philosophy professors who drink wine at college bars and ponder virtue ethics at academic soirées also exist in a world where, as the film’s tagline boasts, not everything is supposed to make you comfortable. Luca Guadagnino’s new film After the Hunt…
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STATIC’s Guide to NYFF 63
New York at the end of September and beginning of October might be the best time of year: there’s a chill in the air, the leaves begin to change colors, and hundreds of thousands of cinephiles descend on Lincoln Square for the New York Film Festival. For three weeks, you…
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film Review: Ronan Day-Lewis’s “Anemone” (STATIC @ NYFF)
When Ronan Day-Lewis said he wanted to make a film with Sean Bean because of the impression his work on Game of Thrones made upon him when he was 13, the crowd audibly gasped. For someone so young, a feature debut at The New York Film Festival is shocking; perhaps…
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NIGHTSWEAT: 6 movies to make you sweat this summer
I hope I’m not the only person here to have had a rather regrettable and naughty July. I’ve slept till noon on disgustingly hot mornings with all the usual symptoms: shirt grossly clinging to the slick of my back, cotton mouth, phone not actually plugged in etc., etc. All this…
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“We Had to Search for a Truer Self”: Jia Zhangke on the 22-year-long Journey towards Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke operates with the kind of precise and spontaneous patience of a fly on the wall of an archeological dig. Zhangke, born amid the reforms of the 1970s, came to prominence as a part of the “Sixth Generation” of directors in China’s post-socialist period; his films, often made without…
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“Reproducing life as it is—I was never interested in that”: An Interview with Alain Guiraudie (STATIC @ NYFF)
Alain Guiraudie’s breakout film Stranger by the Lake was all about murder and sex. His latest Misericordia is all about murder and the absence of sex. But the lack of anything explicit is somehow more titillating, making brawls between men ooze big-time sensuality. “I work on love scenes and fight…
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Film Review: Luis Buñuel’s Él
If women in 2025 needed yet another reason to become misandrists, renowned Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel provides a compelling case to do just that. Luis Buñuel’s 1953 film Él is searing takedown of the bourgeois male ego.The film follows entrepreneur turned paranoiac Don Francisco—a man so convinced of his own…
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Film Review: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
What do jazz drummer Max Roach and Russian head of state Nikita Khrushchev have in common? According to the stunning new documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, they both had rhythm. Director Johan Grimonprez trains his eye on the “cool war,” focusing on a protest led by Black artists like…
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NYFF Quick Reviews: See It or Skip It – November ’24 (STATIC @ NYFF)
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…
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Film Review: Teaches of Peaches
Explosive, orgasmic, sleuthing, and sexy—Everything there is to say about the iconoclastic rockstar Peaches has already been said. The 2024 documentary Teaches of Peaches attempts to demystify the mythology of Peaches, exposing audiences to a less extreme Peaches as she celebrates the 20th anniversary of the seminal album of the…
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NYFF Review: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)
Late at night, a woman sporting full Missy Elliott garb is driving alone on an empty street with soft funk music playing through the speakers. Something in the middle of the road prompts her to come to a full stop. She stares at the corpse, not fearful, but indifferent. As…
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Film Review: All Shall Be Well
If your media diet consists solely of TikToks, you might be led to believe that one is a queer elder by the age of 25. Still, for all the lip service people pay to “queer elders,” there is a severe lack of stories about queer people growing into old age.…
