Film at Lincoln Center announced 32 films for the New York Film Festival’s 64th edition on Wednesday, a carefully managed parade of prestige titles that will run Sept. 25 to Oct. 12. The lineup includes new work from James Gray, Ava DuVernay and Tony Gilroy, with James Gray’s Paper Tiger opening the festival, Gilroy’s Behemoth! serving as the centerpiece gala, and DuVernay’s 14th closing it. The festival also said Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero will get its world premiere at NYFF on Sept. 26. The machinery of culture, like every other institution, loves a slate, a schedule, a gate, and a press release.
The Curators and Their World
Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, framed the lineup as a mirror of crisis and unease. "It’s hard to recall a prior main slate program in which the state of the world has been as urgently reflected in so many creative ways," he said in a statement. He added, "You could take any cross section of this lineup and come away with a vivid picture of what our present looks, sounds, and feels like. I’m deeply encouraged to be able to introduce New York audiences to works by so many fearless, imaginative directors whose artistry has been inspired by the shared realities of our world."
That’s the language of cultural authority doing what cultural authority does: presenting a curated selection as if it were a public reckoning. The festival’s main slate is not a commons. It’s a controlled funnel, with 32 films chosen by organizers and then presented as the shape of the moment.
The lineup stretches across a familiar circuit of prestige names and festival capital. Alongside Gray, DuVernay and Gilroy, the slate includes Pedro Almodovar’s Bitter Christmas, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter, Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland and Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love. Chris Rock’s Misty Green will first premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, while William and David Greaves’ documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem and Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile also made the cut.
Prestige, Premiere, and the Festival Circuit
The festival’s structure is as rigid as any other hierarchy. One film opens, one closes, one gets the centerpiece gala, and the rest are sorted into the official slate. Paper Tiger, a Queens-set crime drama starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller, will kick off the festival. Behemoth!, starring Pedro Pascal as a cellist, will be the centerpiece gala and will have its world premiere in New York. DuVernay’s 14th, described as a documentary on the 14th Amendment and a kind of sequel to her 13th documentary, will also have its world premiere and will close the festival.
Godzilla Minus Zero, announced Tuesday, will premiere at NYFF on Sept. 26. The film is Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel to 2023’s Godzilla Minus One. Even the monster gets folded into the calendar of institutional approval. Nothing escapes the schedule.
The festival’s own framing leans hard on the idea that art can capture the condition of the world. Maybe it can. But the festival still packages that condition through the same old filters: selection committees, premiere status, gala slots, and the prestige economy that decides which stories get amplified and which ones stay outside the gates.
The AP story was written by Jake Coyle from New York. The byline matters less than the system around it. A festival announces 32 films, names a few marquee directors, and calls it a portrait of the present. The present, apparently, arrives with a red carpet.