The New York Film Festival's 64th edition will open with stories that reflect what artistic director Dennis Lim calls "the state of the world" reflected "in so many creative ways" — a lineup heavy with directors grappling with political upheaval, historical reckoning, and social fracture.
Film at Lincoln Center announced Wednesday that 32 films have been selected for the main slate, running Sept. 25 to Oct. 12. The festival opens with James Gray's Paper Tiger, a Queens-set crime drama starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller. But it's the festival's centerpiece and closing night selections that signal its thematic weight.
World Premieres Center Social Justice
Tony Gilroy's Behemoth!, starring Pedro Pascal as a cellist, will have its world premiere as the centerpiece gala. Ava DuVernay's 14th, a documentary examining the 14th Amendment and serving as a sequel to her acclaimed 13th, will also premiere in New York and close the festival. DuVernay's return to constitutional history comes as debates over citizenship, equal protection, and voting rights remain deeply contested in American politics.
The lineup includes established auteurs known for politically engaged work: 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.
Documentaries Confront Dissent and Exile
Julia Loktev's My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile continues her documentary series on modern-day dissent in Russia, a project that takes on added resonance as authoritarian crackdowns intensify globally. William and David Greaves' documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem also makes the slate, alongside Chris Rock's Misty Green, which will first premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Lim said in a statement, "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."
Godzilla Returns With Political Metaphor
On Tuesday, the festival announced that Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus Zero, his sequel to 2023's Godzilla Minus One, will make its world premiere at the NYFF on Sept. 26. The Godzilla franchise has long served as allegory for existential threat — from nuclear devastation to climate collapse — and Yamazaki's new entry arrives as anxieties over technological risk and environmental catastrophe deepen.
The festival's emphasis on films that don't look away from crisis reflects a broader shift in prestige cinema. Directors aren't retreating into escapism. They're using the screen to document what Lim describes as "the shared realities of our world" — realities that include democratic backsliding, mass displacement, and the erosion of civic norms.
Why This Matters:
The New York Film Festival's main slate offers a snapshot of how filmmakers are responding to a fractured political moment. DuVernay's constitutional documentary, Loktev's chronicle of Russian dissent, and the return of directors known for social critique suggest that cinema remains a space for reckoning with institutional failure and human resilience. In an era when documentary and narrative film increasingly blur, these selections reflect an art form refusing to separate aesthetics from the urgent questions of power, justice, and survival that define the present. The festival's choices aren't neutral — they're a curatorial argument that the stories worth telling are the ones that confront what's hardest to face.