NYFF Opens with Paper Tiger, Closes with DuVernay's 14th
The 64th New York Film Festival kicks off Friday evening at Alice Tully Hall, part of Lincoln Center, with James Gray's Paper Tiger. Programming continues until October 12, wrapping up with Ava DuVernay's 14th, which follows her well-received 2016 documentary 13th — the film that launched NYFF that year. Artistic director Dennis Lim gives credit to local moviegoers for drawing filmmakers, noting that how New York crowds respond to a work makes for a launch directors remember and value.[S1]
World Premieres Include Guadagnino's Sam Altman Biopic and Godzilla Sequel
This year's lineup features world premieres from Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman biopic Artificial, Tony Gilroy's Behemoth!, Tom McCarthy's The Statement, and Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus Zero. Jonathan Glazer, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Ava DuVernay will also debut new documentaries. Lim explained that Artificial was in flux due to a change in ownership: when the film was at Amazon, conversations took place, but it was not going to be a 2026 release. That changed when it landed at Neon, which acquired global rights in June. Amazon dropped the nearly finished $50 million film after investing heavily in Altman's OpenAI, noting the project would be better served elsewhere.[S1]
Godzilla Minus Zero arrived at the festival well ahead of completion because of its enormous volume of complex effects. Lim said talks began in the spring, and the team behind it — who had skipped festivals for the prior installment — wanted to try something new, so an unfinished cut was shown during the summer. A24's Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything had its world premiere as a surprise Telluride screening. In 2023, before she went to prison after being convicted of defrauding investors, the Theranos founder gave the filmmakers unrestricted entry to her San Diego residence.[S1]
NAZA and You Can See Everything Tackle Contemporary Reality
NAZA, which had its world premiere in Venice, joined the slate late. This examination of Israel's mass killing of civilians in Gaza was filmed at night atop Tel Aviv rooftops, where the directors spoke with Israeli military intelligence personnel and soldiers about the destruction and the deaths. Lim observed that movies aren't created in a vacuum but by people, and that no other year has felt to him as though the films were so directly conversing with the real world, confronting present-day reality head on. Documentaries or fiction alike, he said, all films come out of the world we share and will interact with real-world institutions.[S1]
You Can See Everything marks Nathan Fielder's first time directing a feature film. Lim remembered that Fielder's 2023 Showtime comedy The Curse was the first television series, and one of only a handful, to hold a world premiere in the NYFF main lineup. Across its Main Slate, Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals sections, the festival has scheduled 119 films — 75 features plus 44 shorts — alongside a slate of talks that accompanies the program.[S1]
