A.O. Scott's perspective on NYFF

If you want quantity — racks and shelves full of stuff to sort through in the hope of finding something that might fit your taste — wait for Tribeca, with its grab-bag programs and crowd-pleasing extras. The New York Film Festival, in contrast, prides itself on quality, refinement and selectivity. It is not so much programmed as curated. This selection is a form of criticism — it involves applying aesthetic standards and deciding that some films are better than others — and to understand this festival it helps to understand that its selection committee, led by Richard Peña, the festival’s program director, is made up of film critics. This year’s movies were chosen by Mr. Peña; Kent Jones, associate programmer at the Film Society and editor at large of Film Comment; Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly; John Powers of Vogue; and Phillip Lopate, editor of the recently published Library of America anthology of American movie criticism and an all-around man of letters.

These critics, like others in their profession, incline toward material that is sometimes described as difficult or challenging, but that requires a disciplined, active attention. In previewing the movies that will be shown over the first week of the festival — and some that will come later — I have been struck by how few of them conform to the conventions of genre and narrative that dominate American commercial cinema. The split between the domestic mainstream and the world of international “art"? films has rarely seemed so wide. As the big Hollywood studios, with their eyes on the global market, strive for maximum scale and minimal nuance, independent-minded filmmakers in other countries seem to be going in the other direction. Or, rather, in their own idiosyncratic directions, forging a decentralized, multifarious cinema of nuance, intimacy and formal experimentation.

But when nearly every film in the line-up has already been shown (and received international press coverage) at Cannes, Telluride and/or Toronto, and is then going into domestic theatrical release within a few days or weeks of its NYFF screening, what does the festival itself do for these films? Where's the "prestige" (a word Scott does not use, but Caryn James did in her earlier piece) come in, when the program is cherry-picked mostly from films that have already premiered at other, more prominent (and in Telluride's case, even more "exclusive" and "selective") US and European festivals? Where is the excitement of discovery a festival can offer, when virtually everything has been pre-discovered and there is nothing unheralded to be found around the edges of the galas? Don't misunderstand me -- I see no reason why a movie shouldn't play all these festivals. But what is "special" about NYFF? Is it really, as some have said, the New York Times Film Festival, because the NYFF showing marks the occasion of a Times review? (Like the opening night film, "The Queen," which is a festival premiere only in a technical sense, since it plays the festival on Friday and goes straight into theatrical release on Saturday.) Is that the NYFF's primary significance? Discuss.