Most Anticipated Movies at the 2025 New York Film Festival

After many months traveling the globe, some of the year’s best movies will touch down in New York City at last. The 63rd New York Film Festival kicks off on Friday, September 26 with a line-up full of this year’s festival favorites and some new surprises. If you didn’t make it to Utah for Sundance, now’s your time to see Mary Bronstein’s immensely stressful If I Had Legs I’d Kick You or Ira Sachs’s very much not stressful Peter Hujar’s Day. For those who missed out on Cannes, now’s the time to catch Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, or Jafar Panahi’s searing but surprisingly funny Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident. Out of Venice, we have Luca Guadagnino’s pulpy campus drama After The Hunt and Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite. NYFF’s biggest world premiere is its closing night film: Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, starring Will Arnett as a newly divorced man who gets into stand-up comedy (how bad could that go?). Whether you’re looking to see something big and starry, like Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, or long and winding like Lav Diaz’s Magellan, there’s something up at Lincoln Center for everyone over the next few weeks. Here’s what we’re looking forward to most.

Luca Guadagnino’s third film to be released in the last 18 months is said to be a cancel-culture provocation. It stars Julia Roberts as a successful ivory-tower professor who ends up embroiled in a tense standoff of morals, ethics, and generational frustration when a colleague (Andrew Garfield) is accused of improper conduct with a student (Ayo Edebiri). The reviews out of Venice, where it premiered, were mixed, and press interactions with the cast were fraught with a kind of tone-deafness so aligned with the movie itself you might assume they were a stunt. (They weren’t. I’m almost certain.) But even when Guadagnino misses his mark, he is still great at prodding actors out of their comfort zones, so there’s considerable excitement for this one. —Joe Reid

Look, I never believed Daniel Day-Lewis when he said he was retiring from acting, and you shouldn’t have either. Eight years after Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis is back in his son Ronan’s directorial debut. Father and son teamed up to write this fraught family story about estranged brothers (Day-Lewis and Sean Bean) whose attempts at reconciliation have to overcome some horrific past event. The trailers are promising Daniel Day-Lewis at his most intense, and it’s hard not to get excited at the most honored actor of his generation getting another opportunity to let ‘er rip. Of course, Day-Lewis has only worked with cinematic masters like Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese for the last twenty-plus years. That’s a lot for a first-time filmmaker like Ronan to live up to, but I’m certainly thrilled to see him try. —JR

If I had to name the best filmmaker working today, my answer would change depending on the day, but more often than not it would be Radu Jude, who turns out caustic, hilarious, profound, brilliant work that speaks to the absurdities of contemporary life without divorcing it from the past. Jude has two films in the fest this year, the first being a riff on a Romanian icon and the other a darkly funny morality tale. Dracula is a multisegment monster of a movie that involves two actors on the run from a tawdry tourist spectacle gone wrong and an unnamed filmmaker using A.I. to fix his own take on the bloodsucker of the title. Kontinental ‘25 also takes place in Transylvania, but turns its attention to a bailiff, played by Eszter Tompa, who has to evict a homeless man from the basement of an apartment block. —Alison Willmore

Word was mixed on the newest feature from Claire Denis out of its Toronto premiere earlier this month. The Fence, adapted from a play by Bernard-Marie Koltès, reunites Denis with actor Isaach de Bankolé and focuses on the legacy of colonialism in Africa, one of her favorite themes to explore. Matt Dillon plays Horn, the foreman at a construction site somewhere in West Africa, and de Bankolé is Alboury, who shows up at the barrier surrounding the heavily guarded facility one night, wanting to claim the body of his brother, who was killed in a reported workplace accident — a straightforward request complicated by the fact that what actually happened may have been more sinister. The compact cast also includes up-and-comers Mia McKenna-Bruce as Horn’s new, much-younger wife, and Tom Blyth as his erratic boss. —AW

This new film from Ulrich Köhler features what seems to be a fictional equivalent of Claire Denis. Gavagai is about the filming of a new interpretation of Euripedes in Senegal, where Jean-Christophe Folly and Maren Eggert are playing Jason and Medea when the cameras are rolling and engaging in a fraught affair when they aren’t. Nathalie Richard, meanwhile, plays a character described as the film’s “high-anxiety director,” who strongly resembles the French auteur. —AW

One of the most electrifying titles at the Venice Film Festival this year was Kathryn Bigelow’s spectacular comeback, a breakneck thriller about a nuclear missile headed towards the United States. First things first: This is a Netflix release, so you should seize any chance you get to see it on a big screen before it disappears into the streaming void. More importantly, beneath its (expertly put-together) urgent genre trappings, it’s actually a deeply despairing film about nuclear proliferation, a portrait of a group of highly competent professionals with all the power in the world doing their best to try and stop something that they are ultimately helpless against. It would make a terrific (if very depressing) double feature with Oppenheimer. —Bilge Ebiri

At first glance, Bradley Cooper’s third film as a director is a departure from his past work: A Star Is Born and Maestro were large-scale, musically-driven epics. Is This Thing On?, on the other hand, is set in the world of New York City comedy. But Cooper’s first two films were also about marriages in crisis: the price of ambition, art, and notoriety, a fascination that seems to continue in Is This Thing On?, which stars Will Arnett as a newly divorced man who shifts to comedy in the wake of his marriage’s collapse. Laura Dern co-stars as Arnett’s ex-wife, and Cooper himself appears to have a much smaller part than usual (in some kind of Marc Maron cosplay). “A comedy about doing comedy, but this time it’s serious” is not the newest concept, but Cooper’s work has always been deftly emotional and robust. He shoots Arnett in raw, confessional close-up, every worry and failure in his life etched onto his face. —Fran Hoepfner

Jafar Panahi doesn’t appear onscreen to play a version of himself in his latest film, the deserving winner of this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or, but his personal experiences of being mistreated while imprisoned are all over It Was Just an Accident, which has the contours of a very grim dark comedy. A chance encounter with a customer at his garage leads Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) to impulsively kidnap the man. He’s convinced this is the intelligence agent he was tortured by, but whom he never actually laid eyes on in prison. His doubts lead him to seek a second, then third, then fourth opinion, until he’s driving around in his van with his prisoner as well as a collection of other survivors who are all at different places in dealing with their rage and trauma. It Was Just an Accident is a deeply angry movie, but more than that, it’s heartsick in its efforts to grapple with what it means to seek closure, and to balance out ideals with the realities of wanting revenge. —AW

Paolo Sorrentino has made a number of wild, absurdist films about real Italian politicians, so it’s surprising to see him make a somber, subtle film about a fictional one. The great Toni Servillo plays Mariano De Santis, a highly thoughtful Italian president and former judge at the end of his term, as he wrestles with a number of controversial issues. Confronted with the sheltered nature of his office, De Santis tries to go out into the world to better understand how to proceed. This is a movie about the cocoon of power and moral paralysis, but it’s also a movie about a political leader who happens to be a decent, thoughtful, sincere man. In that sense, for all its understated qualities, it might wind up being the most surreal film Sorrentino has made to date. —BE

This might sound crazy but Magellan, Lav Diaz’s 160-something minute Ferdinand Magellan biopic, might just be the Filipino director’s most accessible work yet. Diaz is a longtime favorite of the “slow cinema” crowd (he’s a contemporary, for instance, of Memoria’s Apitchatpong Weerasethakul) who is known for rarely moving the camera. But Magellan is also a large-scale reckoning with the colonial ambition and violence that Ferdinand Magellan and his crews wrought upon the Philippines. Gael García Bernal stars as the Portuguese explorer, lending the role a desperate urgency. Magellan was not so much a bloodthirsty tyrant, but something worse — a very regular man poisoned by ambition and blinded by faith. Diaz shows us some of Magellan’s adventures, but also two indigenous communities fighting to preserve their ways in times of danger and upheaval. The film is a true epic — beautifully shot, enthrallingly told, and one of the festival’s most unforgettable journeys. —FH

Kelly Reichardt’s heist film is not really a heist film at all, but something much subtler and deeper. Josh O’Connor, at his filthy best, plays a disillusioned ’70s suburban dad married to Alana Haim and vaguely fathering a pair of pathologically chatty sons as the Vietnam War and its attendant protests color the world around them. He decides to steal some paintings from a local museum to make some much-needed cash, and though he’s initially successful, he soon finds the whole thing unraveling slowly and catastrophically. The movie is quietly funny at times, but mostly downbeat and thoughtful, with contemporary politics on its mind as it dredges up America’s past. At its Cannes premiere, a visibly sad Reichardt made a plea to the international community about the U.S.: “Don’t give up on us.” —Rachel Handler

This year’s NYFF is a real family affair for Rebecca Miller and Daniel Day-Lewis. While Day-Lewis is there with the couple’s son Ronan, starring in his directorial debut Anemone, Miller is presenting her five-hour documentary on Martin Scorsese. (Maybe they saved money on flights by all coming together.) It’s a must-see for any fan of the director, replete with new interviews with actors, collaborators, and peers, but also for fans of film in general. It will be coming to Apple TV+ later in the fall, but NYFF will be showing Miller’s movie in full on the big screen. Like Scorsese’s work, Miller’s documentary is both big and small, local and global, and dense with sinners and saints alike. —FH

Director Park Chan-wook’s dark comedy about joblessness, poisoned capitalism, and paper mills was a hit at the Venice and Toronto film festivals earlier this month. Park’s more recent films have showcased his eagerness to push past the boundaries of genre, whether the noir trappings of Decision to Leave or the period drama of The Handmaiden or the highly stylized horror of Stoker. No Other Choice is the funniest of that bunch, and as a result it plays incredibly well in a packed festival theater. Lee Byung-hun stars as Man-soo, a middle-aged family man who gets downsized in a corporate merger at the film’s onset and spends the rest of the movie ever more desperate to maintain his former standard of comfort. Among a roster of great supporting performances, the standout is Yeom Hye-ran as a dissatisfied wife whose path crosses with Man-soo repeatedly and with audacious results. —JR

Resolved: We take Richard Linklater for granted. He’s coming off one masterpiece (Hit Man) and he’s got two major new films coming out, and yet there appears to be so little discussion of it, or them, or him. Both pictures were successful on the festival circuit, too. Nouvelle Vague, about the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, lightly adopts the French New Wave style to create a distinctly Linklaterian hang-out picture. And then there’s the wildly acclaimed Blue Moon, which won Andrew Scott a Best Supporting Actor award at Berlin and which features the great Ethan Hawke at its center as legendary songwriter (and diminutive motormouth) Lorenz Hart on the eve of the premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943. The director has had his hits and misses over the years, but he currently appears to be in a golden age. It’s worth paying attention. —BE

Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length doc delves into a theme she’s previously tackled in her outstanding narrative work — Argentina’s treatment of its indigenous population. Nuestra Tierra documents the murder trial involving the death of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Chuchagasta community, who was shot when trying to stop a local land baron and his hired security from evicting them from their land. The film captures every enraging detail of the trial while using it as a jumping off point for an exploration of the history of the region and the ways in which the Chuchagasta have been bureaucratically erased in order to strip them of their property and rights. But the most spectacular aspect of Nuestra Tierra may be its use of drone camerawork, and the way Martel uses the unsettling stillness of a drone as the eye of an impassive god, looking down at the wrongs carried out by those on the ground. —AW

Ira Sachs makes great movies about relationships. His latest recreates, pretty much verbatim, a 1974 interview the photographer Hujar (a wonderful Ben Whishaw) gave to the journalist Linda Rosenkrantz (an equally wonderful, though far more quiet, Rebecca Hall) about how he spent the previous day. On one level, Sachs allows the atmosphere of downtown New York in the 1970s to peek through, and it’s transporting. But he also subtly weaves an increasingly intimate back-and-forth between Hujar and Rosenkrantz — and it’s one of the most captivating things you’ll see on film this year. —BE

Sepideh Farsi’s documentary premiered at one of Cannes’s smallest sidebar fests this year, but it wound up becoming the focus of attention when its subject, 25-year-old Fatma Hassona, was killed along with her family in an Israeli airstrike on April 16, a month or so before the festival. It served as a stark reminder that even as festivals and screenings and cultural events and red carpets and galas and cocktail hours go on, the world and its murderous ways don’t stop. Farsi’s film is, in some ways, about that helplessness: The director couldn’t get into Gaza, so her film is built out of video calls she had with Hassona, whom she never got to meet in person. The austerity of the project matches the snap back to reality that it represents. —BE

I’ve never seen an audience turn on a movie in a theater the way I did with Mark Jenkin’s last film, Enys Men. That film, like Rose of Nevada, could be loosely characterized as “folk horror,” but the Cornish filmmaker knows better than to give in to cheap scares. The most terrifying image in Enys Men was literally a flower. He’s back at NYFF this year with Rose of Nevada, his biggest film yet, starring George MacKay and Callum Turner as two fishermen who take jobs on the titular boat that once disappeared for thirty years and came back without any of its crew. Jenkin’s work is idiosyncratic, wry, and lush, shot on gorgeous 16mm. There is a textured magic to his work; everything is tangible, damp, and old. His films beckon you to come closer — if you’re brave enough. —FH

Joachim Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt understand the internal lives of women almost suspiciously well. In May, the Cannes Film Festival agreed, awarding this film the Grand Prix. In his second feature starring actress Renate Reinsve, Trier has yet again made something astonishing about the complexity of the female experience, about family and connection and pain and art. The movie, set mostly at a big familial house on a tree-lined street, looks beautiful, dappled with sunlight and nostalgia, and it’s full of incredible performances from Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård as her emotionally distant father, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as her adoring and protective sister. I cried for about half the runtime. —RH

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda’s latest effort is a gender-bent, action-fantasy blockbuster riff on Hamlet. After medieval Princess Scarlet’s father, the king, is murdered and usurped by her uncle, she swears revenge… and promptly fails and is also killed by the new tyrant. She is then transported to a liminal wasteland called “Otherworld,” a sprawling purgatory overrun with marauders, refugees, and the acolytes of her evil uncle, who she learns is also lurking in this dimension of the dead. Scarlet’s path of vengeance transcends space, time, and the mortal coil until she meets Hijiri, a paramedic from 21st-century Japan who joins her on her journey but slowly shows her an alternative to her bloodlust. Scarlet showcases some career-best storytelling and imagery from the director of Oscar-nominee Mirai (2018) and the richly accoladed Belle (2023). —Eric Vilas-Boas

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent took home two awards at Cannes this year: best director and best actor for Wagner Moura. Filho’s latest is set in his native Recife (the subject of his last film, the excellent Pictures of Ghosts) during Carnival in the 1970s, and tells the story of a former teacher on the run from his past during the final years of the Brazilian dictatorship. Filho’s film both is and isn’t a “spy movie.” Like his film Bacurau, The Secret Agent bends back on its own genre, indulging in tangents and side characters and tonal shifts throughout. The opening credits describe the film’s setting as “a time of great mischief,” but the same could be said for any time spent watching Filho’s work. —FH

A series of women living in the same farmhouse over the course of four generations experience something like parallel lives in the second feature from German director Mascha Schilinski. They dream of self-annihilation, grow heavy with lust, wander into dark water, discover what their bodies can do, hide from abusive men, and protect one another. It all unfolds like a dream, breathtaking and lyrical, a long and rich poem. Alison Wilmore agreed, naming it the possible “best film at Cannes,” where it tied for the Jury Prize. —RH

20th Century Studio’s taking a Bruce Springsteen biopic into awards season one year after their indie-shingle cousin Searchlight had so much success with their Bob Dylan documentary seems prescriptive in a way that might be annoying if we weren’t talking about Springsteen. I can’t not be excited for this, or for The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White attempting to capture The Boss at his most introspective. The film is said to focus on the period where Springsteen was crafting the songs for Nebraska. Director Scott Cooper gave Jeff Bridges a platform to country croon his way to an Academy Award for Crazy Heart, which is enough to ignite the Oscar hopes for White, who while quite good in 2023’s The Iron Claw nevertheless doesn’t possess Bridges’ decades of goodwill. The film’s deep bench of co-stars includes recent Oscar nominee Jeremy Strong as Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau, recent Emmy winner Stephen Graham as Springsteen’s father, and recent uncanny Theo Vonn impersonator Marc Maron as Springsteen’s producer. —JR

Who better than Ben Stiller, their son, to make a documentary about the life of married comedians Jerry Stiller and Ann Meara? This film is reportedly built out of the family’s vast archive of material, which feels like the right approach: Stiller and Meara were huge once upon a time, and their popularity reached across a wide swath of American pop cultural history, but younger generations are mostly unfamiliar with them; a film about the duo really needs to show them at their height. Plus, Ben Stiller is an interesting director! We won’t hold his last released feature, 2015’s Zoolander 2, against him, but this is the guy who gave us Tropic Thunder and The Cable Guy and the first Zoolander, so anything he makes is worth checking out. —BE