The New York Film Festival ran from September 27 to October 14 at Lincoln Center and additional venues throughout the city.
Renata Adler once wrote that to be a critic “is not a day’s work for a thinking adult,” which is probably why I spent fourteen hours waiting in line on the second floor of the Samuel B. & David Rose Building as September turned to October, only a long run time less than I spent watching movies inside of Walter Reade Theater, press hub of the sixty-second New York Film Festival. I saw eight films in full, including two double features and a public screening, walked out of one, watched another in the Criterion office, and projected five more onto my bedroom wall in Crown Heights. Only one of these—a small sample of the seventy-one features programmed—actually premiered in New York (Julia Loktev’s miniseries-length My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow), the rest having made earlier debuts at Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Telluride, Marseille, and Gothenburg, which says as much about Lincoln Center’s peck…