Must-see list for N.Y. festival

Every major film festival has its thing: Cannes features stunning stars arriving by speedboat and a wealth of international films playing before well-heeled audiences on the French Riviera; Sundance plays American indies, many of which are as yet unsold, in the frigid clime of the Utah mountains; Toronto brings a veritable tidal wave of some 300 films, from obscure indie and international auteur to Hollywood prosaic; while New York hand-selects some 30-odd films from all over the world for its main slate.

If the Toronto Film Festival is a massive wine cellar representing every possible chateau and region from Napa to New Zealand, New York is the comparatively small bottle-refrigerator with nothing but exquisite vintages from which to sip.

This year, especially, the festival has outdone itself with greatly coveted titles from some of the world's most intriguing -- and best-known -- directors. To the consternation of some of the other majors, the New York Film Festival, which starts today and ends Oct. 12, has culled a far-reaching array of potentially beguiling cinematic delights, including films by two of this country's most revered and celebrated directors and the last work of a French master.

Given the genial brevity of the festival menu, it's almost impossible not to include the whole list in any preview of the most anticipated films playing there, but cutting it to the quick, I've managed to whittle the list down to the 10 films we will most likely be hearing about come prestige awards time at the end of the year, in alphabetical order:

Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance: Truth to tell, I was decidedly not a fan of the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for the vast majority of his early career. 21 Grams seemed dubiously reliant on its radical structure to mask what was actually a pretty insipid story; Babel was certainly ambitious, but to my mind it bit off far more than it could chew; then he had to go and put out Biutiful, an absolute masterpiece of interweaving plot strands and brilliantly conceived, fitful drama, such that I have come to believe in his ability to work wonders. His new film stars Michael Keaton as a washed-up former star, known for portraying a superhero in a big budget hit from decades earlier (!), who suddenly decides his career needs a jolt in the form of performing a theatrical adaptation of a Raymond Carver story off-Broadway.

Citizenfour: A fascinating sounding doc from filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was one of the original media contacts for Edward Snowden when he decided to out the National Security Agency's wiretapping and surveillance initiatives, and in so doing, betrayed the agency for which he was working in favor of illuminating the American people as to what their government had sanctioned. Whether you celebrate or condemn Snowden's action, the film, in which he is interviewed just prior to his going public and then continues through the political maelstrom he set off, is absolutely essential to understanding the state of U.S. domestic policy in 2014.

Gone Girl: David Fincher hasn't always hit his mark -- to my mind, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button remains a stultifying Forrest Gump-like mash -- but the supremely gifted director has far more significant hits (Se7en, Zodiac, Fight Club, The Social Network) than misses. What makes this project so intriguing is that he's adapting the film from an extremely popular novel by Gillian Flynn, a book whose startling plot twist (I am to understand) completely blew away its readership. Starring Ben Affleck (reportedly cast, in part, for having a "creepy smile") as a husband who may or may not have killed his missing wife, the film is loaded with promise.

Heaven Knows What: Young filmmaking brothers Joshua and Ben Safdie have made a name for themselves with a handful of well-crafted shorts and under-the-radar features (The Pleasure of Being Robbed) playing the festival rounds. This film, concerning a pair of junkies who fall chaotically in love in lower Manhattan, promises to be their most raw and searing to date.

Inherent Vice: It will surprise no regular readers of mine that at this point, any film Paul Thomas Anderson puts out will be near the top of my list of must-sees under any circumstances, even here, adapting a novel by Thomas Pynchon, a writer I must say I've never managed to much appreciate. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon and is set in the wild and woolly Los Angeles of the early '70s, so we can say it certainly affords Anderson with material squarely in his wheelhouse.

Life of Riley: Alain Resnais began his film career back in 1946 with Schema d'une identification, a film no longer believed to exist. In the 49 other acclaimed features, shorts, and documentaries he made right up until his death in March, the 91-year-old crammed an enormous and multifaceted filmography into his 68-year career, including the all-time classics Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Resnais' last film deals with mortality, appropriately enough, as three French couples spending time in the English countryside learn one of their party is terminally ill.

Maps to the Stars: Canadian auteur David Cronenberg's films are certainly not for everyone -- despite the undying support of many influential critics and film connoisseurs, his films remain extremely hit and miss for me -- but there's no denying his evocative intellectualism and potency as a filmmaker. With an impressively varied cast (including Julianne Moore, Carrie Fisher, John Cusack and Robert Pattinson), and a premise tailor-made for his oft-peculiar form of social satire, this flick, about the members of an L.A. family, each either pursuing or contending with the elusive power of fame, sounds loaded with potential.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper: We are a country addicted to true crime stories and serial killers in particular, but what happens when you more closely examine the trail of bodies and broken families left behind by just such a psychopath? Documentarian Nick Broomfield traveled with his camera and crew to the poverty-stricken neighborhood in south L.A. where the notorious killer Lonnie Franklin Jr. plied his homicidal trade murdering a succession of black women over two decades. What Broomfield finds there four years after Franklin was finally caught is a community still roiling from grief, anger, denial, and the lingering racial politics of the LAPD investigation.

Time Out of Mind: With his first two features (The Messenger, Rampart), director Oren Moverman proved himself to be an intelligent and thoughtful filmmaker, capable of rendering difficult, psychologically dense dramas about rogue cops and miserable military men with deft precision. His third feature stars Richard Gere as a newly homeless man in New York, evicted from his apartment and having to start from scratch to learn how to live on the streets, even as he's trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Jena Malone). Expect compassionate bleakness.

MovieStyle on 09/26/2014

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