Festivals

Group chat: Phoebe Chen, Molly Haskell, and Kelli Weston join to discuss highlights and lowlights from the festival that was, including TÁR, Saint Omer, Master Gardener and more

Through the looking glass: Jafar Panahi’s No Bears offers a timely story about the real and imagined borders—national, social, religious—that constrict the freedoms of Iranians

Love bites: Claire Denis’s first “straightforward thriller,” Stars at Noon, is a too-oblique portrait of the exploits of Western colonialists abroad

Multi-tasking: Edward Yang’s 1994 ensemble piece, A Confucian Confusion, wryly weaves references to the ancient philosophy into a relentlessly busy big-city network narrative

Tick-tock: the Swiss director discusses his anti-nostalgic approach to historical narrative, summoning an everyday sense of the past, and the central place of objects in his film, Unrest

Animal spirits: the 84-year-old filmmaker discusses the youthful verve and visual panache of his new, donkey-starring EO

Distancing effects: NYFF filmmakers Laura Poitras, Elvis Mitchell, and Tiffany Sia join for a special live talk on the ways in which critique allows us to imagine and work toward alternative and better realities

Leaky ship: Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness is high on rhetorical acrobatics but lacks the humanist curiosity of his earlier films

The home and the world: the Iraqi-French director discusses his latest work of docufiction, a simultaneously personal and panoramic portrait of a Lebanon roiled by the pandemic and political crises

Truth claims: the French-Senegalese filmmaker discusses the real-life roots of her fiction debut and what it means to embody universality in a Black woman