The Cotton Club Encore (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984/2019)

House-painting union organizers, metaphorical teenage zombies, goateed jewelers, working-class Italian poets, lonesome bovines, and ladies on fire: the 57th New York Film Festival features a staggering array of fascinating characters, themes, and stories. This year’s selection is also notable for its wealth of music, with films from Scorsese to Sciamma to Lapid to Baumbach all employing pop songs as narrative fulcrums. Our NYFF57 playlist is comprised of these cinematically crucial ditties, along with a handful of tunes by composers whose work otherwise appears in NYFF selections.

But wait, there’s more! We’re giving away a free, one-year subscription to Film Comment, along with a pair of tickets to a NYFF screening, to a reader who correctly matches the most songs in our playlist to the corresponding films. To enter, first subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter by visiting our homepage and clicking the red “Weekly Newsletter” text in the upper right corner. Then, submit your answers here. The contest closes on Monday, October 7 at 5 p.m., and in the case of a tie, we’ll draw a name from a hat. Good luck, would-be NYFF mix masters!

Log in to Spotify to stream the full playlist.

Clinton Krute is Film Comment’s digital editor.