New York Film Festival Is Now Just Rich People Arguing

Ah, the New York Film Festival. That glorious autumnal tradition where Manhattan’s most committed cinephiles and anyone who owns a $4,000 cashmere scarf gather at Lincoln Center to nod thoughtfully at subtitles. This year’s lineup dropped, and if you squint past the press releases, it’s the same blessed ritual: a bunch of movies you’ll never see in a theater near you until February, screened for people who will describe them as “a meditation on” something while you’re stuck in traffic on the Van Wyck. For the uninitiated, NYFF is the crown jewel of the fall festival circuit—Toronto gets the Oscar buzz, Venice gets the glamour, and New York gets the self-satisfaction. It’s where a three-hour black-and-white Romanian film about a leaking roof becomes a cultural event, and where the Q&A afterward is longer than the actual movie. Somewhere, a publicist is sweating through a Patagonia vest. The big draws this year? A bunch of auteur stuff you’ll pretend to have heard of and one or two Netflix titles that will be buried under a “trending now” algorithm by Thanksgiving. There’s always one movie that everyone calls “challenging” and “essential,” which is code for “you will check your phone at minute forty and feel profound guilt.” The festival’s real purpose, let’s be honest, is to give New Yorkers something to bring up at dinner parties in Cobble Hill. “Oh, you didn’t catch the new Radu Jude? It’s a scathing critique of late capitalism via a TikTok influencer. No? Well, it’s not for everyone.” And the tickets. Oh, the tickets. Members-only presale, general public gets the scraps, and somehow a single screening costs more than a monthly Criterion subscription. You’ll sit in the Walter Reade Theater next to a guy who laughs at a joke that hasn’t landed yet, just to prove he gets the reference. The film itself might be a masterpiece. It might also be a two-hour experiment in endurance where the director’s cat gets a “story by” credit. Either way, you’ll clap politely and then argue about it on the 1 train for forty blocks. The Q&As are their own sport. A director will explain that the film’s ambiguous ending is “open to interpretation,” which means they ran out of money. An actor will say the role was “transformative,” which means they were paid scale and got a free trip to Cannes. The moderator will ask a question that’s actually a humblebrag, and the audience will nod like bobbleheads at a philosophy seminar. Somewhere in the back, a film student is live-tweeting the whole thing with the caption “cinema is alive.” Look, I love NYFF. It’s a beautiful, ridiculous institution where you can see a Mongolian goat-herding documentary at 11 a.m. and a Nicole Kidman melodrama at 9 p.m., then spend the walk home wondering why your own life isn’t scored by a mournful cello. But let’s not pretend it’s accessible. It’s a velvet rope disguised as a film reel, and the rope is made of $18 popcorn and a very specific brand of intellectual insecurity. So go ahead, buy the pass, stand in the standby line, and pray you get into the one movie everyone’s talking about. Just remember: the real festival is the arguments you have afterward, and you can have those for free at any bar in the East Village. **The Take:** NYFF is theater for people who claim they don’t like theater. It’s a perfectly fine excuse to feel cultured for two weeks before returning to your regularly scheduled doomscrolling—just don’t act like you discovered Béla Tarr when you watched one clip on YouTube.