Why NYFF's Biggest Premiere Was America's Quiet Collapse
The line outside Alice Tully Hall stretched past the fountain, past the protesters with their hand-lettered signs, past the man in the $1,400 overcoat who kept checking his phone as if the world might end before the 6 p.m. screening. It was a Tuesday in early October. The tickets cost $32. The film was two hours and forty-one minutes long, in Korean, with subtitles. Everyone there felt good about being there.
That's the thing about the New York Film Festival, now in its sixty-third year. It is not a failure. It is a triumph. And that is precisely what should bother us.
For eleven days each fall, Film at Lincoln Center turns the Upper West Side into the conscience of American cinema. Dennis Lim and his programmers assemble a Main Slate of world premieres and festival-circuit darlings, the kind of movies that will never play at your local multiplex, because your local multiplex no longer exists. There are no awards at NYFF. No jury. No red-carpet horse race. Just films, introduced by someone with a microphone, watched by people who paid to
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