The 2025 New York Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Will DiGravio

In thinking back on this year’s New York Film Festival, a single word first comes to mind: paper.

It’s central to my own festival rituals. A copy of the official festival poster—this year designed by filmmaker RaMell Ross, director of NYFF 62 standout Nickel Boys—is often the only purchase I make each year from the small merchandise stand outside Alice Tully Hall. And though I mostly just attend press screenings, which begin in the days leading up to the official opening night, I eagerly wait each year for the arrival of the printed festival guides scattered throughout Lincoln Center, the satisfyingly sized pamphlets full of showtimes, fine-tuned descriptions, and luxury ads, signaling that, yes, Lincoln Square is alive with the energy of new cinema once more.

But this year, paper was crucial to the movies, too. Before I get to the most obvious, and indeed greatest, example, consider the centrality of paper to Late Fame, directed by the critic-turned-filmmaker Kent Jones, written by Samy Burch (who penned 2023’s May December), and based on the posthumously published novella of the same name by Arthur Schnitzler. Late Fame centers on a mail-room worker named Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe). Decades after arriving in New York to live as a poet (with modest success) in the downtown scene of the 1970s, Saxberger now works for the most venerable of institutions: the United States Postal Service.

For Saxberger, poetry is firmly in the past—and that seems alright. He’s still working with letters in a stable, honorable profession, with good benefits. He rolls around a cozy, book-filled, presumably rent-stabilized apartment he’s occupied for decades. And he’s got a blue-collar gang of pals he hangs around with each night after work at the local dive bar. They shoot the shit, tease each other, and enjoy cheap, tasty-looking sandwiches. Life is good. 

Then, Meyers appears. A rich kid and aspiring intellectual, Meyers (Edmund Donovan) corners Saxberger on the street. With the look and feel of a man years removed from his days at the schools of Carnal Knowledge and Dead Poets Society, Meyers, on the curb outside his hero’s apartment, begins to profess his love for Saxberger’s long out-of-print poetry collection, Way Past Go. Saxberger looks around as if his friends are putting him on. But none appear; this is all, apparently, real.

After a few failed attempts, Meyers eventually succeeds in drawing Saxberger into their circle, who call themselves the Enthusiasm Society. First, he’s the worn writer, merely listening and validating the group with his presence. Slowly, he begins to get pulled into their drama: the infighting and the intellectual insecurities. He one day pays a visit to Meyers’s posh apartment, one overflowing with first editions of modern classics. Saxberger opts to turn a blind eye to the other kind of paper that so fuels this literary cosplaying: money.

Only the actress Gloria sees the group for what it is. Played by Greta Lee, Gloria is older than the core members of the Enthusiasm Society but younger than Saxberger, making her an important bit of connective tissue, a bridge between two generations. Her over-the-top demeanor comes from understanding what Saxberger has not yet seen: they will never be one of them. This gives her a freedom to play character, one perhaps closer to her true self; to dance and sing and banter however she chooses, and in a way that mesmerizes all who watch.

In both Gloria and Saxberger, the young men see something of what they want to be. They reject technology. They search for answers in books. But their wealth and privilege and, a tad more sympathetically, the time in which they live, has rendered them unable to create. The men are stand-ins for a broader nostalgia for 1970s New York that permeates the cultural scene today, one dominated (to its detriment) by the only people able to participate: the wealthy.

Most oddly, this nostalgia is most often felt by people around my age, who search desperately for a culture that no longer exists, opting to emulate past lives rather than create something new, something that even money can’t buy it. It’s why at first Saxberger seems comfortable: they are role-playing his time. But by the film’s end, one of the boys gives the game away. And when it happens, a look plays out across Saxberger’s face: maybe the paperback of his poems was better off in the past.

A far more significant bit of paper sits at the tense core of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent.  Set in 1977, during the years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the incredible film centers on Armando (Wagner Moura), a widower and scholar now on the run from the regime. Once a prolific researcher, Armando (who now goes by Marcelo) made enemies when failing to go along with the regime’s corruption (though we later learn the more complicated story).

Now linked up with members of the resistance, he lands a job working in the government offices of Recife (Mendonça Filho’s home city), where he spends his days rummaging through the archives. He’s searching for any bit of information—an ID, a photograph, any official scrap of paper—about his late mother. Once he has this piece of the historical record, this proof that she did, in fact, exist, he can finally flee with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who lives with his material grandparents.

Among the central sites in The Secret Agent is the city’s movie theater, the Cinema São Luiz, run, in the film, by Marcelo’s father-in-law, Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco). The centrality of the city’s cinemas to the director’s own life features as the subject of his previous film, Pictures of Ghosts (2023). A documentary delivered in part as an autobiographical video essay, Pictures of Ghosts details the moviegoing culture of twentieth-century Recife and its influence on the director’s own art. Throughout the film, Mendonça Filho draws on various archives, including newsreel footage of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis visiting the city, family photos and ephemera, and found material from his own film shoots. To the eye that has witnessed Pictures, it is difficult not to see the director as Marcelo burrows through archives in search of his family story.

In The Secret Agent, the Cinema São Luiz also sits at the center of the action. Not only does it feature one of the film’s most tense scenes, in which Marcelo must evade death at the hands of hit men, but it is also the city’s beating cultural heart: Jaws is playing. Moviegoers can’t look away. And odd coincidences are starting to take shape. A dead shark is found washed up on shore, and in it is a leg that eventually goes missing. Soon, a rumor starts to spread around the city to be careful at night, for the disembodied leg now haunts the streets in revenge. Is the story a distraction by the regime? A case of the movies taking over the human psyche? Or perhaps both? And there is another subplot too. On occasion, the film cuts to present-day Brazil, where a pair of researchers are playing back archival interviews with the characters (including Marcelo) and pouring through newspaper clippings. Like we in the audience, they are captivated by this man and the many parts of his story that are (and will remain) unknown.

Mendonça Filho’s work as a weaver of tales—the thrilling beats of the main story, gorgeously shot on Panavision by Evgenia Alexandrova, the Jaws-inspired subplot featuring a partially digested leg, and the archival researchers working away throughout the film until they feature heavily in the superb denouement—is astonishing. Palpable is his deep appreciation for history, and an understanding that each bit of archival material comes with a story worth mining for the human connections they carry, especially a dusty old filing cabinet in a government room filled with yellowed documents. 

About three years ago, Kelly Reichardt gave the city the greatest film of the festival’s sixtieth edition: Showing Up (2022), a portrait of an artist with just enough talent to carry on (played by Michelle Williams), but unsure of how to do so, weighed down by the responsibilities of family life and the rhythms of a stable job at an art school. It’s a cycle banal to most, but vicious to the artist. From this quiet tale Reichardt—in no small part due to Williams’s extraordinary performance—draws out great drama and tension from a seemingly innocuous set of circumstances.

The Mastermind is nearly the reverse. On paper, the film reads like a thriller à la The Secret Agent. Set in 1970, the film features a married couple played by two millennial giants: Josh O’Connor, most recently of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024) and Alaina Haim, one third of the eponymous rock group and star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021). Their marriage falls apart after an art heist orchestrated by J. B. (O’Connor) goes wrong. He must then seek refuge in the cozy rural home occupied by old art school friends, played by beloved indie film vets John Magaro and Gaby Hoffmann.

At the film’s outset, Reichardt plays into the audience’s expectation for a thrilling tale of theft. The opening scene features J. B. (a woodworker out of work) slyly stealing a carved Revolutionary War figurine from the fictional Framingham Museum of Art. He deftly fishes his hand into a glass display, neatly stashing the object away before leaving the museum with his young family. It seems we are, in fact, in the presence of a mastermind, a man willing to steal relics to put food on the table.

But Reichardt then subverts this notion. What follows is the story of a man without redemption, a rich kid who has borrowed too much money from his parents and has now turned to robbery rather than take advantage of the leg-up in life he has already been given. Oh, and he’s a horrible at it too. After the carving is successfully sold, J. B. and some pals decide to take their work to the next level and steal paintings right off the wall in the middle of the day. Things don’t quite go as planned. 

Reichardt tells this 110-minute story with a pace bordering on slow cinema—the heists, O’Connor’s insecurities, and the failed plot are all dragged out to the extreme. She seems to anticipate what we in the audience want: a cute and clever protagonist upping the stakes, winning too much until he is finally caught. But no, we are anchored down with him. It drags, and drags, and drags. And it is spectacular.

Through O’Connor’s J. B., Reichardt captures the bleakness of America then and now. There is no great man overcoming the odds. There is no way to be saved. J. B.’s once great life is now but a plunge into nothingness. And if there is redemption, we don’t see it.  

The one bright moment of his life that we witness comes just after the big heist. J. B. takes a few moments to simply stare at the paintings he has stolen. Enamored with the artwork, but even more so by his own handiwork, he cannot take his eyes off the spoils. For once, he has succeeded. The moment, though, is fleeting. Soon, the cops will be on the case. J. B. puts his woodworking skills to good use and builds crates to store the paintings. They won’t be there long.

The crate thus becomes a kind of coffin, a sealing of J. B.’s own fate. Soon, he will be without the paintings. In fact, he will have nothing at all. But perhaps a fleeting moment alone with art is all one can hope for in this world

And then there was No Other Choice. The latest from South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, who takes as his source material here Donald E. Westlake’s The Ax, a 1997 novel previously adapted into the 2005 film, The Ax (Le couperet), directed by Costa-Gavras, to whom Park’s film is dedicated, centers on a man name Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a veteran of the paper industry. After an American company buys out his employer, Man-su falls victim to the phenomenon of our times: layoffs. His decades of commitment to the craft of getting paper into the hands of consumers meets a swift, unjust end at the hands of globalism.

Losing his high-paying factory job sends Man-su into an emotional spiral. His family also suffers. No longer is there money for lavish meals, Netflix, or music lessons for his cello-prodigy daughter, Ri-one (So Yul Choi). His relationship with his wife, Lee Mi-ri, brilliantly played by Son Ye-jin, begins to suffer. For months and months he languishes, trying desperately to land one of the few open management positions in the fledgling industry. He encounters the same, equally qualified men at each point of the process, rivals who in another time all could have shared equally in the spoils of big paper.

Man-su’s desperation leads him not to class solidarity but to the conclusion that life really is all about the survival of the fittest. To get ahead, he hatches a far more gruesome (and ingenious) plan than J. B.’s plot for wealth. He decides to kill a manager at a paper company, thinking that will be the most effective way to create an opening in the industry. Just as he is about to get down to business, he realizes a flaw in the plan: as good a candidate as he may be, there will surely be several qualified applicants, the men he has seen in the trenches of the unemployment line. He must think bigger. He must start up a fake company of his own, solicit résumés from top applicants, study their backgrounds to determine which men are his greatest competition, and then kill them one by one. He has, well, you know the film’s title…

What follows is a film fully in Park’s singular style: shocking, silly violence, camera movements and places that instill a sense of wonder, and deep emotional swings that cut right at the core of what it means to be human in a time of rapid global, technological change. If we can’t even make paper, then what is left?

The false promise of neoliberalism was not just that everyone would have a well-paying job, but that that job would merge with one’s personhood: love your job and it will love you back. But big paper, of course did not return the affection. Instead, it brought devastation, financial hardship, deep shame, and unrelenting desperation.

No Other Choice ends (I won’t tell you how) with Man-su standing in an empty paper factory, surrounded only by automation. Here, he is happy. But for how long? These robots make paper, but what would they do with it? And so, the cycle seems likely to only go on.

For more information on the New York Film Festival, visit here.

Will DiGravio, a Cineaste assistant editor, is a Brooklyn-based critic and researcher.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 1