At the New York Film Festival, legacies loom large

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NEW YORK (AP) — Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” isn’t part of the New York Film Festival’s lineup, but its agitated sense of inheritance and keeping a fighting spirit alive are all over this year’s cinematic convergence at Lincoln Center.

The New York Film Festival kicks off Friday, the same day Anderson’s antic American epic lands in theaters. These aren’t completely separate events. Lincoln Center, which hosts the festival, last weekend screened “One Battle After Another” in 70mm. And several of Anderson’s most important colleagues — Daniel Day-Lewis, Martin Scorsese — will be prominent at this year’s festival.

But more than that, much of what so energetically animates “One Battle After Another” can be felt across a wide spectrum of the 106 features unspooling across the 18-day festival. A variety of threads can be found in a slate ranging from the opening night film, Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” to the closing film, Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?” But many of the highlights of the festival are, like Anderson’s film about a former radical (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti), highly concerned with upholding a legacy, of family or duty or both.

That goes for the festival, itself, which has for 63 years been a standard-bearer for the best in cinema. Coming on the heels of the first barrage of fall festivals, the New York Film Festival, which gathers the best of other festivals while mixing in a handful of its own world premieres, has long been an Upper West Side haven for an aspirational idea of cinema.

“Anyone who cares about film knows that it is an art in need of defending, like many of our core values today,” Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, said in announcing the main slate.

There’s no lack of urgency in this year’s lineup. That includes Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ “Cover-Up,” a portrait of the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that doubles as a plea for freedom of the press; “Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks),” the first documentary by the great Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (“Zama,” “The Headless Woman”), about the 2009 murder of Indigenous community leader Javier Chocobar; and Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite,” an intense White House procedural about a nuclear missile bearing down on the Midwest.

“A House of Dynamite,” which Netflix will release Oct. 10, is part of a rich but specialized cinematic legacy. Like those twin 1964 movies, “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” Bigelow’s film is a warning shot. It posits that time has dulled our concern for the threat of nuclear fallout, and it makes a convincing, anxiety-producing case that it’s time to rekindle a mid-century mindset.

Opening day of the festival will feature the rebirth of a cinematic legacy in his own right. In “Anemone,” Day-Lewis returns from an acting retirement he announced in the wake of his second film with Anderson, 2017's “Phantom Thread.” He co-wrote “Anemone” with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who also directs. The movie, fittingly, is a father-son tale. Day-Lewis plays reclusive Irish man whose brother (Sean Bean) comes to his remote cabin to urge him to return to his son.

“Anemone,” which Focus Features will release Oct. 3, is an assured directorial debut for the young filmmaker that carries with it the very welcome news that Day-Lewis hasn’t lost an iota of his intensely magnetic screen presence in the interim.

The last time Day-Lewis appeared publicly in New York was to celebrate Scorsese last year at the National Board of Review Awards. Scorsese, a longtime NYFF regular, will be back at the festival for “Mr. Scorsese,” a five-part documentary series on the 82-year-old filmmaker directed by Rebecca Miller (also Day-Lewis' wife, making the festival a true family affair).

The documentary, which Apple TV+ will debut Oct. 17, is a wonderfully up-close look at Scorsese, featuring warmly intimate interviews with him and his collaborators that nearly answers the unanswerable question of how Scorsese does it. Because Scorsese carries with him so much movie history, Miller’s series is both a portrait of a legend and of half a century of cinema.

Living with the legacy of a show business families sets the backdrop of both Joachim Trier’s piercing family drama “Sentimental Value” (in theaters Nov. 7) and Ben Stiller’s highly personal documentary “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” (in theaters Oct. 17, streaming Oct. 24).

In Trier’s film, one of the best of the year, Renate Reinsve, the breakout star of Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” plays an acclaimed stage actor estranged from her filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård). When he plots a highly autobiographical comeback film, their broken family is brought into uncomfortable proximity, yielding plenty of pain, humor and, maybe, the transcendence of art.

Similar frictions and catharses run through Stiller’s documentary, the actor-director’s portrait of his comedy duo parents, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. Stiller uses the copious amount of letters, recordings and diaries left behind by his parents to find a deeper understanding of their marriage — one where performing together was both a bond and a barrier to a singular love story. It, too, stretches across generations, pondering how Meara and Stiller’s relationship with work, fame and each other shaped their children, Ben and Amy.

These films and others give this New York Film Festival a sense of preoccupation with where we’ve come from and where we’re going — a hard-to-grasp divide that “One Battle From Another” tries so hard to straddle and that a festival entry like Óliver Laxe's explosive “Sirāt” is likewise so consumed with.

That’s true in a different way in Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague.” It’s one of two films by the director at this year’s festival, along with “Blue Moon,” starring Ethan Hawke as “Oklahoma!” lyricist Lorenz Hart. “Nouvelle Vague,” which Netflix will release Oct. 31, is a time capsule and ode to the French New Wave that dramatizes a seminal movie movement and the making of one of its greatest masterpieces, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.”

The movie, light and lovely, adopts much of the style and flavor of “Breathless,” shooting in black and white. In reconstructing Godard’s first feature, Linklater seeks to honor its unplanned and audacious spirit. Linklater’s Godard is resolutely, defiantly fixed on capturing the moment in a way that so many films — though not “One Battle After Another” — fall short of. He barks at his script supervisor: “Reality is not continuity!”