Kevin Lally on Film

The 63rd New York Film Festival opens at Lincoln Center on September 26, 2025. Thanks to early press screenings, I’ve already seen 12 out of the 74 features being screened through October 13—and I can make some strong recommendations.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho for Boxoffice magazine in 2019 about his wild social satire, Bacurau. Mendonça has upped his game with his latest, The Secret Agent, deservedly winning the Best Director award at Cannes. Mendonça’s script is incredibly multi-layered, evoking in sometimes surreal fashion the fraught, justifiably paranoid 1970s in his country, and more specifically his hometown of Recife. The film centers around Marcelo (charismatic Cannes Best Actor winner Wagner Moura), a former university technology researcher and widower who arrives in Recife during Carnival week to reunite with his young son and plot his escape from the country. Marcelo eventually learns that he’s the target of hit men hired by a corrupt federal official he refused to bow down to. The story is peopled with an Altmanesque gallery of memorable characters, including Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the feisty elderly woman who provides shelter and aid to various outcasts; Marcelo’s father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), the projectionist at the local cinema where a woman watching The Omen thinks she’s been possessed by the Devil; and Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), the bold resistance leader facilitating Marcelo’s escape. The film works beautifully as a thriller, but there are numerous brazen detours, most notably Mendonça’s B-movie-style depiction of the dreaded “hairy leg,” a real-life urban legend meant to explain the murders and disappearances plaguing Recife at the time. As Bacurau proved, there’s no one making films quite like Mendonça; with The Secret Agent, his disparate influences have produced an immensely satisfying—and haunting—drama.

It Was Just an Accident

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, It Was Just an Accident is the remarkably brave and thought-provoking new film from Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi. This veteran auteur’s courage is the stuff of legend: Banned from filmmaking for 20 years, he shot one feature on his iPhone (This Is Not a Film), made another at home behind blacked-out windows (Closed Curtain), and shot another on the dashcam of a taxi he drove (Taxi). In 2022, he was sent to prison (for the second time) and released after seven months following international protests. It Was Just an Accident was inspired by his prison experience, often blindfolded for hours while being interrogated. The film was shot guerrilla-style with mostly nonprofessional actors and edited on a MacBook Air without access to the internet.

The lead character, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), works at a garage and is startled by a squeaking sound he associates with the former prison interrogator he never saw, the one called “Peg Leg.” Vahid follows the man, whose real name is Eghbal, and kidnaps him, fully prepared to bury him alive in the desert. But Eghbal’s desperate cries of innocence raise doubts in Vahid, and he rounds up three of his fellow ex-prisoners to verify his identity.

The cast’s lack of acting experience is startling, as Panahi directs them in exceptionally long takes while they debate the morality of this rash kidnapping and potential execution. The situation becomes even more complex when the abductors speak to Eghbal’s frantic young daughter, whose very pregnant mother has collapsed. Panahi’s script deals in themes of revenge, justice, and compassion, but it’s also imbued with absurdist humor and pure suspense. In all, a singular accomplishment.

Margaret Qualley and Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Festival-goers looking for something absolutely delightful will find it in director Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, featuring a tour-de-force performance from frequent Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke as famed lyricist Lorenz Hart. The entire film takes place on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s landmark musical Oklahoma! in 1943, with Hart arriving early at Sardi’s before the celebratory crowd streams in. Richard Rodgers and Hart had been one of the most successful songwriting teams in musical theater history, with such hits as Pal Joey, Babes in Arms, and On Your Toes and standards like “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and, yes, “Blue Moon.” The partnership broke up due to Hart’s alcoholism, and this night would mark the first triumph in Rodgers’s new alliance with Oscar Hammerstein II that would produce Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.

Hawke, nearly unrecognizable with an unflattering combover and camera trickery to replicate Hart’s five-foot height, gives a true character performance, nailing every witty, acerbic line in Robert Kaplow’s script and channeling Hart’s jealousy, bitter melancholy, and feelings of abandonment by his longtime creative partner. Hart was a closeted homosexual (but not so closeted in his bawdy conversations with the bartender played by Bobby Cannavale), yet the film also dwells on his obsession with a college student named Elizabeth, played by a charming Margaret Qualley. (Hart really did have an ongoing correspondence with a young woman named Elizabeth.)

Nearly all the dialogue-heavy story takes place inside Sardi’s (recreated on a set in Ireland), but Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly manage to keep the film visually lively. The supporting cast, all excellent, includes Andrew Scott as a very dapper Richard Rodgers; Patrick Kennedy as famed essayist E.B. White (who finds inspiration in one of Hart’s odd anecdotes); Jonah Lees as the house pianist, a soldier on leave; and Cillian Sullivan as a precocious boy theater nerds will recognize as the young Stephen Sondheim. The sad postscript of the film is that Hart died of pneumonia just eight months after this evening takes place, at age 48.

Below the Clouds

Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the recent Venice Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds is less a documentary and more an impressionistic portrait of a specific place—in this case, the area of Southern Italy near the fabled Mount Vesuvius. Photographed in gorgeous black-and-white, it captures the free-floating anxiety of a region haunted by the huge eruption in 79 A.D. that decimated the population of the city of Pompeii, mummifying their bodies and creating one of the world’s most morbid tourist attractions. That anxiety is best captured in moments recorded at a 911 call center, where operators field calls—some of them oddly comical—from residents unnerved by the frequent tremors in the region. Rosi returns again and again to various subjects and settings: archaeologists still unearthing human remains here in the 21st century; Syrian workers at a tanker depositing grain from Odessa in the Ukraine, the war-torn nation where they must return; an elderly intellectual who conducts an after-school class with curmudgeonly humor; a museum curator who waxes rhapsodic about ancient artifacts. I’ve only seen one of Rosi’s earlier films, Fire at Sea, an equally haunting study of the island of Lampedusa, and I’m eager to see more by this poet/documentarian.

Pictured at top: Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent. Photos courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.