I Wanna Be a Part of It

Just in time for my departure from the East Coast, the New York Film Festival announces an especially succulent program for 2006. Fair enough, the write-ups of David Lynch's Inland Empire and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century seem to borrow an awful lot from earlier films by the same directors, but surely both men deserve our immense trust. I'm very curious about the Malian Bamako, which Amy Taubin adored at Cannes; the much-heralded Korean horror film The Host; and, perhaps most of all, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, co-directed by Zacharias Kunuk, the Inuit director who debuted so fabulously with the breathtaking Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner).

In a peculiar twist, I've become really intrigued by the latest films from directors whose previous efforts I only sorta appreciated, like Todd Field's In the Bedroom follow-up Little Children, described by NYFF staff as "loosely adapted" from Tom Perrotta's novel; Sofia Coppola's coltish and stylistically irreverent Marie Antoinette; and Climates, by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose big Cannes hit Distant was strikingly shot but, for me, a little too calculated and... well, distant. By contrast, as much as I've enjoyed or at least admired Pedro Almodóvar's recent career run, I can't muster up any real excitement about the squishy-sounding Volver, no matter how many actresses appear in it. (Note: A longer discussion of Almodóvar is evolving in the Comments section—by all means, please join in!)

Volver, plus all the American titles—except, as far as I can tell, the Lynch—will make their way to the popular commercial market this fall. As for the Kunuk, who knows, and as for Ceylan, Apichatpong, and Sissako, they're lucky when they get any U.S. distribution for their films, period. That means it's up to our lucky New Yorkers to see everything and report back. You know who you are!