NYFF 2025 Film Review: Festival Dispatch
CAPSULE REVIEWS FROM THIS YEAR’S NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Welcome to my dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival. Like always, I won’t be writing full reviews of everything I see at the festival, but this year has plenty of notable features worth at least a quick write-up: Mary Bronstein’s blistering Rose Bryne Showcase, Park Chan-wook’s return to bloody comedy of errors, and Kelly Reichardt’s subdued anti-heist film. Here are the capsule reviews for No Other Choice, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Mastermind.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Walking out of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, I joked to a friend of mine: “What if, Nightbitch, but good?” Eschewing cloying feminist bromides for a thornier stress nightmare, Mary Bronstein funnels a powerhouse Rose Byrne into one of the best performances of the year as a mother under siege. A steady march of mounting micro- and macro-aggressions as a treatise on women - especially mothers - and the most quotidian ways they’re ignored, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is one of the year’s best “horror” movies. B+
No Other Choice
Souls fed into the machine, our entire worth inextricable from what capital demands. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is a mordant comedy of errors where every other shot is of “how did he do that” caliber; Lee Byung-hun gives the performance of the year. The story of a man whose employment indignities corner him into the murder of his job market competitors, No Other Choice questions the post-capital miasma where the once-attainable comforts of old are now daydreams of the downtrodden. It might not be Decision to Leave, but there’s no such thing as a minor Park Chan-wook. A-
The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt’s ironically-titled, wonderfully subdued anti-heist is a beguiling curio that deliberately needles the “nothing happens in this film” contingent of moviegoers. It sounds exciting enough: family man and amateur art thief J.B. is planning his first heist and he thinks he’s got all his exits covered. But what results is Reichardt firing on cylinders as she takes on boomer existential malaise; Josh O’Connor at the crossroads of counterculture, frozen by inaction as he inhabits a quiet “worst guy you know” — and a complete inability to self-actualize — like a second skin. B+
Better to be a corpse and dream than to live forever and not. And movies are how we dream. Bi Gan’s behemoth is an ode to the artform and a lamentation of our times, carving a path through image-making history.Resurrection is a fever-dream time capsule of the last century of cinema, a hundred-year fugue state disguised as a five-part anthology of dreamers and desire. Somewhere between somnolent and peculiar, it's confirmation that the Chinese filmmaker is one of the strangest, most vital visionaries working today. Minor spoilers ahead…