NYFF Turns Up The Heat As ‘Godzilla’, ‘Artificial’, ‘NAZA’, ‘You Can See Everything’ Spark Festival Buzz — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- NYFF's 64th edition opens Friday at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall with James Gray's "Paper Tiger" and runs through October 12, screening 119 films — 75 features and 44 shorts — across Main Slate, Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals sections
- Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman biopic "Artificial" will world premiere at NYFF after Amazon dropped the nearly finished $50 million film, noting the project would be 'better served elsewhere'; Neon acquired global rights in June
- Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's "You Can See Everything" — an A24 documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that world premiered as a secret Telluride screening — joins NYFF after Holmes allowed filmmakers unfettered access to her San Diego home in 2023, mic'd for 12 hours a day, in the days before she reported to prison
- Ava DuVernay's "14th," a documentary direct follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 film "13th" that opened NYFF that year, is the closing-night selection
- "NAZA" by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — an investigation into Israel's mass killing of civilians in Gaza, shot on Tel Aviv rooftops with Israeli military intelligence officers — was a late NYFF addition after world premiering in Venice
- Tom McCarthy's "The Statement," Tony Gilroy's "Behemoth!," and Takashi Yamazaki's "Godzilla Minus Zero" round out the world premiere slate, with Jonathan Glazer and Paul Thomas Anderson also world premiering new documentaries
Why it matters: The lineup carries unusually heavy real-world weight: Amazon dropped its nearly finished $50M Sam Altman biopic after making a 'massive investment' in Altman's OpenAI, with indie distributor Neon scooping up global rights in June. With 75 features including a Gaza investigation, a Theranos documentary, and an Altman biopic, NYFF signals that distributors and filmmakers see prestige-festival launches as the route to awards-season positioning in 2026.
Ask SkimNews
