NYFF Sets 64th Main Slate: 32 Films, James Gray's Paper Tiger Opens
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- NYFF64's Main Slate features 32 films from 31 countries with three world premieres (DuVernay's 14th, Gilroy's Behemoth!, and Mani Haghighi's I Deserve a Lover...), six North American premieres, and 14 U.S. premieres, running September 25 through October 12.
- James Gray's Paper Tiger — starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver, and Scarlett Johansson in a 1986-set thriller about a family pulled into a Russian-criminal oil-dumping scheme near the Gowanus Canal — opens the festival, while Tony Gilroy's Behemoth! (Pedro Pascal as a cellist) is the centerpiece and Ava DuVernay's 14th closes it.
- Ava DuVernay's 14th is described as a 'tough-minded reckoning' arguing the 14th Amendment's principles — birthright citizenship, due process, equal protection — are 'under systematic attack,' featuring Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Anna Paulina Luna, Sens. Padilla and former Sen. Flake, and Stacey Abrams.
- Cannes 2026 prize winners in the slate include Sandra Wollner's Everytime (Un Certain Regard), Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur (Grand Prix), Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland (Best Director), Emmanuel Marre's A Man of His Time (Best Screenplay), and Valeska Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure (Jury Prize).
- Chris Rock's Misty Green screens at NYFF after world premiering at TIFF, joining veterans Pedro Almodóvar (Bitter Christmas), Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), Lee Chang-dong (Possible Love), Radu Jude (The Diary of a Chambermaid), and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (All of a Sudden), plus two Hong Sangsoo films.
- Artistic Director Dennis Lim called it a slate where 'the state of the world has been as urgently reflected in so many creative ways,' citing Julia Loktev's Russian-journalists-in-exile doc My Undesirable Friends: Part II, Isabelle Stever's queer drama I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming set in Ukraine during Russia's invasion, and William Greaves's 1972-shot Once Upon a Time in Harlem, now finished by his son.
- Screenings span Lincoln Center plus BAM (Brooklyn), Museum of the Moving Image (Queens), Alamo Drafthouse (Staten Island), and AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx).
Why it matters: With DuVernay's '14th' — arguing the 14th Amendment's protections face 'systematic attack' — bookending the slate, and Cannes winners plus films set amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, NYFF's 32-film lineup positions the festival as a politically engaged showcase spread across all five boroughs from September 25 to October 12.
