New York Film Festival 2023: reviews, trailers, and more

In Perfect Days, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a bathroom cleaner. He starts his day early, gets a coffee from the vending machine, pops a classic rock tape into the stereo, and drives his van to various public restrooms, where he gets to work. He scrubs and tidies the sink meticulously. The various parts of a bidet are wiped. He uses a small mirror to check the underside of a toilet to make sure it’s sparkling in places no one will ever see.

I don’t love work, but I love stories about work. The stakes of a job are so obvious and familiar that you get to skip the explanations of motive (we don’t need to know why Don Draper wants to be a good ad man). What you gain instead is usually a process story — the illustrative part, where you get to see how someone is good at their job. 

Priscilla is the work of a filmmaker playing to her strengths. While director Sofia Coppola might be called a “nepo baby” because her father is Francis Ford Coppola, the point of the insult is to call out unacknowledged privilege. Meanwhile, Coppola’s work is largely about growing up in the orbit of powerful men and what that does to one’s own wants and self-worth. Her take on Priscilla Presley, wife of one of the most famous musicians of his century, is Coppola playing a familiar tune — but one that’s getting a little old.

The film’s title character, Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) is, of course, the wife of Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). But although Priscilla is in the orbit of planet Elvis, the strength of the film is what it doesn’t show. Much in the way Bob Harris’ fame is left mostly off-screen in Lost in Translation, all the Elvis stuff exists outside the walls of Graceland. There is a short glimpse of rabid fans at the beginning, the occasional whisper behind Priscilla’s back about you-know-who. But in the movie, you won’t hear a single Elvis song. Coppola even nearly gets away without showing him onstage, either, except for one short scene that’s not exactly flattering (though a part of me wishes the film had committed more strongly and omitted this, too).

During World War II, the Germans designated the area surrounding Auschwitz the “zone of interest.” The dullness of the phrase was intentional, another euphemism as operative as “concentration camp.”

In Jonathan Glazer’s sorta adaptation of Martin Amis’ eponymous novel, this self-delusion is on display. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) runs a stately home. She raises her children, bosses maids around, and tends to the garden. Their house is on a plot beside Auschwitz. Jews are being slaughtered on the other side of the wall.

Before Anatomy of a Fall gives us a body, we get a booming steel drum cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” It’s coming from upstairs, where Sandra’s (Sandra Hüller) husband is insulating the attic. But he’s playing the music loudly — possibly out of spite. Sandra is downstairs answering a grad student’s questions about her career as a successful novelist, speaking pretentiously, and predictably, about how reality informs her fiction. Samuel (Samuel Theis), the husband, is also a writer but has never been able to publish a book. Blasting horrible music is perhaps how he expresses that bitterness to his wife. An hour later, he’ll be found outside, head cracked open after tumbling from the third floor.

That’s the initial assumption at least. But we don’t see how Samuel died, and the police investigation suggests some inconsistencies with Sandra’s story. Was it an accident? Suicide? Or was it… murder?

There’s an old episode of the podcast Reply All I think about all the time called “Negative Mount Pleasant” — a title that reveals nothing about what it’s about. Also, the first eight minutes of the episode aren’t super instructive either. It opens with tape from a village meeting, where the community of Mount Pleasant is accosting their representative about a mysterious new development that is happening in their backyard.

This isn’t exactly how Evil Does Not Exist starts. But like “Negative Mount Pleasant,” it makes the small-town stakes feel big — and specific. The conflict in director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s excellent new film concerns the imposition of a new “glamping” site just outside Tokyo. Some 6,000-plus miles from the Wisconsin village of Mount Pleasant, a talent agency has arrived in the remote town of Mizubiki to introduce a project sure to make it a “tourist hot spot.”

Gary Johnson has a particular set of skills. He talks to strangers about offing loved ones: family members, business partners, or anybody close to them that they want dead. In imaginative detail, he tells them how he’ll murder them. There’s a contract, money is exchanged, an agreement is made. But the thing about Gary is that he isn’t actually a killer; he’s working with the cops.

In director Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, that’s how the sting works. Someone admits they want a person killed and passes Gary the cash. That’s enough evidence for the police to make an arrest. And Gary (Glen Powell), the guy posing as the hard-boiled killer who’s going to fulfill those contracts? When he’s not acting, he’s as normcore as they come, a philosophy teacher at the local college, and a personality that people would probably call “swell.” Gotta say: Glen Powell can really do swell!

Recently, we’ve been gifted two new works by Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo each year. He loves a small movie, usually comfortably under the 90-minute mark, and a scope that might encompass a novella or even a short story. I personally find them kind of hit or miss. Not to say Hong is inconsistent. In fact, it is remarkable how he can keep making the same kind of movie over and over. Even within the self-imposed constraints of Hong’s manner, there is wild variance in what he puts out. In that sense, his new movies are fitting — though unessential — additions to his prolific filmography.

One of this year’s, In Our Day, is fairly standard Hong: low stakes, talky, and cast with familiar actors (if you think Wes Anderson likes recurring players, I’ll raise you any of these). It’s also pure Hong thematically: creatives gently wrestling with their late careers, nebulous self-reflection, and gestures toward alcoholism.