McQueen and Almodovar movies among New York Film Festival highlights

Movies by Steve McQueen and Pedro Almodovar are among the highlights at this year’s New York Film Festival.

Some 33 features will make up the central line-up of the 62nd edition of the annual event presented by Film at Lincoln Centre.

The main slate is particularly international this year, with films hailing from 24 countries, and including 19 directors making their debut in the festival’s most prestigious section.

The festival will kick off on September 27 with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel.

Almodovar – making his 15th appearance in New York’s main slate – will present The Room Next Door, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, as the festival centerpiece.

McQueen’s Blitz, about the bombing of London during the Second World War, will be the closing film.

A number of prize-winners from May’s Cannes Film Festival will be making their US or North American premieres.

Along with Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora, these include Grand Tour, by Miguel Gomes, winner of Cannes’ best director; Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, winner of the Grand Prix; Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a standout from Un Certain Regard; and The Seed of the Sacred Fig, from dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof who fled his home country to unveil his film.

Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, said: “The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world.

“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasise cinema’s relationship to reality.

“They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”

Also on the slate are Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, with Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi; Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, as well as a pair of highlights from Cannes sidebars: Roberto Minervini’s American civil war drama The Damned and Carson Lund’s baseball elegy Eephus.

The New York Film Festival, which runs between September 27 and October 14, takes place at Lincoln Centre and a handful of other venues around the city.