New York Film Festival announces line-up

While it's exciting to hear what films are premiering at Cannes and Venice, for most of us, these festivals are wildly out of reach. Even the North American festivals at Toronto and Sundance can be a pain to get to and are only really an option for hardcore cineastes. This makes the New York Film Festival the only event that most of us can actually take a look at, and its line-up one of the more important ones, at least to those of us living in the Northeast.

That line-up so far this year includes:

The Wrestler - Dir. Darren Aronofsky
Changeling - Dir. Clint Eastwood
The Class - Dir. Laurent Cantet
The Christmas Story - Dir. Arnaud Desplechin
Let It Rain - Dir. Agnès Jaoui
Summer Hours - Dir.Olivier Assayas
Waltz with Bashir - Dir. Ari Folman
Afterschool - Dir. Antonio Campos
Wendy and Lucy - Dir. Kelly Reichardt
The Windmill Movie - Dir. Alexander Olch
24 City - Dir. Jia Zhangke
Ashes of Time Redux - Dir. Wong Kar Wai
Happy-Go-Lucky - Dir. Mike Leigh
Che - Dir. Steven Soderbergh
Gomorrah - Dir. Matteo Garrone
Hunger - Dir. Steve McQueen
Tulpan - Dir. Sergey Dvortsevoy
Tokyo Sonata - Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Overall, there's a good assortment of American and foreign films in the mix. The most exciting projects announced so far are probably the controversial full-length Che, one of the first screenings of The Wrestler, which opens the festival, and finding out what exactly Ashes of Time Redux really is. If one criticism can be leveled at the choices, it's that selections are heavily weighted towards already known auteurs. This isn't the final rundown for the festival, though, so hopefully some new blood will be added when the full schedule is announced.

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