Starting September 26, New York City’s most dedicated cinephiles have been migrating up to Alice Tully Hall to celebrate the 63rd New York Film Festival. This year’s fest features favorites from across the globe — highlights from Cannes, Venice, and Toronto — along with some surprising world premieres, like a new Bradley Cooper movie about stand-up comedy and Daniel Day-Lewis’s coming-out-of-fake-retirement film he made with his son, Ronan. Whether you’re making the trek up on the A train or experiencing it vicariously from elsewhere, here are all the highlights from this year’s NYFF.
A stacked slate
Vulture’s moviegoers put together a list of their most anticipated films at this year’s fest. Bilge Ebiri shouted out Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, one of his favorites out of Venice. Alison Willmore is looking forward to the Radu Jude double feature of Kontinental ’25 and Dracula. Rachel Handler wants you to see Kelly Reichardt’s anti-heist film, The Mastermind, starring a very in-over-his-head Josh O’Connor. Joe Reid is big on Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, especially if you get a chance to see it with a crowd that’s game to laugh. Eric Vilas-Boas is eager to catch Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet. And I’m telling you that Lav Diaz’s globe-spanning epic, Magellan, more than earns its lengthy run time. But if that’s not enough movies for you, there are another 20 we recommend (and twice as many more at the fest). — Fran Hoepfner
➼Read more about the films we can’t wait to see here.
A very Luca Opening Night: After the Hunt
Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt opened the festival following its premiere at Venice Film Festival. Ahead of the film, Vulture caught up with the main trio — Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edibiri — to ask them “What’s My Line?” The stars of the psychological thriller (are we calling it that since it’s not a Me Too movie?) were cozy on the carpet, but the film itself is all about the cold and icy exterior of two professors at Yale within hand’s reach of tenure (Roberts and Garfield) and an eager student (Edibiri) who makes them question their own expectations of students who admire them. Anyone will tell you that the real stand-out of the film, though, is Michael Stuhlbarg, reuniting with the director after 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, who plays Roberts’s therapist husband. After the film screened, Stuhlberg described the film as “a slow-motion trainwreck, but you feel something’s coming,” emphasizing its ambiguous themes and ending. Generously, too, he says his character is “present and watching” the wreck, even if he doesn’t know what’s going on. — Morgan Baila
A buzzy Brazilian feature: The Secret Agent
I checked out Cannes double-winner (for Best Director and Best Actor) Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent on September 28, which arrived at NYFF with lots of buzz. Recently, after a contentious battle between this movie and Marianna Brennand’s Manas, Filho’s film was chosen to represent returning champion Brazil in the Best International Feature Oscar race. During the race, my interest was piqued when Brazilian national treasure Fernanda Torres weighed in on Instagram, supporting The Secret Agent. The movie, set largely in 1977 during the Brazilian military dictatorship, ends on a strange and sad note. During a Q&A with Filho that star Wagner Moura (Narcos) had to duck out of early in order to go perform in a play in Brazil, an audience member asked if Filho had ever considered another ending. “Never,” he said. His producer Emilie Lesclaux revealed that everybody on set asked him to film a “plan B,” just in case, but he never budged. — Jason P. Frank
➼ Read Roxana Hadadi’s interview with director Kleber Mendonça Filho here.
A 86 perfect minutes: Peter Hujar’s Day
Ira Sach’s followup to the much-beloved Passages is the heady, chic Peter Hujar’s Day, starring Ben Whishaw as photographer Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Linda Rosenkrantz, who interviewed Hujar about his day and later released an edited version of the transcript in a book, titled Peter Hujar’s Day. The film is a quick bite, just 86 minutes long, and its screenplay is adapted nearly entirely from Rosenkrantz’s book. Sachs shared in the film’s Q&A that during the writing process, he got to read the full, unedited transcript at an NYU library, and he added some details into the filmed conversation that had been left out of the original — including a discussion of Joan Crawford’s merits as a star (Rosenkrantz prefers Bette Davis). The crowd for the movie was the youngest, coolest, and gayest I’ve seen so far at the festival — it’s clear that Sachs has the L-train set on lock. — J.P.F
“And if it wasn’t Ben Whishaw, it wouldn’t be.” – Ira Sachs on creating Peter Hujar’s Day @janusfilms 🩷 pic.twitter.com/7CgdPUTD3y
— New York Film Festival (@TheNYFF) September 27, 2025
A groovy interview: Father Mother Sister Brother
A callback to his earlier career as a director, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, which took home the Golden Lion in Venice, is a Centerpiece film at this year’s NYFF. To hear more about minimal film, critic Bilge Ebiri spoke to Jarmusch. His questions about how an indie filmmaker gets by these days were ones that fans have longed asked themselves, and they finally got an answer.
Bilge Ebiri asks Jim Jarmusch a question we’ve always wondered about when it comes to indie filmmakers: “How do you pay the bills?” pic.twitter.com/rxKUIwOPeS
— Cinephilia & Beyond (@CCinephilia) September 29, 2025
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