New York’s fall movie season arrived Friday night in the most New York way possible: with a Queens crime story, a Lincoln Center red carpet and a weekend forecast bad enough to cancel a concert for tens of thousands of people across town.
The 64th New York Film Festival opened Sept. 25 with the North American premiere of James Gray’s Paper Tiger, a 1986-set thriller starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson. It was an unusually local opening for a festival that spends much of its 18-day run importing the world’s cinema to Lincoln Center. Gray grew up in Queens. His movie moves through Queens and Brooklyn. Its plot turns on brothers, money, Russian criminals and the kind of middle-class aspiration that can look perfectly sensible until it begins to rot.
Then, on Saturday, the festival pivots from outer-borough fatalism to a creature large enough to flatten the whole map. Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to his Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, receives its world premiere at Alice Tully Hall. Yamazaki is scheduled to appear with actors Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe. Tickets remain available for later screenings, according to Film at Lincoln Center.
That combination makes the festival the city’s most consequential cultural gathering this weekend, but circumstance has sharpened the distinction. The 2026 Global Citizen Festival, which had been scheduled for Saturday on Central Park’s Great Lawn with Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Lenny Kravitz, John Legend and Alicia Keys, was canceled Friday because of the extreme-weather forecast. The cancellation removed what would have been the weekend’s largest single cultural crowd. The movies, housed mostly indoors, inherited the stage.
A festival built for the city
The New York Film Festival has never really behaved like a carnival. It has no awards, no sprawling public marketplace and relatively little of the frantic deal-making that defines Cannes, Toronto or Sundance. Its influence comes from selection. Since 1963, Film at Lincoln Center has treated the program less like a buffet than an argument about what cinema deserves attention now.
This year that argument is unusually broad. The Main Slate contains 34 films from 31 countries, including four world premieres. Luca Guadagnino brings Artificial. Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, starring Pedro Pascal as a composer, is the centerpiece. Ava DuVernay closes the festival with the world premiere of 14th, a follow-up of sorts to her documentary 13th. Elsewhere are new films by Pedro Almodóvar, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Mike Leigh, Ira Sachs and Chris Rock.
The range can make the festival sound like an unusually well-curated streaming menu, which misses the point. Its basic proposition is physical. You still have to go somewhere. You wait on Broadway or West 65th Street. You stand beside people arguing over a director whose name you may have been pretending to know for years. You take your seat while a filmmaker walks onto a stage and discovers exactly how many New Yorkers have strong opinions before the lights have even gone down.
That ritual has become more valuable as moviegoing has become less automatic. The festival is selling films, certainly, but it is also selling the idea of going to films, of giving a screen two uninterrupted hours and granting strangers the right to laugh, cough, shift and gasp in the dark beside you. In 2026, this counts as a surprisingly elaborate social contract.
New York on screen
Paper Tiger was a shrewd opening choice because Gray’s New York has always been resistant to postcard treatment. His city is not the skyline. It is family obligation, municipal grime, bad bargains and the gravitational pull of neighborhoods people spend half their lives trying to escape and the other half trying to recover. In the new film, Teller plays Irwin, an engineer pulled into a scheme by his former-cop brother, played by Driver. Johansson plays Irwin’s wife, Hester, who is dealing with a crisis of her own.
At Friday’s premiere, Johansson appeared with Driver and Teller after traveling back from an overseas shoot. The glamour of opening night was real, but so was the oddness that makes the festival distinctively local: one of the season’s major red carpets was attached to a movie about Russian criminals, polluted waterways and an engineer in 1980s Queens.
Saturday’s Godzilla Minus Zero premiere expands the scale without abandoning the festival’s taste for auteur cinema. Yamazaki’s previous film turned a giant monster picture into a story about postwar grief, guilt and rebuilding, then became the first Godzilla movie to win an Academy Award. The sequel runs 135 minutes and, according to Film at Lincoln Center, was made as Japan’s first production shot entirely for IMAX.
The programming gets stranger from there, in the best sense. The festival includes restorations of films whose original versions were compromised or suppressed, experimental work, documentaries, talks and citywide screenings beyond Lincoln Center. The effect is to make New York temporarily behave like the world’s most argumentative cinematheque.
There are bigger crowds in New York, louder concerts and more expensive galas. But few cultural events ask the city to do quite this much collective noticing. For the next two and a half weeks, films that may eventually end up everywhere first have to survive a roomful of New Yorkers.
On a wet weekend when one of the city’s giant outdoor spectacles has been called off, that may be the right scale after all: a dark room, a bright screen and several hundred people deciding, all at once, whether what they are seeing matters.
New York Film Festival 2026: Sept. 25 through Oct. 12 at Lincoln Center and participating venues around New York City. Schedule and tickets.
