New York Film Festival 2025 Roundup – Margaret Barton-Fumo reports

This year, the 63rd annual New York Film Festival boasted an impressive roster of women-produced and women-prominent features, spanning across a variety of different genres. In general, this year’s more anticipated, big-ticket films turned out to be less remarkable than some of the quieter releases, as we’ll address in this roundup. The festival opener, for example, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, while an apt showcase for Julia Roberts, was a coolly received treatise on cancel culture told from within the confines of the ivory tower of academia. Other films in the Main Slate, like Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, while more understated features, received greater praise from audiences and critics alike.

Aside from Sentimental Value, which costarred Renate Reinsve alongside Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning and others, a couple other male-directed titles in the Main Slate featured strong lead female performances. Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 is one such film, starring Paula Beer as Laura, recent survivor of a car crash, opposite Barbara Auer as Betty, the woman who allows her to convalesce in her home. The relationship between Laura and Betty is fascinating and intense, and complicated by the specter of Betty’s mysterious daughter Yelena. Reminiscent of some of Petzold’s previous films that starred Nina Hoss, Miroirs No. 3 is partially a (welcome) return to form, with striking performances by Beer and Auer.

Another male-directed Main Slate drama worthy of note is Pietro Marcello’s Duse, which stars the great Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as the Italian stage actress Eleonora Duse, who made her comeback to the stage during her country’s turbulent rise to fascism. Bruni Tedeschi doesn’t disappoint as the “divine Duse,” an eccentric diva who floats into the film on a cloud of fog, backed by ethereal synthesizer music. Supported by Fanni Wrochna as Désirée Von Wertheimstein, her nervous assistant, and Noémie Merlant as Enrichetta, her severe daughter, Duse is constantly surrounded by an odd coterie of colleagues and friends. An ode to the theater inasmuch as Marcello’s 2019 film Martin Eden is an ode to literature couched within a period drama, Duse is full of significant cultural and historical references, counting both Sarah Bernhardt and Mussolini as side characters. Sprawling to the point of feeling a bit bloated, Bruni Tedeschi’s bravura performance makes the film worth watching.

Many women directed features in this year’s Main Slate, like Kathryn Bigelow, whose tense A House Full of Dynamite garnered mixed reviews, and Claire Denis, who returned to the fest with the underwhelming theatrical adaptation The Fence. Possibly the most abstract film in the Main Slate was directed by a German woman, Mascha Schilinski, who co-wrote Sound of Falling with Louise Peter. Jumping back and forth in time, sometimes employing experimental sound design and even a moment or two of magical realism, the film can be difficult to latch onto but it is still filled with compelling moments, storylines and characters. Taking place in the same home over the course of several generations, Sound of Falling has a very literary feel in spite of its abstract nature, playing out like a complex novel with a host of women characters across different time periods. There is a lot of death in the film, as if to point out that this world is a hostile place for young women, in any era. It’s an ambitious work that shows a lot of promise for Schilinski, whose career as a feature director is still nascent.

There was only one fiction feature in the Spotlight section of the fest that was directed by a woman, and that was Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, starring Jodi Foster as a psychoanalyst who suspects that one of her patients (played by Virginie Efira) may have been murdered. It’s an odd but charming film, a black comedy with a solid cast and a chic Parisian setting. All of the other women-directed films in the Spotlight section were documentaries, such as Sepideh Farsi’s depiction of a woman’s life under bombardment in Gaza, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, Rebecca Miller’s mini-series Mr. Scorsese, and Geeta Gandbhir’s stirring The Perfect Neighbor, which is about to be released on Netflix. Filmed over the course of two years in Florida, a series of racist and petty grievances issued by Susan Lorincz against her neighbor Ajike Owens and her family eventually turns deadly when Lorincz shoots and kills Owens through her front door and attempts to hide behind a “stand your ground” defense. Gandbhir’s documentary thoroughly covers the backstory leading up to the deadly shooting using footage obtained from police body cameras, surveillance footage, cell phone cameras, television news reports and even doorbell cameras. Lorincz is rotten to the core, and one of thousands who attempt to abuse the already crooked “stand your ground” defense every year. Ultimately, technology is what trips up Lorincz’s weak defense as her motive is called into question when it is revealed that she shot Owens just two minutes after calling the police, and researched “stand your ground” laws online before her second interrogation. The Perfect Neighbor is an utterly chilling film but a necessary watch, and the perfect film to end this roundup on. A miniscule production with a thundering impact, it stands at odds against the festival’s big openers and closers but remains a strong contender for one of the best of the fest.

This year’s New York Film Festival hosted some impressive small-scale features, many of them directed by women, that audiences will be talking about for years to come.