Richard Brody’s second New York Film Festival dispatch favors films that make talk into action and blur the border between scripted drama and documentary observation. His standout is Bruno Dumont’s “Red Rocks,” a fierce miniature melodrama performed by children roughly five to seven years old.
Across the program:
- “Red Rocks” lets its young cast experience a scripted romance and rivalry through their own spontaneous reactions, while differences between a mobile home, a modest house, and a gated villa quietly map class.
- “The Dreamed Adventure” folds oral histories of Bulgaria’s chaotic post-Communist 1990s into a borderland noir about smuggling and human trafficking.
- Hong Sangsoo’s “The Day She Returns” turns three publicity interviews into an inquiry about whether professionalized speech can become art.
- Ira Sachs’s “The Man I Love” follows an HIV-positive performance artist in late-1980s New York, joining queer intimacy and artistic freedom to the physical reality of AIDS.
- Dan Sallitt’s “What Can’t Be Mentioned” uses therapy and confrontation to show how self-examination can become more intimate and more abstract at once.
- Nathan Silver’s “Sounds from Home” pairs Parisian life with recordings of his parents birding in upstate New York, letting political dread enter the soundtrack between bird calls.
Brody’s most useful distinction is between dialogue that explains and dialogue that creates. In these films, interviews, therapy sessions, family riffs, and bitter memories do not pause the drama; they are the drama.
The result is a festival map organized less by official sections than by forms of attention. The bold action here is often simply giving people enough room to speak until the polished story cracks open.