11 Movies You Need to Know at New Directors/New Films

NEW YORK — The movie world can feel boundless in New Directors/New Films, which this year is showcasing work from Cape Verde, China, Jamaica, Japan, Portugal and beyond. For its 47th edition, beginning Wednesday, the festival — programmed by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — is focusing on emerging directors, many on the younger side. The results are invariably uneven, often exciting and at times revelatory in the way they redefine (or even defy) traditional categories and genres. Here are 11 movies you won’t want to miss.

When this delicately observed story opens, Mila is practicing for a piano recital that will take her abroad, her younger teenage brother is mostly just being a boy, and their father seems content to drift along in his own head. A mother is mentioned in passing, but her absence nevertheless fills the air, shaping the family’s exchanges and each member’s discreet solitude. With unforced realism and a graceful visual style — punctuated by a series of fluid, intimate walks — Bulgarian director Ilian Metev beautifully captures the ebb and flow of one family’s everyday life. He finds the singularity of ordinary being, its notes of harmony and discordance.

— MANOHLA DARGIS

Maternity is both the guiding metaphor and one of the subjects of this lyrical, occasionally bombastic documentary essay by Khalik Allah. Gliding from color to black and white, from digital to analog, from grim realism to spiritual ecstasy, the film offers a song of praise to the island of Jamaica and a reckoning with its painful history and hard-pressed present. Allah gathers a rich blend of voices, faces and natural wonders, a kaleidoscope in which shards of violence and poverty commingle with glimmers of dignity and resilience.

— A.O. SCOTT

Austere, intense, claustrophobic and shot through with brilliance, “Closeness” opens shortly before a young man and his fiancée are kidnapped for a ransom. It doesn’t take long before their cloistered Jewish community in the North Caucasus region of Russia begins to dramatically unravel, leaving the family of the kidnapped man scrambling alone and pushing his less-loved sister spiraling into the larger, unnervingly hostile world. The movie’s title aptly describes both its milieu and visual approach. The director Kantemir Balagov crams his frame with people — a celebratory dinner is a bravura example of his use of cinematic space — a choice that captures the existential push and pull of identity. (Caution: The movie includes documentary atrocity imagery.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

Set in contemporary China, this elegant, sensitive, at times wrenching movie plaits together the lives of four characters who over a single day set down separate, difficult paths that finally converge. A high school student struggles at home and at school, where he is savagely bullied; an elderly neighbor faces eviction from his own apartment by his family; and so on. The writer and director Hu Bo puts these lives into motion with compassion, a restlessly moving camera and an intricate narrative that never feels overdetermined. As day edges into night, each character’s life comes into crystalline view, and the ordinary becomes profound. Wholly immersive, the movie has a foreboding four-hour running time that you’ll soon forget. (Hu Bo died in 2017 from an apparent suicide.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

Using a moody, noirish monochrome palette (punctuated with garish swatches of color video) and mordant, monotone voice-over narration (interrupted by stretches of deadpan dialogue), Huang Hsin-yao composes a dark satire of corruption and class resentment in Taiwan. Two friends, Pickle and Belly Button, spend their nights in compulsive voyeurism, watching and listening to dashcam recordings of Pickle’s boss, a big shot named Kevin, as he drives around in his Mercedes looking for (and sometimes having) sex with a series of women. Pickle and Belly Button are envious, aroused and appalled by the amorality of the rich, and the viewer is at once dismayed by the cruelty of this society and seduced by Huang’s smooth and witty style.

— A.O. SCOTT

The most commercial movie playing in the festival’s first week, this tight, showy thriller gives it a much welcome blast of genre filmmaking. Seated in an arid Danish call center and flanked by colleagues he barely speaks with, a cop named Asger (Jakob Cedergren) is having what is clearly another bad day among many. He’s tethered to a phone in a harshly lit room, fielding calls from a citizenry he scarcely tolerates. His bad attitude rapidly shifts when he takes a call from a frantic woman, who says she’s been kidnapped, setting off a classic race-against-the-clock rescue. The director Gustav Möller doesn’t dig deep, but he skims the surface with entertaining wit and finesse.

— MANOHLA DARGIS

The closing-night film of the festival poses a quietly radical challenge to assumptions about race, class and the aesthetics of filmmaking. The director, RaMell Ross (also credited as writer, producer, editor, cinematographer and sound recorder), chronicles several years in the lives of two young African-American men and their families. Ross focuses on work, school, parenthood and other ordinary experiences, but his method is the opposite of prosaic. He glimpses arresting, at times almost hallucinatory beauty in the rural Alabama landscape, and finds nuances of emotion that grow in intensity over 75 heady minutes. The movie is framed by a bluntly political question — as the film’s website puts it, “How does one express the reality of individuals whose public image, lives and humanity originate in exploitation?” — that yields pure cinematic poetry.

— A.O. SCOTT

In recent years, Portugal has emerged as a laboratory for cinematic experimentation, yielding fascinating and ambitious hybrids of documentary and fiction that tackle the country’s colonial legacy, its cultural traditions, the state of its working class and much more. “The Nothing Factory,” an astonishing film by Pedro Pinho, extends this tradition. It’s an almost clinical study of working conditions and labor discontent, set at an elevator factory whose employees are in conflict with management. It’s also a musical. Pinho, shooting in 16 mm film, fuses nostalgia with a militant sense of novelty.

João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis’ “Djon África,” which was written by Pinho, achieves a different kind of fusion. A road movie (involving a quest for a lost father) that passes through the thickets of Portugal’s imperialist past and present-day Cape Verde, it mixes longing with exuberance, and finds an anarchic sense of possibility in a world of pain and injustice.

— A.O. SCOTT

The conceit suggests a horror movie. A house in a small town on Japan’s coast has two sets of occupants — a single mother and her adolescent daughter; a single woman and a stranger afflicted with amnesia — who are unaware of each other’s existence. Are they ghosts? Inhabitants of different dimensions? It’s never made clear, and while the film, the feature debut of Yui Kiyohara, is haunting, it’s more disquieting than terrifying. Its texture is delicately emotional and boldly, eccentrically philosophical. How do we recognize the reality of other people? How can we be sure that we ourselves are real?

— A.O. SCOTT

Less scary than driven and dyspeptically funny, the title character of this mordant comedy is on a mission. It takes a while to figure out what that is, though clues are scribbled in pen across Manana’s arm and etched into her feverish face. She’s writing a novel, a labor of (perhaps) love that her editor, a humble stationery store owner, believes is a masterpiece. Whether both writer and editor are fantasists or not, the novel has become their shared passion and her life’s blood. It sustains Manana even as her loving if unsupportive husband and children conspire against her literary ambitions (especially after they discover her subject). With her terrific star, Nato Murvanidze, Georgian director Ana Urushadze opens up one woman’s life with dark laughter, great feeling and truth.

— MANOHLA DARGIS