#New York Film Festival Unveils Spotlight Slate With ‘The Boy and the Heron’ and Garth Davis’ ‘Foe’ Starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal

The 2023 New York Film Festival has revealed the lineup for its Spotlight section, featuring world premieres of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s Showtime series The Curse, starring Emma Stone, and Garth Davis’ Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal starrer Foe.

Other noteworthy Spotlight selections include the U.S. premieres of Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in a decade, The Boy and the Heron, and Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, co-written by and starring Glen Powell as a philosophy professor who moonlights as an undercover hit man for the New Orleans Police Department.

The festival has also added the North American premiere of Sean Price Williams’ feature debut The Sweet East, starring Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris, and a late-night screening of Harmony Korine’s Aggro Drift, shot entirely in infrared.

Stone, meanwhile, will make her third appearance on New York Film Festival screens in her Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos’ silent black-and-white short film Bleat, presented with live accompaniment by an ensemble of musicians and a choir, in its first screening since its Athens premiere and followed by a conversation with Lanthimos. In the wordless film, Stone plays a young widow, who experiences a journey through sex, death and resurrection.

The festival will additionally screen Pedro Almodóvar’s short Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.

And the Spotlight section features a number of documentaries including Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s Nikki Giovanni film Going to Mars and Errol Morris’ look at John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel.

The above selections join Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which was announced Wednesday as a spotlight gala screening on Oct. 2. More info about the NY Film Festival’s Spotlight selections is available here.

The 61st annual New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center, is set to run from Sept. 29-Oct. 15.