McCarthy’s film spotlights (sorry!) a real-life 1980 congressional meeting on climate change that took place over three sessions in a St. Petersberg, Fla., hotel conference room. The meeting is chaired by Tom Jorling (Rudd) and attended by a slew of people including David Slade (Giamatti), the director of the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide and Climate Research program, MIT nuclear engineer Dr. David Rose (Turturro), and Edith Brown Weiss (Maslany), an environmental lawyer at odds with Dr. Rose.
Also present is Jorling’s friend Rafe Pomerance (a feisty Evan Peters), a passionate environmental lobbyist who wants to throw truth bombs at the committee to get them to agree that something needs to be done about global warming. Much of the tension in “A Statement” comes from us waiting for the moment Rafe finally cuts loose.
Readers know I love movies about process; that is, detailed information and scenes about how something gets done. But “A Statement” may have a bit too much process for me! As dialogue, McCarthy uses much of the actual minutes from this meeting. We see some of these words superimposed on the screen on occasion. It never gets dull, but it might be more than you’re willing to endure. The actors keep the film from becoming a slog, especially Giamatti and Turturro, the latter of whom has a goofy dance scene that shows a different side of his character.
Turturro is also dancing (and costarring with Maslany) in “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.” This time, however, it’s a beautifully choreographed two-minute bop to Odyssey’s immortal disco classic, “Native New Yorker.” I won’t tell you why he’s dancing, but the scene moved me to tears. If there’s any justice, this scene will be the actor’s Oscar night clip.
As Harry, the guy in the title, Turturro headlines a love letter to all five boroughs of New York City that costars Steve Buscemi as a pawn shop owner and Maslany as Turturro’s estranged daughter. She has one scene in the movie, and it’s one of the great one-sceners in recent memory.
Also along for the ride is Giancarlo Esposito as a cop who once arrested Harry. This surprise reunion of “Do the Right Thing”’s Buggin Out and Pino earned gasps and approved applause from my NYFF audience.
The plot of “Pickpocket” is the only standard thing about it. Harry picks the wrong pocket and pays a price for it. Everything surrounding this plot, and how it’s executed, is what makes this movie special. At the Q&A, writer-director Noah Segan read my mind when he said one of his major influences was “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.” I’ll go one step farther: “Pickpocket” is to New York City what “Coyle” is to Boston. I’ll say more in my review when the film opens on Oct. 30 in Boston.
Men running from or dealing with their pasts was a recurring theme at this year’s NYFF. Two films I saw took radically different approaches to their stories.
“Fatherland,” the latest from “Cold War” director Pawel Pawlikowski, follows real-life author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a road trip back to their native Germany after World War II. Like Pawlikowski’s other films, this one is shot in black and white and in the Academy aspect ratio. Unlike the director’s other works, this one has a bitter sense of humor that is both funny and wounding.
Zischler and Hüller are very good, as is August Diehl (“Inglorious Basterds”) as Erika’s brother Klaus, the son Thomas wants little to do with, even after Klaus takes his own life. At 82 minutes with end credits, “Fatherland” was a brisk breath of fresh air at a festival where the average movie runtime was two-plus hours.
I would love to hear what my colleague A.Z. Madonna, the Globe’s classical music critic, thinks of “Behemoth!,” a movie about a cellist who went from playing in the Boston Symphony Orchestra to being a last-minute substitute on a film scoring session. After my screening, I overheard grumbles about Pascal’s cello playing, and these folks would know — this movie was being projected at Lincoln Center.
Writer-director Tony Gilroy (“Andor”) moves us through the life of Alex Serian (Pascal), a well-known cellist who once played with orchestras in Chicago and Boston. He has been assigned to the scoring of a film called “Behemoth!” when this film opens. Gilroy stages Alex’s story like a series of orchestral movements, hopping back and forth in time. The conceit never becomes tiresome.
The behind-the-scenes look at movie scoring is something I haven’t seen in movies before, and Gilroy sweetens the pot by showing us sessions from several types of movies. For each of these scenes, he commissioned a veteran composer — nine in all — to write fragments of a score. You’ll hear compositions by Alan Silvestri (“Forrest Gump”), Michael Giacchino (“Up”), and others.
Eva Victor and Olivia Wilde play two vastly different women in Alex’s life. Wilde’s stalker character is actually quite insane, but the actor steals every scene she’s in. Will Arnett is also part of the cast as Alex’s brother, Andy.
I enjoyed “Behemoth!” a lot and yes, the exclamation point is in the title.
Closing out this year’s NYFF was “14th,” Ava DuVernay’s follow-up to her superb 2016 documentary, “13th.” That movie opened the New York Film Festival that year. While not as tightly constructed as “13th,” this film about the origins of the 14th Amendment and how today’s government is destroying its five tenets is still timely and important. Talking heads like Sherrilyn Ifill, Jasmine Crockett, and Stacey Abrams help us keep track of a barrage of information about what one person calls “The 2nd US Constitution.”
I’ll have more to say when the film is released in December, but I’m compelled to ask two questions now. One, why is Netflix releasing this informative film about current events after the midterm elections instead of before? And two, why oh why did DuVernay use AI to animate some of the old photos? With “Musk,” “Animals,” “Ink,” and other upcoming films, AI is becoming more commonplace. I’ve yet to see a use case that justifies it, and in “14th,” it mars an otherwise worthwhile documentary.
See you next year, New York Film Festival!
Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe’s film critic.
