Will World End Before or After Festival Does?

The opportunity to see two intimidating landmarks — “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” and “The Turin Horse” — is reason enough for any filmgoer with more than a passing interest in the evolution of world cinema to be grateful for the platform of the New York Film Festival. Because the chances that either movie will soon be coming to a theater near you, as they say, are next to nil, the best time to see them may be at Alice Tully Hall in the coming week.

Firat Tanis as a murder suspect in "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia," Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film with supernatural touches

The Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s stately, absorbing 157-minute police procedural, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” has only one festival screening, on Saturday. The great Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s “Turin Horse,” a 146-minute sigh of cosmic futility that he has said will be his final film, is being shown on Sunday. To say that “The Turin Horse,” the more difficult of the two, has no interest in ingratiating itself with audiences is putting it mildly. Once seen, however, it is not easily forgotten.

The other main-slate selections in the festival’s second week may be a little lighter, but that certainly doesn’t mean sunny. Two of the most highly anticipated both star the German-born Irish actor Michael Fassbender, who plays a sex addict in Steve McQueen’s “Shame” and Carl Jung, opposite Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud, in David Cronenberg’s “Dangerous Method.” Another award-seeking performance is Michelle Williams’s Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn,” the festival’s official centerpiece, which I was unable to see before press time because the finishing touches were still being applied.

“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” begins with the haunting image of a three-car caravan, viewed from afar, as it winds its way through the Turkish countryside in the dead of night. The weary travelers include policemen, a prosecutor, a doctor, grave diggers and a confessed murder suspect taking the search party to his victim’s burial site, which he has difficulty finding.

The main characters — a whimsical prosecutor (Taner Birsel), a misanthropic police chief (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) — each occupy a different moral universe, with the doctor, a Chekhovian figure, the story’s moral fulcrum. Flecked with magical realist touches and a sense of the supernatural, the film takes no shortcuts as its characters discharge their laborious and depressing duties. The autopsy of the corpse concludes the film’s sorrowful, unblinking dissection of the human condition. This third film by Mr. Ceylan to be showcased at the festival, following “Distant” in 2002 and “Climates,” in 2006, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” is, in a word, great.

“The Turin Horse” — directed by Mr. Tarr with his longtime collaborator, Agnes Hranitzky — takes its place along with Abel Ferrara’s “4:44 Last Day on Earth” and Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” (which was shown in the first week) as one of several festival movies to imagine the end of the world. In its preface, a facetious narrator tells of Nietzsche’s traumatized reaction to a carriage driver’s assault on a horse. The film, he says, shows what became of the horse.

In the bleak Hungarian plains, that carriage driver, a man of around 60 (Janos Derzsi), and his daughter (Erika Bok) go through their Spartan daily routine, as a gale howls outside their hovel. Their only food consists of boiled potatoes, peeled and eaten by hand and supplemented by palinka, a fruit brandy. As the daughter slavishly serves her father, who has only one functioning arm, the world slowly runs out of life over six days. The horse refuses to eat or drink, the well runs dry, and the light dims. Underscoring the utter gloom is a groaning minimalist soundtrack by Mihaly Vig.

By contrast, Mr. Ferrara’s sci-fi apocalypse is turbulent but shallow. The precise moment the ozone layer disappears has been calculated, and as the heavens spin with weird, misty lights, the Lower East Side neighborhood in which “Last Day on Earth” is filmed prepares for the end. The central couple (Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh) are tiresomely embattled lovers who in between fighting and clinging to each other, contact family members via Skype. The homemade montage sequences are packed with Mr. Ferrara’s usual religious imagery.

In neither “Shame” nor “A Dangerous Method” is the planet imperiled, but these films are hardly cheery. The performances by Mr. Fassbender in both convey a concentrated intensity that has already earned him comparisons to Daniel Day-Lewis.

For “Shame,” he teamed up again with the director of “Hunger,” the harrowing 2008 film about the prison hunger strike led by the Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands. Here, Mr. Fassbender’s character, Brandon, is a knotted-up Midtown Manhattanite who spends his office hours devouring pornography on the Internet and his free time in compulsive sexual pursuit. Staying with him is his emotionally unstable sister (an unrecognizable and very good Carey Mulligan), an aspiring nightclub singer who sings the slowest version of “New York, New York” you’ve ever heard.

Unsexy, despite scenes of strenuous copulation and nudity, “Shame” is a clinical portrait of a man in excruciating psychic pain for reasons that are never explored. Brandon’s every orgasm feels like an anguished death spasm. The film’s vision of Manhattan’s erotic ethos recalls Steven Soderbergh’s chilly portrait of a high-end prostitute, “The Girlfriend Experience.” You might even call “Shame” anti-sexual.
Thematically, “Shame” recalls earlier movies by Mr. Cronenberg, whose 1996 “Crash” imagined a cultish subculture of wounded car accident victims turned on by danger and mutilation. The horror-movie-like fascination with the visceral that colors many of Mr. Cronenberg’s movies is toned down in “A Dangerous Method,” a sleek, beautifully written and acted drama about the fractured mentor-protégé relationship of Freud and Jung.

Adapted by Christopher Hampton from his stage play “The Talking Cure,” which was based on John Kerr’s book, “A Most Dangerous Method,” it is a talky movie that largely transcends its stage origins because the moral and ethical disagreements between the two are so clearly laid out. And Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Sabina Spielrein, a kinky, initially demented patient who becomes Jung’s mistress and, later, a psychoanalyst, gives the movie a searing emotional spark.

This week’s roster also includes “The Kid With a Bike,” the latest neo-realist film by the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose work has been winning major prizes at the Cannes Film Festival for well over a decade. If “The Kid With a Bike” is a little softer than the typical Dardenne brothers film, any sweetness and light is just a glimmer of hope in the chaotic existence of the central character, the 11-year-old Cyril (the remarkable Thomas Doret), a rampaging child abandoned by his father and placed in a children’s home.

When a kind and caring hairdresser he meets agrees to be his part-time guardian, Cyril has a slim chance of landing safely off the streets. The movie’s jumpy, agitated style perfectly reflects his desperate hyperactivity.
In “Sleeping Sickness,” which won Ulrich Köhler a best director award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, a German doctor (Pierre Bokma) who has spent 20 years fighting an epidemic of sleeping sickness in Cameroon is visited by a young black, gay, French-born doctor (Jean-Christophe Folly) with Congolese parents who feels even more alien to the culture than the white doctor whose program he has been sent to evaluate. Provocative as it is, with evocations of “Heart of Darkness,” the movie, which is pessimistic about the ability of Western do-gooders to help Africans, feels frustratingly incomplete.

The Argentine filmmaker Santiago Mitre’s “Student,” set at the University of Buenos Aires, is the most hermetic of the week’s main slate. Entering what the movie portrays as a hotbed of ’60s-style political activism, Roque (Esteban Lamothe), a young man from the provinces, falls in love with a radical teacher. When he becomes a charismatic student leader, torn between various factions that callously manipulate him, his idealism crumbles.

The issues being debated in “The Student” don’t resonate beyond Argentina, or even the university. Even so, “The Student” conveys a variation of the same message that dominates the New York Film Festival with its high-minded austerity. Forget Hollywood escapism for a minute and visit the real world.