Wonders in a Grim World: The New York Film Festival’s Best Trick

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The centerpiece of the 55th New York Film Festival (running now through Oct. 15) is “Wonderstruck,” Todd Haynes’s sweet, nostalgic and beautifully photographed excursion through Manhattan in the 1920s and 1970s. The closing-night film is “Wonder Wheel,” Woody Allen’s somewhat grimmer — though also visually gorgeous — venture into the Brooklyn of the ’50s.

The echo in the titles is surely a coincidence, but it nonetheless feels like a statement of sorts, a Film Society of Lincoln Center spin on those ritualistic Oscar-night invocations of “the magic of movies.” Mr. Haynes and Mr. Allen, working with two of the finest cinematographers in the business (Edward Lachman shot “Wonderstruck”; Vittorio Storaro did “Wonder Wheel”), align the delights of cinema with other forms of hedonism and enlightenment. “Wonderstruck,” based on a children’s book by Brian Selznick, wanders through Broadway theaters, a West Side bookstore and presanitized Times Square before planting its imaginative flag at the American Museum of Natural History. “Wonder Wheel,” starring Juno Temple, Kate Winslet and Justin Timberlake, sets its melodramatic tale of love and betrayal amid the vintage beachside amusements of Coney Island.

Not that this is an escapist festival, exactly. It is, instead, a heroic feat of counterprogramming, an assertion of the wonderfulness of movies in the face of a reality determined with each day to find new ways to be awful. In some ways, the insistence on wonder is a reversal of the standard festival practice of challenging a comfortable audience with reminders of the world’s misery. There are certainly harsh stories and topical themes, but in both the main slate and the documentary sidebar there is ample room for romance, adventure, art and fun.

This includes movies that tackle painful, politically resonant subjects. Dee Rees’s “Mudbound” is a period drama (it takes place in the Mississippi Delta during and after World War II) that is unflinching and unsentimental in its dissection of white supremacy. Unlike most Hollywood movies, it regards racism less as a matter of personal wickedness — though the white characters range from grotesquely bigoted to mostly decent — than as a system of economic plunder and social domination. At the same time, Ms. Rees, aided by a superb cast (including Jason Mitchell, Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund and Mary J. Blige) rejuvenates an old Hollywood tradition of ethically rigorous, dramatically vigorous moviemaking. Sidney Lumet and Elia Kazan would recognize her as a kindred spirit.

The Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki harks back to an even older style of filmmaking. His movies, though set nominally in the present, evoke the 1930s in pacing and mood as well as in their combination of mischievous wit and emotional directness. “The Other Side of Hope,” his first feature since “Le Havre” in 2011 is a wry social-realist fable about the European refugee crisis, a funny and affecting appeal for decency in the face of suffering.

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Robin Campillo’s “BPM (Beats Per Minute)” addresses suffering with a different kind of exuberance — the heady, indignant energy of political activism. Set in the early 1990s, it follows members of the Paris chapter of Act Up through planning sessions, protests and love affairs. Mr. Campillo, who has an extensive résumé as an editor and screenwriter, is fascinated by process, by the arguments and tactical challenges that transform a group of people into an effective, but always contentious, organization. And while there are sex scenes and action sequences, the beating heart of “BPM” is the meetings, in which issues of language, timing and protocol are connected to matters of life and death.

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