Jim Jarmusch and Lav Diaz Sparkle in New York

In addition to the many films I covered in the first installment of my two-part round-up of this year’s New York Film Festival, two in particular stood out from this year’s Main Slate. Both were from notable directors both blessed and damned by their history: one by his long oeuvre and one by his oeuvre of longueur.

Father Mother Sister Brother was this year’s Centerpiece selection and the latest from American independent legend Jim Jarmusch. Though it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, many critics appeared to damn the win — and by extension the film itself — with faint praise as merely an acknowledgment of his legendary career. That does a disservice, though, to a quietly profound film whose insights into family relationships resonate long after the screen has darkened.

Following in the footsteps of Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, Night on Earth, and Coffee and Cigarettes, Father Mother Sister Brother is an anthology film, with all three of its short stories revolving around familial interactions. In the first section, siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) visit their reclusive father (Tom Waits) in New Jersey. As amusingly awkward as their conversations are, a hilarious concluding twist suggests the father may not be as hapless as he seems in their presence. By contrast, the afternoon-tea session that makes up much of the Dublin-set second section, featuring sisters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) catching up with their mother (Charlotte Rampling), is full of barely suppressed tension borne out of sibling rivalry and a matriarch who may know more about her daughters’ private lives than she lets on. There are no parental figures, however, in the third section; instead, siblings Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) travel around Paris tending to their late parents’ affairs and discover much about their existences they didn’t know about when they were still alive.

Individually, each segment might seem narratively slight, though the way Jarmusch and his actors nail the halting rhythms and fraught interpersonal dynamics of characters trying to avoid confrontation for the sake of decorum in the first two segments should not be gainsaid. Here, though, is a film that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Father Mother Sister Brother overflows with gentle wisdom about how families are ultimately all we have, even if they sometimes threaten to drive us nuts. It’s relatable in the best way, since Jarmusch, in his usual wry and deadpan fashion, allows us to unearth such connections organically.

Fittingly, the film is scheduled for a limited release on Christmas Eve, December 24, a time of year when we see our beloved and aggravating families.

Rather than a series of cozy intimacies, the world is the stage for Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz in his latest film Magellan. Diaz has never made easy accessibility a part of his aesthetic. Even putting aside the extreme lengths of some of his previous films — his 2016 A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery clocks in at just over eight hours, while his 2004 film Evolution of a Filipino Family extends beyond 10 — Diaz’s penchant for long takes and stationary camera set-ups deliberately limit easy audience identification. Magellan may be “only” 160 minutes long, and represents his first film featuring a big-name star in the title role, Gael García Bernal, but otherwise, there is no sense of compromise in its immaculately composed frames and emotional distance.

By presenting a series of episodes in Ferdinand Magellan’s life, a distinctly un-romantic portrait of the Portuguese explorer gradually emerges. Most of the film is set during his famous voyage of circumnavigation that started in Spain in 1519 and ended for him in the Philippines in 1521, where he died in battle at the hands of natives who resisted his attempts to convert them to Christianity. One scene in which Magellan confesses to a priest his misgivings about ordering the deaths of two male shipmates caught having sex with one other before he goes on to ask the priest to give up the names of potential traitors most potently indicates Diaz’s somewhat dialectical approach to depicting Magellan’s combination of spiritual belief and worldly megalomania. A supporting character — Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), a Malaysian slave bought by Magellan who becomes his Westernized right-hand man — acts as a counterweight to Magellan’s increasing colonialist madness, especially when he privately professes to trying to hold onto his own former cultural identity.

All of this might have made for a dry experience were it not for the painterly beauty of Diaz and Arthur Tort’s cinematography, which, along Diaz’s immaculate production design and Célia Fernandez and Kim Perez’s costumes, helps bring an immediacy to this period spectacle. Diaz never allows the sterling visual qualities to overwhelm the film’s character observation and thematic heft. In a festival that was full of sharp colonialist critiques (see also Lucrecia Martel’s Landmarks, mentioned in my previous piece; and German filmmaker Ulrich Köhler’s academic yet intriguing Gavagai), Magellan was the subtlest but also arguably the most pointed.