The torrent of cinema that’s coming to the New York Film Festival (Sept. 25-Oct. 12) displays a thrilling array of artistry from around the world, on both sides of the camera. Arthur Harari, best known for co-writing “Anatomy of a Fall,” directed “The Unknown,” a harrowingly intense, metaphysical melodrama, set in and near Paris, where three people, after casual sexual encounters, discover that they have swapped bodies with their partners. The exotic premise is developed with relentless seriousness, even severity, extracting deep pathos from the characters’ eerie reckonings. “The Dreamed Adventure” is an oddly abstract title for the German director Valeska Grisebach’s teeming and seething drama, set in a Bulgarian border zone, where the chance encounter of a petty criminal and his long-ago girlfriend, now an archeologist, sets in motion a dangerous round of gangland maneuvers and brings to light the unresolved chaos of the country’s post-Communist nineties.

The New York Film Festival includes “The Unknown,” directed by Arthur Harari.Photograph courtesy Neon

Movies themselves are the subject of some of the festival’s most alluring offerings. Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” movingly blends playful inventiveness with the melancholy of a life’s experience. It’s a double-decker drama set in the film milieu of Madrid, where, in 2004, a female director in emotional crisis writes a script about her friends’ troubles; that story turns out to be a film-within-a-film written in 2026 by an older male director about his producer. The South Korean director Hong Sangsoo reliably makes two movies a year, and this year’s pair is among his strongest: “The Day She Returns,” shot in black-and-white, observes a middle-aged actress, newly returned to her profession after a long absence, reflecting on her art and her life in three extended interviews with young women journalists; “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” one of Hong’s most expansive and colorful films, involves a young woman, an experimental filmmaker, who visits her mother, a hard-nosed businesswoman, and gives a bold, philosophical account of her artistry, complete with enticing examples.

With “The Man I Love,” Ira Sachs confronts the AIDS crisis in New York in the nineteen-eighties; Rami Malek stars as a performance artist who is H.I.V.-positive and is struggling to première a show as his health takes a downturn. A long take of Malek singing a pop ditty as an anguished ballad is among the year’s most memorable moments in film. Of the entries I haven’t yet seen, the one I’m most impatient for is “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies,” a documentary about an idiosyncratic artist and archivist, by the Iranian director Mani Haghighi, whom I consider the world’s least-known great filmmaker; the festival screening will be its world première.

About Town

Toward the end of “Garry Starr: Classic Penguins,” directed by Cal McCrystal, a man wearing a penguin mask, an Elizabethan ruff, and nothing else dances on a stage strewn with grapes. The man is Garry Starr, a.k.a. Damien Warren-Smith, an Australian comedian whose solo show purports to stage every book of the Penguin Classics series in seventy minutes. Understand “stage” loosely; the grapes are from the “Grapes of Wrath” scene, in which Starr and an audience volunteer pelt each other with them. But the silliness is seasoned with cleverness, as when Starr beguiles viewers into redistributing wealth for “The Communist Manifesto.” There’s a thrilling unpredictability to his antics; you keep thinking, He won’t actually—and then, suddenly, he’s bodysurfing across the audience, still pantsless.—Dan Stahl (Studio Seaview; through Oct. 11.)

In the eighties, Susanna Hoffs became synonymous with the music of the Bangles, the decentralized pop-rock group that she co-founded, thanks largely to an unmistakable, infectious voice that rubber-stamped many of the band's greatest hits. The Bangles disbanded in 1989, and, in the years since, the songwriter and guitarist has settled into a probing solo career rounded out by a self-titled LP, from 1996, and a series of covers albums, with the musician Matthew Sweet, that take on classics from across the rock spectrum. Following the release of a new album, “The List,” Hoffs brings an expanded repertoire to a five-night residency at Café Carlyle.—Sheldon Pearce (Sept. 21-26.)

“Rain Storm,” from 2024.Photograph by Caleb Stein / Courtesy Palo Gallery

Caleb Stein’s excellent new book, “Down by the Hudson,” comes weighted down with text. His exhibition of some of its contents at Palo, in the East Village, keeps the focus of our attention on his black-and-white photographs, which hold it with a sense of ease that never undermines their moody soulfulness. Stein’s subject is the life in and around a swimming hole near Poughkeepsie, where the bodies are young, stripped down, and mostly male. The atmosphere is humid—not just sensual but erotic—and Stein is often close enough to touch. But his work’s power is in its restraint, so even when he’s looking at gnarled tree roots, a dangling hand, or the painterly reflections on water in motion, he’s never distracting us. He’s filling in the details, pulling us closer, and turning a show into an experience.—Vince Aletti (Through Oct. 3.)

For seven brilliant years in the nineties, the Washington punk-rock band Bikini Kill kicked up a ruckus as pioneers of the riot-grrrl movement. “When she walks, the revolution’s comin’,” Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer, howled on “Rebel Girl,” and the group seemed to embody that promise. Across six standout works (three LPs, two compilations, and an EP), the band burned bright and furious with white-hot indignation, etching feminist commandments onto bristling songs until it disbanded, in 1997. Its members didn’t play together again for two decades, but, since 2019, they’ve reconvened periodically for shows honoring a timeless back catalogue.—S.P. (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Sept. 24. Brooklyn Steel; Sept. 25. Under the K Bridge Park for CBGB Fest; Sept. 26.)

Chun Wai Chan, Sara Mearns, and KJ Takahashi in “Solitude,” by Alexei Ratmansky.Photograph by Erin Baiano

New York City Ballet’s season opens with a crowd-pleaser—“Jewels,” Balanchine’s evening-length exploration of French, American, and Russian ballet style—and ends with a farewell, for one of its most sophisticated dancers, Adrian Danchig-Waring. In week two, the company brings back Justin Peck’s “Pulcinella Variations,” a whimsical work set to Stravinsky, with fabulous, Matisse-like costumes by Tsumori Chisato. Peck will create a new pas de deux for the gala, on Oct. 1; the evening also features a new piece by the hip-hop-influenced choreographer Jennifer Archibald. Christopher Wheeldon’s elegant and mysterious “Continuum” returns, as does Alexei Ratmansky’s chilling “Solitude,” a response to the war in Ukraine.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; Sept. 22-Oct. 18.)

The world of fashion is often thought of as frivolous—more spangles than substance, more commerce than art. But a swirl of chaos, sweat, and tears goes into producing a runway collection, and even the most sanguine of designers can crack under the pressure. There is no better glimpse of the labor and the love that goes into putting together a fashion show than the 1995 documentary “Unzipped,” which follows the New York City-based designer Isaac Mizrahi as he prepares for his 1994 fall show, with “fun fur” jackets inspired by the film “Nanook of the North.” In “Unzipped,” running in a new 4K restoration at Film Forum, Mizrahi is a gleeful, gabby presence, as fluent in Old Hollywood slang as he is in supermodelese. A delight.—Rachel Syme (Sept. 25-Oct. 1.)

P.S. Good stuff on the internet: