The 2019 New York Film Festival has announced that Edward Norton’s “Motherless Brooklyn” will close out the 57th edition of the festival this coming October. The Warner Bros. drama will also screen at the Telluride Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival next month.
“Motherless Brooklyn” is only Norton’s second directorial effort after 2000’s mildly amusing “Keeping the Faith.” It stars Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Mann, and Cherry Jones.
Per the film’s NYFF synopsis: “Emotionally shattered by a botched job, Lionel Essrog (Norton), a lonely private detective with Tourette syndrome, finds himself drawn into a multilayered conspiracy that expands to encompass the city’s ever-growing racial divide and the devious personal and political machinations of a Robert Moses–like master builder, played by Alec Baldwin. … ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ is the kind of production Hollywood almost never makes anymore, and a complexly conceived, robust evocation of a bygone era of New York that speaks to our present moment.”
New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said in a statement: “Edward Norton has taken Jonathan Lethem’s novel as a jumping-off point to craft a wildly imaginative and extravagant love letter to New York, a beautifully told semi-musical hard-boiled yarn grounded in the mid-20th century history of the city. What a way to close the festival!”
The 57th New York Film Festival will run September 27 – October 13.
Warner Bros. is releasing “Motherless Brooklyn” in theaters on November 1.
I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of looking forward to the “Michael” sequel. Whether Vantoine directs it or John Logan, it doesn’t matter—it’s an inevitable sh*tshow that will result from its making and release.