NYFF Turns Up The Heat As ‘Godzilla’, ‘Artificial’, ‘NAZA’, ‘You Can See Everything’ Spark Festival Buzz

The New York Film Festival opens Friday night with a lineup featuring great films of 2026 along with heavy-hitting world premieres. Artistic director Dennis Lim insists the global bows are not “the be all, end all,” but if they come he credits the vibrant Big Apple audience.

“The New York audience engages with a film in a way that is meaningful to filmmakers and that creates a memorable launch for a film, so I would credit our audience for that,” Lim tells Deadline of this year’s slate, which includes Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes doc You Can See Everything, NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and world premieres from Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman biopic Artificial to Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, Tom McCarthy’s The Statement and the sequel Godzilla Minus Zero by Takashi Yamazaki.

Jonathan Glazer, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ava DuVernay will also world premiere new documentaries at this year’s NYFF, which runs through October 12.

“These films came to us and decided to premiere with us with for different reasons. It just so happens we have a certain number of them this year, which shows that we have proven in the last few years that we can be a pretty good place to launch a film,” Lim says.

NYFF’s 64^th edition opens tonight at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with James Gray’s Paper Tiger. DuVernay’s 14th, a direct follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 documentary 13th (which opened NYFF that year), is the closing-night selection.

Asked to tick down the lineup, Lim says Artificial “was in flux for a while with the change in ownership. When the film was at Amazon we did have conversations about it. It was not going to be a 2026 film. That changed when it landed at Neon” to join the indie distributor’s awards slate. Amazon dropped the nearly finished $50 million film after making a massive investment in Altman’s OpenAI, noting the project would be better served elsewhere. Neon acquired global rights in June.

Godzilla, conversely, “came pretty early, long before it was finished. There’s a tremendous amount of intricate effects work on the film. We started the conversation early in the spring. They did not do festivals with the previous film, which was a huge success for Gkids and Toho, and they were interested in doing something different with this one. We saw an unfinished version in the summer and though it would be really fun,” Lim tells Deadline.

“The Elizabeth Holmes documentary, obviously, had been in the works for a while. I knew of the existence of the film but was sworn to secrecy when they wanted to have maximum impact in Telluride. It was always understood that it would be a surprise there, and we would announce thereafter.”

You Can See Everything from A24 world premiered as a secret screening at Telluride, gobsmacking the audience. The Theranos founder allowed the filmmakers into her San Diego home with unfettered access in 2023 during the days before she reported to prison after being found guilty of defrauding investors.

Wrote Deadline’s Pete Hammond in his review: “Nothing seems to be off limits as they agree to be miced-up for at least 12 hours a day, wide-angle cameras in place to get all movements, with other cameras getting closeups. Fielder immerses himself in this weird world as someone she comes to trust, much to his astonishment, becoming so close she asks him along on that last drive to prison.”

The doc is Fielder’s feature film directorial debut. His 2023 Showtime comedy The Curse was the first and one of the few television series to world premiere in the NYFF’s main lineup, Lim recalls.

NAZA, which world premiered in Venice, was a late addition. The investigation into Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza was shot at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv where the filmmakers interviewed Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers about destruction and loss of life.

“Films are not made in vacuum, they are made by people. There has not been another year where I felt the films to be so directly in conversation with the real world, really are tackling contemporary reality head on,” Lim says. “I think whether they are documentaries or fiction, all films emerge from this world that we all live in together, the reality that we share, and they will engage with real world institutions.”

This year’s festival has set 119 films — 75 features and 44 shorts – across its Main Slate, Spotlight, Currents and Revivals sections along with a series of talks complementing the lineup.