At the 50th anniversary of the New York Film Festival hosted by the Lincoln Center, the theme is unification in time.

The New York Times describes it this way:

“As the New York Film Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary, its rich, heady brew of nostalgia and anticipation evokes the opening words of T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton”: “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future.”

“The festival’s official centerpiece, “Not Fade Away”is a vigorous rock-’n’-roll coming-of-age movie. Doug (John Magaro), its central character, is an aspiring rock star who physically resembles the young Bob Dylan but is no budding genius. This antiromantic reminiscence of a squabbling suburban New Jersey family (James Gandolfini plays Doug’s roughneck father) and a struggling band unlikely to succeed is opposite in spirit to a grandiloquent ode to the period like Julie Taymor’s“Across the Universe,”from 2007. In its scrappy fragmentary vision of 1960s America “Not Fade Away” shows accelerated cultural change leading to collective disorientation and bewilderment.”