The following essay was written by a participant in the 2016 New York Film Festival Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring critics co-produced by IndieWire, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Film Comment.  From the very first night, this year’s New York Film Festival put women front and center.  Ava DuVernay became the first woman of color in the festival’s 54-year history to direct an opening night film (“13TH”).  Titles like Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” and Mike Mills’s “20th Century Women” punctuated the festival’s Main Slate, offering portraits of emotionally complex (albeit mostly white) modern women.  Actresses over 60, like Sonia Braga and Isabelle Huppert, turned in dazzling, sexy performances, beating back the standards of an industry that often prefers to throw its aging women away, as Huppert’s character Nathalie ironically remarks in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Things to Come.”

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