A still from Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall. Photograph: Courtesy of Janus FIlms View image in fullscreen A still from Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall. Photograph: Courtesy of Janus FIlms First look review New York film festival 2026 Review Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall review – Paul Thomas Anderson’s sumptuous recording is an immediate classic New York Film Festival: The Geese frontman mesmerizes in a concert film that is both swoony and austere
Adrian Horton Fri 2 Oct 2026 22.13 CEST Last modified on Fri 2 Oct 2026 22.14 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google O ne night last December, weary from a busy week and the impending doom of winter, I hurried into Carnegie Hall to witness Cameron Winter. The Geese frontman was marking the end of a breakout year with a series of rapturously received solo acoustic shows, drawing the penitent for whom the 23-year-old’s primordial voice struck some kind of destabilizing natural frequency. I had bought the ticket months earlier, after being hypnotized by Winter’s beguiling debut solo album, Heavy Metal, and sat transfixed in the rafters, far from the Brooklynite’s lanky, stygian presence before a single piano.
So far, in fact, that I assumed the maybe-camera that came on stage at one point was a bit, perhaps a jab at our incessant need to film things from a very deadpan celebrity whose only non-music interlude that evening was to wordlessly stand, stretch and mockingly fight with the stage door, as if trying to escape his own momentous show. I emerged from the event teary, charged by what felt like a communion across time, and confused by a friend’s text: “can’t wait for the cameron winter PTA doc”.
Read more PTA, of course, is Paul Thomas Anderson , the acclaimed film-maker and, it turns out, one of five camera operators (including Benny Safdie) working that evening to capture Winter’s masterly performance on film. The resulting project, Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, which premiered this week at the New York Film Festival, is very much not a bit. Shot on 35mm, with coloring so luscious even the scaffolding outside Carnegie Hall looks dignified, this 75-minute concert film manages to preserve most of what made that evening so special — the stark contrasts of Winter’s music, the mesmeric force of his baritone vibrato, the vanishingly rare power to make an audience implicitly agree to collectively ignore their phones and focus, for as long as necessary. The auteur’s second concert film is an immediate classic, memorializing, in the medium of said classics, a performance that felt less like a concert than an ancient ritual and proclamation, a stake in the ground of a young but blazing career.
Fittingly for a subject whose only address all evening was a post-encore “thank you for coming, everybody,” Anderson dispenses of virtually all bells and whistles; save a minute of exterior shots and ticket scans plus a couple of finely wrought transitions, Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall is, well, just that – the concert, straight up and gorgeously recorded, Winter’s woozy vibrato and intensity on the keys so seemingly unmediated that I felt compelled to applaud after each of the 12 songs. (The film’s brilliant music production was done by Ariel Rechtshaid, a Grammy winner for his work on albums by Vampire Weekend and Adele; a live album is soon to be released.)
View image in fullscreen Cameron Winter. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian The on-stage camera notwithstanding, Anderson et al l…