Even from home, this year's New York Film Festival was a virtual celebration of cinema's power

In the very last scene of Hong Sang-soo's "The Woman Who Ran," a character does something that briefly filled me with envy: She walks into a movie theater, sits down and loses herself in the image playing on the screen.

It's a simple, exquisite moment in a picture full of them, but it feels particularly emblematic of the special longing produced by the just-concluded 58th New York Film Festival. Under normal circumstances, this lovely latest feature from the prolific Hong, a NYFF regular, would have played in a theater itself - specifically, one of the festival's signature Lincoln Center venues, the Walter Reade Theater and Alice Tully Hall. Instead, with the pandemic still raging and the festival having gone mostly virtual, "The Woman Who Ran" played at drive-in venues in New York and on home TV screens across the country, my own included. (It's being released in the U.S. by Cinema Guild.)

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