Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 64th New York Film Festival with You Can See Everything directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. An NYFF64 Spotlight selection, You Can See Everything is now in theaters, courtesy of A24. In this astounding new high-wire act of self-reflexivity from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, created in secret, convicted Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes becomes an entirely different kind of camera subject. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Welcome to the final daily 64th New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, we present a special two-part conversation in celebration of Ken Russell’s restored, uncensored cut of The Devils playing on 35mm for one week only starting this Friday at Film at Lincoln Center. Russell’s infamous adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s novel, about the apparent possession of a group of nuns after one accuses a priest of collaborating with the devil, is at long last available in its full, uncensored splendor. In 2010, a year prior to his passing, Film at Lincoln Center welcomed Russell for our retrospective Russellmania!, which featured a post-screening conversation on The Devils between the director and Vanessa Redgrave, now available to listen to for the first time. Then, at the 64th New York Film Festival, Mark Kermode joined NYFF Programmer Dan Sullivan to discuss the restoration, the film’s legacy, and how it continues to be embraced by new generations. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Ava DuVernay, Ambassador Jeff Flake, editor/producer Spencer Averick, producers Tammy Garnes and Paul Garnes, and Sherrilyn Ifill, founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy, join NYFF programmer Florence Almozini at a press conference to discuss this year’s Closing Night selection 14th. DuVernay follows her epochal 2016 documentary 13th with a thrillingly expansive sequel of sorts, which passionately and persuasively details how the tenets of the 14th Amendment, ratified post–Civil War, are now under systematic attack. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex. 

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Jesse Eisenberg, Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti, Halle Bailey, Bernadette Peters, and Eldar Isgandarov join NYFF Programmer Madeline Whittle to discuss The Debut. In Eisenberg’s theater-world comedy, Moore flings herself with delicious abandon into the role of a middle-aged New Jersey housewife who gets a part in a local stage musical despite having zero experience. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Welcome to the daily 64th New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Pedro Almodóvar and Milena Smit join NYFF programmer Florence Almozini to discuss Bitter Christmas. Special thanks to Carla Marcantonio for interpretation. The incomparable Almodóvar explores the artist’s tenuous relationship with fiction and reality in this film about an actress writing a script inspired by the lives of those around her—which is itself the invention of an Almodóvar-like filmmaker. Bitter Christmas will open on November 13 at Film at Lincoln Center with tickets on sale now. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Luca Guadagnino, Andrew Garfield, Yura Borisov, Ike Barinholtz, Cooper Hoffman, composer Damon Albarn, and screenwriter Simon Rich join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Artificial.  Anchored by brilliant lead performances by Garfield and Borisov, Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human drama propels audiences through the two decades of machine learning research that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex. 

Welcome to the daily 64th New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Cristian Mungiu and Sebastian Stan join NYFF Main Slate and Spotlight Selection Committee Member Justin Chang to discuss Fjord. Mungiu earned his second Palme d’Or for this searing drama starring Stan and Renate Reinsve as a married couple who have immigrated to Norway from Romania and fall under suspicion of child abuse. Fjord is Romania’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Jordan Firstman, Reggie Absolom, Diego Calva, Cara Delevingne, Colleen Camp, Eldar Isgandarov, Alaska Riley, Saturn Risin9, and Miss Benny join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Club Kid. Firstman’s wildly funny and remarkably assured feature debut about a washed-up thirtysomething New York scenester who discovers he has a 10-year-old British son swerves from irreverent satire to genuine pathos. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Tom McCarthy, Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Amy Ryan, Tatiana Maslany, and Nathaniel Rich discuss A Statement with Justin Chang. In 1980, a group of environmental activists, scientists, and policymakers convened to discuss an alarming government study on climate change. Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) re-creates this historical moment with a brilliant ensemble cast including Paul Rudd, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, and more. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Virginie Efira join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss All of a Sudden.  Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes for Academy Award–winning director Hamaguchi’s radiant new film about a nursing home director promoting a radical new care program. All of a Sudden is Japan’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards and opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 25 with Hamaguchi and Okamoto in person for sneak preview screenings November 18 and 19. Tickets on sale soon. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Welcome to the daily 64th New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Tony Gilroy, Pedro Pascal, Eva Victor, and Will Arnett join NYFF programmer Justin Chang at a press conference to discuss their NYFF64 Centerpiece selection Behemoth!. Note: spoilers are briefly discussed from 14:55 from 15:40. An American drama of uncommon intelligence, humor, and grace, the latest from writer-director Tony Gilroy stars Pedro Pascal in a career-best performance as a cellist picking up the pieces of a fractured life. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Sofia Coppola discusses Making Marie Antoinette and collaborating with Eleanor Coppola with NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen. Sofia Coppola’s dynamic craftsmanship in creating her personal vision for 2006’s Marie Antoinette (NYFF44) is on full display in this video diary shot by her mother, Eleanor Coppola, on the film’s set in Versailles in 2005. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Mike Leigh, cast members Marion Bailey, Kate O' Flynn, and Alice Bailey Johnson, cinematographer Lucy Bristow, and producer Georgina Lowe discuss Tender Loving Care with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Mike Leigh’s portrayal of overwhelmed, resilient lives in post-Brexit England should be received as one of his signature works, a film with a leveling sense of humor about the difficulty of asking for—and accepting—help in a world that continually lets us down. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Lee Chang-dong, Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung, and Cho Yeo-jeong discuss Possible Love with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Thanks to Haley Yung, Estelle Lee, and Iris Jang for interpretation. Possible Love opens at Film at Lincoln Center on October 23. Tickets on sale now. The lives of two married couples from different social strata collide in Lee Chang-dong’s brilliantly unfolding narrative about economic precarity, in which a laid-off factory worker and his wife become the camera subjects for a documentary filmmaker. Winner of the Silver Lion at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and South Korea's entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

At the 64th New York Film Festival, Chris Rock, Rosalind Eleazar, Daniel Kaluuya, Topher Grace, and Amy Landecker discuss Misty Green with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In the star-making performance at the center of Chris Rock’s L.A. odyssey, Rosalind Eleazar plays a former actress struggling to make ends meet in an unforgiving Hollywood. The marvelous supporting cast includes Rock, Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick, and more. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Welcome to the daily 64th New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss NAZA following the film's North American premiere. Directed by Abraham and Szor, two of the four co-directors of the 2024 Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, NAZA was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, revealing the systems behind Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Produced by the Guardian and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.

Welcome to the daily 64th New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Takashi Yamazaki, Ryunosuke Kamiki, and Minami Hamabe join NYFF programmer Justin Chang at a press conference to discuss this year’s Spotlight Gala selection Godzilla Minus Zero. Limited tickets are available for our final Godzilla Minus Zero screening this Wednesday in Dolby Atmos at Alice Tully Hall! An experience that demands the big screen, director Takashi Yamazaki’s follow-up to his triumphant, Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One is a supremely satisfying sequel with even more astounding effects choreography than its predecessor. The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

To kick off the 64th New York Film Festival, James Gray, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller joined NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen at a press conference to discuss this year’s Opening Night selection, Paper Tiger. They discussed the inspiration behind the drama, their approach to acting, recreating a 1980s New York City, and more. Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson star in James Gray’s brilliant New York thriller, charting the tragic fallout after a family man is pulled into a shady scheme with Russian criminals by his former cop brother. Opening Night is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a special preview of the 64th New York Film Festival, beginning next Friday, September 25 and running through October 12. NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim is joined by Jordan Raup, Associate Director of Marketing at Film at Lincoln Center, to break down the films and events you can’t miss throughout this year’s 18-day festival. Lim takes your questions from Discord and Reddit, including what a year in programming looks like, navigating the late additions this year, reflecting on the legacy of the festival, and much more. Don’t forget to subscribe for more daily filmmaker conversations throughout the festival. Tickets to this year’s festival are still available but going fast. Get yours here: https://filmlinc.org/tix The 64th New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 51st New York Film Festival in 2013 with The Immigrant director James Gray and lead actor Joaquin Phoenix, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In James Gray’s richly detailed period tragedy The Immigrant, set in a dusty, sepia-toned 1920s Manhattan, a young Polish immigrant (Marion Cotillard) is caught in a dangerous battle of wills with a shady burlesque manager (Joaquin Phoenix). James Gray returns to the New York Film Festival with this year’s Opening Night selection Paper Tiger. NYFF64 tickets will go on sale this Tuesday, Sept. 15 at noon, with pre-sale access for FLC members and Pass holders. Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from 2022 with the great British filmmaker Mike Leigh as he discusses his 1993 film: the NYFF31 selection Naked. Mike Leigh returns to the New York Film Festival with his final film, Tender Loving Care, at the 64th New York Film Festival this September and October. Secure your seats with an NYFF64 Pass at filmlinc.org/passes The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Mike Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life. The story concerns Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, awarded Best Actress at Cannes), a working-class white woman whose personal and interpersonal lives are transformed when she learns that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior. Created, like Leigh’s other films, after long months of intensely collaborative improvisation, Secrets & Lies is remarkable for its lived-in warmth and humor, and above all for its unflinching honesty in capturing the everyday evasions and deceptions that can define our lives.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with the directors and lead actress of Chronovisor, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Tyler Wilson. Chronovisor will be opening at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, September 4 with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/chronovisor Ahead of the film’s release, don’t miss Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor (taking place August 28–September 3), a curated anthology of features and shorts that brilliantly wring suspense, humor, and terror from seemingly undramatizable subjects. The series serves as a great preface to Chronovisor. View the full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/bibliomania Inspired by the true story of a “fake” invention, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s Chronovisor follows a Columbia professor deep into a Borgesian labyrinth of textual clues pointing to a time-travel device rumored to have been suppressed by the Vatican.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from Opening Night of Scary Movies, the popular horror festival that just concluded its spooky 14th edition, with Buddy director Casper Kelly, producers Rafi Margules & Tyler Davidson, and lead actress Delaney Quinn, moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Buddy will be opening in select theaters beginning August 28th, courtesy of Roadside Attractions. Viewers might know Casper Kelly as the mad-genius Adult Swim auteur responsible for 2014’s viral sensation Too Many Cooks, among other fever-dream spoofs of vintage pop-culture weirdness. With his first foray into big-screen feature filmmaking, Kelly embraces a larger canvas, applying his gleefully deranged sense of humor to the uncanny, oppressive cheerfulness of a ’90s soundstage-set kids’ TV show. The plucky young live-action characters of “It’s Buddy!” pass their days (or rather, episodes) laughing and learning in a brightly-hued analog playhouse—until the titular host, a charismatic orange unicorn, turns unexpectedly violent, and the show’s hermetically sealed fantasyland descends into gore-spattered mayhem. The result is an unhinged satire in which Kelly’s trademark flair for surreal black comedy reaches dazzling new heights, here abetted by a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that includes Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, and the voice-acting talents of Keegan Michael Key and Patton Oswalt. Now please enjoy the conversation with Buddy director Casper Kelly, producers Rafi Margules & Tyler Davidson, and lead actress Delaney Quinn, moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Scary Movies XIV was sponsored by MUBI.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations: first, a special programmer’s preview of Scary Movies XIV (the popular horror festival taking place at FLC through August 20) with FLC programmer Madeline Whittle, and then we transition to a conversation about the NYFF63 Main Slate selection Late Fame featuring director Kent Jones and cast members Willem Dafoe and Edmund Donovan, moderated by the great Martin Scorsese. Late Fame is currently playing at FLC. View showtimes and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/fame Scary Movies XIV is currently running through August 20. View showtimes and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/scary Scary Movies XIV is sponsored by MUBI, the streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with The Samurai and the Prisoner director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, moderated by film critic Siddhant Adlakha. The Samurai and the Prisoner is currently playing daily at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Janus Films. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/samurai In 16th-century Japan, Lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) turns against Oda, the warlord he once served, and is besieged inside his own castle, where inexplicable crimes begin to look to Murashige and his frightened advisors like signs of divine judgment. As Oda’s invading army tightens its grip outside and suspicion infiltrates the stronghold, Murashige is forced to consult Kanbei (Masaki Suda of Cloud), the cunning strategist he has locked in the dungeon, while his wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka) and his generals try to keep the court from devouring itself. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s stately jidaigeki—adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s best-selling, Naoki Prize–winning novel and selected at this year’s Cannes Film Festival—is a tense and metaphysical whodunit with the director’s characteristic philosophical overtones, bringing the winding investigations of Cure and Serpent’s Path into a meticulously composed period piece about the manipulation of terror.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2026 edition of the New York Asian Film Festival with Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho on the tenth anniversary of the film’s release, presented on this particular evening in a new 4K restoration. Ten years later, Train to Busan is still a monster with an angry engine. Yeon Sang-ho’s breakout transforms a zombie outbreak aboard the KTX into one of the great modern action-horror rides: brutal, sentimental, and made for packed movie theaters. Gong Yoo plays a self-absorbed, divorced fund manager taking his young daughter to Busan for her birthday. Before they leave Seoul, the outbreak reaches the station, a bitten passenger makes it onto the train, and the trip becomes a car-by-car fight for survival, with fear spreading almost as fast as the virus. Ma Dong-seok became an international fan favorite here as the passenger everyone wanted on their side.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of New Directors/New Films with Lost Chapters lead actress Ena Alvarado, moderated by ND/NF selection committee member Tyler Wilson. Lost Chapters is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Several Futures. When a letter nestled deep inside her father’s library details the writing of an unknown author, the young, ambitious bibliophile Ena sets off to find his work. Is the fabled book real? Did the author even exist? Where most movies might use this to kick off a treasure hunt, Lost Chapters opens a door to Venezuela’s rich cultural history and troubled present. A master class in composition and sound design that leaves no detail to chance, Lorena Alvarado’s feature debut achieves a remarkable sense of emotional warmth from her real-life sister, father, and grandmother, whose on-screen naturalism never once lapses into mannerism.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between legendary filmmaker Elaine May and producer Julian Schlossberg as they discuss a new 4K restoration of the 1976 feature Mikey and Nicky for the film's 50th anniversary this year. Elaine May’s third feature stands apart from the rest of her oeuvre in a number of ways, not least of which is the fact that it finds her working with another paradigm-shifting actor/director in John Cassavetes. Here Cassavetes plays opposite his frequent collaborator Peter Falk, the former playing a Philly gangster who has run afoul of his boss and gone underground due to a fresh contract on his life; the latter playing his childhood friend who—unbeknownst to him—is helping with the assassination plot. Set entirely across one anxious night, Mikey and Nicky remains an eminently potent, emotionally tremulous portrait of male friendship (and male betrayal) that crackles with the raw energy of three of the era’s most indelible and uncompromising American film artists working together.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2026 edition of New Directors/New Films with Do You Love Me director Lana Daher, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Dan Sullivan. Do You Love Me is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Icarus Films. A portrait of Lebanon assembled entirely from archival footage, Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me stitches together a poetic, expansive vision of a country fragmented by military, social, and economic turmoil, turning individual documents into collective memory. It is being hailed as one of the great cinematic discoveries of 2026.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Romería director Carla Simón, moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Florence Almozini. An NYFF63 selection, Romería opens this Friday at Film at Lincoln Center with Q&As at select screenings on June 26 and June 27. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/romeria Amidst the jagged cliffs on the Atlantic coast of Galicia in Spain, 18-year-old Marina has arrived on a deeply personal mission. Having lost both of her parents at a very young age, the orphaned young woman has set off on a journey to meet her paternal grandparents and extended family for the first time. While connecting with her affectionate, teeming new clan, Marina also is forced to reconcile with the past, negotiating her idealized memories of her parents and difficult truths that have been long buried. Alternating between 2004 and the early 1980s, evoked in hallucinatory, grainy flashbacks, Romería achingly dramatizes the processes of creating new memories and holding onto fleeting ones. Carla Simón proves again with this delicate, naturalistic, and poignantly autobiographical film that she is an essential voice in international cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Rose of Nevada director Mark Jenkin and actress Mary Woodvine, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Rose of Nevada opens at Film at Lincoln Center on June 19 with select screenings on 35mm and featuring in-person Q&As opening weekend. View full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/nevada The singular Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin brings his distinctive and bold storytelling approach to his most expansive work yet. Again immersing the viewer in the uncanny environments of the small towns along the coast of Cornwall, Jenkin spins a sci-fi-tinged tale of dislocation and regeneration. In a tiny, sparsely populated fishing village, a boat that had been lost at sea 30 years ago, the Rose of Nevada, suddenly reappears portside, fully intact and without its long-missing crew. Two local neophyte fishermen desperate for work (played by George MacKay and Callum Turner) take jobs on the boat as it sets out for a good-luck return voyage. When they return, all is no longer what it once was. Shot on 16mm, this earthy, psychological portrait of a working-class community’s cyclical existence is an atmospheric plunge into the eerie. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Little Sister lead actress Nadia Melliti, moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. A 2026 Rendez-vous with French Cinema selection, The Little Sister is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Strand Releasing. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/sister Devout Muslim teenager Fatima (Nadia Melliti) lives with her loving Algerian immigrant family in Paris, but fears the inevitable fallout if her tradition-minded kin discover her identity as a lesbian. Initially wary of her own sexuality and eager to downplay it, Fatima blossoms when she meets Ji-na (Return to Seoul star Park Ji-Min), but challenges await the nascent couple. In her fourth directorial effort, Hafsia Herzi (also acclaimed for her captivating performances in The Rapture and The Secret of the Grain) rejects the clichés of queer coming-of-age stories, which so often center around tragedy and trauma. Instead, Herzi centers one young girl’s relatively drama-free journey of self-discovery and coming out, one telling incident at a time. A true discovery in her first on-screen role, Melliti won Best Actress awards at Cannes and Lumières, as well as the César Award for Best Female Newcomer, while the film took home the prestigious Louis-Delluc Prize in 2025. A Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2026 selection. A Strand Releasing release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Silent Friend director Ildikó Enyedi and lead actor Tony Leung, moderated by TIME film critic Stephanie Zacharek. Silent Friend is currently playing daily at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/friend Ildikó Enyedi, whose On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlinale and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film, returns with a century-spanning triptych that moves from 1908 to the early months of the pandemic, unfolding around an ancient ginkgo in the botanical garden of Marburg University, the fixed witness to a century’s worth of passing faces. From a young woman forcing her way into the male-dominated scientific establishment at the dawn of the 20th century to idealistic lovers in the politically turbulent 1970s, Enyedi considers how consciousness itself is historically situated, mapping the incremental rewiring of how people think and connect over time. Tony Leung anchors the 2020 chapter with a characteristically subtle, deeply felt performance as a visiting neuroscientist stranded on campus during lockdown, whose attempt to measure the tree’s electromagnetic signals—guided remotely by a French plant biologist, played by Léa Seydoux—gradually opens into a meditation on perception itself.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with With Hasan in Gaza director Kamal Aljafari, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. An NYFF63 Currents selection, With Hasan in Gaza opens in select theaters beginning May 29, courtesy of The Cinema Guild. It is 2001 in Gaza, and Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist Kamal Aljafari is traveling from north to south, accompanied by a MiniDV camera and searching for a man he met while briefly imprisoned as a teenager. Aljafari’s footage, now nearly a quarter-century old and unseen by the filmmaker himself until recently, is often tranquil: drives down the highway, walks through the market, a trip to the beach, a card game among friends. But the immediate return of Israeli shelling, captured here in detail, invokes the ever-present background of settler violence. With Hasan in Gaza is an aching witness to the beauty of this land and the struggle of its people, neither of which may soon be recognizable at all. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex while NYFF63 Currents features are sponsored by The Travel Agency: A Cannabis Store.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Christophers' lead actor Ian McKellen and screenwriter Ed Solomon as they discuss their film with FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. In Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Christophers, Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, who was once a star of London’s 1960’s and 70’s pop art explosion but hasn’t painted in decades and has been broke for years. His two estranged children (James Corden, Jessica Gunning), desperate for an inheritance, hire Lori, an art restorer and former forger (Michaela Coel), to pose as a prospective assistant in order to access 8 unfinished canvases Julian has buried deep in storage. Her plan is to complete them, then return them to storage, where they are to be “discovered” upon Julian’s death.

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation with global icon Tony Leung, tracing one of the most extraordinary screen careers of the past five decades. From his emergence in the Hong Kong New Wave to his enduring collaborations with many of the defining filmmakers of contemporary cinema, Leung reflects on his roles, working methods, and creative instincts that have shaped his singular screen presence. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming, Florence Almozini. See Tony Leung in the new feature film Silent Friend, currently playing daily at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/friend This conversation took place as part of our recently concluded retrospective The Grandmaster: Tony Leung. The series was sponsored by Criterion.

This week we’re excited to present a special episode featuring the star-studded speeches from our recent 51st Chaplin Award Gala, honoring George Clooney. Having taken place on April 27 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Gala encompassed a joyful celebration of the celebrated actor and filmmaker’s incredible body of work, featuring notable speakers and film clips, and culminating in the presentation of the Chaplin Award, an annual honor bestowed upon cinema’s most outstanding talents. The evening’s guest speakers included, in order of appearance, Emmy Award winner Julianna Margulies, Emmy Award–winning actor, writer, and director John Turturro, Academy Award winner Sam Rockwell, Emmy- and Grammy Award–winning host Stephen Colbert; Academy Award-winning producer Grant Heslov, and the man himself George Clooney.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with Agon director Giulio Bertelli. Agon is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Tyler Wilson. In Agon, three athletes—including one played by a real-life gold medalist in women’s judo—prepare for a fictional Olympiad in this elemental study of athletic discipline from first-time feature director Giulio Bertelli.  Bertelli shows how the athletes’ preparation is dominated by technologies, from arthroscopic surgery footage to simulators to video games, suggesting the dehumanization of vulnerable bodies inside the global behemoth that is modern organized sport.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with the team behind the new film Erupcja. Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, the 55th edition of New Directors/New Films took place April 8-19, with many filmmakers attending in person. In Erupcja, Charli XCX stars as a 365 party girl who wonders whether the music is finally stopping, as a weekend in Warsaw with her boyfriend resurfaces the unresolved, tantalizing excitements of an old friendship. Erupcja is now in select theaters, courtesy of 1-2 Special. The following conversation features Erupcja director Pete Ohs and cast members Jeremy O. Harris and Lena Góra, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with the team behind the opening night selection of this year’s New Directors/New Films. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, the 55th edition of New Directors/New Films takes place April 8-19, with many filmmakers scheduled to attend in person. Get tickets at newdirectors.org The following conversation features Leviticus director Adrian Chiarella and lead actors Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle. Sundance favorite Leviticus expounds daringly on the horror-movie truism that sexual desire makes you vulnerable—notably, to gruesome death. Named for the book of the Old Testament used to justify homophobia, the wrenching and terrifying feature debut from Adrian Chiarella begins with Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) breaking into an abandoned mill, their matey horseplay soon surrendering to its powerful homoerotic subtext. Fans of Heated Rivalry will appreciate how Chiarella draws out the intuitive connections that form beneath the show of machismo that the young men take pains to maintain for their traditional community—in this case, the provincial Australian town where Naim’s mother (Mia Wasikowska in a complex, calibrated performance) has relocated them, dragging him along to a local church’s praise meetings in search of fellowship. Gothic iconography lurks in Chiarella’s oppressive and foreboding widescreen compositions, and soon, after Ryan and another boy are subjected to a disturbing exorcism intended to cure them of their urges, the community’s queer youths, already picked on, begin to be picked off by a spectral killer that appears to them in the form of their forbidden love objects. Ingeniously complicating the deep interrelation between teen sexuality and slasher movie iconography, and staging his set pieces with chilling precision, Chiarella announces himself as a new Aussie horror auteur to stand alongside Jennifer Kent and the Philippous.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with acclaimed German filmmaker Christian Petzold as he discusses the NYFF50 selection Barbara (2012) in a conversation moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Make sure to catch Petzold’s latest feature, the NYFF63 selection Miroirs No. 3 currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/miroirs Set in 1980, Barbara, the first chapter of Christian Petzold’s trilogy “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems,” centers around a doctor—played by the incomparable Nina Hoss, in her fifth film with the director—exiled to a small town from East Berlin as punishment for applying for an exit visa from the GDR. Planning to flee for Denmark with her boyfriend, Barbara remains icy and withdrawn around her colleagues, particularly with the lead physician, who is hiding a secret of his own. With her patients, however, the guarded doctor is kind, warm, and protective, even risking her own safety for one of her charges. Masterfully controlled and totally absorbing, this Cold War thriller expertly details the costs of telling and withholding the truth.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Two Prosecutors director Sergei Loznitsa, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection, Two Prosecutors is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Janus Films. The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from June of 2023. In this conversation, director Béla Tarr discusses his 2000 feature Werckmeister Harmonies with Film at Lincoln Center Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini as part of Tarr’s two-day visit to FLC three years ago. FLC will present “Farewell to Béla Tarr,” a seven-film tribute to the late Hungarian filmmaker whose singular body of work stands among the most rigorous and influential in modern cinema, March 27-31. View full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/tarr Werckmeister Harmonies stands among the defining achievements of Béla Tarr’s late period and remains, alongside Sátántangó, one of his most widely celebrated works. Directed with Ágnes Hranitzky and adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, the film unfolds as a sustained immersion in a weather-beaten provincial town unsettled by the arrival of a traveling circus bearing a colossal stuffed whale—and rumors of a shadowy “Prince.” At its center is the quietly perceptive postman János (Lars Rudolph), whose wide-eyed curiosity contrasts with the mounting paranoia around him. Composed in precisely choreographed long takes and animated by Mihály Víg’s incantatory score, the film transforms rumor and unrest into a searching meditation on harmony, disorder, and the fragility of civic life. A Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Dry Leaf director Alexandre Koberidze and composer Giorgi Koberidze as they discuss their new film. An NYFF63 Currents selection, Dry Leaf opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, March 20 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/leaf This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In soccer, a “dry leaf” is a kick that produces an unpredictable landing of the ball. Shaken by the disappearance of his grown daughter, a sports photographer goes looking for her through a Georgian landscape strewn with football fields. An invisible companion in tow, he meets potential witnesses whose perspectives prove distorted or contradictory. Confirming his position as one of contemporary cinema’s most intrepid artists, director Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, NYFF59) shot the film on an antiquated Sony Ericsson phone. What might seem a perverse choice reveals itself, over Dry Leaf’s epic length, as a brilliant thematic gesture that elicits its own temporal register. Set to a haunting score by the director’s brother Giorgi, this melancholic mystery presents Georgia’s open plains and mountain regions in alien, oneiric contexts. One emerges from its transporting rhythms with a fresh perspective on the world. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Academy Award-nominated actress Lesley Manville as she discusses the new film Midwinter Break with FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Directed by Polly Findlay and based on the 2017 novel Bernard MacLaverty, Midwinter Break is a stirring meditation on faith, commitment, and the enduring power of love, as a longtime couple takes a life-changing trip to Amsterdam. The film co-stars Academy Award nominee Ciaran Hinds. Midwinter Break is now playing in select theaters,, courtesy of Focus Features.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Miroirs. No. 3 director Christian Petzold as he discusses his new film with NYFF programmer Florence Almozini. An NYFF63 selection, Miroirs No. 3 opens at Film at Lincoln Center on March 19 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. See the film and more films from Christian Petzold at our seven-film showcase from March 16-19 of the renowned German director’s signature works. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/petzold Christian Petzold’s (Transit, NYFF56) haunting, beautifully crafted new film stars Paula Beer as a pianist from Berlin who’s taken in by a mysterious woman in an isolated country house after surviving a violent car crash.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Pompei: Below the Clouds director Gianfranco Rosi as he discusses his documentary with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. An NYFF63 selection, Pompei: Below the Clouds opens at Film at Lincoln Center on March 6th with in-person filmmaker Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets now at filmlinc.org/clouds The great Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno, NYFF58) specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has in recent years experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors. In this volatile environment, Rosi finds archeologists reckoning with both uncovered ancient artifacts and the wreckage of tomb raiders, squads of diggers descending into long abandoned tunnels, emergency centers already at breaking points, and a populace experiencing a generalized daily disquietude, fearful of an eruption like the one that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. Linking modern and ancient life, Pompei: Below the Clouds alights on a specific region yet feels connected to everyone’s contemporary moment—the contemplation of the unimaginable nestled within our daily existence. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection. A MUBI release. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Rebecca Zlotowski and lead actress Jodie Foster as they discuss the NYFF63 selection A Private Life. A Private Life is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Zlotowski’s unpredictable and playful murder mystery stars an entrancing Jodie Foster, in her first French-language performance, as an American psychoanalyst in Paris whose tightly knit world begins to unravel after the sudden death of a patient. Unpredictable and loose-limbed, A Private Life, like its incandescent star in her most dexterous role in years, is a complete delight. A Private Life is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between FLC Programmer Madeline Whittle and Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers as they discuss the upcoming retrospective Looking for Ms. Keaton, taking place at Film at Lincoln Center February 13-19. This week-long showcase celebrates the late Diane Keaton, a paradigm-shifting performer whose contributions to the art and craft of screen acting cemented her legacy as an auteur in the truest sense of the word. View the full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/keaton After the conversation, be sure to listen to Diane Keaton’s acceptance speech of Film at Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award at our special Gala honoring the iconic actress from the spring of 2007. Looking for Ms Keaton is sponsored by Criterion, your trusted curator of great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between filmmakers Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers, moderated by NYFF programming advisor Antoine Thirion. Oliver Laxe’s Sirat returns to Film at Lincoln Center for a theatrical engagement beginning next Thursday, February 5th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/sirat. On top of sharing an enthusiasm for mystery, the elements, and utopias, Ben Rivers and Oliver Laxe also shared a producer and a shooting location on their latest films. Rivers’s Mare’s Nest and Laxe’s Sirât are both apocalyptic road movies; the first follows a child through a variety of haunted landscapes in Spain and the United Kingdom, while the second follows a man, his young son, and a motley group of ravers as they try to find their way out of a besieged desert on the borderlands of Morocco, near Spain. Each film is a radical enigma that invites spectators to engage with cinema sensorially. NYFF was pleased to welcome Laxe and Rivers for a wide-ranging conversation about the making of their new films and their intersecting artistic and thematic preoccupations. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Hlynur Pálmason as he discusses the NYFF63 selection The Love That Remains. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Justin Chang. The Love That Remains opens at Film at Lincoln Center this Thursday, January 29 with in-person Q&As and screenings of Pálmason‘s companion film Joan of Arc. View showtimes and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/loveremains Charting the gradual evolution of a family in the midst of an irreparable fracture, Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his feature film Godland is a poignant domestic drama that observes life’s changes with humor and whimsy, set against the majestic, ever-shifting Icelandic landscape. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we're excited to present a conversation with director Lav Diaz and lead actor Gael García Bernal as they discuss the NYFF63 selection Magellan with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Interpretation by Gil Quito. Every astonishing visual composition carries historical and political weight in the monumental new film from singular Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who mounts an absorbing story of colonial conquest and obsession, starring Gael García Bernal as Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan is now in theaters, courtesy of Janus Films. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with One Battle After Another cast member Benicio del Toro as he discusses his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's new film that’s been heralded as one of the year’s finest. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler Wilson. Paul Thomas Anderson’s most viscerally thrilling film to date is a total blast, an epic, comic adventure of the weird new America that spans years and stretches from across the treacherous rolling-hill highways of the southwest and beyond. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, but with a flavor and cinematic rush that’s pure PTA, One Battle After Another is an exhilarating, ultimately moving portrait of undying commitment to family amidst the mania of our contemporary world.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Cover-Up directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, film subjects Seymour Hersh and Camille Lo Sapio, and producers Yoni Golijov and Olivia Streisand. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Justin Chang. Cover-Up will be available on Netflix beginning December 26th. For the past six decades, Seymour Hersh has been at the front lines of political journalism in the United States. Hersh’s breakthrough reportage has brought to the public’s attention many of the most damning constitutional wrongdoings and cover-ups, from the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam to the CIA’s involvement in plots to assassinate foreign leaders to the Iraq invasion and systematic tortures at Abu Ghraib. In many cases, the revelations of his work have led to governmental reckonings and legal ramifications, yet Hersh, now 88 and surrounded by boxes of files from decades of tireless work, sees himself not as a crusader but as a citizen just doing his job. In this arresting documentary, Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, NYFF60) and Mark Obenhaus tell the wide-ranging story of Hersh (whose career has not been free of controversy itself). Though a decades-gestating project for the filmmakers, Cover-Up couldn’t have come at a more crucial moment, when freedom of the U.S. press is increasingly under fire by those in power. A Netflix release. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Father Mother Sister Brother director Jim Jarmusch and cast members Adam Driver, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Vicky Krieps, and Tom Waits. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The NYFF63 Centerpiece selection, Father Mother Sister Brother will open at Film at Lincoln Center on December 24. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/jarmusch For years, Jim Jarmusch has written, directed, and produced delicate, character-driven films. Winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, Father Mother Sister Brother is a perceptive study in familial dynamics, a feature film carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three chapters all concern the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents, which take place in the present, and each in a different country. Siblings Jeff and Emily (played by Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) check up on their hermetic father (played by Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey; sisters Lilith and Timothea (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett) reunite with their guarded novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin; and twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) return to their Paris apartment to address a family tragedy. Father Mother Sister Brother is a kind of anti-action film, its subtle and quiet style carefully constructed to allow small details to accumulate—almost like flowers being carefully placed in three delicate arrangements. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

We’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Bi Gan as he discusses the NYFF63 Main Slate selection Resurrection. Resurrection opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Thursday, December 11. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/resurrection This phantasmagoric dream machine from visionary Chinese director Bi Gan is an elusive yet monumental love letter to a century of cinema. Unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles, Resurrection is a cascade of imagery united by a luminous mythopoetic conceit: in a sci-fi-coded world where people have lost the desire to dream in the hopes of prolonging life, rogue “fantasmers” continue to stoke their imaginations and exist within unreality. From this magical premise, the film sends its ever-morphing protagonist through a series of genres, from Méliès-inflected silent fantasy to wartime thriller to con-artist buddy picture to millennial vampire romance—the latter depicted in one of Bi’s customary, and ever astonishing, single takes. Resurrection is one of the most audacious and ambitious gifts for cinematic thrill-seekers in many a moon. And before you get to that conversation between Resurrection director Bi Gan and NYFF programmer Florence Almozini, please listen to a brief programmer’s preview of our new retrospective Kōzaburō Yoshimura: Tides of Emotion, now in progress at FLC through December 11! The conversation is between FLC Programmer Dan Sullivan and FLC Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers. To view the complete schedule and secure tickets to the retrospective Kōzaburō Yoshimura: Tides of Emotion, please visit filmlinc.org/yoshimura

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with members of the filmmaking team behind the Main Slate selection BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, including director Kahlil Joseph, screenwriter Madebo Fatunde, artist Kaneza Schaal, and filmmakers Savanah Leaf and Raven Jackson, moderated by Jon-Sesrie Goff, Program Officer at the Ford Foundation. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions opens in select theaters this Friday, November 28th. Visual artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS debuted in galleries and museums across the country in 2019, immersing viewers in the imagined world of a television news network from a Black perspective. After expanding this concept into a short film, Joseph has developed it even further into a feature film, and the result is a celebration of Black life that reconceptualizes and remediates common, corporate notions of journalism. Joseph’s sprawling film is an uninterrupted gush of ideas, mixing newly shot footage and extant media, leaping from fantastical images to historical narratives, collapsing boundaries that often separate documentary and fiction. A multidimensional work of vision and ambition, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions offers an alternately riotous and meditative compendium of the Black experience. A Rich Spirit release. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation with Peter Hujar’s Day director Ira Sachs. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection, Peter Hujar’s Day is now playing daily at FLC. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/hujar FLC and Janus Films recently presented a deep-dive discussion into the inspiration behind the film and the connection between Peter Hujar and his deeply felt legacy in New York City. Held in the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, this free talk with writer/director Ira Sachs was moderated by Antonio Monda, writer and Artistic Director of the international literary festival Le Conversazioni. The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs. Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Peter Hujar’s Day is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors.

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, moderated by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Maddie Whittle. This talk is sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter. Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup center on artists confronting the passage of time: Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke as the legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart, fretful and embittered at the prospect of his one-time creative partner scaling the heights of musical-theater celebrity; Kent Jones’s Late Fame adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s novella about a once-upon-a-time New York poet, played by Willem Dafoe, who is intoxicated by the sudden attentions of a coterie of twentysomething would-be literati. Each film taps into extraordinary reserves of wit and melancholy via the contributions of their lead actors, titans of contemporary American cinema and exemplary interpreters of the cultural forces that have defined their respective generations. NYFF was thrilled to bring together Hawke and Dafoe for an in-depth discussion of their craft, their creative philosophies, and their portrayals of aging artists on the brink of an uncertain future. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between filmmakers Joachim Trier and Noah Baumbach, moderated by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Maddie Whittle. This Talk is sponsored by Deadline. NYFF veterans Noah Baumbach and Joachim Trier returned to the festival this year with a pair of films that explore how artistry, authenticity, and artifice collide in the public and private lives of star actors and famed filmmakers. In Baumbach’s charmingly reflexive Jay Kelly, an aging megastar—played, fittingly, by George Clooney—arrives at a crisis point in his career; haunted by the past and uninspired by the present, he embarks on a somewhat reckless screwball adventure with his entourage (featuring Adam Sandler and Laura Dern) in tow. Meanwhile, Trier’s Sentimental Value finds an acclaimed stage actress (Renate Reinsve) and her estranged movie-director father (Stellan Skarsgård) clashing, connecting, and introspecting over a film project that draws from their complicated lives. Dramatizing the dimensions of modern-day, larger-than-life celebrity with deft humor, both films hone in on the relationships—familial, professional, transactional—that undergird the creative process and industrial artmaking. Baumbach and Trier joined NYFF63 for a lively, probing discussion of their approaches to writing grounded, lived-in characters, and the collaborations that have shaped their own illustrious bodies of work. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Widely hailed by critics, audiences, and artists alike as one of the greatest directors working today, Martin Scorsese—the subject of Rebecca Miller’s monumental NYFF Spotlight selection Mr. Scorsese—is a lifelong trailblazer, a guiding light whose passionately committed artistic vision, ebullient cinephilia, and dedicated stewardship of film history (exemplified through his work with The Film Foundation and the World Cinema Project) have left an indelible mark on the terrain of American and global cinema for the last six decades. On the occasion of Mr. Scorsese’s world premiere, the special panel discussion On Mr. Scorsese took viewers behind the scenes of Miller’s comprehensive biographical portrait and celebrated the enduring influence and still-evolving legacy of this icon of American cinema. The discussion centered on his vibrant creative relationships with longtime collaborators in front of and behind the camera, placing those artists in conversation with fellow filmmakers whose own work bears the influence of the great auteur’s artistry and mentorship. Panelists included Rebecca Miller, Ari Aster, Michael Imperioli, and Margaret Bodde (producer and Executive Director of the Film Foundation), moderated by NYFF Talks programmer Madeline Whittle. The 63rd New York Film Festival and On Mr. Scorsese are presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, and Chase Infiniti as they discuss their hit film One Battle After Another, which was recently presented on 70mm at our Walter Reade Theater. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In One Battle After Another, washed-up revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his evil nemesis resurfaces after 16 years and Bob’s daughter goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past. Paul Thomas Anderson’s most viscerally thrilling film to date is a total blast, an epic, comic adventure of the weird new America that spans years and stretches from across the treacherous rolling-hill highways of the southwest and beyond. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, but with a flavor and cinematic rush that’s pure PTA, One Battle After Another is an exhilarating, ultimately moving portrait of undying commitment to family amidst the mania of our contemporary world One Battle After Another is now in theaters.

Welcome to the final edition of the daily 63rd New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Park Chan-wook and Lee Byung Hun join NYFF selection committee member Justin Chang to discuss No Other Choice. In his diabolical new thriller, director Park crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture, starring Lee Byung Hun as a husband and father who takes violent action after being laid off. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Director Jafar Panahi returned to the New York Film Festival for the first time in 25 years to present the Main Slate selection It Was Just an Accident, his first film since his 2022 imprisonment. NYFF was honored to invite Panahi for special conversation with none other than Martin Scorsese. The legendary filmmakers discussed Panahi's childhood, early days of filmmaking, his relationship with Abbas Kiarostami, the rebellious nature of his work, his 2025 Palme d’Or winner, and much more. Thank you to interpreter Sheida Dayani. It Was Just An Accident opens at Film at Lincoln Center on October 15 with Panahi in person. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Andra Day, and Christine Ebersole join NYFF selection committee member Florence Almozini to discuss this year’s Closing Night selection, Is This Thing On? Will Arnett and Laura Dern play a couple whose separation leads to unpredictable midlife self-reckonings, most dramatically in Alex’s wild career pivot to become a confessional stand-up comic. Director Bradley Cooper’s beautifully lived-in third feature is both lacerating and sweet-souled, funny and tender. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Claire Denis, Isaach de Bankolé, Matt Dillon, and Tom Blyth discuss The Fence with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim at the 63rd New York Film Festival. In Claire Denis’s absorbing and intimate film, set at a white-run construction site in West Africa, Albouny (Isaach de Bankolé) demands the return of his brother’s body, killed in a mysterious work accident, but the site’s foreman (Matt Dillon) is clearly hiding the truth. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Ben Stiller and Amy Stiller discuss Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim at the 63rd New York Film Festival. In this funny, moving documentary from director Ben Stiller—the most personal film of his career—he tells the story of his parents: the comedy duo of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who were a beloved mainstay of 1960s and ’70s American culture. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Harry Lighton and Alexander Skarsgård discuss Pillion with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim at the 63rd New York Film Festival. In his unorthodox queer romance, Harry Lighton crafts a film about a sadomasochistic relationship that is both transgressive and disarming, starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård in fearless performances as a mild young man and his leather-clad dom lover. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Welcome to the daily 63rd New York Film Festival podcast. Today we’re featuring two conversations with Richard Linklater and the teams of his two NYFF selections. First, NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim moderates a conversation with Linklater and Blue Moon’s screenwriter Robert Kaplow, as well asd its stars Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, and Andrew Scott, followed by a conversation with Linklater and Nouvelle Vague’s Zoey Deutch, Guillaume Marbeck, Aubry Dullin, and Michèle Pétin, moderated by NYFF programmer Florence Almozini. Blue Moon is a portrait of one crucial night in the melancholy life of legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart (played by Ethan Hawke, in a tour de force performance). The film is a surprising yet entirely fitting addition to the Richard Linklater canon. And the spirit of cinematic revolution is alive and well in Linklater’s affectionate and wildly entertaining passion project, Nouvelle Vague, which transports the viewer back to a creative landmark: the 1959 making of Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague opens at Film at Lincoln Center on October 31st, with the first week of screenings presented on 35mm. Tickets are on sale now. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex. Get tickets at filmlinc.org.

Mary Bronstein, Rose Byrne, Conan O'Brien, and Christian Slater discuss If I'd Had Legs I'd Kick You with Film Comment editor and NYFF Talks programmer Devika Girish at the 63rd New York Film Festival. The nightmarish stresses of motherhood and work are pushed to their absurdist extremes in Mary Bronstein’s stellar piece of cinematic anxiety, starring a bravura Rose Byrne (Berlinale Silver Bear winner) as a woman on the verge of something far beyond a nervous breakdown. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Welcome to the daily 63rd New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Joachim Trier, Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, and Eskil Vogt join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Sentimental Value. In Joachim Trier’s Cannes Grand Prix–winning follow-up to The Worst Person in the World, Renate Reinsve burrows to the steely core of an acclaimed stage actress reconnecting with her estranged movie director father (played by Stellan Skarsgård). The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex. Get tickets at filmlinc.org Enjoy this conversation with Joachim Trier and the cast of Sentimental Value.

Jim Jarmusch, Adam Driver, Vicky Krieps, Tom Waits, Indya Moore, and Luka Sabbat join NYFF selection committee member Florence Almozini to discuss this year’s Centerpiece selection, Father Mother Sister Brother. Winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, Jim Jarmusch’s perceptive study in familial dynamics is carefully constructed in the form of a triptych, with three chapters concerning the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents. Father Mother Sister Brother opens at Film at Lincoln Center on December 24, with tickets on sale soon. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Noah Baumbach, George Clooney, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, and Riley Keogh join Film Comment Editor and NYFF Talks programmer Devika Girish to discuss Jay Kelly. Noah Baumbach’s stellar character study gives George Clooney his best film role in years, as—fittingly—the last great movie star, who may be harboring more regrets than he cares to admit. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Kathryn Bigelow, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Noah Oppenheim, Paul N.J. Ottosson, Kirk Baxter, and Volker Bertelmann join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss A House of Dynamite, which had its North American premiere at the 63rd New York Film Festival.  The detection of an unidentified incoming missile sets in motion an escalating series of actions and reactions across all levels of the U.S. government in Kathryn Bigelow’s kinetic thriller, featuring a terrific ensemble cast led by Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, and Gabriel Basso. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Scott Cooper and Jeremy Allen White join NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen to discuss Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the Spotlight Gala selection of the 63rd New York Film Festival. Jeremy Allen White inhabits a legend in Scott Cooper’s exceptionally moving biographical drama, chronicling the early-’80s crossroads in Bruce Springsteen’s career when he crafted the intensely personal acoustic songs that would become his mythic album Nebraska. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Kleber Mendonça Filho, Wagner Moura, and Emilie Lesclaux join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss The Secret Agent at the 63rd New York Film Festival. Bacurau director Kleber Mendonça Filho returns with a thrillingly unpredictable, shape-shifting epic set in his hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, starring a magnetic Wagner Moura as a man on the run from his past. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex. The Secret Agent will open at Film at Lincoln Center on November 26.

We were delighted to welcome Kelly Reichardt, Bill Camp, Hope Davis, Gaby Hoffmann, and John Magaro to the 63rd New York Film Festival to discuss The Mastermind in a conversation with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Reichardt’s restrained and often funny anti-thriller is set against a Nixon-era backdrop of alienation and disillusionment, following a taciturn family man (Josh O’Connor) who makes the rash, largely inscrutable decision to orchestrate a heist at the local art museum. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex. The Mastermind opens at Film at Lincoln Center on October 17. Get tickets: https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2025/films/the-mastermind/

The 63rd New York Film Festival welcomed Ronan Day-Lewis, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Sean Bean for a press conference for the world premiere of Anemone, joined by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Daniel Day-Lewis roars back to the screen for his first role in eight years in this emotionally charged family drama—directed by Ronan Day-Lewis and co-written by father and son—about lives undone by seemingly irreconcilable legacies of political and personal violence on a path toward familial redemption. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Welcome to the daily 63rd New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Luca Guadagnino, Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Nora Garrett join NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen at a press conference to discuss this year’s Opening Night selection After the Hunt. In his razor-sharp new drama, Luca Guadagnino gives Julia Roberts one of the most complex and gratifying starring roles of her career as a philosophy professor whose life is thrown into chaos after her protégée (Ayo Edebiri) accuses her longtime colleague and friend (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. The 63rd New York Film Festival and Opening Night are presented in partnership with Rolex. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff Enjoy this conversation with Luca Guadagnino and the cast of After the Hunt.

This week we’re excited to present a special preview of the 63rd New York Film Festival, beginning next Friday, September 26 and running through October 13. Tickets to this year’s festival are still available but going fast! NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim is joined by Jordan Raup, Associate Director of Marketing at Film at Lincoln Center, to break down the films and events you can’t miss throughout this year’s 17-day festival, including Anemone, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Dry Leaf, Gavagai, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes, Sholay, Sirât, What Does That Nature Say to You, and more. Dennis Lim takes your questions from Discord and Reddit, including what a year in programming looks like, the state of cinema and the world in 2025, his favorite spot to sit in a theater, where to grab a bite near Lincoln Center, and much more. Don’t forget to subscribe here for more daily filmmaker conversations throughout the festival. Join Discord: https://filmlinc.org/discord Join Reddit: https://reddit.com/nyfimfestival Learn more about the festival: https://filmlinc.org/nyff The New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from the 51st New York Film Festival in 2013 with Only Lovers Left Alive director Jim Jarmusch and lead actress Tilda Swinton. Jim Jarmusch returns to the New York Film Festival this October with the North American Premiere of our NYFF63 Centerpiece selection Father Mother Sister Brother. NYFF63 single tickets will go on sale this Thursday, September 18! Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff This conversation was moderated by Amy Taubin. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston make a dashing and very literal first couple—centuries-old lovers Eve and Adam—in Jim Jarmusch’s wry, tender take on the vampire genre. When we first meet the pair, he’s making rock music in Detroit while she’s hanging out with an equally ageless Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) in Tangiers. (Long-distance spells aren’t such a big deal when you’ve been together throughout hundreds of years.) Between sips of untainted hospital-donated blood, they struggle with depression and an ever-changing world, reflect on their favorite humans (Buster Keaton, Albert Einstein, Jack White) and watch time go by, each finding stability in the other.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 13th edition of the recently concluded Scary Movies with Rabbit Trap director Bryn Chainey. Rabbit Trap opens in select theaters this Friday, September 12, courtesy of IFC Films. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Joining the likes of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie among the great troubled marriages of genre cinema, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen disappear into the roles of Darcy and Daphne Davenport, a sound engineer and his experimental musician wife, freshly decamped from London and taking up residence in an isolated cottage deep in the Welsh countryside in search of creative renewal and acoustic inspiration. When the couple set about exploring their new environs, recording instruments in tow, Darcy stumbles upon a “fairy circle” that emits a strange, unidentifiable frequency; this odd discovery is followed closely by the appearance on their doorstep of an otherworldly child who claims to live nearby and is eager to befriend the Davenports. Soon the child has become a fixture in their household, alternately ingratiating himself and raising suspicions, and exposing unacknowledged rifts and unexamined secrets that threaten to wreak psychological and spiritual havoc in the lives of his makeshift adoptive parents. Bryn Chainey has crafted a sensorially vivid, darkly beguiling debut feature that’s steeped in regional folklore, harnessing the uncanny undercurrents of occult tradition and mythology to illuminate obscure, irreducible mysteries of the human condition that stubbornly resist the flattening certainties of modernity.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with M. Night Shyamalan, the subject of our current series Night at the Movies: An M. Night Shyamalan Retrospective, on his 2004 feature The Village. Featuring 2-for-1 double bills that place Shyamalan’s features alongside a film of his own choosing, the series runs through Thursday, September 4th. View remaining screening schedule and secure 🎟️ at filmlinc.org/night This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler WIlson. Set in an isolated hamlet bordered by forbidding woods, The Village, M. Night Shyamalan’s 19th-century fable, follows a blind young woman who must decide whether to cross her community’s strict boundaries to save a gravely wounded man. Beneath its period artifice, The Village plays like a post-9/11 analogy refracted through the American Gothic tradition—evoking Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, and Irving alongside Bush-era politics in its portrait of invented monsters, fear-inducing color codes, and the high cost of fabricated innocence, secrecy, and self-containment. The result is a melancholic thriller whose emotional directness is matched by its symbolic precision, with every element working in concert: Roger Deakins’s painterly cinematography, James Newton Howard’s haunting score, and a wholly committed ensemble including Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, and Adrien Brody.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with legendary French New Wave filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet and his creative and life partner Antonietta Pizzorno as they discuss the 1976 feature, Anatomy of a Relationship, with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. This event took place as part of our recently concluded retrospective Luc Moullet: Anarchy in the Alps. Luc Moullet’s follow-up to the far-out excursions of The Smugglers and A Girl Is a Gun grounds itself in the shared everyday life of a couple. Moullet himself plays a filmmaker who struggles to earn a living practicing his vocation; his professional frustrations are matched by his apparent inability to please his intellectual wife (Christine Hébert), sexually or otherwise. Moullet and Pizzorno (Moullet’s real-life wife and creative partner) set the proceedings in spare, claustrophobic spaces, chronicling quarrels, cringe-inducing episodes, and fleeting moments of tenderness on the way to a comic meditation on filmmaking’s capacity to complicate relationships.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with FLC Programmer Madeline Whittle about the 13th edition of Scary Movies. Taking place at Film at Lincoln Center from August 15-21, Scary Movies is New York City’s premier showcase for the best in new genre (and genre-bending) cinema from around the globe alongside spine-tingling classics and rediscoveries conjured from the dark recesses of midnight-movie lore. To view the full screening schedule and to purchase tickets to this year’s edition of Scary Movies, please visit filmlinc.org/scary Scary Movies XIII is sponsored by MUBI, the global streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with cinematographer Fred Murphy as he discusses Hoosiers. Hoosiers screened as part of our recently concluded retrospective celebrating the career of the late, great Gene Hackman. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler WIlson. Few sports films land with the clarity, grit, and emotional lift of Hoosiers. Gene Hackman brings flinty, lived-in authority to Norman Dale, a disgraced coach seeking a second act in 1950s Indiana, where basketball is practically a religion. Directed with unflashy conviction by David Anspaugh and shot in real Hoosier gyms, this underdog story favors restraint over bombast, with Jerry Goldsmith’s elegiac score and a quietly shattering turn by Dennis Hopper as a washed-up assistant adding unexpected weight. At its core is one of Hackman’s most cherished performances—contained, weathered, and quietly magnetic—in a film that’s less about victory than the long, uncertain work of earning it.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of New Directors/New Films with No Sleep Till director Alexandra Simpson. No Sleep Till is now in select theaters, courtesy of Factory 25. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle. The slice-of-life indie is alive and well in Alexandra Simpson’s feature debut, recipient of a Special Mention from the jury at the 2024 Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week. While a looming hurricane spells doom for a sleepy Florida town, citizens carry on: two friends pull pranks and ponder life; another pair captures terrifying footage of the storm; a young woman harbors a deep crush. Through this fleet exploration Simpson keeps audiences on their feet, no two stories told at the exact same tempo and no composition easily anticipated. And backgrounding it all is a sun-soaked, palm tree-lined Florida that has seldom looked as beautiful as it does in No Sleep Till.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with legendary Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa as he discusses his new feature Cloud, currently playing daily at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/cloud This conversation was moderated by New York magazine and Vulture film critic Alison Willmore. Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) delivers one of his most chillingly prescient films with this riveting fusion of social satire, techno-thriller, and survival-action. Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a T-shirt factory worker, supplements his income by flipping merchandise online—dubious medical devices, counterfeit designer handbags, collectible figurines—until disgruntled customers begin organizing against him on an anonymous message board. As his profits grow and he quits his day job (even hiring an assistant), he becomes the target of a coordinated vendetta that ratchets into something increasingly brutal, absurd, yet eerily plausible. At once a pulse-pounding provocation and a cautionary tale for our atomized, hustle-economy era, Cloud—Japan’s official submission for the 97th Oscars—is a genre-bending vision of virtual grievances mutating into real-world terror, orchestrated with Kurosawa’s signature precision and nerve. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between film scholars Shana L. Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor in NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies, as they discuss a double feature of Oscar Micheaux's 1925 silent film Body and Soul and Jordan Peele's 2019 sophomore feature Us. Hailed as “a colossal achievement” and “blissfully ambitious” upon its release, Jordan Peele’s 2019 feature Us plumbed everything from American isolationist fears and labyrinthine power structures to the rich lineage of the doppelgänger motif and home-invasion thrillers. Now with the recent publication Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay by Inventory Press, in-depth footnotes, commentaries, and a constellation of images, definitions, and inspirations have untethered entirely new references orbiting the film. This past June, Film at Lincoln Center was thrilled to interpret the cosmology outlined in this book through a presentation of double features, supplementary reading material, in-person appearances from some of the book’s contributing writers, and never-before-seen 35mm presentations of Us.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from the 52nd New York Film Festival in 2014 with Inherent Vice director Paul Thomas Anderson and his very large and talented cast. For one week only from July 4-10, join Film at Lincoln Center in revisiting this great American film on 70mm film, ahead of the director’s highly anticipated new feature One Battle After Honor. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/vice This conversation was moderated by Kent Jones, former Director of the New York Film Festival. Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing Thomas Pynchon adaptation is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all in as Doc Sportello, the private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston), menaced at every turn by the telegenic police detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Among the other members of Anderson’s mind-boggling cast are Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Jena Malone.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Afternoons of Solitude director Albert Serra. An NYFF62 Spotlight selection, Afternoons of Solitude opens at Film at Lincoln Center on June 28. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/solitude This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Albert Serra trains a patient and poetic lens on the dazzling pomp and devastating brutality of bullfighting in his new documentary portrait of the charismatic Peruvian-born star torero Andrés Roca Rey. Intensely in-the-moment, Afternoons of Solitude expertly balances the visceral thrill of the battle inside the ring, pitting animal instinct against human technique, with a filmmaking style that allows the viewer to appreciate the emotional and physical toll the violence takes on both man and beast. Unflinching yet reflective, Serra’s film is a monumental depiction of the persistence of the primitive in the present day, while acknowledging the extraordinary skill of the man who puts his life and spiritual endurance at risk as he faces down rampaging nature.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with cinematographer Peter Deming, who recently joined us for two special screenings of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, courtesy of Deming’s personally owned 35mm film print. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. Most of Lynch’s later films straddle (at least) two realities, and their most ominous moments arise from a dawning awareness that one world is about to yield to another. In Lost Highway we are introduced to brooding jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) while he lives in a simmering state of jealousy with his listless and possibly unfaithful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). About one hour in, a rupture fundamentally alters the narrative logic of the film and the world itself becomes a nightmare embodiment of a consciousness out of control. Lost Highway marked a return from the wilderness for Lynch, and the arrival of his more radical expressionism—alternating omnipresent darkness with overexposed whiteouts, dead air with the belligerent soundtrack assault of industrial metal bands, and the tactile sensation that everything is really happening with the infinite delusions of schizophrenic thought. Lost Highway is a Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Meeting with Pol Pot director Rithy Panh and journalist Elizabeth Becker, moderated by FLC’s Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Meeting with Pol Pot will open at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, June 13 with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/polpot In 1978, three French journalists arrive in Cambodia to survey the country and interview its leader, Pol Pot—but after a picture-perfect arrival, cracks begin to emerge in the murderous regime’s facade of respectability. For Cambodian-born Rithy Panh, the damage inflicted upon his homeland by the Khmer Rouge has fueled a lifetime of innovative work in the vein of 2013’s The Missing Picture, which reconstructed the period’s events in part through clay-figurine dioramas. This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, is brought to life thanks to exemplary lead performances from Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï, meticulously conjuring the sights and sounds of 1978 Cambodia with the assistance of archival footage and more clay figurines. The result is a unique admixture—historical horror paired with a rich meditation on the impossibility of portraying it—that only Panh could make. A Strand Releasing release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Ghost Trail director Jonathan Millet. Ghost Trail is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/ghost This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Two years after being released from Syrian jail, Hamid (Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge—but what’s the real price of vengeance for the person seeking it? Inspired by true events, Jonathan Millet’s deeply researched thriller excavates the too-little-examined moral dilemmas and political negligence that traumatized migrants must confront amid the struggle to rebuild their lives and take control of their destinies at the margins of contemporary French society, inviting audiences to better empathize with France’s newest residents, and to better understand their place in the world—and our own. A Music Box Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Northern Lights directors John Hanson & Rob Nilsson and cast members Susan Lynch & Joe Spano. This conversation was moderated by NYFF62 Revivals programmer Dan Sullivan. An NYFF62 Revivals selection, Northern Lights is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Kino Lorber. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/lights Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, the sui generis Northern Lights marks one of the most moving and committed works of political cinema from the late 1970s. Dramatizing the formation of the populist Nonpartisan League in North Dakota in the mid-1910s, Northern Lights captures the plight of immigrant Dakotan farmers as they toil and struggle against the combined forces of industry and finance. Amid this class tension, two young lovers find themselves swept up in the tide. Shot on location (on grain-rich black-and-white 16mm) in the dead of winter and featuring an astonishing cast of non-professional actors, this handmade masterpiece remains a stirring monument to collectivity.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of the New York African Film Festival with Black Tea director Abderrahmane Sissako and producer Kessen Tall. This conversation was moderated by Film Comment editor Devika Girish. After saying no on her wedding day, Aya leaves the Ivory Coast for a new life in the buzzing “Chocolate City” of Guangzhou, China. In this district where the African diaspora meets Chinese culture, she gets hired in a tea boutique owned by Cai, a Chinese man. In the secrecy of the back shop, Cai decides to initiate Aya to the tea ceremony. Through the teaching of this ancient art, their relationship slowly turns into tender love. But for their burgeoning passion to lead to mutual trust, they must let go of their burdens and face their past. Having made its New York Premiere at Film at Lincoln Center earlier this month, Black Tea is currently playing in select theaters, courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

This week we’re excited to present a special episode featuring the star-studded speeches from our recent Chaplin Award Gala. FLC was pleased to honor Pedro Almodóvar as the recipient of the 50th Chaplin Award, presented in partnership with ROLEX, at a Gala evening on April 28. The full house at Alice Tully Hall was treated to a joyful celebration of the celebrated filmmaker's incredible body of work with hilarious and heartfelt tributes by Almodóvar's cast members, friends, admirers, and more, culminating in Dua Lipa presenting the Chaplin Award to Almodóvar himself. The evening’s guest speakers included, in order of appearance, Secretary of our Board of Directors Wendy Keys, Former Film at Lincoln Center Programming Director & head of the New York Film Festival Richard Peña, acclaimed filmmaker, writer, & artist John Waters, actress and longtime Almodóvar muse Rossy de Palma, renowned performer & artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov, Emmy Award–winning actor, director, & writer John Turturro, and global pop powerhouse Dua Lipa.

This week we’re excited to present a special programmer’s preview of our upcoming retrospective, Kira Muratova: Scenographies of Chaos, taking place in our theaters May 16-25. The episode features a conversation between FLC programmer Madeline Whittle, Marta Kuzma (Professor of Art at Yale University), and film scholar and writer Ivan Kozlenk. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/muratova Kira Muratova: Scenographies of Chaos offers a rare opportunity to explore the complete body of work of a filmmaker who remained largely unknown to American audiences during her lifetime and has only recently come into widespread international acclaim. Muratova is now widely considered the greatest Ukrainian filmmaker of the last half century—and arguably one of the most influential women directors in cinema history. Deeply fascinated by eccentric characters and linguistic deviations, Muratova honed a distinctive style characterized by surreal and unexpected repetitions, refracting the experience of an unstable reality by way of outré storytelling devices. Caustic and misanthropic in life, Muratova nevertheless was touchingly humanistic in her films, radiating childish wonder, defiant hope, and sparkling irony.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with Blue Sun Palace director Constance Tsang and cast members Ke-Xi Wu and Murielle Hsieh. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films co-chair Dan Sullivan. Blue Sun Palace is now in select theaters, courtesy of Dekanalog. For more than 30 years the Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng has forged an indelible, inimitable creative partnership with Tsai Ming-liang. Lee makes as big an impression in Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, which relocates him to working-class Queens. When wayward Taiwanese immigrant Cheung (Lee) finds his life of part-time work and light extramarital affairs shattered by violence, he connects with workers at a small Queens salon, victims themselves to the indignities forced upon strangers in a strange land. But Blue Sun Palace is no misery showcase. Intimacy and warmth co-exist with economic anxieties and deep grief that are articulated with uncommon intelligence and understanding of how adults endure any given day. In this debut feature, awarded the French Touch Prize by the jury at the 2024 Cannes Critics’ Week, Tsang shapes an immigrant’s tale, a relationship drama, a workplace comedy, and a great New York story in one.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Shrouds writer & director David Cronenberg and lead actress Diane Kruger, moderated by FLC programmer Tyler Wilson. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, The Shrouds is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets: https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-shrouds/ In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, The Shrouds is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Invention director Courtney Stephens and lead actress Calle Hernandez (moderated by FLC's Tyler Wilson) from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films. Presented by The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) takes place through April 13, and has, since 1972, showcased new and emerging filmmakers whose distinctive visions and risk-taking works highlight the vitality and potential of cinema. Personal anguish and noirish mystery are inextricably bound in Invention, wherein Callie Hernandez (who co-conceptualized the film, and plays a cross between herself and some other vision) seeks the truth about her father—an inventor of devices boasting untapped power—whose death is not what it seems. Traversing a backwoods America of oddballs, cretins, estate vultures, and even the occasional sweetheart, Hernandez’s journey is a constant reminder of how much our loved ones hide from us in life and death alike. Courtney Stephens’s years in experimental documentary cinema help turn this Super 16mm–shot investigation narrative on its head, while a commanding performance confirms Hernandez as a captivating screen performer and artist.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with Familiar Touch director Sarah Friedland and cast members Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle, and H. Jon Benjamin. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films co-chair Dan Sullivan. Presented by The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) takes place through April 13, and has, since 1972, showcased new and emerging filmmakers whose distinctive visions and risk-taking works highlight the vitality and potential of cinema. The Opening Night selection of this year’s festival, Familiar Touch is about an octogenarian named Ruth (played by Kathleen Chalfant) who has been living independently, but cracks have started to emerge: toast is placed to dry in the dish rack, confusion rests on her face, the dead are spoken of in present tense while the living (such as a son right before her) go entirely unrecognized. Her entrance into an assisted-living facility begins the strange, transcendent journey that is Familiar Touch, Sarah Friedland’s feature debut, which earned three awards at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, including the Lion of the Future, Best Director, and Best Actress for Chalfant’s astonishing turn. Friedland builds her drama through sharp honesty, and tough as its material may be, few films are so tonally flexible, so able to turn on a dime: stray moments of tenderness, humility, even absurdity poke through, with a love and care for Ruth shown by characters and creators alike. Familiar Touch portends the arrival of major directorial talent and we were honored to have it as the opening night selection of the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films. Familiar Touch will open in select theaters beginning June 20th, courtesy of Music Box Films.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Grand Tour director Miguel Gomes. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, Grand Tour is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Mubi. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/tour. In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, the uncommonly ambitious Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50; Arabian Nights, NYFF53) takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon to tell the tale of an unsettled couple from colonial England and the world as it both expands and closes in around them. It’s 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) has escaped the clutches of beckoning marriage, leaving his bemused fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), in indefatigable pursuit. Edward gives chase from Mandalay to Bangkok to Shanghai and beyond, while Gomes responds with a splendid and enthralling series of scenes that use a magic form of cinema to situate us in these places both then and now, keeping us at a knowingly exotic traveler’s distance while also immersing us in rhythm, texture, and emotional reality. Whether black-and-white or color, zigzagging or meditative in tone, scripted or captured as documentary, Grand Tour is splendid, moving, and human-scaled. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 20205 edition of the just-concluded Rendez-vous with French Cinema with Being Maria cast members Matt Dillon and Anamaria Vartolomei. Being Maria is now in select theaters, courtesy of Kino Lorber. Actors don’t choose roles,” actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal) tells his daughter Maria Schneider (Anamaria Vartolomei). “Roles choose them!” After her galvanizing performance as a young woman seeking out an illegal abortion in Audrey Diwan’s Happening (ND/NF 2022), Vartolomei delivers another indelible portrait of a woman in extremis with writer-director Jessica Palud’s second feature, moving beyond Schneider’s encounter with director Bernardo Bertolucci on the set of Last Tango in Paris, during the shoot of the infamous “get the butter” scene (which the actress repeatedly identified as a violation of her consent), to contemplate the actress’s larger life and legacy. The shoot itself is meticulously reconstructed—featuring a remarkable turn by Matt Dillon as Schneider’s significantly more famous costar and scene partner, Marlon Brando—in order to contextualize the private and public fallout from Schneider’s equally iconic and traumatizing breakout performance. Palud was herself an assistant director for Bertolucci at age 19 (the same age Schneider was during the production of Last Tango) and brings a welcome eye for complexity to an unsparing, compassionate reframing of a much-discussed incident—rooted firmly in the perspective of the actress at its center. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Who by Fire director Philippe Lesage and actor Noah Parker. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, Who by Fire is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/fire A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage (Genesis, New Directors/New Films 2019). Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage, who in recent years has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous. This conversation was moderated by NYFF selection committee member K. Austin Collins.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Film at Lincoln Center Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle, as she discusses the films featured in the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center present the 30th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, running from March 6 to March 16. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/rdv. This celebrated festival offers a dynamic showcase of contemporary French filmmaking, featuring an array of 23 films by both emerging voices—some selected as part of Unifrance’s 10 to Watch 2025 Program, a yearly initiative honoring a new generation of directors and actors who contribute to the vitality of French creation—and seasoned directors that tackle relevant and enduring themes. This selection of North American, U.S., and New York premieres celebrates the energy, innovation, and range of French cinema. The conversation was moderated by Erik Luers, FLC's Digital Marketing Manager.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with Mickey 17 writer and director Bong Joon Ho, interpreted by Sharon Choi, and moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. From the Academy Award-winning writer/director of Parasite (which was an NYFF57 Main Slate selection), Bong Joon Ho now presents his next groundbreaking cinematic experience, Mickey 17, based on the novel by Edward Ashton. The unlikely hero, Mickey Barnes has found himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job… to die, for a living. Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson as the title character (well, characters) and also stars Naomi Ackie, Academy Award nominee Steven Yeun, Academy Award nominee Toni Collette, and Academy Award nominee Mark Ruffalo. Mickey 17 will open in theaters nationwide on Friday, March 7.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, moderated by multiple-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker John Wilson. Through March 5, Film at Lincoln Center presents “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution,” a retrospective featuring an extensive selection of films spanning decades of the iconic filmmaker’s prolific career, all newly restored in 4K. With 11 of Wiseman’s films having been selected for the New York Film Festival since 1967, this series signifies a celebration of the long-standing relationship between FLC and the renowned documentary filmmaker. Once limited to 16mm film prints rarely screened in theaters, these invaluable works can now be experienced in their fullest form at the Walter Reade Theater. To view the remaining screening schedule and to get tickets, please visit filmlinc.org/wiseman.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Universal Language director Matthew Rankin, cast members Ila Firouzabadi & Pirouz Nemati, and producer Sylvain Corbeil. A Currents selection of NYFF62, Universal Language is now in select theaters, courtesy of Oscilloscope. With deadpan, absurdist charm, Manitoban filmmaker Matthew Rankin triangulates a group of interconnected storylines set in a wintry, bleakly beautiful Winnipeg. Two kids discover a bank note frozen in a block of ice, which they hope to retrieve to buy their classmates a new pair of glasses. A tour guide brings befuddled visitors on a walking tour of the city’s modest environs. A melancholy man (Rankin, in an autobiographical role) returns home from Montreal to reunite with his family after many years. Imagining a city in which Farsi is the predominant language, Rankin’s visually and narratively inventive film was inspired by Iranian films of the 1970s, frequently humanistic children’s fables, in this case transferred to a world of beige, concrete brutalist buildings and increasingly surreal, Tati-esque humor. Universal Language was the winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. NYFF62 Currents features are sponsored by Mubi.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival with Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire director Oren Rudavsky and co-producer Annette Insdorf. This conversation was moderated by Rachel Chanoff. With his unforgettable and shattering 1958 memoir Night, Elie Wiesel forever changed the way the Holocaust would be written about. A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager, the Romanian-born Wiesel became an international spokesperson and renowned author, eloquently transforming his trauma into literature of the highest and most profound order. In this enthralling new documentary, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky goes deeper into Wiesel’s philosophically abundant inner life, depicted with nuance and tenderness, and enriched by access to his personal archives. In many ways a private man despite being one of the most public voices of Holocaust remembrance, Wiesel is presented here in newly intimate ways known only to his closest friends. Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire stands as a crucial testament to an extraordinary man who helped shape our collective memory of the darkest chapter of the 20th century.

Director Zeinabu irene Davis, writer Marc Arthur Chéry, and cast members Michelle A. Banks & John Earl Jelks discuss Compensation, an NYFF62 Revivals selection, with moderator Racquel Gates. Compensation opens at Film at Lincoln Center on February 21. Learn more at filmlinc.org/compensation Inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem of the same title, Zeinabu irene Davis’s debut feature is an exploration of language, migration, illness, love, and ritual that likewise illuminates unique Black histories, cultures, and artistry. Starring Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks, the film follows two couples in different time periods between the early and late 20th century who must contend with their emotions, tensions between Deaf and hearing experiences, and the toll of structural racism on Black lives during major medical epidemics. Shot in luminous black-and-white and incorporating a rich trove of historical photos, an original ragtime score, and title cards, Compensation evokes both a sense of tragedy and a hopefulness for life that remains persistent in the hearts of Black Americans today. A Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with I’m Still Here director Walter Salles, lead actress Fernanda Torres, and Brazilian journalist & author Marcelo Rubens Paiva. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. An NYFF62 Spotlight selection, I’m Still Here is now nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Best International Feature, and Best Picture. One afternoon in 1971, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman and outspoken critic of Brazil’s newly instituted military dictatorship, was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro by government officials, told nothing more than that he must give a “deposition” to authorities, and disappeared. Adapted from his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, this overwhelming, richly realized political drama from Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) stays tightly wedded to the perspective of Rubens’s wife, Eunice (a shattering Fernanda Torres), whose indefatigable search for the truth about her husband would stretch out for decades. A devastating true story, I’m Still Here is exhilarating in its portrayal of human tenacity in the face of injustice. Featuring a deeply affecting appearance from Fernanda Montenegro, Oscar nominee for Salles’s Central Station. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui of the new hit documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. The story of Christopher Reeve is an astonishing rise from unknown actor to iconic movie star, and his definitive portrayal of Clark Kent/Superman set the benchmark for the superhero cinematic universes that dominate cinema today. Reeve portrayed the Man of Steel in four Superman films and played dozens of other roles that displayed his talent and range as an actor, before being injured in a near-fatal horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. After becoming a quadriplegic, he became a charismatic leader and activist in the quest to find a cure for spinal cord injuries, as well as a passionate advocate for disability rights and care - all while continuing his career in cinema in front of and behind the camera and dedicating himself to his beloved family. From the directors of McQueen, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, this film includes never-before-seen intimate home movies and an extraordinary trove of personal archive material, as well as the first extended interviews ever filmed with Reeve’s three children about their father, and interviews with the A-list Hollywood actors who were Reeve’s colleagues and friends. The film is a moving and vivid cinematic telling of Reeve’s remarkable story. This conversation was moderated by Melena Ryzik. Super/Man is now streaming on Max.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Hard Truths actresses Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin. A Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, Mike Leigh’s latest film Hard Truths is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/truths Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister. Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. This conversation between was moderated by Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with writer/director Robert Eggers who recently joined us for a Q&A following a screening of his highly anticipated new feature Nosferatu. Across four intensely stylish, powerfully atmospheric and richly detailed feature films, Robert Eggers has established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular auteurs. His work looks to different historical periods, folkloric traditions, and the abject and the arcane alike to craft enigmatic and utterly gripping parables about madness, the antagonism between man and nature, and desire as all-consuming compulsion. But his films, while deeply researched and steeped in worlds that themselves predate the advent of cinema, are nevertheless plainly the output of a passionate cinephile, an artist both in conversation with film history and in conversation with the the history of the occult. This is particularly evident in his latest, Nosferatu, which takes up the challenge of reinventing the story of Dracula after the seminal treatments by F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola, to name a few. This February, Film at Lincoln Center is excited to present Conjuring Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Presents, a special series made up of the films that inspired Eggers’s spellbinding new take on fiction’s most famous monster, an eclectic can’t-miss array of gothic Hollywood deep cuts, rare works of Eastern European folk horror, and captivating evocations of 18th-century England, as well as a special screening on 35mm of his own Nosferatu. Stay tuned to filmlinc.org for more information. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with author Sigrid Nunez. With her novels The Friend (winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction) and What Are You Going Through, New York–based author Sigrid Nunez has supplied the extraordinarily rich source material for not one, but two films in the NYFF62 lineup: Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Spotlight standout The Friend, starring Naomi Watts as a writer mourning the complicated loss of a beloved mentor; and Pedro Almodóvar’s Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door, which follows another writer (Julianne Moore) as she reconnects with a friend from her past (Tilda Swinton) who approaches her with an unusual request. We were honored to welcome Nunez for a special conversation about her prismatic literary meditations on grief, friendship, and the passage of time; the experience of seeing her creative work adapted into other mediums; and cinema’s alchemical capacity to both translate and transform a novel’s meaning. This conversation was moderated by A.O. Scott, critic at large for The New York Times Book Review. A New York Times Critic’s Pick, Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door is now playing at FLC. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/room NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross and Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk director Barry Jenkins. The Opening Night selection of NYFF62, Nickel Boys is now playing in select theaters, courtesy of Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios. Director RaMell Ross has crafted something of a new American masterpiece with the NYFF62 Opening Night selection Nickel Boys. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teens at a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida (inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys), Nickel Boys brings Ross’s extraordinary felicity and radical sense of perspective as a photographer of Black life in the South to a historical fiction that is as much about the trauma of racism in the U.S. as about the politics of subjectivity and spectatorship. We were thrilled to welcome RaMell Ross for a wide-ranging conversation with Barry Jenkins—another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach to depicting Blackness and the American South onscreen, including in his own Colson Whitehead adaptation, 2020’s The Underground Railroad series. NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO. This Free Talk between RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins was sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Oh, Canada director Paul Schrader. Oh, Canada is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Kino Lorber. In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Wracked with cancer, Leonard has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé (Michael Imperioli) in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Cinema becomes a confessional space as Leonard, accompanied by his stalwart wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman), excavates his own past, facing down regrets and guilt, and interrogating his own career, personal life, and political courage. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Room Next Door director Pedro Almodóvar and cast members Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro. The Room Next Door opens at Film at Lincoln Center on December 20th. Get tickets a filmlinc.org/room Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Hard Truths director Mike Leigh and cast members Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Tuwaine Barrett. Hard Truths opens at Film at Lincoln Center for an exclusive one-week running beginning December 6. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/truths Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister. Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Seed of the Sacred Fig director Mohammad Rasoulof.   The Seed of the Sacred Fig opens at FLC on November 27. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/fig A target of Iran’s hardline conservative government for his films’ criticism of the state, director Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, though he hadn’t finished editing his latest film yet. His searing drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig won a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is every bit as urgent and gripping as its real-life backstory would portend: longtime government worker Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just received a major promotion to the role of judge’s investigator, to the hopeful delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani); at the same moment, a series of student protests against the government have exploded in the streets, stoking the sympathies of their independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). The growing wedge between progressive children and traditional parents intensifies through a series of unsettling events that put Iman’s future in jeopardy. Both paranoia thriller and domestic drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is above all an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A NEON release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with A Traveler’s Needs lead actress Isabelle Huppert. A Traveler’s Needs opens at Film at Lincoln Center beginning Friday, November 22nd. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/traveler Isabelle Huppert reunites with Hong Sangsoo for their third delightful outing, this time starring as a nomadic Frenchwoman named Iris who drifts into the lives of a disconnected group of people in a Seoul suburb. In need of money, she has taken up giving French lessons, although she has no teaching experience to speak of. Cutting an ethereal figure in a straw hat, flowered sundress, and green cardigan, Iris puzzles the locals with her unorthodox methods and unyielding love for a Korean rice wine. Iris’s effect on those around her is at once familial, romantic, and pedagogical, leading to a succession of gently amusing moments of cultural confusion and curiosity. Hong’s endearing, enigmatic observational comedy is a gentle exploration of human motivation and the surprising connections between people despite—or because of—language barriers. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Berlinale. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Payal Kapadia and producer Thomas Hakim of the NYFF62 Main Slate selection All We Imagine as Light. All We Imagine as Light opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 15 with Payal Kapadia in person! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/light The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness by Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—and a newly retired coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on prosaic moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is pursued by a courtly doctor; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside resort with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actors with an unforced expressivity and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, co-directors of No Other Land, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.  No Other Land opens at FLC on November 1. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/land This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military. Headed by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham (also two of the film’s directors), the collective commits itself to filming and protesting the demolitions of homes and schools and the resulting displacement of their inhabitants, which were carried out to make way for Israeli military training ground. In addition to the indelible footage of destruction and expulsion captured by its undaunted witnesses, No Other Land serves as a moving portrait of friendship between Adra and Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world. Winner of multiple awards including the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Justin Chang.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Mati Diop on Dahomey, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.  Dahomey opens at FLC on October 25, with Q&As opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/dahomey The African kingdom of Dahomey, which ruled over its region at the west of the continent until the turn of the 20th century, saw hundreds of its splendid royal artifacts plundered by French colonial troops in its waning days. Now, as 26 of these treasures are set to return to their homeland—now within the Republic of Benin—Diop documents their voyage back, transforming this rich subject matter into a multifaceted examination of ownership and exhibition. Alternating images of nocturnal melancholy and debates among students at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi about what should be done with the objects, Dahomey brilliantly negotiates a lost past and an unsure present. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Justin Chang.

Director Robinson Devor and co-writers Jason Reid, Bob Fink, and Charles Mudede joined NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim for the world premiere of Suburban Fury at the 62nd New York Film Festival. In September 1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. Moore holds the center of this fleet and compelling nonfiction drama from protean filmmaker Robinson Devor, who lends it the feel of a 1970s thriller. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO.

Director Carson Lund and actor Keith William Richards joined NYFF selection committee member Justin Chang for the North American premiere of Eephus at the 62nd New York Film Festival.  Set in autumnal Massachusetts, sometime in the 1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant and gracefully accomplished debut feature lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league baseball teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down for the construction of a middle school. Eephus opens on March 7, 2025 at Film at Lincoln Center.

Director Steve McQueen joins NYFF62 Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Blitz, the Closing Night selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Blitz opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 1st. Tickets are now on sale: filmlinc.org/blitz An authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg, Blitz pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen to ever more impressive levels. Working on a vast scale, McQueen sets things at human eye level, telling his original tale from the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. Alternately overwhelming and tender, McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London too infrequently seen on screens.

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, author Sigrid Nunez, and cast members Naomi Watts, Sarah Pidgeon, Carla Gugino, Noma Dumezweni, Constance Wu, Owen Teague, and Bing join NYFF62 programmer Florence Almozini to discuss The Friend, a Spotlight selection at the 62nd New York Film Festival. This deeply fulfilling adaptation of Nunez’s beloved, slyly shape-shifting National Book Award winner features Naomi Watts as a novelist who finds her comfortable, solitary New York life thrown into disarray after her closest friend and mentor (Bill Murray) commits suicide and bequeaths his beloved Great Dane to her.

On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director Jesse Eisenberg, cast members Kieran Culkin and Jennifer Grey, and producers Emma Stone and Dave McCary discuss A Real Pain, a Spotlight selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In A Real Pain, cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), having drifted apart over the years, attempt to reconnect on a pilgrimage to the Polish hometown of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg’s work of compassion and maturity alternates nimbly between anxious comedy and meditative drama. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director David Cronenberg discusses The Shrouds with NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim at its U.S. Premiere. In David Cronenberg’s sly and thought-provoking latest, techno-entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger), Karsh uncovers a potentially vast conspiracy. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Luca Guadagnino, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, costume designer Jonathan Anderson, and cast members Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey to discuss Queer, the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Written in the early 1950s yet not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. In his wildly ambitious adaptation, Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55) expertly evokes the book’s post–World War II time period and cinematically translates Burroughs’s iconoclasm with panache. In a transformative role, Daniel Craig immerses himself into Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a habitual heroin user luxuriating in freedom and desiccation among a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he swoons into a headlong love affair, commencing an odyssey that will take them all the way to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high. Buoyed by go-for-broke performances from Craig and Starkey, and rollicking, unexpected supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, Queer is a dazzling showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s a film that finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet, a universal love story featuring expressionistic flights of fancy, gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism, and surprising tenderness. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. Queer opens in theaters on November 27, courtesy of A24.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Paul Schrader and cast members Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli to discuss their film Oh, Canada, which made its U.S. Premiere in the Main Slate of this year's festival. The discussion was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins. In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. Oh, Canada will be released in theaters on December 6, courtesy of Kino Lorber.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Leos Carax to discuss his film It’s Not Me, in an extended conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and director Annie Baker. In his new film, the French cinema firebrand lovingly evokes the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard, paying aptly cheeky respect to the late New Wave master, his own career, and cinema itself, rummaging through a century of movies to situate his work within a continuum of the medium. To learn more and get tickets for this year's New York Film Festival, visit filmlinc.org. Enjoy this conversation with Leos Carax and Annie Baker.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we present the press conference from this year's Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door, featuring director Pedro Almodóvar and cast members Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and John Turturro, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. The Room Next Door will open at Film at Lincoln Center on December 20. Tickets on sale soon.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, director Alex Ross Perry, producer/editor Robert Greene, and members of the band Pavement (Stephen Malkmus, Scott Kannberg, Mark Ibold, Steve West, and Bob Nastanovich) join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Pavements at its North American Premiere. Fueled by a sardonic, tricky sense of humor, Alex Ross Perry’s very funny sorta-documentary about the beloved indie rock band integrates archival footage of Pavement at the height of their cult popularity, newly shot material following them during their recent comeback tour in 2022, and a kaleidoscope of semi-scripted contemporary scenes about the shooting of a movie within the movie starring Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Nat Wolff, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, and a hilarious Joe Keery as an actor seeking awards glory. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, Jacques Audiard and cast members Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Édgar Ramírez discuss Emilia Pérez, a Spotlight selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF programmer Justin Chang. From the moment it introduces its titular antiheroine, a Mexican drug-cartel boss seeking gender-affirming surgery, this boldly genre-dissolving tour de force is predicated on the power of astonishing transformations. The most ambitious and exuberant film to date by Jacques Audiard, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, Emilia Pérez is at once a darkly funny crime drama and a jaw-dropping musical, powered by a quartet of superb actors—Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz—whose fearless performances defy every expectation. Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where its four leads also shared the Best Actress prize. A Netflix release. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, director Pablo Larraín, cast members Angelina Jolie and Alba Rohrwacher, cinematographer Ed Lachman, production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, and editor Sofía Subercaseaux join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Maria.  In an all-consuming performance at once poignant and imperious, Angelina Jolie becomes Maria Callas, the American-born, Greek opera singer whose voice and intensely dramatic life captivated millions before her death from a heart attack at the age of 53.  Maria opens in theaters on November 27 and arrives on Netflix on December 11. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, & Galen Johnson, and cast members Cate Blanchett and Denis Menochet discuss Rumours, a Spotlight selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen. The world’s wealthy democratic world leaders have come together for the annual G7 summit, trading quips and nervous smiles as they do their best to diplomatically discuss vague matters of international emergency and draft statements of import between sips of wine. Yet a major, unforeseen crisis looms on the horizon for the presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors—nothing less than potential human apocalypse, hastened by the arrival of unearthed “bog men” from the Iron Age and a giant pulsating brain perched ominously in the woods. This sci-fi pulp satire finds Canadian trickster extraordinaire Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg) and fellow Manitoban co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson in a particularly wacky mood, corralling an outstanding, starry cast—including Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Denis Ménochet, Charles Dance, and Nikki Amuka-Bird—for a merciless, midnight-movie skewering of the bureaucratic processes that govern our precarious reality. A Bleecker Street release. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On this episode of our daily 62nd New York Film Festival edition, writer-director Sean Baker and stars Mikey Madison, Karren Karagulian, and Vache Tovmasyan, join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss the NYFF62 Main Slate selection Anora. Anora opens at Film at Lincoln Center on October 18, with select screenings on 35mm through October 20 only, courtesy of Neon. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/anora This year’s rambunctious Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival is a pure shot of frenetic pleasure, a New York odyssey that is the most immersive and accomplished comic adventure yet from American original Sean Baker. In a thrilling, star-making performance, Mikey Madison plays Ani, a tough-as-nails exotic dancer from Brighton Beach suddenly thrust into the lap of luxury when she’s whisked away on a whirlwind romance with a wealthy young customer at her strip club. Baker always takes a good-natured, sociological approach to his subject matter and milieu, and here he has created an authentic 21st-century screwball comedy that tackles sex, love, class, and money with matter-of-fact directness. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, director Brady Corbet, co-writer Mona Fastvold, composer Daniel Blumberg, production designer Judy Becker, and cast members Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Alessandro Nivola, Isaach de Bankolé, Emma Laird, and Stacy Martin discuss The Brutalist, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. An accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in the U.S. and enters the orbit of an obscenely wealthy captain of industry (Guy Pearce) in Brady Corbet’s richly detailed, brilliantly acted recreation of postwar America. Interweaving a provocative tapestry of ideas around privilege, money, religious identity, architectural aesthetics, and the persistence of historical trauma, The Brutalist is an absorbing, brilliantly acted American epic that reminds us the past is always present. The Brutalist opens in select theaters on December 20th, courtesy of A24. To learn more and get tickets for this year's New York Film Festival, visit filmlinc.org/nyff

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, director RaMell Ross and cast members Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Fred Hechinger, and Hamish Linklater join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Nickel Boys, the Opening Night selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Nickel Boys screens again on October 3, 5, and 9. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff Rare is the film of a major book that maintains the power and precision of its source material while also generating its own singular aesthetic. Yet RaMell Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida, achieves just this. In breakout performances that cut to the bone, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th century. Ross, whose unforgettable Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Closing Night of New Directors/New Films, 2018) portrayed an Alabama community in moments of revelatory intimacy, has here fashioned a film of equal daring and intensity, buoyed by expressive, shallow-focus cinematography by Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), pinpoint-precise editing by Nicholas Monsour (NOPE), and deeply felt supporting performances from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, and Daveed Diggs. Inspired by actual events, this harrowing tale comes to vivid life via an ingenious visual approach that brilliantly adapts the novel’s exercise in subjectivity. Ross’s Nickel Boys sets the beauty of the natural world against the cruel realities of American racism, and confirms its maker’s status as a visionary cinematic artist. An Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios release. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow director Julia Loktev and film subjects Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, and Olga Churakova join NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen to discuss their documentary, world premiering at the 62nd New York Film Festival.  My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow screens on October 5, 6, 10, and 13. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, NYFF49), born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev ends up immersing herself with a group of young women fighting to ensure the vocalization of dissent and outspoken criticism of the country—even as they are branded by the government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives increasingly at risk as the country creeps toward war. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film, the climactic days of which were filmed in Moscow during the first week of the invasion, when most independent journalists fled the country, is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety, as well as a vital depiction of the eternal hope that so many in Russia hold for living in a democratic state. Screening in two parts: Chapters 1–3 (198m), Chapters 4–5 (124m). All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

This week we’re excited to present a special preview of the 62nd New York Film Festival, beginning this Friday, September 27 and running through October 14. Tickets to this year’s festival are still available but going fast! NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim is joined by Jordan Raup, Associate Director of Marketing at Film at Lincoln Center, to break down the films and events you can’t miss throughout this year’s 17-day festival, including Nickel Boys, The Room Next Door, Blitz, Queer, April, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, Transamazonia, Afternoons of Solitude, exergue – on documenta 14, Jimmy, The Sealed Soil, and more. Opening with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, this year’s festival will feature screenings across New York City’s five boroughs, free talks with your favorite filmmakers, stimulating panel discussions, trivia nights, and much more. Don’t forget to subscribe here for more daily filmmaker conversations throughout the festival. Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with His Three Daughters director Azazel Jacobs and cast members Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, and Carrie Coon during a special advance screening at FLC. His Three Daughters is now streaming on Netflix. From writer-director Azazel Jacobs comes this bittersweet and often funny story of an elderly patriarch and the three grown daughters who come to be with him in his final days. Katie (Carrie Coon) is a controlling Brooklyn mother dealing with a wayward teenage daughter; free-spirited Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is a different kind of mom, separated from her offspring for the first time; and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is a sports-betting stoner who has never left her father’s apartment—much to the chagrin of her half-sisters, who share a different mother and worldview. Continuing his astute exploration of family dynamics in close-knit spaces, Jacobs follows the siblings over the course of three volatile days, as death looms, grievances erupt, and love seeps through the cracks of a fractured home.  This conversation was moderated by filmmaker Tamara Jenkins.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2012 at the 50th New York Film Festival with No director Pablo Larraín and lead actress Antonia Zegers. Larraín returns to the New York Film Festival this fall with the NYFF62 Spotlight selection Maria. Don’t miss the NYFF premiere of Maria and many more great films at this year's festival. Single tickets will go on sale this Tuesday, September 17! Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote YES or NO to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for the NO persuade a brash young advertising executive, Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), to spearhead their campaign. Against all odds, with scant resources and under scrutiny by the despot's minions, Saavedra and his team devise an audacious plan to win the election and set Chile free. The conversation was moderated by Richard Peña.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2011 at the 49th New York Film Festival with The Loneliest Planet director Julia Loktev and lead actress Hani Furstenberg. Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Loktev returns to the New York Film Festival this fall with the NYFF62 Main Slate selection My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow. Single tickets to the festival will go on sale on Tuesday, September 17! Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff. In The Loneliest Planet, Julia Loktev crafts an intimate relationship film starring Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as young fiancés backpacking through the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The two characters are joined by a mountaineer, forming a trio that quietly treks across dramatic landscapes, where there is just as much said as left unsaid. Loktev dramatically expands her scope with The Loneliest Planet and in the gorgeously filmed mountains has found the perfect setting for isolated, at times suffocating drama. The conversation was moderated by Richard Peña.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2011 at the 49th New York Film Festival with the makers of the Main Slate selection A Dangerous Method: director David Cronenberg, screenwriter Christopher Hampton, producer Jeremy Thomas, and lead actor Michael Fassbender. Cronenberg returns to the New York Film Festival this Fall with the NYFF62 Main Slate selection The Shrouds starring Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger. Don’t miss the U.S. Premiere of The Shrouds and many more great films by securing your Pass to NYFF62 today at filmlinc.org/passes. From acclaimed director David Cronenberg came A Dangerous Method, a dark tale of sexual and intellectual discovery featuring two of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Carl Jung (played by Michael Fassbender) has just begun his psychiatric career, having been inspired by the great Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). When a mysterious and beautiful woman (Keira Knightley) goes under Jung's care, Jung finds himself crossing the line of the doctor/patient relationship, causing great conflict with his mentor and making Jung question his own morality in the process. The conversation was moderated by Scott Foundas.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Between the Temples director Nathan Silver and cast members Carol Kane, Robert Smigel, and Cindy Silver. Directed by New York filmmaker Nathan Silver, who co-wrote the screenplay with C. Mason Wells, Between the Temples follows Jason Schwartzman as a bereaved cantor at an upstate New York synagogue, who has lost his wife, can’t sing anymore, lives with his two mothers, and has a newfound taste for mudslide cocktails. While he keeps kosher and remains devout, his ennui-addled regression seems all but terminal until his 70-year-old grade school music teacher (played by Carol Kane) walks back into his life and becomes his new adult Bat Mitzvah student… and maybe something more.  Something like Harold and Maude by way of Mike Leigh, Silver’s ninth feature is perhaps his most accomplished film yet—a portrait of love in a time of loss that is equal parts touching, cringingly hilarious, and effortlessly strange, shot in stunning 16mm by Sean Price Williams and featuring indelible performances by Schwartzman and Kane. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2020 with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross, moderated by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Garrett Bradley (Time). The two discuss Ross’s documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which was a 2018 New Directors/New Film selection. Ross’s next feature, Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, will open the 62nd New York Film Festival on September 27.  “The American stranger knows Blackness as a fact—even though it is fiction,” says writer-director RaMell Ross. For his visionary and political debut feature, Ross spent five years intimately observing African-American families living in Hale County, Alabama. It’s a region made unforgettable by Walker Evans and James Agee’s landmark 1941 photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the impoverished lives of white sharecropper families in Alabama’s Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Ross’s poetic return to this place shows changed demographics and depicts people resilient in the face of adversity and invisibility. An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Hale County This Morning, This Evening introduces a distinct and powerful new voice in American filmmaking.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Red Island director Robin Campillo from the 2024 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Rendez-Vous and NYFF veteran Robin Campillo, whose 2017 period drama BPM: Beats Per Minute reconstructed and celebrated ACT UP’s legacy of AIDS activism in France during the 1990s, once again draws on personal history with his latest film, reaching back further to evoke a sumptuously visualized 1970s childhood spent with his military family on Madagascar. Growing up on one of the last remaining French colonial bases on the island, young Thomas (Charlie Vauselle) keeps a curious and observant eye on the adults around him, not least his parents (Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Quim Guterriez). Bonding with young Suzanne (Cathy Pham) over the Fantômette comic books, Thomas’s imagination and observational powers grow even as the world around him is about to die. Making striking use of a child’s perspective, Campillo’s carefully observed drama of a lost world is lyrical and clear-eyed in equal measure. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Good One director India Donaldson and cast members Lily Collias and James Le Gros from the 2024 edition of New Directors/New Films. Good One opens at FLC on August 9 with Q&As opening weekend. A seemingly small incident has monumental implications in the extraordinary feature debut of India Donaldson, a film of expertly harnessed naturalism and restrained emotional intensity. Seventeen-year-old high school senior Sam (a revelatory Lily Collias) has agreed to join her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy) on a camping trip in the Catskills, though she’d rather be hanging with her friends for the weekend. Affable and wise, Sam at first seems to enjoy the intergenerational bonding experience with the two divorced dads, yet the men’s own festering, middle-aged resentments begin to change the emotional tenor of the trip—until something happens that alters Sam’s perception of the men and her place in their orbit. Amidst the lush beauty and contemplative forest atmosphere in upstate New York, Good One asks provocative questions about the dynamics of family, friendship, and what it means to engage in or avoid conflict. A Metrograph Pictures release. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Customs Frontline lead actor Nicholas Tse, recently on hand for the film's North American Premiere at the 2024 New York Asian Film Festival. In this explosive Hong Kong thriller, superstars Nicholas Tse (2024 Screen International Star Asia Awardee) and Jacky Cheung ignite the screen as customs officers caught in a deadly web of arms smuggling. Tse, in a powerhouse performance that also marks his debut as an action director, plays the uncompromising Chow Ching-lai, whose unwavering dedication puts him on a collision course with the elusive mastermind behind the weapons trafficking, while Cheung, as Chow’s mentor and superior, brings a world-weary gravitas to the role. As the stakes rise and the body count mounts, Chow and his Thai counterparts race against time to thwart the shipment of stolen weapons. With pulse-pounding action, shocking twists, and a villain who seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once, this is a white-knuckle ride that will take you to the very edge of the law, a place where even the good guys can’t be trusted, and the only thing more dangerous than the criminals might be the truth itself. A Well Go USA release. This conversation was moderated by NYAFF’s Executive Director Samuel Jamier.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Dìdi director Sean Wang, who recently joined us for the 2024 New York Asian Film Festival. In his feature debut, Sean Wang, hot on the heels of his Oscar-nominated documentary short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, crafts a poignant and humorous narrative that captures the essence of adolescence in 2008 California. Thirteen-year-old Chris, aka Wang Wang (Izaac Wang), navigates the treacherous waters of teenage life, from awkward dating to ruining friendships, while discovering his passion for skateboard filming. Wang deftly employs timeless coming-of-age tropes, exposing the embarrassing and hilarious moments that define this pivotal stage. However, it is Chris’s struggle with his identity as an Asian American that elevates the film. Joan Chen and Shirley Chen deliver nuanced performances as Chris’s mother and sister, respectively, adding depth to the family dynamics. Wang’s nonfiction background lends authenticity and an insightful touch to this resonant dramedy, reminding us that the journey to self-discovery is universal, regardless of one’s background, and that the path to understanding oneself is often paved with both laughter and tears. Winner of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic and U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award: Ensemble. Dìdi opens in theaters on July 26, courtesy of Focus Features. This conversation was moderated by NYAFF’s Executive Director Samuel Jamier.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Life Ahead director Edoardo Ponti who recently joined us for the retrospective Sophia Loren: La Signora di Napoli. Sophia Loren delivers a towering performance in her son Edoardo Ponti’s 2020 adaptation of the novel Madame Rosa, which embodies the range, intelligence, and innate charisma of the legendary actress. Previously adapted in 1977 by Moshé Mizrahi, with Simone Signoret in the lead role, Ponti moves Romain Gary’s novel to Bari, Italy, where a Holocaust survivor turned children’s caretaker (Loren) forms an unlikely friendship with a bitter street kid (a spectacular Ibrahim Gueye) after he robs her. By turns tender and haunted, the storied role of Rosa is imbued here with the unmistakable wisdom of a seasoned performer, who subtly nods to her own illustrious on-screen persona with subtlety and grace. This conversation was moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between My Dinner with André lead actor Wallace Shawn and Janet Planet filmmaker Annie Baker. When Dan Talbot, the pioneering distributor and exhibitor of international art films, read playwrights Wallace Shawn and André Gregory’s script for My Dinner with André, he was so excited about the project that he helped director Louis Malle procure production funding from Gaumont. The concept was to depict an encounter between the two writers, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as they discuss mortality, money, despair, and love over a meal at an Upper West Side restaurant—according to Gregory, Malle’s one direction was to “talk faster.” By turns entertaining, confessional, funny, and moving, suffused with melancholy and joy alike, the film became a sensation at the art house upon its release, playing to packed theaters for a solid year, and went on to endure as a perennial favorite on the home video circuit. Now please enjoy the conversation between Annie Baker and Wallace Shawn.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Last Summer director Catherine Breillat and lead actress Léa Drucker from the 61st New York Film Festival. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection, Last Summer opens Friday at FLC, featuring Q&As with Breillat on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/summer One of the world’s most consistently provocative filmmakers for nearly 50 years, Catherine Breillat proves with her incendiary, compelling new drama that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels. In Last Summer, Léa Drucker stars as Anne, a lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual consent and parental custody. Seemingly happily married to kind-hearted businessman Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) with adopted twin daughters, Anne inexplicably finds herself drawn to Pierre’s estranged 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) after the boy returns home to live with them. Embarking on a passionate affair with the teenager, Anne all too willingly thrusts herself into a maelstrom of attraction, intimidation, and manipulation. Breillat’s incisive screenplay—cannily altered from the Danish erotic thriller Queen of Hearts on which it’s based—elegantly surveys the situation’s extreme power dynamics while giving the brilliant Drucker the chance to create a character who exists entirely within her own moral boundaries. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Music director Angela Schanelec following her film’s U.S. premiere in the Main Slate at the 61st New York Film Festival. Music opens at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, June 28 with introductions by Doug Tielli, the singer-songwriter featured in the film, at the 6:15pm screenings on June 28 and 29. Get tickets to Music! Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec is singularly adept at creating dramas of unexpected catharsis via the most oblique narrative strategies. Her latest film, Music, pushes this approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, Music tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death. Brought together by fate and horrible irony, Ion (Aliocha Schneider) and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) first meet in prison, where he’s an inmate and she’s a guard; they kindle a romance fomented by passion for classical music and opera, followed by marriage and children. Yet as in all tragedies, the past returns to haunt them. Inspired by the Oedipus myth, Schanelec has created an alternately austere and vivid portrait of grief and redemption through art told with her distinctive compositional rigor. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Advisor Michelle Carey.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Film at Lincoln Center Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle, as she discusses the films featured in FLC’s new series Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker. A series of 17 films handpicked by acclaimed playwright Annie Baker that engage with theater as a cinematic theme, Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Bakera runs from June 14-20 in anticipation of the release of Baker’s directorial debut, Janet Planet, on June 21. Get tickets to Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker! Get tickets to Janet Planet! Many films in the series will be shown on 35mm and Baker will join us in-person for select introductions and Q&As, including a sneak preview of Janet Planet on June 20. Opening Night of the series will feature Louis Malle’s iconic collaboration with André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, My Dinner with André (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), both presented on 35mm. Baker will also engage in a discussion with Shawn about each film’s perspective on theater as an art form and its translation to the big screen. The conversation was moderated by Erik Luers, FLC's Digital Marketing Manager.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Another End director Piero Messina from Opening Night of this year’s edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema. A melancholic, philosophical take on science fiction, Piero Messina’s ensemble drama contemplates a futuristic twist on the afterlife and its implications for those whom the deceased have left behind. Gael García Bernal stars as Sal, who has recently lost his partner Zoe in a car accident. When Sal’s sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo) suggests he use a new technology to transplant Zoe’s memories into the mind and body of a stranger (Renate Reinsve), he finds himself confronted with a new opportunity to say goodbye to his love—but at what price? A rare blend of high-concept and deep feeling, Another End is a moving work on human connection in an increasingly virtual world. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 61st New York Film Festival with Green Border director Agnieszka Holland, cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk, and cast members Behi Djanati Atai & Joely Mbundu. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. Green Border was a Main Slate selection of NYFF61 and will open in select theaters on June 19th. A Syrian family leaves the violence of their country behind, hoping to cross from Belarus into Poland and then onto the safe haven of Sweden. But, like so many lost souls, they end up caught in a political maelstrom, demonized by the Polish government and press and used as pawns in an inhumane, deadly border game. This harrowing, urgent drama from the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland constructs an intricate account of the contemporary global humanitarian crisis, expanding out to encompass the interconnected lives of security patrol officers, activist lawyers, and civilians who put themselves on the line for strangers. With the sobering and sometimes shocking Green Border, Holland reaffirms both her unyielding commitment to political filmmaking and the ability of immersive storytelling to illuminate the darkest corners of the world.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Over the Bridge director Tolu Ajayi from a recent Q&A at the Opening Night of the 2024 edition of the New York African Film Festival. Since its inception in 1993, the festival has been at the forefront of showcasing African and diaspora filmmakers’ unique storytelling through the moving image. In Over the Bridge, a man named Folarin is an accomplished investment banker with a beautiful wife and a life most people can only dream of. When a high-profile government project his company was hired to manage goes awry, he starts to question everything he’s ever known to be true. After going missing, he discovers himself in a remote fishing village and starts to put together the missing pieces—but will he ever find his way back home?

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, lead actor Hitoshi Omika, and composer Eiko Ishibashi from a recent Q&A for Evil Does Not Exist, an NYFF61 Main Slate selection currently playing in our theaters. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/evil Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana, and takes care of odd jobs for locals, chopping wood and hauling pristine well water. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, where deer peacefully roam free, is about to be disrupted by the imminent arrival of the Tokyo company Playmode, which is ready to start construction on a glamping site for city tourists—a plan, which Takumi and his neighbors discover, that will have dire consequences for the ecological health and cleanliness of their community. The potent and foreboding new film from Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, both NYFF59) is a haunting, entirely unexpected cinematic experience that reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller. Intensified by a rapturous, ominous score by Eiko Ishibashi, this mesmeric journey diverges from country-vs-city themes to straddle the line between the earthy and the metaphysical. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes from a recent advance screening of the highly anticipated new film Challengers. From visionary filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach and a force of nature who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married to a champion on a losing streak (Mike Faist, West Side Story), Tashi’s strategy for her husband’s redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against the washed-up Patrick (Josh O’Connor, The Crown)–his former best friend and Tashi’s former boyfriend. As their pasts and presents collide, and tensions run high, Tashi must ask herself, what will it cost to win? The conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a special podcast episode featuring the star-studded speeches from our recent Chaplin Award Gala. FLC was pleased to honor Jeff Bridges as the recipient of the 49th Chaplin Award, presented at a gala evening on April 29. The full house at Alice Tully Hall was treated to a joyful celebration of the actor’s incredible body of work with hilarious and heartfelt tributes by Bridges’s costars, culminating in Chris Pine presenting the Chaplin Award to the Dude himself. The evening’s guest speakers included, in order of appearance, FLC President Lesli Klainberg; Sharon Stone, who starred in two 1999 films with Bridges: Matthew Warchus’s Simpatico and Albert Brooks’s The Muse; Rosie Perez, who appeared with Bridges in Peter Weir’s Fearless, for which Perez received a 1993 Academy Award nomination; Blythe Danner, who starred alongside Bridges in the 1975 film Hearts of the West; and Chris Pine, who co-starred with Bridges in the Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water in 2016.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2024 edition of New Directors/New Films with Exhibiting Forgiveness director Titus Kaphar and lead actor André Holland. One of the contemporary art world’s most important painters, Titus Kaphar creates powerful work that is multidisciplinary in nature and profound in historical meaning, often incorporating multiple layers and sculptural dimensions to his canvases. Kaphar brings the same sense of profoundly felt dynamism to his startlingly accomplished cinematic debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness, a wrenching work of emotional depth and visual flair starring the magnificent André Holland in one of the actor’s greatest screen roles so far. Painter Tarrell Rodin (Holland) is a loving and grounded husband to singer Aisha (Andra Day) and father to young Jermaine (Daniel Berrier), but he’s violently haunted by nightmares of his childhood. While preparing for a new gallery show, Tarrell finds his life upended by the sudden return of his father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks). His mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), has forgiven La’Ron for the abuse and addiction of their family’s troubled past, but Tarrell cannot bring himself to do the same. While working on his large-scale canvases, Tarrell journeys to his past, wondering if he can alter the pain of his present. Kaphar’s film—as provocative in its depiction of unresolvable familial crises as it is about the meaning and co-opting of Black voices in the contemporary art scene—wrestles with difficult, personal questions without settling on easy answers. The conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations: the first with Stress Positions director Theda Hammel, co-writer Faheem Ali, & lead actor John Early from Closing Night of the 2024 edition of New Director/New Films, and the second with The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed director Joanna Arnow & her cast from the 61st New York Film Festival. The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed will open at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, April 26 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/feeling Our Stress Positions conversation was moderated by ND/NF selection committee member Madeline Whittle. Our The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed conversation was moderated by NYFF61 Currents programmer Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Omen director Baloji from the 2024 edition of New Directors/New Films. The sense of dread that often accompanies being around blood relatives with whom you share no real connection is brought into vivid focus in songwriter and rapper Baloji’s debut feature, Omen. Having been banished to Europe as a baby after a birthmark convinced his mother that he must be a sorcerer, Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his white Belgian fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay) embark on a family reconciliation trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The kinetic chaos of the return—missed airport transfers and traffic, bloody noses, family gatherings and judgments––sets the stage for a visceral reimmersion tale. Winner of the New Voice Prize at Cannes and selected as Belgium’s entry for the 96th Academy Awards, Omen melds the modern and the mystical in mesmerizing fashion. A Utopia release. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films committee member Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with A Different Man director Aaron Schimberg and lead actor Sebastian Stan from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films. Learn more: newdirectors.org With the hotly anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed sophomore feature, 2018’s Chained for Life, New York-based director Aaron Schimberg boldly announces himself as one of the most fearless and socially incisive new voices in American independent cinema wth the 2024 New Directors New Films Opening Night selection A Different Man. Sebastian Stan, winner of this year’s Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin Film Festival, delivers an ingeniously embodied performance as Edward, an aspiring actor with severe facial disfigurement, to whom we’re introduced as he navigates a dreary daily existence marked by discouragement and resignation. When a winsome playwright moves in next door, and an experimental medical procedure becomes available to change his face, Edward’s outlook brightens, and he jumps at the chance for a new lease on life—until the arrival of Oswald, an outgoing and warmly charismatic stranger puts his newfound “normalcy” into perspective, and his artistic aspirations in jeopardy. Schimberg’s latest is a discomfiting tour de force, a social satire that wrangles thorny questions of identity and authenticity with unflinching honesty and slyly virtuosic storytelling flair. ork pushes the envelope in unexpected, striking ways. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films co-chair Dan Sullivan.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Léa Seydoux, lead actress of the 61t New York Film Festival Main Slate selection The Beast, which will open in our theaters on April 5. The Beast opens at FLC next Friday, April 5 View showtimes and get tickets at filmlinc.org/beast A filmmaker consistently unafraid to wade through the weird miasma of contemporary life, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama; Coma, NYFF60) works from the outside in, dramatizing the psychological toll of the political and cultural world around us. Here he has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) to diagnose our acute—and perhaps eternal—feelings of estrangement and alienation. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bonello tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been intertwined, for better and worse, with a young man (George MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI and incel culture, which may recur throughout history as commonly as love and hate, The Beast, like all good science-fiction, asks essential questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow and Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by FLC's Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations. First up, with our retrospective celebrating the films of the late Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has currently running through March 31, listen to Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers discuss the career of the filmmaker with Annette Insdorf, a celebrated scholar and author of the book Intimations: The Films of Wojech Has. Get tickets to The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has retrospective at filmlinc.org/has Following that conversation, we’re happy to share a Q&A from the 61st New York Film Festival with La Chimera director Alice Rohrwacher and actors Josh O’Connor & Isabella Rossellini, moderated by NYFF Advisor Michelle Carey. With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. La Chimera opens at FLC next Friday, March 29. View showtimes and get tickets now at filmlinc.org/chimera

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Animal Kingdom director Thomas Cailley and The Pod Generation director Sophie Barthes as they discuss their playful, up-to-the-minute experiments with genre and the use of speculative fiction to examine political realities and probe timeless emotional truths. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle with interpretation by Nicholas Elliott. Thomas Cailley, whose 2014 breakout feature Love at First Fight charmed audiences with its invigorating fusion of the rom-com and coming-of-age genres, returned to Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with this year’s Opening Night selection, The Animal Kingdom, in which a darkly imaginative sci-fi premise gives way to a thoughtful study of fatherhood. When mankind is plagued with a mysterious infection that selectively mutates the bodies of ordinary people into animal hybrids, a widower and his teenage son must fight to survive in Cailley’s darkly imaginative exploration of a human ecosystem undergoing inexplicable—but potentially liberating—transformation. The Animal Kingdsom is in select theaters now, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Little Girl Blue director Mona Achache, producer Laetitia Gonzalez, and lead actress Marion Cotillard as they discuss the 2024 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection with FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. The lives and legacies of three generations of extraordinary women artists are unpacked in Mona Achache’s César-nominated hybrid documentary. Achache, herself an accomplished writer and filmmaker, turns her gaze on her mother, Carole—a writer, photographer, and actress, and the daughter of novelist and screenwriter Monique Lange (goddaughter of William Faulkner). Carole’s myriad professional achievements notwithstanding, her private life was indelibly marked by predatory behavior she experienced at the hands of those close to her, including family friend Jean Genet. Marion Cotillard brilliantly embodies Carole across a series of hauntingly resonant reconstructions that, alongside a generous archive of video, photography, and personal writing, create a rounded portrait of a troubled but outstandingly creative mind. Achache blurs the line between truth and fiction, producing a work as fittingly unsettling and unforgettable as her mother’s own story.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Denis Villeneuve, the subject of a recent retrospective presented by FLC and who’s new highly anticipated sci fi-epic, Dune: Part Two, is now in theaters worldwide courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures. The saga continues as award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embarks on Dune: Part Two, the next chapter of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel Dune, with an expanded all-star international ensemble cast. The big-screen epic continues the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed bestseller Dune with returning and new stars, including Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, and Austin Butler. Dune: Part Two explores the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a path of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Lulu Wang, who’s new Prime Video series Expats is now streaming. Lulu Wang casts her penetrating gaze on the intersection of race and class in Hong Kong’s milieu of expats, and the migrant domestic workers employed by them, in this vivid adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s widely acclaimed novel, The Expatriates (1998). Across six episodes, Expats shuttles back and forth between the prelude and aftermath of a tragedy that has dramatically reshaped the lives of three women—Margaret (Nicole Kidman), a mother left shattered as she navigates her way through an inconceivable loss; her neighbor Hilary (Sarayu Blue), herself struggling to regain control of her marriage in the face of infidelity; and the twentysomething, free-spirited Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), who finds herself caught in the center of Margaret and Hilary’s anguish. But for the limited series’ feature-length fifth episode, the three women recede into the background with Wang shifting her focus in an entirely different direction, and transforming this rich tapestry of stories into something altogether more complex. In this penultimate episode, “Central,” Margaret and Hilary’s Filipina caretakers, Essie (Ruby Ruiz) and Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), come to the fore as we follow them on their day off—socializing, corresponding with family abroad, and carving out time to pursue their own dreams, but who nevertheless remain entangled in their employers’ quandaries, and whose own future hangs in the balance of their every decision. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with About Dry Grasses director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection, About Dry Grasses opens at FLC next Friday, February 23rd. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/grasses. In a village nestled within the wintry landscape of the East Anatolia region of Turkey, an art teacher named Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is struggling through what he hopes to be his final year at an elementary school. Already tiring of the unforgiving environment, where he has been assigned by the government’s public education system, Samet is further disillusioned and frustrated after a young girl in his class, Sevim, appears to accuse him of inappropriate behavior. The only light on the horizon for Samet is his growing friendship with—and clear attraction to—a teacher from a nearby school, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a sharp, politically engaged woman unafraid to put the self-involved Samet in his place for his general apathy and narcissism. Turkey’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards, the latest deeply philosophical drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, NYFF49) is a work of elegant, novelistic filmmaking, rigorously unpacking questions of belief versus action, the tangible versus the enigmatic, and who we wish to be versus how we live. A centerpiece conversation between Samet and Nuray—capped off by a provocative metacinematic flourish—ranks with Ceylan’s greatest sequences, and Dizdar, who won the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, commands every second she’s on screen. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Advisor Violeta Bava.

This week we’re excited to present a panel of critics and programmers to discuss the significance of the late French film critic Serge Daney (1944–1992)'s thought today, with a particular emphasis on how his politically driven analysis and radical enthusiasms of the 1970s might speak to our contemporary moment. Film at Lincoln Center was proud to recently present Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s, a series that celebrated French film critic Serge Daney and the films he championed in his book La Rampe, occasioned by its long-awaited English translation under the title Footlights. Complementing this program was a panel that featured The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, translator of Footlights and series co-programmer Nicholas Elliott, and moderator FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. This discussion considered the relation between mise-en-scène and moral perspective, the cinema as an antidote to advertising, and the critic’s role as an ally to filmmakers. Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970 was sponsored by MUBI.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Trân Anh Hùng to discuss the NYFF61 Spotlight selection, THE TASTE OF THINGS, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 9th. The director will appear in person at select screenings opening weekend as well as for a sneak preview on Thursday, Feb. 8. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/taste. Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture, and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel (married, decades ago, in real life) as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmet chef she has been working with for 20 years. As they reach middle age, they can no longer deny their mutual romantic feelings, which have so long been concentrated in their passionate professionalism. This simple narrative—based upon Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel LA PASSION DE DODIN-BOUFFANT, GOURMET—sets the table for a sublime, sense-heightening exploration of pleasure, in which the play of sunlight across a late-afternoon kitchen is as meaningful as the image of a perfectly poached pear or the crisp of a buoyant vol-au-vent. Director Trân Anh Hùng won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema. France’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. An IFC Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Bas Devos and actress Liyo Gong to discuss the NYFF61 Main Slate selection, HERE, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 9th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/here. Stefan, a migrant construction worker living in Brussels, is planning a trip home to his mother in Romania. In preparing for his voyage, he reconnects with local family members over gifted bowls of homemade soup, interacts with strangers, and discovers a revivifying commune with nature. This all leads him to an unexpected connection with Shuxiu, a Chinese-Belgian bryologist, who’s studying the local moss. The gradual cultivation of this friendship—beautifully performed by actors Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong—motivates this hushed, emotionally resonant film about the power of observation, of people often deemed socially invisible, and of the larger green world surrounding us. In his lovely and tranquil fourth feature, Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos (GHOST TROPIC) has created a work that finds transcendence in the simplest human encounters and the most radiant of cinematic gestures. Winner of the Best Film prize in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Encounters competition. A Cinema Guild release.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations, the first with programmers Madeline Whittle and Nicholas Elliott about our upcoming retrospective, Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s, and the second with Kleber Mendonça Filho, director of the NYFF61 Main Slate selection Pictures of Ghosts, opening in our theaters on January 26th. Beginning Friday, Film at Lincoln Center presents a series celebrating French film critic Serge Daney and the films he championed, occasioned by the long-awaited English translation of the critic’s first book La Rampe, now titled Footlights. The series runs from January 26 through February 4 and will feature a robust selection of works by master filmmakers, with many presented on 35mm or in digital restorations, accompanied by guest introductions. The programmers of the retrospective, Madline Whittle and Nicholas Elliott, spoke with Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers about how they curated the lineup and the importance of Daney’s writing and views on cinema. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/daney Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s is sponsored by MUBI. Learn more at mubi.com/en/flc The life of a true cinephile is one constantly haunted by the dead, as the history of the movies is a corridor of ghosts. Brazilian filmmaker and unrepentant cinema obsessive Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new documentary—Brazil’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards—serves as a poignant testament to the liminal state of movie love. It tells, in three chapters, the story of his cinematic world—namely the city of Recife, where his youthful film education took place. At theaters like the Veneza and the São Luiz, Mendonça discovered a popular art form that would change his life; today, with the landscape of the city altering drastically, he surveys its empty rooms now pregnant with memories. This moving and playful film, as much about the architectural and social structures of a city as about the movies that inspire and haunt us, honors the personal spaces that are also the communal lifeblood of our urban centers. Enjoy the conversation from the New York Film Festival between Kleber Mendonça Filho and FLC Vice President of Programming, Florence Almozini. Get tickets to Pictures of Ghosts at filmlinc.org/ghosts.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations, the first from the 61st New York Film Festival with Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell director Pham Thien An and the second with Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, Nizhonniya Luxi Austin, and Dave McCary of the new Showtime series The Curse. Winner of the prestigious Camera d’Or for best first film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the enthralling Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell from Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Thien An is a reverie on faith, loss, and nature expressed with uncommon invention and depth. It’s a simple tale told with visual complexity: after a car accident claims the life of his sister-in-law and leaves his 5-year-old nephew an orphan, a thirty something man named Thien (Le Phong Vu) leaves Saigon for a trip back to his rural hometown. During his meditative, wandering visit, Thien wrestles with his own agnosticism in the face of others’ religious beliefs, summons memories of his long-disappeared brother, and reconnects with a former girlfriend who now lives as a nun at a Christian church and school. With its drifting camera, evocative use of natural light, and gratifying perambulatory nature, this is a film with the power to readjust one’s perceptions of the world around us. An NYFF61 Currents selection. In this brilliantly discomfiting collaboration between Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, Fielder and Emma Stone play married entrepreneurs (don’t call them gentrifiers!) who flip houses and convert them into eco-friendly homes for the struggling residents of Española, New Mexico—all for an HGTV-style reality show. Following the world premieres of episodes 1–3 at the 61st New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to present the remaining seven episodes from this genre-defying, riotously funny series, directed by Fielder and David and Nathan Zellner. An NYFF61 Spotlight selection. Get tickets to Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on Jan. 19: filmlinc.org/cocoon

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 61st New York Film Festival between American Cinema Editor members Sandra Adair (Hit Man) and Jonathan Alberts (All of Us Strangers). Across genres, styles, and modes of production, the work of the film editor remains one of the least visible but most essential elements of cinematic storytelling. In last year’s NYFF lineup, Main Slate selection All of Us Strangers and Spotlight selection Hit Man were exemplary showcases for the range of expressive effects made possible by the film editor’s contributions, demonstrating how pacing, rhythm, and punctuation can amplify or obscure meaning, accentuate performances, and synthesize precise interactions between comedy, drama, suspense, and eroticism. This talk was organized in collaboration with American Cinema Editors and was moderated by American Cinema Editor member Jeffrey Wolf. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Anselm director Wim Wenders moderated by filmmaker Michèle Stephenson. Anselm is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center, in stunning 3D! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/anselm Oscar-nominated director Wim Wenders traces the life of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most innovative and influential fine artists working today. For more than five decades, Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures have confronted his native Germany’s dark past through a vast network of cultural references in a dazzling mixture of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, with a distinctive focus on physical elements: from lead, glass, and textiles to found and incinerated organic matter. As he did for his sublime portrait of Pina Bausch in 2011, Wenders employs groundbreaking stereoscopic cinematography to transport us to key chapters of Kiefer’s early life in post-Nazi Germany and throughout his 100-acre studio in France. Anselm, which debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a portrait of an artist at work like you’ve never seen before—an indelible visual experience and a vivid tour of Kiefer’s imposing yet intricately textured works. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

Director Jonathan Glazer, stars Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel, sound designer Johnnie Burn, and producer James Wilson joined us at NYFF61 to discuss sound design, physicality, and the morality of portraying the Holocaust in The Zone of Interest, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The Zone of Interest is now playing in select theaters. In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality: the domestic routine of a Nazi Commandant, his wife, and their kids, while death and violence occur against those imprisoned in Auschwitz over the wall from their idyllic house. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

This week we’re excited to present a panel discussion with the creative team of Poor Things, an NYFF61 Main Slate selection. The discussion features director Yorgos Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara, production designers James Price & Shona Heath, composer Jerskin Fendrix, costume designer Holly Waddington, and sound designer Johnnie Burn in conversation with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Poor Things is now playing in select theaters and will open nationwide on December 22nd. In his boldest vision yet, iconoclast auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, previously featured in NYFF with The Lobster (NYFF57) and The Favourite (NYFF56), creates an outlandish alternate 19th century on the cusp of technological breakthrough, in which a peculiar, childlike woman named Bella (Emma Stone) lives with her mysterious caretaker, the scientist and surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). At once poignant and grotesque, Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is a punkish update of the Frankenstein story that becomes a deeply feminist fairy tale about women taking back control of their own bodies and minds. A Searchlight Pictures release.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations, the first a panel discussion centered around the films of the late Japanese filmmaker Kijū Yoshida, whose films we will be screening beginning this Friday in the new series, The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida, through December 8, followed by a Q&A with The Sweet East director Sean Price Williams, screenwriter Nick Pinkerton, and cast members Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, Jeremy O. Harris, Rish Shah, and Earl Cave from the 61st New York Film Festival. Get tickets to The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida at filmlinc.org/yoshida

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen, the two lead actors of the NYFF61 Main Slate selection Fallen Leaves from director Aki Kaurismäki. Sweet-souled in story, scalpel-sharp in filmmaking precision, this enchanting love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart. Evoking dark-comic romances from his early career such as Shadows in Paradise and Ariel (NYFF27), the sardonic yet exquisitely melancholic Fallen Leaves devotes its wry, humane gaze to grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who commence an on-again, off-again relationship of extreme tentativeness, while seeking employment and stability. As with the greatest of Kaurismäki’s films, everyday details register as grand, meaningful cinematic gestures. This filmmaker has scrupulously carved another fictive universe out of a handful of specific, vivid locations, yet Fallen Leaves very much takes place in the world we’re living in, which makes its surrender to hope all the more affecting. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Finland’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. A MUBI release. This conversation was moderated by The Wrap's Tomris Laffly.

This week we’re excited to present an NYFF61 Crosscuts conversation between Wang Bing, the director of the NYFF61 Main Slate selection Youth (Spring), and Eduardo Williams, director of the NYFF61 Currents selection, The Human Surge 3. If there are two films from 2023 that might be remembered in the years to come as time capsules of life as we live it today, they are Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), an NYFF61 Main Slate selection, and Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3, which opens this year’s NYFF Currents lineup. Williams follows up on The Human Surge with a playfully misnumbered sequel that captures the ambulations of a group of young people in three countries—Peru, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka—using a 360-degree camera, giving resonant form to the virtual, cacophonous, and borderless (yet bounded) texture of our contemporary existence. In Youth (Spring), Bing returns to his project of documenting a China transformed by the vagaries of industrialization: Shot across five years within privately run textile workshops in Zhili, which employ swathes of underpaid twentysomethings, Youth (Spring) accumulates a monumental portrait of life shaped by the temporality of ruthless, relentless production. This talk will bring together these two masterful chroniclers of the present for a conversation about their inspirations and influences, their form-bending play with the cinematic medium, and their radical approaches to time and space. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Todd Haynes, the director of the NYFF61 Opening Night selection May December, which will be opening at Film at Lincoln Center this Friday exclusively on 35mm film. The conversation was moderated by playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris. Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a popular television star, has arrived in a tight-knit island community in Savannah. Here, she will be doing intimate research for a new part, ingratiating herself into the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she’ll be playing on-screen, and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), to better understand the psychology and circumstances that more than 20 years ago made them notorious tabloid figures. As Elizabeth attempts to get closer to the family, the uncomfortable facts of their scandal unfurl, causing difficult, long-dormant emotions to resurface. From the sensational premise born from first time screenwriter Samy Burch’s brilliant script, director Todd Haynes (Safe, Carol) has constructed an American tale of astonishing richness and depth, which touches the pressure and pleasure points of a culture obsessed equally with celebrity and trauma. It’s a feat of storytelling and pinpoint-precise tone that is shrewd in its wicked embrace of melodrama while also genuinely moving in its humane treatment of tricky subject matter. Boasting a trio of bravura, mercurial performances by Moore, Portman, and Melton, May December is a film about human exploitation, the elusive nature of performance, and the slipperiness of truth that confirms Todd Haynes’s status as one of our consummate movie artists. A Netflix release. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

This week we’re excited to present an NYFF61 Crosscut conversation between Annie Baker and Raven Jackson, the directors of two of the most self-assured debut films of the year (Janet Planet and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, respectively). Covering traits of the coming-of-age genre, writing practices, and non-traditional scripts, Baker and Jackson’s conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate Committee member Kameron Austin Collins. Breaking onto the scene with two of the most original and assured feature debuts in recent memory, Baker and Jackson have each crafted tone poems of breathtaking delicacy. With stories that weave together themes of motherhood and coming-of-age with a lush, exquisitely detailed sense of place, Baker and Jackson distill and transpose the singular qualities of their literary work to the cinematic medium. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with director Martin Scorsese, whose new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, is currently playing in theaters worldwide courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Apple Original Films.  In this conversation with Scorsese, the director discusses his early '70s masterpiece, Mean Streets, co-starring his Killers of the Flower Moon supporting actor Robert De Niro. De Niro’s lasting partnership with Scorsese began with the filmmaker’s breakthrough third feature, an electrifying and unforgettable depiction of small-time thugs in Little Italy that established much of what was to come in both artists’ careers. Harvey Keitel, an alum of Scorsese’s student feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, is Charlie, an aspirant gangster seeking a middle ground between his profession and his efforts to lead a morally upright life. But his irrepressible friend Johnny Boy (De Niro) complicates matters with his anarchic behavior and debts to loan sharks. Raising hell as soon as he arrives on screen, De Niro is entirely at home as Scorsese’s young id of Mulberry Street—equal parts funny, ferocious, and frightening. This conversation was moderated by former NYFF Associate Director of Programming, Scott Foundas.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Rodrigo Moreno, whose new film, The Delinquents, made its U.S. Premiere at the 61st New York Film Festival and is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets now at filmlinc.org/delinquents A heist picture unlike any other, The Delinquents upends genre expectations with a gentle yet deftly constructed existentialist fable. Timid bank clerk Morán , fed up with his dead-end middle-management job, decides one day to simply walk into the vault, pack a bag with enough cash to cover his salary until retirement age, and saunter out. Knowing he has been inevitably caught on security camera, Morán plans on turning himself in, but not before passing the stash along to his coworker Román, now an accomplice who agrees to hold onto the money until Morán gets out of prison. From this gripping premise, Argentinean writer-director Rodrigo Moreno spins an endlessly surprising tale that moves into increasingly idyllic territory, adding layer upon layer to the twinned stories of these two men’s lives, and inquiring what it means to be free in a world of monetary satisfaction. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Advisor Violeta Bava.

On the final daily NYFF61 edition of the FLC podcast, director Frederick Wiseman, the United States’s unrivaled maestro of observational nonfiction, joins us to discuss Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, a Spotlight selection in this year’s festival, with FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini. Wiseman brings his camera into a three-star Michelin restaurant in rural central France, and the result is an expansive, delectable, and provocative portrait of the demand for perfection—a surprising but apt subject in Wiseman’s decades-long inquiries into the inner workings of complicated institutions that function with their own rules and standards. A Zipporah Films release. All NYFF61 feature documentaries are presented by HBO.

Ferrari director Michael Mann and cast members Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, and Gabriel Leone discuss diving deep into projects, the complexities of the Ferrari family, and competitive racing with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim at the Closing Night press conference. Michael Mann (The Insider) brings his astonishing command of technique and storytelling to bear on this emotional, elegantly crafted dramatization of the life of the legendary car manufacturer and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari at a professional and personal fulcrum. It’s 1957, and the marriage of Enzo (Adam Driver, in an artfully internalized performance) and Laura (Penélope Cruz, a ferocious revelation) has begun to irrevocably fracture as a result of his philandering and the tragic recent death of their young son. Their unsettled domestic world is on a collision course with his work life as Enzo faces a pair of major turning points: financial pressure to increase productivity, which means going against his long-standing desire to only produce race cars, and preparations for the treacherous cross-country open-road Mille Miglia race. Dovetailing these narrative strands, Mann effortlessly shifts gears between elegiac and spectacular, climaxing in an exhilarating and terrifying race across the Northern Italian landscape—a visual and aural wonder of revving machinery against bucolic splendor—that ranks with the greatest set pieces of Mann’s career. Aided by a magnificent cast, which also includes Shailene Woodley, Gabriel Leone, Patrick Dempsey, and Jack O’Connell, and glorious on-location shooting in Ferrari’s hometown of Modena, Mann has constructed a marvel of classical cinema. A Neon release. NYFF61 Closing Night is presented by Campari.

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus director Neo Sora discusses the personal nature of the film, the logistics of recording live music, and Sakamoto’s relationship with cinema. When Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March 2023 at age 71, the world lost one of its greatest musicians: a classical orchestral composer, a techno-pop artist, and a piano soloist who elevated every genre he worked in and inspired and influenced music-lovers across the globe. As a final gift to his legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances. Recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo, this filmed concert is an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show, featuring just Sakamoto and a Yamaha grand, as the composer glides through a playlist of his most haunting, delicate melodies (including “Lack of Love, “The Wuthering Heights,” “Aqua,” “Opus,” and many more). Shot in pristine black-and-white by Bill Kirstein and edited by Takuya Kawakami, this stirring film brings us so close to a living, breathing artist that it feels like pure grace. A Janus Films release. All NYFF61 feature documentaries are presented by HBO.

Director Bertrand Bonello discusses the timelessness of Léa Seydoux, slashers, and The Beast, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Coma) has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) and tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

On today’s daily NYFF61 podcast, director Annie Baker and lead actresses Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler discuss Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Baker’s superb debut feature Janet Planet with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.  It’s 1991 in rural Western Massachusetts, the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods. As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends. This work of surreal tranquility moves at a different, lost pace of life, and introduces Ziegler as an incredible new talent. An A24 release. Listen to the Q&A featuring Baker, Nicholson, and Ziegler as they discuss watching the film for the first time, resisting conventions, and the origins of Janet Planet.

Director Jonathan Glazer, stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, sound designer Johnnie Burn, and producer James Wilson joined us at NYFF61 to discuss sound design, physicality, and the morality of portraying the Holocaust in The Zone of Interest, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini. In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality: the domestic routine of a Nazi Commandant, his wife, and their kids, while death and violence occur against those imprisoned in Auschwitz over the wall from their idyllic house. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

On today’s daily NYFF61 edition of the FLC podcast, director Justine Triet, co-writer Arthur Harari, and lead actress Sandra Hüller join us to discuss Anatomy of a Fall, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s drama is a riveting procedural and a delicate inquiry into the impossibility of an ultimate truth in human relationships. When the husband of famous novelist Sandra Voyter (played by Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller) is found dead on the ground outside their chalet in the French Alps, authorities suspect that she might have been responsible, as the impact and position of his body suggest a push rather than a fall. This leads to a murder trial that puts every aspect of their marriage under impossible scrutiny, and whose outcome might hinge on the perspective of their vision-impaired 11-year-old son. Triet’s fiercely intelligent, emotionally devastating film dissects the ways we create subjective narratives for ourselves and others and questions the insufficiency of language to describe the essential mysteries each of us possesses. At its core is the brilliant Hüller, whose Sandra is articulate, open, and utterly inscrutable. Anatomy of a Fall opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Oct. 18. Tickets are on sale now: filmlinc.org/anatomy Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On today’s daily NYFF61 edition of the FLC podcast, director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi joins us to discuss Evil Does Not Exist, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In his potent and foreboding new film, Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller with the tale of a serene rural village that’s about to be disrupted by the construction of a glamping site for Tokyo tourists. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. Enjoy this discussion Hamaguchi and don’t forget to subscribe here for more filmmaker conversations. Evil Does Not Exist will be released by Sideshow and Janus Films. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.