The Close-up

Last weekend we welcomed writer/director Frederick Wiseman and actress and co-writer Nathalie Boutefeu to NYFF60 to present and discuss A Couple, a Main Slate selection of this year’s festival.  Countess Sophia Behrs married Leo Tolstoy when she was 18 and he was 34. They were husband and wife for 48 years, had 13 children, and she outlived him by nine years. Yet their relationship, among the most discussed and written about in literary history, was anything but harmonious, as Sophia, an artist in her own right—a photographer, memoirist, and editor—was constantly forced to negotiate her happiness with her husband’s infidelities. Inspired by Sophia’s story, legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman has made a film based on Sophia’s diaries and letters from Leo to Sophia, structured as a series of monologues delivered with magnificent poise and gathering intensity by star and co-writer Nathalie Boutefeu, pillowed by graceful images of natural beauty from the film’s bucolic French setting. Wiseman’s ca

This weekend we welcomed writer/director Paul Schrader and cast members Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver to NYFF60 to present and discuss Master Gardener, a Main Slate selection of this year’s festival.  Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) takes great care and pride in his work as the longtime head horticulturist at Gracewood Gardens, the historic estate of the demanding, imperious Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). An enclosed, scrupulously run world of its own, Gracewood has been in the Haverhill family for generations, and Norma trusts no one other than Narvel to continue its traditions. However, a threat of change is harkened by the arrival of Norma’s troubled grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), whose presence sets off a chain reaction of events that catalyze Narvel into coming to terms with his own shocking past. Following First Reformed and The Card Counter, Paul Schrader continues his dramatic renaissance with an equally effective, startling tale about dormant violence and the possibility of regenerati

This weekend we welcomed writer/director Ruben Östlund and cast members Dolly de Leon and Zlatko Burić to NYFF60 to present and discuss Triangle of Sadness, a Main Slate selection of this year’s festival.  Cinematic mischief maker Östlund liberally applies his customary playfulness to the wide canvas of his wildly ambitious, frequently hilarious latest film, which won the Swedish director his second Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Kicking off as a satirical romance, following the bickering, money-soured relationship between two hot young models (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean), the three-part film escalates into increasing absurdity after they are invited on a luxury cruise, where they rub elbows with the super-rich, as well as a disheveled and disillusioned, Marx-spouting sea captain (Woody Harrelson). To tell more would ruin the Buñuelian twists of this poison-dipped farce on class and economic disparity, which doesn’t skewer contemporary culture so much as dunk it in raw sewage. Listen

The 60th edition of the New York Film Festival, currently in progress through October 16th, recently hosted the World Premiere of Chinonye Chukwu’s powerful new drama, Till, in the festival’s Spotlight section. Till tells the story of Mamie Till-Mobley, the Chicago woman whose son, Emmett Till, was lynched while visiting cousins in Mississippi and whose body became an indelible image of the horrors of American racism. Employing a direct, unflinching, yet sensitive gaze, Chukwu has created the definitive drama of this woman’s grief and resilience, and in an astonishing performance, Danielle Deadwyler captures both a mother’s indescribable heartbreak and her inspiring ascension to the role of civil rights activist. Till is a momentous reminder of an ever-present tragedy, featuring painstaking production design, subtly expressive camera framing and composition, and a note-perfect supporting cast, including Sean Patrick Thomas, Jalyn Hall, Tosin Cole, John Douglas Thompson, Frankie Faison, and Whoopi Goldberg.

The 60th edition of the New York Film Festival officially kicked off on September 30, 2022 with our Opening Night selection: the North American premiere of Noah Baumbach's White Noise, presented by Campari. At the film's press conference, we welcomed Noah Baumbach and select cast members Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy, May Nivola, and Sam Nivola, composer Danny Elfman, and songwriter James Murphy in conversation with NYFF's Artistic Director, Dennis Lim. Their wide-ranging discussion covers adapting the "unfilmable" Don DeLillo novel, the story's frightening similarities to our current pandemic, working with a very large cast, and shooting in Anamorphic widescreen. White Noise opens in theaters on November 25th and will premiere on Netflix December 30th. To learn more and get tickets for this year's NYFF, taking place through October 16 throughout NYC, visit filmlinc.org/tix.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center Podcast, we're excited to welcome NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim and FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini for a programmers preview of the 60th New York Film Festival, through October 16th. Moderated by FLC Assistant Director of Marketing Jordan Raup. The three talked about the standouts and hidden gems of the festival across all five sections—Main Slate, Currents, Revivals, Spotlight, and Talks—along with the general ethos of the curation behind this year's historic edition. Don't miss NYFF60 and attend screenings in all five NYC boroughs! Get up to date information on available tickets at filmlinc.org/tix.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special archival Q&A from the 39th New Directors/New Films in 2010 on I Am Love, with director Luca Guadagnino. Luca Guadagnino returns to Film at Lincoln Center for this year’s 60th New York Film Festival with the Spotlight selection, Bones and All, a work of both tender fragility and feral intensity, setting corporeal horror and runaway romance against a vividly textured Americana, featuring Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as lovers with insatiable, dangerous desires. Tickets to NYFF60, which takes place Sept. 30 - October 16, are now on sale! Don’t miss screenings of Bones and All on October 6th (followed by a Q&A with Guadagnino), 8th, 11th, and 16th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special archival Q&A from the 48th New York Film Festival in 2010 on Meek’s Cutoff, with director Kelly Reichardt and moderator Melissa Anderson. Kelly Reichardt returns to NYFF for this year’s 60th anniversary edition with the North American Premiere of Showing Up, a Main Slate selection, which reunites the director with star Michelle Williams in a marvelously particularized portrait of a sculptor’s daily work and frustrations in an artist’s enclave in Portland. Tickets to NYFF60, which takes place Sept. 30 - October 16, are now on sale! Don’t miss screenings of Showing Up on October 5th and 6th, followed by Q&As with Reichardt. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special archival panel discussion on the late filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard from the 52nd New York Film Festival. Listen to a special panel, including The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, former MoMA curator Lawrence Kardish, Goodbye to Language star Héloise Godet, and critic Max Nelson, discuss Godard’s work and career with moderator Eric Kohn from IndieWire. Tickets to the 60th New York Film Festival, taking place from September 30 to October 16th, go on sale Monday, September 19 at noon. Don’t miss this anniversary milestone edition and explore the lineup at filmlinc.org/nyff

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re revisiting a conversation from the  27th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Hold Me Tight (opens tomorrow!) director Mathieu Amalric and actor Vicky Krieps, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Bergman Island) gives another riveting performance as Clarisse, a woman on the run from her family for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Widely renowned as an actor but less well-known here for his equally impressive work behind the camera, Mathieu Amalric’s sixth feature directorial outing—his most ambitious to date—is a virtuosic, daringly fluid portrait of one woman’s fractured psyche. Alternating between Clarisse’s adventures on the road and her abandoned husband Marc (Arieh Worthalter) as he struggles to take care of their children at home, Amalric’s film keeps viewers uncertain as to the reality of what they’re seeing until the final moments of this richly rewarding, moving, and unpredictable portrait of grief.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re revisiting a conversation from the 51st New Directors/New Films, moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini, with filmmaker Ricky D’Ambrose in anticipation of his latest film, The Cathedral, opening in our theaters this Friday with Q&As.  A multigenerational family saga in extreme miniature, the new feature from singular American independent director Ricky D’Ambrose is his most refined, emotionally resonant work yet. Slicing across decades with impressionistic precision, The Cathedral tells the formally economical yet engrossing story of the Damrosch family, whose quiet rise and fall is seen through the eyes of its youngest member, Jesse, born in the late 1980s. Using photographs and archival news footage to buttress his oblique drama, D’Ambrose shows how a family’s financial and emotional wear and tear can subtly reflect a country’s sociopolitical fortunes and follies. Explore showtimes and Q&As at filmlinc.org/cathedral.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special archival Q&A from the 47th New York Film Festival in 2009 with director Claire Denis and cast members Isaach de Bankolé & William Nadylam on White Material, moderated by Melissa Anderson. Claire Denis returns to NYFF for this year’s 60th-anniversary edition with two films: the Main Slate selection, Stars at Noon, and the Revivals selection, No Fear No Die. Based on the 1986 novel by Denis Johnson, Stars at Noon represents a new mode for director Claire Denis, a contemporary thriller suffused with political intrigue and languid eroticism, moving entirely to the tactile rhythms of its actors, especially rising star Margaret Qualley, who gives a live-wire performance of fervid spontaneity and mercurial passion. No Fear No Die, Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature, is a radically physical cinematic journey into the shadowy (under)world of illegal cockfighting. Isaach De Bankole and Alex Descas star as Dah and Jocelyn, two immigr

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special archival Q&A from the 43rd New York Film Festival in 2005 with Noach Boambach on The Squid and the Whale, moderated by Phillip Lopate. Noah Baumbach returns to NYFF for this year’s 60th-anniversary edition with the Opening Night film, White Noise, a wonderfully abrasive and precisely mounted period piece based on Don DeLillo’s epochal postmodern 1985 novel, which befits our modern, through-the-looking-glass pandemic reality.  NYFF60 Passes are now on sale! Single tickets will go on sale to the General Public on September 19, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff. Owen Kline, who plays the youngest son in The Squid and the Whale, returns to Film at Lincoln Center with his feature debut Funny Pages on August 26, with in-person Q&As and introductions. The actor-turned-director has also handpicked an assortment of films that influenced the world to which his hilariously

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with director Kiro Russo on his NYFF59 Currents selection, El Gran Movimiento, moderated by NYFF Program Advisor Violeta Bava. Expanding on the hybrid narrative of his remarkable 2016 film Dark Skull, Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs. Set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas, El Gran Movimiento follows a young miner as he looks for work alongside his friends, even as he begins to descend into a mysterious sickness. With its marvelous long-lens zoom work and increasingly dynamic, rhythmic editing, Russo’s film is a hypnotic journey into a psychological space that touches upon the supernatural. El Gran Movimiento opens this Friday in our theaters. For showtimes and tickets, go to filmlinc.org/movimiento.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmers preview of our King Vidor Retrospective, a long overdue series dedicated to the fascinating and prolific filmmaker whose career bridged the silent and sound eras of Hollywood, featuring live musical accompaniments at selection screenings, rare 35mm prints, and more. Listen to FLC Programmers Dan Sullivan and Thomas Beard as they discuss the trajectory of one of the Hollywood studio system’s enduringly great auteurs, their recommended films in the series, and more.  Our King Vidor Retrospective kicks off Friday and plays through August 14. Explore the lineup and get tickets and All-Access Passes at filmlinc.org/vidor.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 51st New Directors/New Films with Sara Dosa, director of Fire of Love, moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Tyler Wilson. World-famous volcanologists and lovers Katia and Maurice Krafft fearlessly observed and studied volcanic eruptions up close across the globe; they were at once intrepid adventurers, committed scientists, and innate filmmakers, capturing destructive earth ruptures with surreal beauty and terror. Tragically, they were killed together at the eruption of Japan’s Mount Unzen in June 1991. Using a trove of the couple’s monumental, almost otherworldly 16mm footage, filmmaker Sara Dosa consummately constructs the narrative of their remarkable lives, making the Kraffts into both vivid movie stars and unknowable figures whose pursuits constantly put them on the crater’s edge of existence. Evocatively narrated by Miranda July, Fire of Love is a transportive work of genuine awe. The NDNF51 selection is now playing in the

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmers preview of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the New York Asian Film Festival with NYAFF Executive Director Samuel Jamier and NYAFF Programmer David Wilentz. The two discussed the robust lineup of over 50 films, favorites from various countries, and much more.  The 20th Anniversary Edition of the New York Asian Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and runs through July 31st. Explore the lineup, all-access passes, talks and Q&As with filmmakers, and get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyaff.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation from the 27th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch. Claire Denis, the singular cinematic visionary behind Beau Travail (NYFF37), Let the Sunshine In (NYFF55), and High Life (NYFF56), returned to Film at Lincoln Center with this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opening Night selection Both Sides of the Blade, a searing and unsparing romantic drama. Denis sat down with longtime friend and fellow filmmaker Jim Jarmusch—an icon of the American independent filmmaking landscape, and the official Guest of Honor at the 2022 edition of the festival—for an extended conversation about their decades-spanning careers. Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade opens this Friday in our theaters. Go to filmlinc.org/blade for showtimes and tickets. Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, a boozy and beautiful pilgrimage to Memphis, plays for free outdoors in Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza on July 14. Go to filmlinc.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A on Secrets & Lies with director Mike Leigh from our recent retrospective on the British filmmaker. Moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. They discussed the making and trajectory of Leigh's "most commercially successful" film, working with actors, and more. 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

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A with Dario Argento on Deep Red following the world premiere of the new restoration at our retrospective, underway through June 29. The conversation was moderated by Maddie Whittle with interpretation by Michael Moore. Get tickets for our retrospective at www.filmlinc.org/argento Blow–Up’s David Hemmings takes the lead in Argento’s most sophisticated giallo, playing a jazz pianist who struggles to remember a vital piece of evidence after witnessing the murder of Macha Méril’s German psychic. Joined by Argento’s real-life partner Daria Nicolodi in the role of a plucky journalist, Hemmings embarks on a dizzying tour of Rome (with shooting locations in Turin standing in for the capital city) which, through Argento’s roving, suprahuman lens, appears just as haunted and hyper-compartmentalized as the movie’s tortured human protagonists. Ranked among the director’s masterworks, Deep Red is supplemented by Argento’s first score with Italian prog