The Close-up

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmers preview of Beware of Dario Argento, our 20-film retrospective taking place Friday through June 29. Join FLC Programmers Maddie Whittle and Tyler Wilson in an overview of the Master of Giallo’s oeuvre. Explore the lineup, featuring 17 world premieres of new restorations, the North American Premiere of Dark Glasses, 3D and 35mm screenings, and in-person appearances from Argento himself at filmlinc.org/argento. After the preview, listen to a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and actress Tilda Swinton on their Main Slate selection Memoria, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Collective and personal ghosts hover over every frame of Memoria, somehow the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works. Inspired by the Thai director’s own memories and those of people he encountered while traveling across Colombia, the film follows Jessica (a wholly immerse

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmer's preview of the 21st Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, our annual series featuring a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. Join FLC Assitant Programmer Dan Sullivan in an overview of the hidden gems in this year’s festival, taking place June 9 - 15. Explore the lineup and filmmaker Q&As, and get tickets at filmlinc.org/openroads. After the preview, listen to a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman on their Main Slate selection Neptune Frost, moderated by NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez. Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with his partner, the Rwandan-born artist Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place amidst the

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Q&A on Hedwig and the Angry Inch with co-creator, director, and lead John Cameron Mitchell and makeup artist and hairstylist Mike Potter, moderated by FLC’s President Lesli Klainberg. After falling in love with a U.S. Army sergeant, an East Berlin boy named Hansel undergoes a sex-change operation so that he can legally marry his beloved. But the operation goes awry, leaving the boy less than a man, but not quite a woman. Deserted in a Kansas trailer park, now Hedwig reinvents themself as a rock star. Based on the hit off-Broadway musical.  Catch Hedwig and the Angry Inch for free this Friday on Governors Island, presented in association with Newfest, with a pre-show DJ set from John Cameron Mitchell and Michael Cavadia starting at 7pm, and an introduction from John Cameron Mitchell before the screening. Ferry ticket reservations are required before the event. Go to filmlinc.org/hedwig for more information.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with The Tsugua Diaries directors Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes, moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson. The rigorous process of moviemaking meets the torpor of pandemic life in this beguiling new film co-directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights, NYFF53). A daily journal that unfolds in revelatory reverse order, this playful rug-puller begins by surveying the mundane routines of three housemates (Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, and João Nunes Monteiro) living in rural peace during the COVID lockdown: impromptu dance parties, cleaning, building a backyard butterfly house. Soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame. Cockeyed, funny, and slyly meta-cinematic, The Tsugua Diaries, lovingly shot on 16mm, demonstrates the possibility of artistic creation out of sheer will. The Tsugua Diaries opens this Friday in our theaters. For showtimes a

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A with Hong Sangsoo on his new film In Front of Your Face, moderated by FLC’s Director of Programmer Dennis Lim, and a special programmers preview of Human Conditions: The Films of Mike Leigh. After years of living abroad, a middle-aged former actress has returned to South Korea to reconnect with her past and perhaps make amends. Over the course of one day in Seoul, via various encounters—including with her younger sister; a shopkeeper who lives in her converted childhood home; and, finally, a well-known film director with whom she would like to make a comeback—we discover her resentments and regrets, her financial difficulties, and the big secret that’s keeping her aloof from the world. Both beguiling and oddly cleansing in its mix of the spiritual and the cynical, In Front of Your Face finds the endlessly prolific Hong Sangsoo in a particularly contemplative mood; it’s a film that somehow finds that life is at once full of grace and a sic

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 51st New Directors/New Films with Eskil Vogt, director of The Innocents, moderated by FLC’s Director of Programming Dennis Lim and a programmers preview of the 29th New York African Film Festival. Perhaps best known as the co-screenwriter of acclaimed Norwegian director Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World), Eskil Vogt proves himself to be a filmmaker of astonishing skill and elemental force in his own right with this daring supernatural thriller. Set during the summer at an apartment complex surrounded by an ominous, fairy-tale-like forest, The Innocents follows the sinister, increasingly alarming interactions of a group of prepubescent children: Ida, feeling ignored next to her autistic older sister Anna; the bullied Ben; and the angelic Aisha, who appears to communicate telepathically—and feel through—the nonverbal Anna. With unforgettable, dark images and fleet visual storytelling, Vogt’s film pushes the “evil childre

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 51st New Directors/New Films with Happening director Audrey Diwan and lead Anamaria Vartolomei on their Opening Night selection. The conversation was moderated by The Museum of Modern Art programmer Josh Siegel. Winner of the Venice International Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion, Audrey Diwan’s exceptionally well-observed breakthrough is an unsparing, gripping portrait of a young woman’s attempts to secure an illegal abortion in 1960s France. A student of ambition and promise, hoping to leave her small town and embark on a professional life of the mind, Anne Duchesne (Anamaria Vartolomei in a brave, overwhelming performance) finds her entire future thrown into doubt upon discovering that she’s pregnant. Sure to be one of the most talked-about movies of the year, Happening, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by acclaimed author Annie Ernaux, is a drama that incrementally builds in power, showing the step-by-step proce

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 49th New Directors/New Films, with Los conductos director Camilo Restrepo and FLC’s Director of Programming Dennis Lim. A former criminal and cult member living under cloak of night in the crevices and corners of the Colombian city of Medellín makes his way back into civilization, yet is gripped by a shadowy past, in this fragmented first feature from Camilo Restrepo. After his memorable shorts Cilaos and La bouche, the director proves his mastery at economical yet expansive storytelling here, taking a complex narrative about the possibility of regeneration within a society all too willing to discard its outcasts and boiling it down to a series of precise shots, sounds, and gestures of off-handed beauty. Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival and a New Directors/New Films 2020 selection, Los conductos opens exclusively in our theaters this Friday, with live Q&As with the director and cast during

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmers preview of the 51st New Directors/New Films, our annual festival celebrating filmmakers who speak to the present and anticipate the future of cinema, and whose bold work pushes the envelope in unexpected, striking ways, co-presented with the Museum of Modern Art. Join FLC programmer Tyler Wilson and MoMA programmers La Frances Hui and Rajendra Roy as they highlight films from the 51st edition of the festival. This year’s lineup will introduce 26 features and 11 shorts, a total of 39 directors, 21 of which are women. New Directors/New Films takes place from April 20 - May 1. Explore the films and get tickets at newdirectors.org.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with The Tale of King Crab directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis and NYFF programmer Tyler Wilson. This rich, engrossing fiction feature debut from documentary filmmakers Rigo de Righi and Zoppis takes storytelling itself as its subject. Based on a legendary figure about whom the filmmakers first heard while making their previous collaboration, 2015’s Il Solengo, this rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano, played by a bewitching Gabriele Silli, a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy. In the film’s first half, set in the countryside near Rome, his life is undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and an escalating quarrel with a local aristocrat; in the second, Luciano is in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, hunting for a mythic treasure with the help of a compass-like crab. Rigo de Righi and Zoppis have created a highly unconventional n

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with Silvan Zürcher, one of the directors of The Girl and the Spider, and NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen. Everything is in its right place, yet nothing is ever what or where it seems in this alternately droll and melancholy new film from the Zürcher brothers, whose The Strange Little Cat was one of the most striking and original debut features of recent years. Their latest charts a few days in the lives of two young people on the verge of change: Lisa (Liliane Amuat), who is in the process of moving into a new apartment, and her current roommate, Mara (Henriette Confurius), who’s staying behind. Though its setup is simple, the film—and the ambiguous relationship between the women—is anything but. The architectural precision of the filmmaking belies the inchoate longings and desires that appear to course through Lisa and Mara, as well as the various characters who come in and out of their homes. T

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a preview of the ninth Art of the Real, our annual festival highlighting the world’s most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking, with programmers Dennis Lim, Rachael Rakes, Dan Sullivan, and Almudena Escobar López. Art of the Real is now in full swing and playing through April 7! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/aotr. We're also featuring a Q&A from a recent patron event with director Eva Husson and star Odessa Young on their most recent film, Mothering Sunday. On a warm spring day in 1924, house maid and foundling Jane Fairchild, played by Odessa Young, finds herself alone on Mother’s Day. Her employers, Mr. and Mrs. Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman), are out and she has the rare chance to spend quality time with her secret lover. Paul (Josh O’Connor) is the boy from the manor house near by, Jane’s long-term love despite the fact that he’s engaged to be married to another woman, a childhood friend and daughter of his p

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Q&A from our one-night only 35mm screening of Licorice Pizza with Paul Thomas Anderson, Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, and Benny Safdie, moderated by FLC Senior Vice President Eugene Hernandez. Licorice Pizza is the story of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine growing up, running around, and falling in love in the San Fernando Valley in 1973. Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the film tracks the treacherous navigation of first love. PTA's Licorice Pizza is now playing in theaters.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmer’s preview on our Kinuyo Tanaka Retrospective, and a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with director Nadav Lapid on Ahed’s Knee,  moderated by NYFF Programmer Rachel Rosen. As an actress in over 250 films, Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the most celebrated and wildly popular artists of her time, regularly collaborating with consummate masters like Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse. Between 1953 and 1962, Tanaka directed half a dozen films with a determined sense of freedom and touches of provocation, placing women at the forefront of her movies as mistresses, prostitutes, poets, heroines, and victims of social injustice. The Kinuyo Tanaka Retrospective, featuring brand new 4K restorations of her directorial work and 35mm screenings of her collaborations as an actor, takes place March 18 - 27! Listen to an introduction to the filmmaker from Assistant Programmer Tyler Wilson and rediscover the groundbreaking auteur at f

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special talk between Juliette Binoche and Déborah Lukumuena from the 27th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, moderated by FLC programmer Maddie Whittle. In a Rendez-Vous lineup that features an abundance of extraordinary performances from women, two names stand out: Juliette Binoche, a much-acclaimed icon of French and international cinema, anchoring new films from directors Claire Denis (Fire) and Emmanuel Carrère (Between Two Worlds); and Déborah Lukumuena, a singular talent and rising star who embodies the best of a new generation of young French actors, performing opposite Gérard Depardieu in Constance Meyer’s Robust. Their conversation explores the two women’s professional trajectories and creative influences, their philosophies and priorities in selecting new projects, and their respective relationships with the American film industry. Rendez-Vous with French Cinema continues to play in our theaters through March 13th. Explore the lineup

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmers preview of the 27th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, the celebrated annual festival that exemplifies the variety and vitality of contemporary French filmmaking, co-presented with UniFrance and taking place now through March 13. Join programmers Florence Almozini, Maddie Whittle, and Adeline Monzier in a preview of this year's impressive lineup where they discuss their favorite films, hidden gems, and more. Get tickets, explore the full lineup, filmmaker Q&As, and free live talks at filmlinc.org/rdv22.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmers preview of the seventh edition of Neighboring Scenes, the annual wide-ranging showcase of contemporary Latin American cinema featuring established auteurs as well as fresh talent from the international festival scene. The preview is led by Cinema Tropical programmers Carlos A. Gutiérrez and Cecilia Barrionuevo. Featuring premieres and filmmaker Q&As, Neighboring Scenes takes place from February 24 - 28. Go to filmlinc.org/NS2022 for showtimes and tickets. Following the preview is a special conversation from our To Sir, With Love free screening about the legacy of Sidney Poitier and the figure of the Black movie star with scholars Racquel Gates and Michael Gillespie, moderated by filmmaker and critic Tayler Montague.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmer's preview of our Jonas Mekas Retrospective with FLC Jr. Programmer Dan Sullivan, followed by a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with Flee director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, moderated by NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez. Few if any figures in the history of New York City film culture have left as large a mark as that of the Lithuanian filmmaker, critic, and poet Jonas Mekas. Rising to notoriety in the 1950s and ’60s as a champion of and mouthpiece for the New American Cinema, he founded and presided over such stalwart fixtures of the underground and avant-garde film scenes as Film Culture magazine, the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Anthology Film Archives. But he was also one of the 20th century’s most vital film artists, a master cine-diarist and something like a present-tense historian who documented the particulars of emigrant life in New York City. Featuring 16mm screenings, our Jonas Mekas Retro

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from our sneak preview of The Worst Person in the World with director Joachim Trier and actors Anders Danielsen Lie and Renate Reinsve, moderated by FLC’s Director of Programming Dennis Lim. As proven in such exacting stories of lives on the edge as Reprise and Oslo, August 31, Norwegian director Joachim Trier is singularly adept at giving an invigorating modern twist to classically constructed character portraits. Trier catapults the viewer into the world of his most spellbinding protagonist yet: Julie, played by Cannes Best Actress winner Renate Reinsve, who’s the magnetic center of nearly every scene. After dropping out of pre-med, Julie must find new professional and romantic avenues as she navigates her late-twenties, juggling emotionally heavy relationships with two very different men (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie and engaging newcomer Herbert Nordrum). Fluidly told in 12 discrete chapters, Trier’s film elegantly depicts the

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a talk from Camera Man: Dana Stevens on Buster Keaton, a recent FLC event celebrating the new book from author and Slate film critic Dana Stevens, moderated by writer Imogen Sara Smith and FLC Programming Assistant Maddie Whittle. The conversation ranged from the two authors’ love of Buster Keaton, the evolution of the filmmaker’s filmography, the perception of masculinity in Charles Reisner’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., and the legacy of Keaton in Hollywood and beyond. Dana Stevens’s new book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century and Imogen Sara Smith’s Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy are both available for purchase.