The Close-up

We were happy to have director Yorgos Lanthimos back at the New York Film Festival to discuss Poor Things, a Main Slate selection of this year’s festival, as well as cinematographer Robbie Ryan, costume designer Holly Waddington, composer Jerskin Fendrix, and production designers James Price & Shona Heath, with NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen. 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. Listen to the conversat

The 61st edition of the New York Film Festival kicked off on Friday, September 29 with the North American premiere of May December, directed by Todd Haynes. 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. Boasting a trio of bravura, mercurial performances by Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles 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. Opening Night of NYFF61 is presented by Campari. Listen to the press conference featuring Haynes, Burch, and producers Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Jessica Elbaum, and Sophie Mas as they discuss May December. Don’t forget to mark your calendar

This week we're excited to present a Programmers Preview of NYFF61 with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim, Revivals Programmer Dan Sullivan, Currents & Shorts Programmer Tyler Wilson, and Talks programmers Devika Girish and Madeline Whittle. Opening with the North American premiere of Todd Haynes’s May December, 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. Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Yui Kiyohara, whose new film, Remembering Every Night was a 2023 New Directors/New Films selection that is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center along with the filmmaker’s first feature, Our House. And, if you purchase a ticket to one Yui Kiyohara film, receive a ticket to the other free! A film that moves on the rhythms of a gentle breeze, Yui Kiyohara’s follow-up to her acclaimed Our House is an evocatively quotidian film that’s as mysterious and beautiful as everyday life itself. Kiyohara immerses viewers in the quiet pursuits of several women, including a wandering university student, a helpful neighborhood meter reader, and a middle-aged gentle soul seeking employment but finding herself agreeably lost instead. Their paths converge or just miss one another over the course of a single sunny afternoon, captured by Kiyohara with calming long takes and the occasional drifting camera that seems to have a perspective all its own. Remembering Ever

This week we’re excited to present a conversation which recently took place as part of our new series, Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s, following a screening of Yu Hyun-mok’s 1961 South Korean classic, Aimless Bullet. Film critic, lecturer, and author Darcy Paquet and series co-curators, Korean Film Archive's Young Jin Eric Choi and Subway Cinema's Goran Topalovic, lead a discussion of the film. Banned in 1961 for its scathing critique of postwar reconstruction but now widely hailed as one of the greatest Korean films ever made, Yu Hyun-mok’s breakout feature was this unrelentingly bleak, noir-tinged melodrama set in the aftermath of the Korean War. The film follows the tragic bond between two brothers living with their surviving family in a Seoul slum called Liberation Village. While Cheol-ho, an accountant suffering from a toothache he can’t afford to treat, struggles to scrape together a meager existence, the senseless consequences of the war gradually tear at the seams of his family and push his

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with The Human Surge director Eduardo Williams. Eduardo Williams’s latest film,The Human Surge 3, will make its U.S. Premiere as the Opening Night selection in the Currents section of the 61st New York Film Festival. A twenty-something in Argentina loses his warehouse job. Boys in Mozambique perform half-hearted sex acts in front of a webcam. A woman in the Philippines assembles electronics in a small factory. The Human Surge, a Projections selection of NYFF54, features Eduardo Williams’s inquisitive camera in constant motion in, as are his rootless characters, who wander aimlessly, make small talk, futz with their phones, and search for a working Internet connection. Unfolding within the unfree time between casual jobs, this wildly original rumination on labor and leisure in the global digital economy seems to take place in both the immediate present and the far horizon of the foreseeable future. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Di

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with Saint Laurent director Bertrand Bonello and cast members Gaspard Ulliel & Aymeline Valade. Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, The Beast, will make its U.S. Premiere at the 61st New York Film Festival in this year’s Main Slate. Saint Laurent, which had its North American premiere at the 52nd New York Film Festival in 2014, is a different kind of biopic, focusing on a particularly hedonistic time in the life of legendary fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. The film playfully warps and obscures the passage of time, which results in a delirious viewing experience. Anchored by an enigmatic performance by Gaspard Ulliel, the fashion icon becomes a myth, a brand, and an avatar of his era. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation between journalist & author Min Jin Lee and Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose new film, Evil Does Not Exist, will make its U.S. premiere as a Main Slate selection of the 61st New York Film Festival. Inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi spins an engrossing, rapturous epic about love and betrayal, grief and acceptance. With his characteristic emotional transparency, Hamaguchi charts the unexpected, complex relationships that theater actor-director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) forges with a trio of people out of professional, physical, or psychological necessity: his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), with whom he shares an erotic bond forged in fantasy and storytelling; the mysterious actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), whom he’s drawn to by a sense of revenge as much as fascination; and, perhaps most mysteriously, Misaki (Tôko Miura), a plaintive young woman hired by a theater company, against his wishes, to be his c

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Ira Sachs, whose new film, Passages, is currently playing in our theaters. A masterful work of psychosexual intensity, the newest film from Ira Sachs offers one of the director’s most cutting variations on desire and intimacy. Co-written by author and longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, Passages follows Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a mercurial German filmmaker living in Paris whose commitment to his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), falls short when he pursues a dalliance with a young schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Martin begins his own affair soon after, while Tomas swings between both relationships and unleashes a reckless succession of breakups and makeups. With fearless performances from Rogowski, Whishaw, and Exarchopoulos, Sachs crafts a cinematic rarity in which the white-hot pleasures and compulsions of a particularly dysfunctional amour fou are kept on par with ferocious honesty. This conversation was moderated by film crit

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Sofia Coppola, whose new film, Priscilla, will make its North American premiere as the Centerpiece selection of the 61st New York Film Festival on October 6th. In this archival conversation with Coppola, the director discusses her 2013 film, The Bling Ring. Co-starring Emma Watson and Leslie Mann, The Bling Ring tells the story of a group of teenagers obsessed with fashion and celebrity that burglarize celebrities' homes in Los Angeles. Tracking their targets' whereabouts online, they break-in and steal their designer clothes and possessions. Reflecting on the naiveté of youth and the mistakes we all make when young, amplified by today's culture of celebrity and luxury brand obsession, we see through the members of the Bling Ring temptations that almost any teenager would feel. What starts out as teenage fun spins out of control and leaves us with a sobering view of our culture today. This conversation was moderated by former Director of the Ne

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Todd Haynes. Haynes's new film, May December, will make its North American premiere as the Opening Night selection of the 61st New York Film Festival on September 29th. In this archival conversation with Haynes, the director discusses his mid-90s classic, Safe, starring his May December and Far From Heaven leading actress, Julianne Moore. While Haynes shot Safe in 1994, he set it at the height of the AIDS epidemic seven years earlier. The unnamed disease at the center of this indelible, shuddering movie—widely considered one of Haynes’s masterpieces—has taken on new, unexpected meanings since the film’s release, and yet much of what makes Safe revelatory to watch is the uncanny precision of its setting, look, and tone. Carol (Julianne Moore), whose mysterious breakdown from perfect housewife to cloistered invalid drives the movie’s plot, is a character couldn’t live anywhere but suburban L.A. in the late ’80s—a landscape Haynes captures in a str

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Christian Petzold about his new film, Afire, now playing in our theaters courtesy of Janus and Sideshow Films. Set against the backdrop of a seaside town threatened by encroaching wildfires, Christian Petzold’s latest is a breezy, often funny, yet emotionally layered melodrama of creative and romantic insecurities along the German Riviera. The film centers around Leon, a disgruntled novelist struggling to finish his manuscript while traveling with his photographer friend to a vacation home near the Baltic Sea, where they’re met by an unexpected third house guest, Nadja (Paula Beer;, whose presence distracts Leon as much as it cringingly exposes his self-obsessed bubble. Full of sunkissed tints and nocturnal blues, Afire finds the director operating with a deceptively light touch, but what starts as a hangout comedy gradually opens up into something entirely more surprising and psychologically complex. The film is the winner of the Silver Bear Gr

This week we're excited to present a conversation with Paulina Urrutia, a film subject in Maite Alberdi's new documentary, The Eternal Memory. Augusto and Paulina have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, their lives were forever changed by Augusto’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. As one of Chile’s most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved Paulina, whose own pre-eminence as a famous actress and Chilean Minister of Culture predates her ceaselessly inventive manner of engaging with her husband. Day by day, the couple face this challenge head-on, relying on the tender affection and sense of humor shared between them that remains, remarkably, fully intact. This conversation was moderated by Lucila Moctezuma.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with cult-favorite  director Park Chan-wook. Three decades into his feature filmmaking career,  Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook—recipient of the Best Director award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—made his New York Film Festival debut with Decision to Leave, an intricate Hitchcockian epic that both draws on familiar genres like the crime thriller and the melodrama and takes them in entirely new formal and psychological directions. We were thrilled to welcome Park to NYFF60 last October for a deep-dive conversation delving into his long and acclaimed career, his affinity for genre filmmaking, his artistic influences and inspirations, and the making of his latest feature. For our event, Deep Focus: Park Chan-wook, the filmmaker spoke with film critic Farran Smith Nehme.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins, who recently joined us for a screening of his latest feature, The March on Rome. Filmmaking’s role in influencing the political landscape and popular consciousness has been a well-established subject in cinema, but few works have performed as deep an investigation into it as the latest from Mark Cousins, The March on Rome. Using a propagandistic documentary depicting Mussolini and the Black Shirts’ seizure of power as his point of departure, Cousins captivatingly delves into the film’s cinematographic particulars and political context to demonstrate that the rise of fascism in the first half of the 20th century had little to do with its supposed popularity—rather, its ascent was just another spellbinding illusion on the silver screen, albeit one with tragic real-life consequences. Alba Rohrwacher appears periodically in staged interludes as a woman whose initial enthusiasm for fascism tarnishes when she witnesses first

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with the great Hungarian filmmaker, Béla Tarr, who recently joined us for screenings of four films from his acclaimed filmography, three of which were new restorations, courtesy of Janus Films. Three years in the making, Werckmeister Harmonies is a sustained, real-time immersion in the universe of weatherbeaten villages and full-contact metaphysics in which co-directors Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, and writer László Krasznahorkai specialize. A curiously smart paper carrier named János (Lars Rudolph, in an astonishingly complex performance) observes a mysterious traveling circus—complete with a stuffed whale—that comes to town, and marks a sea change in relationships of all kinds—between families, lovers, peasants and royals. In this movie, voted as one of the best of its decade by Film Comment, each action, however small, carries the weight of revolution. With Fassbinder icon Hanna Schygulla.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with actress Françoise Lebrun, who appeared in Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece, The Mother and the Whore, and Charles Gillibert, the producer of the film’s new restoration. The Mother and the Whore will be opening in our theaters in a new 4K restoration as part of “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache,” a 12-film retrospective of the French director’s work, from June 23–July 13, courtesy of FLC and Janus Films. Tickets are on sale now at filmlinc.org/eustache. After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May 1968 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun,

This week we’re excited to present a career-spanning conversation with actress Virginie Efira, who next appears in Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, opening in our theaters on June 23rd. Tickets are on sale now at filmlinc.org/revoir Efira has attracted a dedicated following in recent years with her rigorous, singularly sensitive performances, including star-making turns in NYFF selections Benedetta and Sibyl. In this year’s edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema she took center stage, with lead roles in Revoir Paris (the Opening Night selection) and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children. During the festival, Efira participated in a wide-ranging conversation with FLC Assistant Programmer Maddie Whittle in which Efira discussed the evolution of her craft and approach to portraying profoundly complicated, endlessly compelling characters.

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Pietro Marcello about his latest feature, the NYFF60 Main Slate selection, Scarlet, opening in our theaters next Friday, preceded by a special one night only screening of his previous feature, Martin Eden, on June 8th. Tickets are on sale now at filmlinc.org/scarlet. Marcello, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile talents, follows his dramatic breakthrough, Martin Eden, with an enchanting period fable based on a beloved 1923 novel by Russian writer Alexander Grin. The film begins as the tale of a sensitive brute who returns home from World War I to his rural French village to discover that his wife has died and he must take care of their baby daughter, Juliette, then blossoms into a pastoral portrait of Juliette as a free-spirited young woman reckoning with a local witch’s prophecy for her future and falling for the modern man who literally drops from the sky. In his first fil

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Paul Schrader about two of his recent features, First Reformed and The Card Counter. We were delighted to have the filmmaker recently join us in anticipation of the opening of his latest feature, the NYFF60 Main Slate selection, Master Gardener, now playing in our theaters. For nearly half a century, Schrader has crafted a personal and provocative body of work typified by an obsessive focus on moral decay, isolation, and self-redemption across various dispirited pockets of the United States. Rounding out an era-delineating thematic trilogy that began with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardener  (NYFF60) continues what the writer-director has referred to as his “man in a room” movies with a startling tale of dormant violence and the possibility of regeneration. Following our screenings of First Reformed and The Card Counter, Schrader spoke with FLC Assist