The Close-up

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 Ce

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 fas

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

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-cen

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 tic

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 centur

On the first episode of our daily 62nd New York Film Festival edition of the FLC podcast, director Julia Loktev and subjects Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, and Olga Churakova join Rachel Rosen to discuss My Undesirable Friends Part I – Last Air in Moscow, world premiering in the Main Slate of this year's festival. 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 fiv

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 thr

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 Richar

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 m

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/pa

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

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 pla

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 cl

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

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

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, remi