The Close-up

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 convers

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

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 Fe

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 Radica

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 pl

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 fi

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 t

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 and Executive Producer 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 girlfrien

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

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

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

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

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 co

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.

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

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

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.