The Close-up

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast we’re featuring a special Q&A that followed the recent U.S. Premiere of The Birthday during our Jordan Peele curated series, The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice, with director Eugenio Mira and lead Corey Feldman. Moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson. Part comedy of manners by way of Jerry Lewis, part phantasmagorical head trip, Eugenio Mira’s debut has garnered cult status in the years since its premiere at Sitges in 2004, in part for never getting an official home video release or U.S. theatrical premiere—that is, until this January at Film at Lincoln Center. Set in a ruby-red Art Deco hotel in 1987, The Birthday follows hapless protagonist Norman Forrester (Corey Feldman)—whose accent might suggest Brooklyn, New York, but is actually Brooklyn, Baltimore—as he navigates an inhospitable birthday celebration for his scolding girlfriend’s wealthy father (cult icon Jack Taylor) and struggles with the anxieties of his deteriorating romance. The a

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a recent conversation with filmmaker Lukas Dhont on his latest film Close, which was recently nominated for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards, and moderator and critic Thelma Adams. This talk was first exclusive for FLC Patrons.  If you're interested in supporting FLC by becoming a member and exploring member benefits, visit filmlinc.org/members for more information.  Leo and Remi are two thirteen-year-old best friends, whose seemingly unbreakable bond is suddenly, tragically torn apart. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Lukas Dhont's second film is an emotionally transformative and unforgettable portrait of the intersection of friendship and love, identity and independence, and heartbreak and healing. Close is now playing in theaters.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re revisiting a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival with Mia Hansen-Løve on One Fine Morning, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim, followed by our recent conversation with Jordan Peele, Keke Palmer, and more on the making of NOPE. Few filmmakers are as adept at exploring the contours of modern love and grief as Mia Hansen-Løve, whose intensely poignant and deeply personal latest drama stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads. Her father, rapidly deteriorating from a neurological illness, will soon require facility care, and her new lover is a married dad whose unavailability only seems to draw her nearer to him, despite—or because of—the fact that she’s going through an overwhelming time in her life. Hansen-Løve, so finely observant of the small nuances of human interaction, creates, in harmonious concert with a magnificent Seydoux, a complicated portrait of a woman torn between romant

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re sharing a talk from the 60th New York Film Festival with Alice Diop & Frederick Wiseman, whose films Saint Omer (opening Friday at FLC with Q&As!) and A Couple, respectively, were both NYFF60 Main Slate selections. The conversation was moderated by Dessane Lopez Cassell, editor-in-chief of SEEN journal with translation by Nicholas Elliott. French filmmaker Alice Diop has said that it was the work of Frederick Wiseman that inspired her to become a documentarian. It is fitting, then, that NYFF60's Main Slate featured new films by Wiseman and Diop that speak to each other in extraordinary ways—including in their deviation from documentary into the more delicate terrain between fiction and nonfiction. Both A Couple (Wiseman) and Saint Omer (Diop) take true stories of extraordinary and fraught women as their bases, probing the formal possibilities and limits of cinema in revealing the inner lives of real people. The two directors convened for a conversation a

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring two conversations from the 60th New York Film Festival. The first is with Carla Simón, director of Alcarràs, an NYFF60 Main Slate selection about a family in present-day Catalonia, moderated by former NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. The second conversation is a deep dive on liberating lost movies with various Missing Movies board members and advisors. Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale Festival, Carla Simón’s follow-up to her acclaimed childhood drama Summer 1993 is a ruminative, lived-in portrait of a rural family in present-day Catalonia whose way of life is rapidly changing. The Solé clan live in a small village, annually harvesting peaches for local business and export. However, their livelihood is put in jeopardy by the looming threat of the construction of solar panels, which would necessitate the destruction of their orchard. From this simple narrative, pitting agricultural tradition against the onrushing train

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation from our recent sneak preview screening of Corsage with director Marie Kreutzer and lead Vicky Krieps.  In a perceptive, nuanced performance, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) quietly dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her fortieth birthday. Marie Kreutzer boldly imagines Elizabeth’s cloistered, late-19th-century world within the Austro-Hungarian Empire with both austere realism and fanciful anachronism, while staying true and intensely close to the woman’s private melancholy and political struggle amidst a crumbling, combative marriage and escalating scrutiny. Star and director have together created a remarkable vision of a strong-willed political figure whose emergence from a veiled, corseted existence stands for a Europe on the cusp of major, irrevocable transformation. Corsage, an official selection of the 60th New York Film Festi

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation with Hugh Jackman on his latest film, The Son, which recently played in our theaters exclusively for FLC Patrons. If you're interested in supporting FLC by becoming a member and exploring member benefits, go to filmlinc.org/members. For a limited time, get 30% off Memberships with the promo code HOLIDAY30; available for Contributor-level Memberships and above. A cautionary tale that follows a family as it struggles to reunite after falling apart. The Son centers on Peter (Hugh Jackman), whose hectic life with his infant and new partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby) is upended when his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) appears with their son Nicholas (Zen McGrath), who is now a teenager. The young man has been missing from school for months and is troubled, distant, and angry. Peter strives to take care of Nicholas as he would have liked his own father to have taken care of him while juggling work, his and Beth's new son, and the offer of

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation between The Eternal Daughter director Joanna Hogg and filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The two talked about discovering each other's filmography, Hogg’s lifelong friendship with Tilda Swinton, and the process of creating art out of grief.  The Eternal Daughter follows a middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother who take an eerie, emotional trip to the past when they stay at a fog-enshrouded hotel in the English countryside. The great Joanna Hogg uses this Victorian gothic scenario for an entirely surprising, impeccably crafted excavation of a parent-child relationship starring Tilda Swinton in a performance of rich, endless surprise. The NYFF60 selection plays  daily in our theaters. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/eternal.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmers preview of our Yoshimitsu Morita retrospective and a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival between filmmakers Joanna Hogg & Kelly Reichardt.  First up, listen to programmers Dan Sullivan and Aiko Masubuchi dive into the career and films of Yoshimitsu Morita, one of the most fascinatingly idiosyncratic and prolific directors in modern Japanese cinema. Our Yoshimitsu Morita retrospective takes place through December 11 with special introductions during opening weekend. Get tickets and All-Access Passes at filmlinc.org/morita.  After the preview, we’re revisiting an NYFF60 conversation with The Eternal Daughter director Joanna Hogg and Showing Up director Kelly Reichardt. Two of the leading auteurs of contemporary cinema, Joanna Hogg and Kelly Reichardt have built acclaimed bodies of work that stand out for their epic existential scope and intimate emotional textures. With The Eternal Daughter and Showing Up, respectivel

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring two conversations: the first with director Jerzy Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska on the NYFF60 selection, EO, and the second with director Nikyatu Jusu and producer Nikkia Moulterie on the ND/NF51 selection Nanny. At age 84, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski has directed one of his spryest, most visually inventive films, following the travels of a peripatetic donkey named EO. After being removed from the only life he’s ever known in a traveling circus, EO begins a journey across the Polish and Italian countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom. Skolimowski imagines the animal’s mesmerizing journey as an ever-shifting interior landscape, marked by absurdity and warmth in equal measure, putting the viewer in the unique perspective of the protagonist. Skolimowski has constructed his own bold vision about the follies of human nature, seen from the ultimate outsider’s perspective. EO, a New York Times Critic's

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a talk from the 60th New York Film Festival with photographer, artist, and activist Nan Goldin, moderated by NYFF programmer Rachael Rakes. In the NYFF60 Centerpiece selection All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, documentarian Laura Poitras takes as her subject Nan Goldin. An era-defining artist who rose from the New York “No Wave” underground to become one of the great photographers of the late 20th century, Goldin put herself at the forefront of the battle against the Sackler family and their pharmaceutical empire, both as an activist at art institutions around the world that had accepted millions from the Sacklers and as an advocate for the destigmatization of drug addiction. This intimate, career-spanning conversation with Goldin dove into the personal and political roots of her creative practice, the radical humanism of her photography, and the defiant intertwinings of her art and activism.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed opens on November

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special introduction from Martin Scorsese ahead of the premiere of Personality Crisis: One Night Only at the 60th New York Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with directors Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, subject David Johansen, Executive Producer Mara Hennessey, producer Margaret Bodde, and Leah Hennessey, moderated by FLC Programmer Dan Sullivan. Continuing his vibrant and invaluable documentaries about iconic American artists and musicians such as George Harrison: Living in the Material World, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, and the Fran Lebowitz portrait Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese turns his camera on another beloved New York institution: the singular David Johansen. Equally celebrated as the lead singer-songwriter of the androgynous ’70s glam punk groundbreakers The New York Dolls and for his complete reinvention as hepcat lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the ’80s, the chameleonic Johansen has created an entire genre unto himself,

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival, moderated by Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish. This talk brought together the directors behind two stunning works of autofiction in the NYFF60 lineup. One Fine Morning by leading French filmmaker (and NYFF staple) Mia Hansen-Løve and Aftersun, the debut feature by Charlotte Wells, both center on father-daughter relationships drawn from the directors’ own lives, exploring tenderness and trauma, love and loss with formal ingenuity and emotional force. Both films also feature powerhouse performances—Paul Mescal in Aftersun and Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning—that challenge and reinvigorate routine cinematic portrayals of femininity, masculinity, and intimacy.  Hansen-Løve and Wells partook in an extended conversation about the process of making art out of one’s life, giving filmic shape to the workings of memory and time, reimagining the contours of “women’s cinema,” and more. NYFF T

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we're revisiting a special conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival with director Park Chan-wook and actor Park Hae-il on the season's biggest hit, Decision to Leave. Moderated by NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. Busan detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) finds that he’s increasingly obsessed with a puzzling new case: a middle-aged businessman has mysteriously fallen to his death during a rock climbing expedition. Upon discovering photos of his abused wife, a Chinese national named Seo-rae (Tang Wei), Hae-joon begins to suspect it wasn’t an accident, all the while becoming emotionally and erotically drawn to her. From this Hitchcockian situation, director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) weaves a swelling, expanding, ever more complex tale about a possible black widow and the investigator who just might be fashioning his own web. One of Park’s most enveloping and accomplished thrillers, which earned him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film F

Director Elegance Bratton and cast members Jeremy Pope, Gabrielle Union, and Raúl Castillo, and producers Effie Brown and Chester Algernal Gordon present and discuss The Inspection, the Closing Night selection of this year’s festival, with NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. Known for his affecting and dynamic documentary Pier Kids, about homeless queer and transgender youth in New York, and the Viceland series My House, on underground competitive ballroom dancing, filmmaker and photographer Elegance Bratton has made his ambitious narrative debut with The Inspection, a knockout drama based on his own experiences as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training following a decade of living on the streets. In a breathtaking first cinematic starring role, Tony– and Emmy–nominated actor Jeremy Pope is run through an emotional and physical gauntlet as a young man dealing with the intimidation of a sadistic sergeant (Bokeem Woodbine), his desire for a sympathetic superior (Raúl Castillo), and his complicated feel

Director Maria Schrader, screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, cast members Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, and Ashley Judd, and New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey discuss She Said, a Spotlight selection and World Premiere at NYFF60, with NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. In 2017, New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke a story that would change the world. Uncovering decades of sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, Kantor and Twohey boldly took on an establishment that had too long been allowed to systematically protect abusers. This thrilling new drama based on Kantor and Twohey’s best-selling book about their hard-fought investigation is directed by Maria Schrader (director of I’m Your Man and the acclaimed TV series Unorthodox) from a screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida). She Said stars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan in wonderful performances as the two intensely committed reporters whose efforts would ultimately help ignite the #MeToo movement. Schrader’s film

We welcomed director James Gray and cast members Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, and Jaylin Webb to present and discuss Armageddon Time, the 60th Anniversary Celebration and Main Slate selection of this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The most personal film yet from James Gray (The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z) is also one of his greatest, an exquisitely detailed and deeply emotional etching of a time and place: Queens, 1980. Set against the backdrop of a country on the cusp of ominous sociopolitical change, Armageddon Time follows Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth grader who dreams of becoming an artist. At the same time that Paul builds a friendship with classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who’s mercilessly targeted by their racist teacher, he finds himself increasingly at odds with his parents (Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway), for whom financial success and assimilation are key to the family’s Jewish-American identity. Paul feels on firmest ground with his kind grandfat

We welcomed director Chris Smith and producers Robert Downey Jr., Susan Downey, and Kevin Ford to present and discuss "Sr.", a Spotlight selection of this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director, Dennis Lim. Rarely do films about artists allow the kind of poignant intimacy seen in this tender yet fittingly irreverent portrait of the life and career of Robert Downey Sr., the fearless, visionary American director who set the standard for counterculture comedy in the sixties and seventies. An inspired collaboration between celebrated documentarian Chris Smith (American Movie); the subject’s son, Robert Downey Jr.; and the man himself, who’s occasionally shown working on his own version of the movie we’re watching, “Sr.” functions both as an elegy for the rule-flouting underground icon, who passed away at age 85 in July 2021, and as a testament to his tireless creative spirit. Capturing its subjects’ refreshing candor about aging, past struggles with addiction, and the ups and downs of working in Hollywood,

We welcomed director Sarah Polley, cast members Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod, Kate Hallett, & Liv McNeil, and producer Dede Gardner to present and discuss Women Talking, a Spotlight selection of this year’s festival, with NYFF Executive Director, Eugene Hernandez. Sarah Polley brings ferocious honesty and restrained urgency to her screen adaptation of Miriam Toews’s acclaimed novel about of a group of women from a remote religious community dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault perpetrated by the colony’s men. A film of ideas brought to life by Polley’s imaginative direction and a superb, fine-tuned ensemble cast—including Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Ben Whishaw, and Judith Ivey—Women Talking is a deep and searching exploration of self-determination, group responsibility, faith and forgiveness, philosophically engaging and emotionally rich in equal measure. A United Artists release.

On today’s episode of our daily NYFF60 edition, director Elvis Mitchell and executive producer Steven Soderbergh discuss Is That Black Enough For You?!?, a Spotlight selection of this year’s festival, with NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. American film critic Elvis Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic documentary creates a definitive narrative of the Black revolution in 1970s cinema, from genre films to social realism, from the making of new superstars to the craft of rising auteurs. With Is That Black Enough for You?!? (the title referencing a recurring line from Ossie Davis’s 1970 benchmark Cotton Comes to Harlem), Mitchell takes a personal and panoramic approach, expressing his own experiences as a viewer while detailing the cinematic and political histories that led to this extraordinary flowering of a newly ascendant Black heroism. The Learning Tree, Watermelon Man, Shaft, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Cool Breeze, Sounder, Super Fly, Coffy, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Claudine, Uptown Saturday Ni