The Close-up

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 13th edition of the recently concluded Scary Movies with Rabbit Trap director Bryn Chainey. Rabbit Trap opens in select theaters this Friday, September 12, courtesy of IFC Films. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Joining the likes of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie among the great troubled marriages of genre cinema, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen disappear into the roles of Darcy and Daphne Davenport, a sound engineer and his experimental musician wife, freshly decamped from London and taking up residence in an isolated cottage deep in the Welsh countryside in search of creative renewal and acoustic inspiration. When the couple set about exploring their new environs, recording instruments in tow, Darcy stumbles upon a “fairy circle” that emits a strange, unidentifiable frequency; this odd discovery is followed closely by the appearance on their doorstep of an otherworldly child who claims to live nearby and is eage

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with M. Night Shyamalan, the subject of our current series Night at the Movies: An M. Night Shyamalan Retrospective, on his 2004 feature The Village. Featuring 2-for-1 double bills that place Shyamalan’s features alongside a film of his own choosing, the series runs through Thursday, September 4th. View remaining screening schedule and secure

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with legendary French New Wave filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet and his creative and life partner Antonietta Pizzorno as they discuss the 1976 feature, Anatomy of a Relationship, with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. This event took place as part of our recently concluded retrospective Luc Moullet: Anarchy in the Alps. Luc Moullet’s follow-up to the far-out excursions of The Smugglers and A Girl Is a Gun grounds itself in the shared everyday life of a couple. Moullet himself plays a filmmaker who struggles to earn a living practicing his vocation; his professional frustrations are matched by his apparent inability to please his intellectual wife (Christine Hébert), sexually or otherwise. Moullet and Pizzorno (Moullet’s real-life wife and creative partner) set the proceedings in spare, claustrophobic spaces, chronicling quarrels, cringe-inducing episodes, and fleeting moments of tenderness on the way to a comic meditation on filmmaking’s capacity to complicate rel

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with FLC Programmer Madeline Whittle about the 13th edition of Scary Movies. Taking place at Film at Lincoln Center from August 15-21, Scary Movies is New York City’s premier showcase for the best in new genre (and genre-bending) cinema from around the globe alongside spine-tingling classics and rediscoveries conjured from the dark recesses of midnight-movie lore. To view the full screening schedule and to purchase tickets to this year’s edition of Scary Movies, please visit filmlinc.org/scary Scary Movies XIII is sponsored by MUBI, the global streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with cinematographer Fred Murphy as he discusses Hoosiers. Hoosiers screened as part of our recently concluded retrospective celebrating the career of the late, great Gene Hackman. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler WIlson. Few sports films land with the clarity, grit, and emotional lift of Hoosiers. Gene Hackman brings flinty, lived-in authority to Norman Dale, a disgraced coach seeking a second act in 1950s Indiana, where basketball is practically a religion. Directed with unflashy conviction by David Anspaugh and shot in real Hoosier gyms, this underdog story favors restraint over bombast, with Jerry Goldsmith’s elegiac score and a quietly shattering turn by Dennis Hopper as a washed-up assistant adding unexpected weight. At its core is one of Hackman’s most cherished performances—contained, weathered, and quietly magnetic—in a film that’s less about victory than the long, uncertain work of earning it.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of New Directors/New Films with No Sleep Till director Alexandra Simpson. No Sleep Till is now in select theaters, courtesy of Factory 25. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle. The slice-of-life indie is alive and well in Alexandra Simpson’s feature debut, recipient of a Special Mention from the jury at the 2024 Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week. While a looming hurricane spells doom for a sleepy Florida town, citizens carry on: two friends pull pranks and ponder life; another pair captures terrifying footage of the storm; a young woman harbors a deep crush. Through this fleet exploration Simpson keeps audiences on their feet, no two stories told at the exact same tempo and no composition easily anticipated. And backgrounding it all is a sun-soaked, palm tree-lined Florida that has seldom looked as beautiful as it does in No Sleep Till.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with legendary Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa as he discusses his new feature Cloud, currently playing daily at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/cloud This conversation was moderated by New York magazine and Vulture film critic Alison Willmore. Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) delivers one of his most chillingly prescient films with this riveting fusion of social satire, techno-thriller, and survival-action. Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a T-shirt factory worker, supplements his income by flipping merchandise online—dubious medical devices, counterfeit designer handbags, collectible figurines—until disgruntled customers begin organizing against him on an anonymous message board. As his profits grow and he quits his day job (even hiring an assistant), he becomes the target of a coordinated vendetta that ratchets into something increasingly brutal, absurd, yet eerily plausible. At once a pulse-pounding provocation and a cautionary tale for our at

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between film scholars Shana L. Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor in NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies, as they discuss a double feature of Oscar Micheaux's 1925 silent film Body and Soul and Jordan Peele's 2019 sophomore feature Us. Hailed as “a colossal achievement” and “blissfully ambitious” upon its release, Jordan Peele’s 2019 feature Us plumbed everything from American isolationist fears and labyrinthine power structures to the rich lineage of the doppelgänger motif and home-invasion thrillers. Now with the recent publication Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay by Inventory Press, in-depth footnotes, commentaries, and a constellation of images, definitions, and inspirations have untethered entirely new references orbiting the film. This past June, Film at Lincoln Center was thrilled to interpret the cosmology outlined in this book through a presentation

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from the 52nd New York Film Festival in 2014 with Inherent Vice director Paul Thomas Anderson and his very large and talented cast. For one week only from July 4-10, join Film at Lincoln Center in revisiting this great American film on 70mm film, ahead of the director’s highly anticipated new feature One Battle After Honor. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/vice This conversation was moderated by Kent Jones, former Director of the New York Film Festival. Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing Thomas Pynchon adaptation is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all in as Doc

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Afternoons of Solitude director Albert Serra. An NYFF62 Spotlight selection, Afternoons of Solitude opens at Film at Lincoln Center on June 28. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/solitude This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Albert Serra trains a patient and poetic lens on the dazzling pomp and devastating brutality of bullfighting in his new documentary portrait of the charismatic Peruvian-born star torero Andrés Roca Rey. Intensely in-the-moment, Afternoons of Solitude expertly balances the visceral thrill of the battle inside the ring, pitting animal instinct against human technique, with a filmmaking style that allows the viewer to appreciate the emotional and physical toll the violence takes on both man and beast. Unflinching yet reflective, Serra’s film is a monumental depiction of the persistence of the primitive in the present day, while acknowledging the extraordina

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with cinematographer Peter Deming, who recently joined us for two special screenings of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, courtesy of Deming’s personally owned 35mm film print. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. Most of Lynch’s later films straddle (at least) two realities, and their most ominous moments arise from a dawning awareness that one world is about to yield to another. In Lost Highway we are introduced to brooding jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) while he lives in a simmering state of jealousy with his listless and possibly unfaithful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). About one hour in, a rupture fundamentally alters the narrative logic of the film and the world itself becomes a nightmare embodiment of a consciousness out of control. Lost Highway marked a return from the wilderness for Lynch, and the arrival of his more radical expressionism—alternating omnipresent darkness with overexposed whiteouts, dead air with t

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Meeting with Pol Pot director Rithy Panh and journalist Elizabeth Becker, moderated by FLC’s Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Meeting with Pol Pot will open at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, June 13 with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/polpot In 1978, three French journalists arrive in Cambodia to survey the country and interview its leader, Pol Pot—but after a picture-perfect arrival, cracks begin to emerge in the murderous regime’s facade of respectability. For Cambodian-born Rithy Panh, the damage inflicted upon his homeland by the Khmer Rouge has fueled a lifetime of innovative work in the vein of 2013’s The Missing Picture, which reconstructed the period’s events in part through clay-figurine dioramas. This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book When the War Was

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Ghost Trail director Jonathan Millet. Ghost Trail is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/ghost This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Two years after being released from Syrian jail, Hamid (Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge—but what’s the real price of vengeance for the person seeking it? Inspired by true events, Jonathan Millet’s deeply researched thriller excavates the too-little-examined moral dilemmas and political negligence that traumatized migrants must confront amid the struggle to rebuild their lives and take control of their destinies at the margins of contemporary French society, inviting audiences to bette

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Northern Lights directors John Hanson & Rob Nilsson and cast members Susan Lynch & Joe Spano. This conversation was moderated by NYFF62 Revivals programmer Dan Sullivan. An NYFF62 Revivals selection, Northern Lights is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Kino Lorber. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/lights Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, the sui generis Northern Lights marks one of the most moving and committed works of political cinema from the late 1970s. Dramatizing the formation of the populist Nonpartisan League in North Dakota in the mid-1910s, Northern Lights captures the plight of immigrant Dakotan farmers as they toil and struggle against the combined forces of industry and finance. Amid this class tension, two young lovers find themselves swept up in the tide. Shot on location (on grain-rich black-and-white 16mm) in the dead of winter and featuring an astonishing

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of the New York African Film Festival with Black Tea director Abderrahmane Sissako and producer Kessen Tall. This conversation was moderated by Film Comment editor Devika Girish. After saying no on her wedding day, Aya leaves the Ivory Coast for a new life in the buzzing “Chocolate City” of Guangzhou, China. In this district where the African diaspora meets Chinese culture, she gets hired in a tea boutique owned by Cai, a Chinese man. In the secrecy of the back shop, Cai decides to initiate Aya to the tea ceremony. Through the teaching of this ancient art, their relationship slowly turns into tender love. But for their burgeoning passion to lead to mutual trust, they must let go of their burdens and face their past. Having made its New York Premiere at Film at Lincoln Center earlier this month, Black Tea is currently playing in select theaters, courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

This week we’re excited to present a special episode featuring the star-studded speeches from our recent Chaplin Award Gala. FLC was pleased to honor Pedro Almodóvar as the recipient of the 50th Chaplin Award, presented in partnership with ROLEX, at a Gala evening on April 28. The full house at Alice Tully Hall was treated to a joyful celebration of the celebrated filmmaker's incredible body of work with hilarious and heartfelt tributes by Almodóvar's cast members, friends, admirers, and more, culminating in Dua Lipa presenting the Chaplin Award to Almodóvar himself. The evening’s guest speakers included, in order of appearance, Secretary of our Board of Directors Wendy Keys, Former Film at Lincoln Center Programming Director & head of the New York Film Festival Richard Peña, acclaimed filmmaker, writer, & artist John Waters, actress and longtime Almodóvar muse Rossy de Palma, renowned performer & artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov, Emmy Award–winning actor, director, & writer John Turturro, and global

This week we’re excited present a special programmer’s preview of our upcoming retrospective, Kira Muratova: Scenographies of Chaos, taking place in our theaters May 16-25. The episode features a conversation between FLC programmer Madeline Whittle, Marta Kuzma (Professor of Art at Yale University), and film scholar and writer Ivan Kozlenk. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/muratova Kira Muratova: Scenographies of Chaos offers a rare opportunity to explore the complete body of work of a filmmaker who remained largely unknown to American audiences during her lifetime and has only recently come into widespread international acclaim. Muratova is now widely considered the greatest Ukrainian filmmaker of the last half century—and arguably one of the most influential women directors in cinema history. Deeply fascinated by eccentric characters and linguistic deviations, Muratova honed a distinctive style characterized by surreal and unexpected repetitions, refracting the experience of an unstable reality by way of outr

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with Blue Sun Palace director Constance Tsang and cast members Ke-Xi Wu and Murielle Hsieh. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films co-chair Dan Sullivan. Blue Sun Palace is now in select theaters, courtesy of Dekanalog. For more than 30 years the Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng has forged an indelible, inimitable creative partnership with Tsai Ming-liang. Lee makes as big an impression in Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, which relocates him to working-class Queens. When wayward Taiwanese immigrant Cheung (Lee) finds his life of part-time work and light extramarital affairs shattered by violence, he connects with workers at a small Queens salon, victims themselves to the indignities forced upon strangers in a strange land. But Blue Sun Palace is no misery showcase. Intimacy and warmth co-exist with economic anxieties and deep grief that are articulated with uncommon intelligence and unde

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Shrouds writer & director David Cronenberg and lead actress Diane Kruger, moderated by FLC programmer Tyler Wilson. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, The Shrouds is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets: https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-shrouds/ In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a desc

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Invention director Courtney Stephens and lead actress Calle Hernandez (moderated by FLC's Tyler Wilson) from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films. Presented by The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) takes place through April 13, and has, since 1972, showcased new and emerging filmmakers whose distinctive visions and risk-taking works highlight the vitality and potential of cinema. Personal anguish and noirish mystery are inextricably bound in Invention, wherein Callie Hernandez (who co-conceptualized the film, and plays a cross between herself and some other vision) seeks the truth about her father—an inventor of devices boasting untapped power—whose death is not what it seems. Traversing a backwoods America of oddballs, cretins, estate vultures, and even the occasional sweetheart, Hernandez’s journey is a constant reminder of how much our loved ones hide from us in life and deat