The Close-up

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.

Ferrari director Michael Mann and cast members Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, and Gabriel Leone discuss diving deep into projects, the complexities of the Ferrari family, and competitive racing with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim at the Closing Night press conference. Michael Mann (The Insider) brings his astonishing command of technique and storytelling to bear on this emotional, elegantly crafted dramatization of the life of the legendary car manufacturer and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari at a professional and personal fulcrum. It’s 1957, and the marriage of Enzo (Adam Driver, in an artfully internalized performance) and Laura (Penélope Cruz, a ferocious revelation) has begun to irrevocably fracture as a result of his philandering and the tragic recent death of their young son. Their unsettled domestic world is on a collision course with his work life as Enzo faces a pair of major turning points: financial pressure to increase productivity, which means going against his long-standing desire to only produce rac

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus director Neo Sora discusses the personal nature of the film, the logistics of recording live music, and Sakamoto’s relationship with cinema. When Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March 2023 at age 71, the world lost one of its greatest musicians: a classical orchestral composer, a techno-pop artist, and a piano soloist who elevated every genre he worked in and inspired and influenced music-lovers across the globe. As a final gift to his legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances. Recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo, this filmed concert is an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show, featuring just Sakamoto and a Yamaha grand, as the composer glides through a playlist of his most haunting, delicate melodies (including “Lack of Love, “The Wuthering Heights,” “Aqua,” “Opus,” and many more). Shot in pristine black-and-white by Bill Kirstein and edited by Takuya Kawakami,

Director Bertrand Bonello discusses the timelessness of Léa Seydoux, slashers, and The Beast, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Coma) has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) and tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

On today’s daily NYFF61 podcast, director Annie Baker and lead actresses Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler discuss Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Baker’s superb debut feature Janet Planet with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.  It’s 1991 in rural Western Massachusetts, the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods. As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends. This work of surreal tranquility moves at a different, lost pace of life, and introduces Ziegler as an incredible new talent. An A24 release. Listen to the Q&A featuring Baker, Nicholson, and Ziegler as they discuss watching the film for the first time, resisting conventions, and the origins of Janet Planet.

Director Jonathan Glazer, stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, 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 FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini. 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.

On today’s daily NYFF61 edition of the FLC podcast, director Justine Triet, co-writer Arthur Harari, and lead actress Sandra Hüller join us to discuss Anatomy of a Fall, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s drama is a riveting procedural and a delicate inquiry into the impossibility of an ultimate truth in human relationships. When the husband of famous novelist Sandra Voyter (played by Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller) is found dead on the ground outside their chalet in the French Alps, authorities suspect that she might have been responsible, as the impact and position of his body suggest a push rather than a fall. This leads to a murder trial that puts every aspect of their marriage under impossible scrutiny, and whose outcome might hinge on the perspective of their vision-impaired 11-year-old son. Triet’s fiercely intelligent, emotionally devastating film dissects the ways we c

On today’s daily NYFF61 edition of the FLC podcast, director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi joins us to discuss Evil Does Not Exist, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In his potent and foreboding new film, Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller with the tale of a serene rural village that’s about to be disrupted by the construction of a glamping site for Tokyo tourists. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. Enjoy this discussion Hamaguchi and don’t forget to subscribe here for more filmmaker conversations. Evil Does Not Exist will be released by Sideshow and Janus Films. 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.

At the North American premiere of Priscilla, our Centerpiece selection, actors Cailee Spaeny & Jacob Elordi, costumer designer Stacey Battat, production designer Tamara Deverell, and producer Youree Henley discussed the film with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. No one knew American pop icon Elvis Presley more tenderly during his superstar years than Priscilla Ann Wagner, whose own story as Elvis’s romantic partner and only wife has rarely been told. Director Sofia Coppola, who in her remarkable filmography has so often returned to intimate portraits of women living complicated lives behind closed doors, has found a subject exquisitely tailored to her interests. As portrayed with extraordinary poise and strength by Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla finally becomes the center of her narrative. Coppola follows her love affair with Elvis (an equally revelatory, larger-than-life Jacob Elordi), from her early years as a teenage army brat stationed in West Germany to her surreal arrival at Graceland, which becomes both h

We recently welcomed actress Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos to the New York Film Festival for the U.S. premiere of Bleat, a Spotlight selection in this year’s festival, for a post-screening Q&A with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone have worked together before, but never in black-and-white on a remote Greek island with a herd of goats. In this entrancing, wordless collaboration, Stone gives a mesmerizing performance as a young widow who, along with her late husband (Damien Bonnard), embarks on a singularly unclassifiable journey through sex, death, and resurrection. Showing for the first time since its Athens premiere last year and designed never to be presented with a recorded soundtrack, this unique 35mm screening of the silent film featured live accompaniment by an ensemble of musicians and a choir, performing pieces by J.S. Bach, Knut Nystedt, and Toshio Hosokawa. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on

We recently welcomed back director Richard Linklater for the U.S. premiere of Hit Man, a Spotlight selection in this year’s festival, for a post-screening Q&A with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Richard Linklater’s peppy sunlit neo-noir is a continually surprising delight. Glen Powell, in a wily and charismatic star turn, plays strait-laced philosophy professor Gary Johnson, who moonlights as an undercover hitman for the New Orleans Police Department, inhabiting different guises and personalities to catch hapless criminals hoping to bump off their enemies. It’s based on an improbable true story, with a few wild embellishments. 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.