New York Film Festival 2025

[Chris Knipp]

New York Film Festival 2025



Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt Set as New York Film Festival Opening Night Film

It's got a trendy theme of wokeness and campus shaming for "alleged sexual assault" at an Ivy League school. Here's the trailer:
TRAILER

The cast features Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield and costars Michael Stulbarg (of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME), Chloë Sevigniy and Ayo Edebiri. Produced by Amazon MGA and penned by Nora Garrett. Looks like Julia is good, it's a great role for Andrew, good backup from Michael and Chloë. Ayo is a relative unknown (perhaps most recognized from Comedy Central) who plays the central student "victim." The director Luca Guadagnino has previously featured at the NYFF with CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and QUEER.


JULIA ROBERTS, ANDREW GARFIELD IN AFTER THE HUNT

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF63 (the 2025 New York Film FEstival) announces its Centerpiece Film:

Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother

[Blurb:]
Jim Jarmusch’s perceptive study in familial dynamics is carefully constructed in the form of a triptych, with three chapters concerning the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents. With Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Tom Waits, and Charlotte Rampling.

[Chris Knipp]

The New York Film Festival 2025 announces its Closing Night Film (July 30, 2025.):

Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?

[Blurb:]
The movie, which Cooper directed and co-wrote and stars Will Arnett and Laura Dern, will have its world premiere on Friday, Oct. 10 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as Closing Night of the 63rd New York Film Festival

The Searchlight film follows Arnett and Dern’s married couple as they divorce and embark upon midlife self-examinations, as Arnett’s character makes a dramatic career pivot to become a confessional stand-up comedian in New York City’s West Village, where he finds a new purpose and community. Inspired by the true story of British comedian John Bishop, IS THIS THING ON? features a screenplay co-written by Arnett and Mark Chappell with Cooper. The cast includes Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds, Sean Hayes, Peyton Manning and Amy Sedaris.

[Chris Knipp]

August 4, 2025: Film at Lincoln Center announces the 63rd New York Film Festival Main Slate

SOURCE

The lineup of 34 films in the Main Slate celebrates global cinema with world, North American, U.S., and New York premieres from 26 countries. There are two world premieres, eight North American premieres and 13 U.S. debuts. NYFF63 runs from September 26 through October 13, 2025

Opening Night: After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)
Centerpiece: Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)
Closing Night: Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper)
Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi)
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph)
Cover-Up (Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus)
The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler)
Duse (Pietro Marcello)
The Fence (Claire Denis)
Gavagai (Ulrich Köhler)
A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
I Only Rest in the Storm (Pedro Pinho)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach)
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
Landmarks (Lucrecia Martel)
Late Fame (Kent Jones)
The Last One for the Road (Francesco Sossai)
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Magellan (Lav Diaz)
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
Romería (Carla Simón)
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Sirât (Oliver Laxe)
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
What Does That Nature Say To You (Hong Sangsoo)


GEORGE CLOONEY IN JAY KELLY

63rd New York Film Festival Main Slate Films & Descriptions:

Opening Night
After the Hunt
Luca Guadagnino, 2025, U.S., 135m
North American Premiere
In his razor-sharp new drama, the prolific Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55; Queer, NYFF62) plunges with refreshing abandon into the murky seas of contemporary morality—and gives Julia Roberts one of the most complex and gratifying starring roles of her career. Roberts embodies chilly, seemingly self-assured Yale philosophy professor Alma Olsson, whose comfortable professional career and domestic life with her mercurial husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) are thrown into chaos after her PhD candidate protégée Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Alma’s longtime colleague and friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. As a result, the air of rarefied academic privilege on campus begins to dissolve, and Alma must navigate minefields of gender, sexuality, race, and institutional power, all while trying to reconcile her own difficult choices with the demons of her past. From a trenchant, tightly plotted script by Nora Garrett, and with the aid of a sensational cast (also including Chloë Sevigny as Kim, a colleague of Alma’s), Guadagnino teases out a genuine provocation with no easy answers, inquiring where our true selves lie when every decision we make is thrown into the court of public opinion. An Amazon MGM Studios release. PREMIERE: VENICE (AUG. 29)

Centerpiece
Father Mother Sister Brother
Jim Jarmusch, 2025, U.S., 110m
North American Premiere
For years, Jim Jarmusch has written, directed, and produced delicate, character-driven films, including Stranger Than Paradise, Only Lovers Left Alive, Paterson, and Down by Law. Father Mother Sister Brother is a perceptive study in familial dynamics, a feature film carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three chapters all concern the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents, which take place in the present, and each in a different country. Siblings Jeff and Emily (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) check up on their hermetic father (Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey; sisters Lilith and Timothea (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett) reunite with their guarded novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin; and twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) return to their Paris apartment to address a family tragedy. Father Mother Sister Brother is a kind of anti-action film, its subtle and quiet style carefully constructed to allow small details to accumulate—almost like flowers being carefully placed in three delicate arrangements. As always, Jarmusch brings his worlds to life with the essential assistance of his collaborators, including two masterful cinematographers, Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, and the brilliant editor Affonso Gonçalves. A MUBI release. PREMIERE: VENICE

Closing Night
Is This Thing On?
Bradley Cooper, 2025, U.S., 124m
World Premiere
In a pair of galvanizing, deeply honest performances, Will Arnett and Laura Dern play Alex and Tess Novak, whose marriage has reached an impasse. With amicable sorrow, the couple—parents of two young boys—mutually agree to split up. Yet in director Bradley Cooper’s keenly observed comic drama, their separation leads to unpredictable midlife self-reckonings, most dramatically in Alex’s wild career pivot to become a confessional stand-up comedian in New York City’s West Village, where he finds new direction and camaraderie. This seemingly outlandish scenario—in a script by Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell inspired by the true story of British comedian John Bishop—is never played for easy laughs, while Cooper uses his penchant for naturalism to give the actors space to find their complicated centers. In his beautifully lived-in third feature following A Star Is Born and Maestro (NYFF61), Cooper confirms his dexterity for representing the complexities of human relationships, constructing a film that is both lacerating and sweet-souled, funny and tender. Is This Thing On? features a stacked, stellar supporting cast, including Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds, Sean Hayes, Peyton Manning, and Amy Sedaris, as well as charming assistance from New York stand-up standbys such as Chloe Radcliffe, Reggie Conquest, and Jordan Jensen, supplying the film its downtown authenticity. A Searchlight Pictures release from Lea Pictures and Archery Pictures. PREMIERE: NYFF

Below the Clouds / Sotto le nuvole
Gianfranco Rosi, 2025, Italy, 114m
Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The great Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno, NYFF58) specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has in recent years experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors. In this volatile environment, Rosi finds archeologists reckoning with both uncovered ancient artifacts and the wreckage of tomb raiders, squads of diggers descending into long abandoned tunnels, emergency centers already at breaking points, and a populace experiencing a generalized daily disquietude, fearful of an eruption like the one that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. Linking modern and ancient life, Below the Clouds alights on a specific region yet feels connected to everyone’s contemporary moment—the contemplation of the unimaginable nestled within our daily existence. PREMIERE: VENICE

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Kahlil Joseph, 2025, U.S., 107m
New York Premiere
Visual artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS debuted in galleries and museums across the country in 2019, immersing viewers in the imagined world of a television news network from a Black perspective. After expanding this concept into a short film, Joseph has developed it even further into a feature film, and the result is a celebration of Black life that reconceptualizes and remediates common, corporate notions of journalism. Joseph’s sprawling film is an uninterrupted gush of ideas, mixing newly shot footage and extant media, leaping from fantastical images to historical narratives, collapsing boundaries that often separate documentary and fiction. A multidimensional work of vision and ambition, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions offers an alternately riotous and meditative compendium of the Black experience. A Rich Spirit release. PREMIERE: SUNDANCE (NEXT SECTION)

Cover-Up
Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, 2025, U.S., 117m
English, Vietnamese, and Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
For the past six decades, Seymour Hersh has been at the front lines of political journalism in the United States. Hersh’s breakthrough reportage has brought to the public’s attention many of the most damning constitutional wrongdoings and cover-ups, from the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam to the CIA’s involvement in plots to assassinate foreign leaders to the Iraq invasion and systematic tortures at Abu Ghraib. In many cases, the revelations of his work have led to governmental reckonings and legal ramifications, yet Hersh, now 88 and surrounded by boxes of files from decades of tireless work, sees himself not as a crusader but as a citizen just doing his job. In this arresting documentary, Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, NYFF60) and Mark Obenhaus tell the wide-ranging story of Hersh (whose career has not been free of controversy itself). Though a decades-gestating project for the filmmakers, Cover-Up couldn’t have come at a more crucial moment, when freedom of the U.S. press is increasingly under fire by those in power. PREMIERE: VENICE

The Currents / Las Corrientes
Milagros Mumenthaler, 2025, Switzerland/Argentina, 104m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
While on a work trip in Switzerland, where she’s being fêted for her storied fashion career, designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) plunges herself, without warning, into an icy winter lake. After surviving the shocking ordeal, Lina returns to her hometown of Buenos Aires, yet a transformation has taken place within her, and she finds it impossible to readjust to her former life as a wife, mother, and artist, distancing herself from her husband (Esteban Bigliardi) and career. Acclaimed Argentinean filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler (Back to Stay) has constructed a compelling existential puzzle, a work of psychological interiority that, with its oblique narrative and complexly layered soundscape evoking a woman’s enigmatic dissociation, recalls the work of Lucrecia Martel and Todd Haynes, yet with its own singular emotional perspective and aesthetic sophistication. PREMIERE: TORONTO (PLATFORM COMPETITION)

Duse
Pietro Marcello, 2025, Italy, 123m
Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Bringing the same intellectual and muscular energy to the historical biopic as he did with his momentous Jack London adaptation Martin Eden (NYFF57), Pietro Marcello depicts the late career of legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse, incarnated by the wondrously expressive Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. The diva emerges vulnerable yet undeterred from the cataclysm of World War I, taking the stage again in her sixties despite a tubercular condition and a knotty relationship with her resentful daughter (Noémie Merlant), even as world politics and the aesthetics of theater itself are on the verge of changing forever. Epitomizing the full-bodied emotional materiality of his subject, Marcello goes beyond the formal and structural limitations of the biographical film, examining how acting itself can be a reflection of modernity and how performing brought Duse closer to becoming a radical political being. As always, Marcello brings both great flourish and historical realism to his work, incorporating mesmerizing early-20th-century archival color footage into this fictionalized portrait of the life of the artistic mind. PREMIERE: TIFF

The Fence / Le Cri des Gardes
Claire Denis, 2025, France, 92m
English and Yoruba with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The absorbing new drama from Claire Denis (Beau Travail, NYFF37) is centered around a fascinating, intractable tête-à-tête. On a white-run construction site in an acrid, dust-strewn town in West Africa, a local man named Albouny (the riveting Denis regular Isaach De Bankolé) has arrived to demand the immediate return of the dead body of his brother Nouofia, killed in a mysterious work accident. The site’s anxious foreman, Horn (Matt Dillon), protected behind the perimeter fence, yet ruffled by Albouny’s defiance and unflappability, is clearly hiding a terrible truth from the man. Set primarily over the course of one unrelenting night, Denis’s film, based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, also drifts on the neurotic vibrations of Horn’s alienated younger wife (Mia McKenna-Bruce), just arrived from London, and his live-wire right-hand man (Tom Blyth), to whom Horn owes a secret debt. All these simmering tensions converge in Denis’s unpredictable and intimate film, with which the French director returns to the subjects of colonialism and racial segregation so central to her unparalleled filmography. PREMIERE: TIFF

Gavagai
Ulrich Köhler, 2025, Germany/France, 91m
French, English, German, and Wolof with English subtitles
World Premiere
In this charged, unexpected metacinematic drama from German director Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), a radical new movie production of Medea, drastically altered from Euripides’s original play, becomes the center of a series of unresolvable contemporary tensions. Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) and Maja (Maren Eggert) embody Jason and Medea on-screen, tussling with the film’s high-anxiety director (Nathalie Richard) during the shoot in Senegal, all the while negotiating an adulterous romance off-set. Later, at the film’s premiere in Berlin, Nourou, unresolved in his personal and professional life, has a rattling run-in with a racist security guard, which throws his—and the film’s—world off its axis. Köhler specializes in cunning, tonally surprising films about cross-cultural disconnection, and Gavagai is his most ambitious and expansive film yet—a pinpoint-accurate account of moral crises and social biases, modern and ancient, internal and external. PREMIERE: NYFF

A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow, 2025, U.S., 112m
North American Premiere
At a remote military outpost, an unidentified incoming missile is detected, setting in motion an escalating series of actions and reactions across all levels of the United States government. With her trademark dynamic kineticism, Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days, NYFF33 Centerpiece) puts the viewer in the center of a crisis in which decisions must be made in limited time, based on incomplete and evolving information and untested protocols. Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim construct a frighteningly plausible scenario in which a multitude of dilemmas—practical and personal, bureaucratic and existential—overlap in real time and at a mounting rate. The film’s prismatic structure allows for a broad-scale thriller that entangles intimate dramas with an unfolding world-historic event, and the terrific ensemble cast, which includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, and Tracy Letts, conjures vivid characters with muscular efficiency, bringing emotional depth to this taut, thought-provoking exploration of an all-too-believable nightmare. A Netflix release. PREMIERE: VENICE

I Only Rest in the Storm / O Riso e a Faca
Pedro Pinho, 2025, Portugal/Brazil/France/Romania, 211m
Portuguese and Creole with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The charming, well-meaning environmental engineer Sergio (Sérgio Coragem) has traveled from Lisbon to Guinea-Bissau to meet with locals and research the possibility of his European company constructing a road that will connect the city areas to rural villages. While drifting through his revelatory trip, Sergio tentatively makes friends and lovers, talks to people who either embrace or abhor the possible project, and falls into conversations and confrontations about his place in this world: friend or interloper, lover or enemy? Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho’s epic yet scrappy—and sexually fluid—I Only Rest in the Storm is a playful and loose-limbed portrayal of the contemporary postcolonialist liberal mindset that cleverly cuts to the bone in one entertaining scene after another, and features an outstanding supporting performance by Cleo Diára (who won Best Actress in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) as a local businesswoman and bar owner who suffers no fools. PREMIERE: CANNES (UN CERTAIN REGARD)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Mary Bronstein, 2025, U.S., 113m
New York Premiere
The nightmarish stresses of motherhood and work are pushed to their absurdist extremes in Mary Bronstein’s stellar piece of cinematic anxiety, starring a bravura Rose Byrne as a woman on the verge of something far beyond a nervous breakdown. A therapist whose life has become one crisis after another, Linda (Byrne) and her young daughter (who requires a feeding tube due to a mysterious illness) have had to relocate to a motel following a cataclysmic ceiling leak in their house. Meanwhile, her own therapist and colleague (Conan O’Brien, unlike you’ve ever seen him) has reached his own boiling point, her toughest patient (Danielle Macdonald) is a needy bundle of nerves that’s spilling over into Linda’s personal life, and her belligerent husband (Christian Slater) is unhelpfully away on a business trip. Bronstein’s breathless, pressure-cooker visual approach and Byrne’s fearlessly committed performance (which earned her the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlinale) contribute to a full-throttle film that depicts life as a series of never-ending fires—without losing its sense of fanciful humor. An A24 release. PREMIERE: SUNDANCE


IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

It Was Just an Accident / Un simple accident
Jafar Panahi, 2025, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 105m
Persian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Jafar Panahi (No Bears, NYFF60) reaffirms his status as one of this century’s great cinematic heroes with perhaps his bravest film yet, which won him the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Ever since he was arrested, imprisoned, and banned from making movies by the Iranian government 15 years ago, Panahi has found ways of producing films in secret and without official permission. Showing his political risk-taking as well as his confident command of craft, It Was Just an Accident is his most explicit attack on his country’s repressive regime, a cutting and darkly humorous thriller that concerns a mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who believes he has reencountered by chance the government intelligence officer, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), who had tortured him while under detainment. As Vahid enlists the services of acquaintances whose lives were also forever altered by Eghbal’s cruelties, the thirst for revenge and the sense of danger escalate—as do questions of moral choice and culpability. A NEON release. PREMIERE: CANNES (PALME D'OR)

Jay Kelly
Noah Baumbach, 2025, U.K./U.S./Italy, 132m
New York Premiere
In his most captivating film role in years, George Clooney is cast—fittingly—as the last great movie star. Jay Kelly is at a crisis point: uninspired by his work, reeling from the loss of his mentor, and tormented by a run-in with a haunting figure from his past, he does the unthinkable, backing out of a big new production at the 11th hour in order to run off to Europe and catch up with his college-bound daughter in France before attending a career tribute in Italy. Unable to entirely shed his Hollywood skin, he finds himself trailed by his entourage, including his long-suffering manager (played by a marvelously fragile Adam Sandler). At once introspective and raucous, the stellar character study Jay Kelly peeks at Hollywood narcissism with curiosity rather than judgment. Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, NYFF57 Centerpiece) and co-writer Emily Mortimer walk a delicate balance between industry parody and heartfelt sentiment, moving in and out of Jay’s past and present, fantasy and reality, probing the professional, familial, and moral life of a man for whom “all my memories are movies”—and who may be harboring more regrets than he cares to admit. A Netflix release. PREMIERE: VENICE

Kontinental ’25
Radu Jude, 2025, Romania, 109m
Romanian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Following his recent triumphs Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (NYFF59) and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (NYFF61), Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude further confirms his status as the preeminent satirist of our contemporary sociopolitical miasma with this sly, gutting tale of a modern crisis of conscience. In the city of Cluj, located within the country’s Transylvania region, a bailiff named Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) evicts the homeless Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) from the unused cellar of a local house to make way for the construction of the Kontinental boutique hotel. Her fateful decision proves to have great consequences, and Jude tracks her subsequent guilt trip with merciless humanity, echoing Rossellini’s Europa ’51. Rather than rely on simplistic caricature, Jude tells this story of Eastern European economic expansion, berserk nationalism, and the inability to create meaningful change with crushing relatability. Jude won the Silver Bear for best screenplay at this year’s Berlinale. A 1-2 Special release. PREMIERE: SARAJEVO

Landmarks / Nuestra Tierra
Lucrecia Martel, 2025, Argentina/U.S./Mexico/France/Netherlands/Denmark, 122m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In October 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province, tried to defend himself and his people from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local landowner and two police officers. As a result, the 68-year-old man was shot and killed, and two other community members were wounded. In her expansive and enlightening first feature documentary, the great Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (Zama, NYFF55) takes a sweeping approach to this tragic true story, triangulating the murder trial of the three men, the lives of Chocobar and his fellow Chuchagasta people, and the centuries-old, colonialist legacy of land and property theft across Latin America. With a ravishing, at times vertiginous visual approach to filming the natural beauty of the contested land, Martel pays cinematic tribute to people whom history has systematically tried to erase. PREMIERE: VENICE

The Last One for the Road / Le Città di Pianura
Francesco Sossai, 2025, Italy/Germany, 100m
Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Aimlessly if coolly navigating the absurdities of middle age, Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlo (Sergio Romano) make for delightful company in Italian director Francesco Sossai’s genial, wistful hangout movie. The two best friends, who can never seem to make that “one last drink” truly the last, imbibe and bicker and trade anecdotes as they traverse the Venetian countryside, befriending an anxious architecture student, Giulio (Filippo Scotti), who’s cramming for an upcoming design exam. Imparting their screwball wisdom to Giulio, and even roping the younger man into some of their half-baked capers, Doriano and Carlo are welcome emissaries from an increasingly lost generation, disillusioned and adrift in our mercenary world yet holding on to the fleeting joys of life. Sossai has created a freeform, energetic comedy that echoes work by Aki Kaurismäki and Richard Linklater yet has its own beautiful sense of rhythm and revelation. PREMIERE: CANNES (UN CERTAIN REGARD)

Late Fame
Kent Jones, 2025, U.S., 96m
North American Premiere
A wonderfully introspective Willem Dafoe lends his delicate gravitas to the role of Ed Saxberger, a once-upon-a-time New York poet who has worked at a post office for nearly four decades, his work now largely forgotten. After an eager and flattering young fan (Edmund Donovan) appears on his doorstep one night, Saxberger is welcomed into a new coterie of twentysomething admirers who hope to make him the central figure in an emerging literary salon. Intoxicated by the attention—and the presence of the wannabe tragedienne Gloria (a sinuous, Kurt Weill–crooning Greta Lee)—Saxberger nevertheless must reckon with the authenticity of this newfound circle of aspirants. Kent Jones’s thoughtful and marvelously witty second feature adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s recently rediscovered novella Late Fame (in a sly, hugely entertaining script by Oscar-nominated May December writer Samy Burch), updating the Austrian writer’s take on turn-of-the-century Vienna for a wistful yet unromantic look at a lost idea of downtown New York. PREMIERE: VENICE (ORIZZONTI)

The Love That Remains / Ástin Sem Eftir Er
Hlynur Pálmason, 2025, Iceland/Denmark/Sweden/France, 109m
Icelandic, English, Swedish, and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Charting the gradual evolution of a family in the midst of an irreparable fracture, The Love That Remains is a poignant, crisply pointillistic domestic drama that observes life’s changes with humor and whimsy, set against the majestic, ever-shifting Icelandic landscape. Visual artist Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and fisherman Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason) were teenage sweethearts but have recently grown apart, and Magnús has moved out of the house. As long as the newly estranged parents put on a good face, the children—and their adorable sheepdog Panda (who won the prestigious Palme Dog award at Cannes)—seem to take the split in stride. Yet as Magnús becomes increasingly alienated from his domestic life, harsh reality can’t help but bubble to the surface. Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his austere 19th-century drama Godland is a constantly surprising film with an immaculate sense of framing and pacing—and an evocative, dulcet piano score by Harry Hunt—dotted with idiosyncratic flights of fancy that never detract from the central emotional authenticity. A Janus Films release. PREMIERE: CANNES (PREMIERE SECTION)

Magellan / Magalhães
Lav Diaz, 2025, Portugal/Spain/France/Philippines/Taiwan, 160m
Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Every astonishing visual composition carries historical and political weight in the monumental new film from singular Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (Norte, The End of History, NYFF51). Gael García Bernal brilliantly subordinates his stardom to Diaz’s discerning camera, disappearing into the role of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who, at the start of the 16th century, navigated a crew to Southeast Asia after convincing the Spanish crown to fund his journey. Rather than retell the mythical, received narratives of the Age of Discovery, Diaz mounts an impressive and absorbing story of colonial conquest and obsession, depicting Magellan’s charted course to the Malayan Archipelago as a pitiless reckoning with human frailty and brutal violence as much as an evocation of overwhelming natural beauty. A Janus Films release. PREMIERE: CANNES

The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt, 2025, U.S., 110m
New York Premiere
In early-1970s Framingham, Massachusetts, taciturn family man James (Josh O’Connor) makes the rash, largely inscrutable decision to orchestrate a heist at the local art museum, absconding with a selection of modern paintings—without much of a plan. This autumnal, restrained, and often quite funny anti-thriller from Kelly Reichardt (Showing Up, NYFF60) sets this low-key criminal enterprise against a Nixon-era backdrop of alienation and political disillusionment. As always, Reichardt’s impeccable craft is front and center: the film’s naturalism and remarkable period detail creating a portrait of unerring authenticity and psychological mystery. Whether driven by social apathy or artistic passion, James—effortlessly played by O’Connor with hangdog elegance—registers as a compelling update of the ’70s American male loner archetype for another dispiriting, directionless time. A MUBI release. PREMIERE: CANNES

Miroirs No. 3
Christian Petzold, 2025, Germany, 86m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In the haunting new film from esteemed German director Christian Petzold (Transit, NYFF56), his regular star Paula Beer plays Laura, a pianist from Berlin who finds herself in a transitory state. After surviving a violent car crash that kills her boyfriend, Laura is immediately taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), a mysterious middle-aged woman who lives alone in an isolated house in the countryside. Strangers to one another, the two women build a quiet, respectful life together, though the reemergence of Betty’s estranged husband and son sheds light on the tragic past that explains the murky present. The pleasurable enigma of Miroirs No. 3, named for a Ravel piano suite, returns Petzold to the metaphysical ambiguity of earlier films like Yella (2007) and the themes of doubling in his cherished Phoenix (2014), yet with a distinctive ethereality all its own: It’s an economical and beautifully crafted work about the mystery of human interaction. A 1-2 Special release. PREMIERE: CANNES (DIRECTORS' FORTNIGHT)

No Other Choice / Eojjeol suga eopda
Park Chan-wook, 2025, South Korea, 139m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In his diabolical new thriller, Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave, NYFF60) crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture and the domestic desperation for material comfort. In a fine tightrope-walk of a performance, Lee Byung-hun brings humor and likability to the tricky role of Man-soo, a middle-aged husband and father who has been laid off from the paper manufacturing company to which he has devoted decades of his life. After an extended and increasingly worrisome period of unemployment, Man-soo begins to take merciless measures toward solidifying his standing with a potential new employer, leading to wild—and ever more absurd—acts of violence, crafted by Park in his inimitable and extravagant pitch-black comic style. Adapted from the Donald E. Westlake novel The Ax, updated for our precarious moment in time, Park’s No Other Choice is enthralling all the way to its brilliant bitter pill of an ending. A NEON release. PREMIERE: VENICE

Peter Hujar’s Day
Ira Sachs, 2025, U.S., 76m
New York Premiere
The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs (Passages). Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Sachs’s film is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors. With this engrossing and wholly unexpected film, Sachs shuttles us back to a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene that lives on in words as much as images. A Janus Films release. PREMIERE: BERLINALE (INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA SECTION)

Resurrection / 狂野时代
Bi Gan, 2025, China/France, 156m
Chinese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This phantasmagoric dream machine from visionary Chinese director Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, NYFF56) is an elusive yet monumental love letter to a century of cinema. Unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles, Resurrection is a cascade of imagery united by a luminous mythopoetic conceit: in a sci-fi-coded world where people have lost the desire to dream in the hopes of prolonging life, rogue “fantasmers” continue to stoke their imaginations and exist within unreality. From this magical premise, the film sends its ever-morphing protagonist (Jackson Yee) through a series of genres, from Méliès-inflected silent fantasy to wartime thriller to con-artist buddy picture to millennial vampire romance—the latter depicted in one of Bi’s customary, and ever astonishing, single takes. Even within genre parameters, the director never takes the road well-traveled, offering jolts and marvels around every corner. Resurrection is one of the most audacious and ambitious gifts for cinematic thrill-seekers in many a moon. A Janus Films release. PREMIERE: CANNES (PRIX SPÉCIAL)

Romería
Carla Simón, 2025, Spain/Germany, 112m
Spanish, Catalan, and French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Amidst the jagged cliffs and summery, sun-kissed shores of Vigo, on the Atlantic coast of Galicia in Spain, 18-year-old Marina (the arresting Llúcia Garcia) has arrived on a deeply personal mission. Having lost both of her parents at a very young age, the orphaned young woman has set off on a journey to meet her paternal grandparents and extended family for the first time. While connecting with her affectionate, teeming new clan, Marina also is forced to reconcile with the past, negotiating her idealized memories of her parents and difficult truths that have been long buried. Alternating between 2004 and the early 1980s, evoked in hallucinatory, grainy flashbacks, Romería achingly dramatizes the processes of creating new memories and holding onto fleeting ones. Carla Simón (Alcarràs, NYFF60) proves again with this delicate, naturalistic, and poignantly autobiographical film that she is an essential voice in international cinema. PREMIERE: CANNES

Rose of Nevada
Mark Jenkin, 2025, U.K., 114m
U.S. Premiere
The singular Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin (Enys Men, NYFF60) brings his distinctive and bold storytelling approach to his most expansive work yet. Again immersing the viewer in the uncanny environments of the small towns along the coast of Cornwall, Jenkin spins a sci-fi-tinged tale of dislocation and regeneration. In a tiny, sparsely populated fishing village, a boat that had been lost at sea 30 years ago, the Rose of Nevada, suddenly reappears portside, fully intact and without its long-missing crew. Two local neophyte fishermen desperate for work (George MacKay and Callum Turner) take jobs on the boat as it sets out for a good-luck return voyage. When they return, all is no longer what it once was. Shot on 16mm, this earthy, psychological portrait of a working-class community’s cyclical existence is an atmospheric plunge into the eerie. PREMIERE: VENICE


WAGNER MOURA IN THE SECRET AGENT

The Secret Agent / O Agente Secreto
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025, Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany, 159m
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who has gifted us such breathtakers as Aquarius (NYFF54) and Bacurau (NYFF57), returns with a thrillingly unpredictable, empowering political fable about people swept up in forces beyond their control. A dynamic, shape-shifting epic set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, The Secret Agent earned him the Best Director award at Cannes. Wagner Moura was also deservedly honored as Best Actor at the festival for his magnetic performance as a widowed former university researcher whose life has been violently upended by the greed and vengeance of a government bureaucrat. On the run and living under an alias during the country’s military dictatorship, he tries to escape, while also reconnecting with the young son he had to leave behind. Even this brief description cannot fully prepare the viewer for the zigzagging subplots and delights of Mendonça’s eccentric and affectionate ode to the movies and the Brazil of his youth—and to maintaining individuality amid abuses of power. A NEON release. PREMIERE: CANNES (BEST ACTOR, WAGNER MOURA, BEST DIRECTOR, MENDOCA FILHO, FIPRESCI PRIZE). )

Sentimental Value / Affeksjonsverdi
Joachim Trier, 2025, Norway/France/Denmark/Germany, 134m
Norwegian and English with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his beloved The Worst Person in the World (NYFF59), Renate Reinsve burrows to the steely core of Nora Borg, an acclaimed stage actress going through the first rumblings of a personal crisis after the death of her mother. She and her devoted therapist sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), are suddenly forced to confront long-suppressed elements of their past when their estranged movie-director father, Gustav (a wonderfully restrained Stellan Skarsgård, conveying a world of regret in the smallest of gestures) returns with a script he has written for Nora. After she refuses the role, Gustav turns to an American movie star (Elle Fanning), further complicating his own attempt at reconciliation. Trier’s insightful and captivating adult drama, which won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, furthers the writer-director’s piercing exploration of the frayed ties that bind us to one another and to our creative selves. A NEON release. PREMIERE: CANNES

Sirât
Oliver Laxe, 2025, France/Spain, 115m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The glorious and forbidding Moroccan desert provides the backdrop for this extraordinary psychological journey from Oliver Laxe (Fire Will Come, NYFF57), a Galician filmmaker of startling ambition. Sergi López plays middle-aged Luis, whose worry over the disappearance of his daughter Mar has brought him, along with his young son, to Morocco. He believes she has fallen in with a group of nomadic thrill-seekers who are in pursuit of the next big rave in the desert. Tagging along with them in a makeshift caravan in the hopes he will find Mar, Luis is pushed toward emotional and physical extremes that extend far past his everyday comprehension. Even beyond the pulsing techno soundtrack and the majestic desolation of the landscape, Sirât (the title referring to the Islamic term for the razor-thin bridge between heaven and hell) creates a sensory experience of audacity and shock that touches the sublime. Joint winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A NEON release. PREMIERE: CANNES (COMPETITION: JURY PRIZE)

Sound of Falling / In die Sonne schauen
Mascha Schilinski, 2025, Germany, 149m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
You can feel the presence of ghosts in the rooms and environs of a rural farmhouse in German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski’s highly accomplished multigenerational saga. Sound of Falling skips back and forth through time, alighting on moments of both horror and grace across a century in the lives of four women—adolescent and adult—inhabiting the same unsettled spaces. Using a fragmentary, collage-like approach that unites characters from different eras, from the turn of the 20th century to the post–World World II era to the years of GDR rule and on to the present, Schilinski treats history like a constant haunting. Both sobering and dreamlike, with moments of genuine tenderness, her film bears witness to cycles of trauma and creates a devastating indictment of historical patriarchal abuse. Above all, it confirms the arrival of a major new talent, whose visionary narrative technique creates a fresh and striking cinematic grammar. Joint winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release. PREMIERE: CANNES (COMPETITION)

Two Prosecutors
Sergei Loznitsa, 2025, France/Germany/Netherlands/Latvia/Romania/Lithuania, 118m
Russian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, NYFF48) is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov) to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world. A Janus Films release. PREMIERE: CANNES (FRANCOIS CHALAUS PRIZE)

What Does That Nature Say to You / 그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니
Hong Sangsoo, 2025, South Korea, 108m
Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Over the winding course of one languorous day, a good-natured thirtysomething poet, Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), visits the suburban home of his girlfriend, Junhee (Kang Soyi), and is introduced to her parents (Kwon Haehyo and Cho Yunhee) and sister (Park Miso) for the first time. Dazzled by the size of the home and the beauty of its rural environs, Seoul-dweller Donghwa bonds with the family, especially the benevolent patriarch, for whom family, tradition, and filial devotion seem paramount. Yet as the hours drift by—and, of course, the makgeolli flows—Donghwa’s anxieties gradually surface. Combining the casual familiarity of a meet-the-parents scenario with the lo-fi visual experimentation of his recent work like In Water (NYFF61), Hong Sangsoo’s latest keeps revealing new emotional layers, finally offering a rich examination of economic anxiety and contemporary alienation. A Cinema Guild release. PREMIERE: BERLINALE

(CANNES: 14, VENICE: 10, TIFF: 3, SUNDANCE: 2, BERLIN: 2, NYFF: 2, SARAJEVO: 1)

[Chris Knipp]

RENATE REINSVE, ELLE FANNING IN SENTIMENTAL VALUE

Comments on the 2025 NYFF Main Slate

There are the Cannes films and the Venice films. The first we have reports on, the others are purely speculation, plus impressions from trailers.

Top choices: THE SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonça Filho), a brilliant Brazilian drama of an academic on the run in the murderous 1970s, has been described as wildly entertaining, Wagner Moura amazing in it. Similarly Joachim Trier's SENTIMENTAL VALUe: extremely involving tale Peter Bradshaw summarized as "Norwegian auteur-on-the-slide Skarsgård putting his showbiz family through the wringer in the service of his fading career", which the Oscar Expert stayed up till three in the morning to enthuse about it in a lengthy video. Renate Reinsve was already a Best Actress, and here she is again. Elle Fanning is reportedly a big surprise. Anders Danielsen Lie has never not been great in a Trier film. I look forward to this one a lot. SIRAT (Oliver Laxe), about a father looking for his missing daughter in the wake of a Morrocan desert rave, sounds like a real trip that takes us to an intense, wild place.

AFTER THE HUNT is aa new arrival, but there's a TRAILER. Guadagnino is hot these days CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, CHALLENGERS, and the miniseries I love, WE ARE WHO WE ARE: he keeps doing great stuff. A career-destroying sexual accusation at a major university is a timely theme indeed. The performances of Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield look like they're in top form and then some.

SOUND OF FALLING (Mascha Schilinski), where intergenerational angst haunts a German farmhouse, and TWO PROSECUTORS (Sergei Loznitsa), a haunting film that unravels a terrifying parable of bureaucratic evil, came early at Cannes and were deemed excellent, but not so easy watches.

Watch The Panahi? May depend on your involvement in the theme of political repression, which nearly everybody is nowadays. I will want to watch IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT very, very closely.

Baumbach's JAY KELLY is described as "funny and emotional coming-of-age film about adults" and that sounds good. He's an old NYFF favorite so the mood will be warm.

Jarmusch is Jarmusch, hard to predict, but this one is more international. Another guy with a strong New York audience.

Bronstein's IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU reportedly has a great performance, but is a rough story to watch. This is an anxiety-inducing exploration of motherhood that stars Rose Byrne as an overwhelmed therapist with a suspicious hole in her ceiling. It's 17 years since Bronstein's Mumblecore debut.

There's an unusual number of films by Italian directors in this year's Main Slate: LUCA GUADAGNINO, GIANFRANCO ROSI PIETRO MARCELLO, and FRANCESCO SOSSAI. And it was just July 25th that newcomer and Guadagnino protege GOVANNI TORTORICI'S Italian intellectual coming-of-age film DICIANNOVE came to US theaters. See the review of DICIANNOVE on Filmleaf.

For the rest, we'll see.

[Chris Knipp]

The 2025 NYFF Currents sidebar announced in a FLC press release

New York, NY (August 7, 2025) – Film at Lincoln Center announces Currents for the 63rd New York Film Festival, taking place from September 26 through October 13 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city. The Currents slate includes 16 feature films and 24 short films in five programs, representing 28 countries. NYFF63 films are screened at Lincoln Center and at four venues across the city: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). This is the festival's edgier stuff, outsidethe Main Slate. Of note: a new Tsai Ming-liang film, BACK HOME / HUI JIA and what must be the haunting flashback to Gaza 25 years ago, WITH HASAN IN GAZA مع حسن في غزة . Also attracting much attention are Radu Jude’s DRACCULA, James Benning’s LITTLE BOY and Ben Rivers’ MARE'S NEST.

CURRENTS FEATURES & DESCRIPTIONS [short films list omitted]
Currents Centerpiece
Mare's Nest
Ben Rivers, 2025, U.K./France/Canada, 98m
English and Catalan with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A child emerges from a crashed car and picks up a turtle to whom no less than the origin of humanity is explained during an extended walk-and-talk set against a gorgeous sunset. This child is Moon, who wanders a post-apocalyptic world conspicuously devoid of adults, a mystery the movie never answers. The latest feature by Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea, NYFF49) deepens the filmmaker’s longstanding thematic preoccupations (freedom and utopia, alternative existences and imagined futures), at times recalling earlier works like Slow Action and Ah, Liberty! even as it ventures into new realms of narrative exploration. Anchored by newcomer Moon Guo Barker’s magnetic performance, this enigmatic, ever-shifting road movie is also a showcase for Rivers’s awe-inspiring view of the natural world, inhabited by his charismatic young actors across a panoply of sequences—some amusing, some unnerving, and in the case of a stealth Don DeLillo adaptation, both.

Back Home / Hui Jia
Tsai Ming-liang, 2025, Taiwan, 65m
North American Premiere
Over the course of three decades, Tsai Ming-liang has mastered a mode of observational, durational filmmaking that reshapes our relation to the space and time we inhabit. This style translates seamlessly to the documentary portraiture of Back Home, where Tsai depicts Anong Houngheuangsy (star of Tsai’s Days, NYFF58) and the daily life of his home village in Laos. We witness buildings in varying states of habitation and disrepair, farm animals, rice fields, religious sites, domestic scenes, a sun-dappled food market, and a dog adorably trying (and failing) to escape a carnival ride. Bestowing a different kind of moving stillness from his recent works, with sequences that convey a radiant atmosphere and buzzing natural life, Back Home draws attention to the brilliance all around, a homecoming of sorts after a string of films about a Walker in exile.

Preceded by:
Ecce Mole
Heinz Emigholz, 2025, Italy, 28m
No dialogue
World Premiere
The latest entry in Heinz Emigholz’s (Slaughterhouses of Modernity, NYFF60) incisive, decades-long inquiry into the cinematic representation of space contrasts two Turin landmarks designed by Italian neoclassical architect Alessandro Antonelli: the narrow Casa Scaccabarozzi and the towering Mole Antonelliana, now home to the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. With Emigholz’s signature metrical cutting and oblique framings, Ecce Mole explores cinema’s own spatial and symbolic dimensions through the buildings’ opposing scales and functions—interior and exterior, domestic and civic, modest and monumental.

Barrio Triste
Stillz, 2025, Colombia, 84m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Among a group of violent youths who steal diamonds and burn cars, one of the crew has turned a pilfered camera into an image-making endeavor. Found footage and dead pixels become the texture of a new aesthetic and a new kind of thriller in Barrio Triste, the debut feature from Bad Bunny collaborator Stillz, and the newest production by Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD studio. Amid the callous acts and hopeless rage of these kids—who are resourceful enough to orchestrate a high-speed heist but too disaffected for much else—a supernatural eeriness surfaces through word of mysterious lights in the sky and missing citizens. With this ominous elegy of corrupted youth, the LiveLeak generation meets its Los Olvidados. Featuring original music by Arca.

Bouchra
Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, 2025, Italy/Morocco/U.S., 83m
Arabic, French, and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Moroccan filmmaker Bouchra is writing an autobiographical film that reflexively weaves together her own life in New York City with that of her fictional double. Bouchra happens also to be a coyote in a city of anthropomorphic creatures, rendered in nearly photorealistic and hyper-expressive animations. Alongside her creative struggles and attempts to unpack her mother’s unresolved feelings about her queerness are everyday releases—sexual encounters, nights out clubbing, intimate conversations—all brilliantly constructed by directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani (Life on the CAPS, NYFF60) through actual phone calls, letters, and characters voiced by friends and family playing versions of themselves. Bridging animation and live action, daily life in New York and the complexities of being home in Casablanca, Bouchra is laced with pathos and familiarity, suffused with the political nuances of inhabiting multiple cultures.

Dracula
Radu Jude, 2025, Romania, 170m
Romanian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
An inimitable social chronicler, Radu Jude expands the dystopian visions of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (NYFF61) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (NYFF59) by connecting vampire mythos to seemingly everything in our troubled times. His Dracula is less a spin on Bram Stoker and (per the film’s presenter) “more like Frankenstein’s monster,” variously following the madcap chase of two actors, adapting the first-ever Romanian vampire novel, and chronicling blood-soaked misdeeds around a video-game sweatshop. Stinging critiques of AI, capitalism, and cultural degradation are buttressed with meditations on vampire stories (F.W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola) and wide-ranging cultural allusions (Beckett, Chaplin). Dracula exhibits a gleeful, chaotic vulgarity, yet Jude’s sideways vampire history concludes on a note of reconciliation and hope. A 1-2 Special release.

Drunken Noodles
Lucio Castro, 2025, Argentina/U.S., 83m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The new film from New York–based Argentinean director Lucio Castro—whose time-bending End of the Century (ND/NF 2019) marked one of the past decade’s queer cinematic discoveries—weaves five chapters in the sexual life of a cat-sitting art student named Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), all of them united by an erotic magical realism. While the situations within each of the film’s playful, nonchronological segments seem to represent anecdotal facets of everyday gay life, from urban dating rituals to monogamy anxieties during a weekend upstate, Drunken Noodles consistently pushes things into the realms of the unreal, even the mythic. Like End of the Century, Castro’s latest is both sexy and surprisingly cosmic, but this time with a casual, puckish charm. A Strand Releasing release.

Dry Leaf
Alexandre Koberidze, 2025, Germany/Georgia, 186m
Georgian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In soccer, a “dry leaf” is a kick that produces an unpredictable landing of the ball. Shaken by the disappearance of his grown daughter, a sports photographer goes looking for her through a Georgian landscape strewn with football fields. An invisible companion in tow, he meets potential witnesses whose perspectives prove distorted or contradictory. Confirming his position as one of contemporary cinema’s most intrepid artists, director Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, NYFF59) shot the film on an antiquated Sony Ericsson phone. What might seem a perverse choice reveals itself, over Dry Leaf’s epic length, as a brilliant thematic gesture that elicits its own temporal register. Set to a haunting score by the director’s brother Giorgi, this melancholic mystery presents Georgia’s open plains and mountain regions in alien, oneiric contexts. One emerges from its transporting rhythms with a fresh perspective on the world.

Escape / Toso
Masao Adachi, 2025, Japan, 114m
Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A contemporary of Nagisa Ōshima and Kōji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi has spent more than six decades as a revolutionary figure on both cinematic and political stages. These personal histories are brilliantly distilled in his biopic of Japanese terrorist Satoshi Kirishima, who, as one of the country’s most wanted men, successfully evaded capture for nearly 50 years before revealing his true identity on his deathbed. Kirishima’s remarkable, often troubling life—from anarchist activities to a new existence under an assumed name, all the while driven by guilt for failing to fulfill his vocation—is told through a dazzling mix of archival footage, staged recreations, and outright fantasy that allows Adachi to trace a history of resistance and terror in Japan. The performances from Kanji Furutachi and Rairu Sugita convey lifetimes of idealism and regret.

Evidence
Lee Anne Schmitt, 2025, U.S., 75m
New York Premiere
The United States is built on secret plans and backroom deals, and whether one benefits or suffers from these arrangements is a roll of the dice. Lee Anne Schmitt’s fleet and intricate essay film about the Olin Corporation, a longtime manufacturer of ammunition and chemicals, considers the company’s seemingly bottomless reach in modern life and its place in her own family. Doubling as an account of modern American conservatism (from media gadflies to six Supreme Court justices), the film is punctuated with contemporaneous footage that, viewed through the lens of Olin’s misdeeds, generates the tension and shock of a genre film. Evidence functions as a confession, an exegesis on motherhood, and finally, a film about, in Schmitt’s own words, “being hurt inside your own home by the people who are supposed to take care of you.”

Hair, Paper, Water… / Tóc, Giấy và Nước…
Trương Minh Quý, Nicolas Graux, 2025, Vietnam, 71m
Vietnamese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
With Hair, Paper, Water… Trương Minh Quý (Việt and Nam, NYFF62) and Nicolas Graux have made an unassuming yet vivid film about one Vietnamese family living amid extraordinary epochs and personal strife. Born in a cave more than 60 years ago, Mrs. Hậu regales us with a lifetime’s wisdom—local folklore, natural history, personal methods for fighting COVID—while one of her grandchildren, in the here and now, faces a heartbreaking domestic struggle. Graux’s 16mm photography is equal parts raw and opulent, and the sound design, by Trương and Ernst Karel, pays justice to every living creature (bees, monkeys, tigers, bats) under a perpetually clouded sun. Hair, Paper, Water… emboldens one’s love of this earth and the words used to share it.

Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes / Anoche conquisté Tebas
Gabriel Azorín, 2025, Spain/Portugal, 106m
Portuguese, Latin, Galician, and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Gabriel Azorín announces himself as a major new voice in his debut feature, a cosmic hangout film of sorts with a formal control that suggests a director decades his senior. In the vicinity of an ancient Roman thermal bath in the Spanish countryside, several young men boast of victories, confess fears, and look up at the darkening sky; as night falls, another group materializes, their conversations echoing what came before and gradually confounding our very sense of time. A film of lingering mystery and beauty, distinguished by remarkable night photography, a breathtaking drone shot, and an impressive command of blocking, space, and light, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes is narrative cinema as travelogue and time machine.

Levers
Rhayne Vermette, 2025, Canada, 93m
English and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Something is very wrong in the forests and homes of Levers, the newest feature from Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette (Ste. Anne, NYFF59). People speak of unstable events—sunrises are gifts instead of givens, darkness becomes an increasing presence—while tarot-themed chapters point toward a grand theory of discontent. Are these narratives real, or spun from the television and radio broadcasts we hear throughout? Could these events be a local myth beginning to come to life, or a curse? In a work as captivated with pastoral landscapes as the haunting glow of a tube TV, Vermette extracts possibility from every shot, down to crossfading that recalls the expressiveness of silent cinema. Levers is visually resplendent and a sonic marvel.

Little Boy
James Benning, 2025, U.S., 73m
North American Premiere
James Benning’s mesmerizing new film spans decades of U.S. history with simple and seemingly minor gestures. Foregrounding its own structural form, Little Boy shows us a series of prefabricated toy models being painted in close-up, accompanied by the rallying cries of folk and pop standards, followed by images of the models’ final construction overlaid with passages of political oratory, from voices inspiring or nefarious. The cumulative image is one of a society doomed to cycles of domestic decline and implicated in international terror in the name of “peace-making” interventionism. A companion piece to American Dreams: Lost and Found, Benning’s 1984 film composed entirely of baseball card memorabilia, Little Boy—its title recalling the lyrics from Pete Seeger’s “What Did You Learn in School Today?”—is an American epic in miniature.

Pin de Fartie
Alejo Moguillansky, 2025, Argentina, 106m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Produced by El Pampero Cine, the Argentine collective known for its boundless imagination in cinematic storytelling (La Flor, NYFF57 and Trenque Lauquen, NYFF60), Pin de Fartie unfolds as a playful spin on theatrical adaptation and an experiment in character dynamics. The film charts three relationships defined by Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Fin de Partie (Endgame): one between a blind man and his daughter; another concerning two actors rehearsing that same text; the third following a man who reads his blind mother Beckett’s play and discovers that it reflects their lives. Director Alejo Moguillansky retains much of Fin de Partie’s choreography and structure, then carefully loosens it with comic acts of repetition and musical scoring. Surprises and revelations (a brilliantly staged tennis match, an in-joke based on a Martín Rejtman film) arrive continuously in a delightful film that affirms Pampero regular Laura Paredes as one of the greatest actors working today.

Windward
Sharon Lockhart, 2025, Canada/U.S., 70m
World Premiere
D.W. Griffith once opined that cinema had lost “the beauty of moving wind in the trees.” A 21st-century exception, Sharon Lockhart’s Windward comprises 12 tableaux of the fields, shorelines, and coastal structures of Fogo Island off Newfoundland, Canada. Lockhart turns these arresting settings into her own stage, capturing the vivid blues and greens of nature, and the remote island’s distinctive geology and geography, while the children at play within the landscapes bring movement and surprise to her extended static takes. Windward heightens one’s senses and underscores Lockhart’s remarkable eye for color, composition, light, and shadow.

With Hasan in Gaza / مع حسن في غزة
Kamal Aljafari, 2025, Palestine/Germany/France/Qatar, 106m
Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
It is 2001 in Gaza, and Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist Kamal Aljafari is traveling from north to south, accompanied by a MiniDV camera and searching for a man he met while briefly imprisoned as a teenager. Aljafari’s footage, now nearly a quarter-century old and unseen by the filmmaker himself until recently, is often tranquil and languid: drives down the highway, walks through the market, a trip to the beach, a card game among friends. But the immediate return of Israeli shelling, captured here in detail, invokes the ever-present background of settler violence. With Hasan in Gaza is an aching witness to the beauty of this land and the struggle of its people, neither of which may soon be recognizable at all.

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF63 SPOTLIGHT GALA FILM ANNOUNCED: Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

New York, NY (August 11, 2025) – Film at Lincoln Center announces the premiere of Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere as the Spotlight Gala selection of the 63rd New York Film Festival. At the premiere presentation on Sunday, September 28, Cooper and cast members Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, and Odessa Young will be in attendance, along with Bruce Springsteen. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, the 63rd New York Film Festival will take place from September 26 through October 13.

Jeremy Allen White inhabits a legend and lays bare his beating heart in this graceful, exceptionally moving film about a very specific part of peerless American rock icon Bruce Springsteen’s life. Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, adapted from Warren Zanes’s 2023 best-selling chronicle of the same title, is set at an early-’80s crossroads in Springsteen’s career when, still negotiating the transformative waves of his rising fame, he crafted the intensely personal acoustic songs that would become his mythic album Nebraska—at the same time that he was recording the demos for Born in the U.S.A., which would catapult him to global superstardom. This biographical drama focuses with gratifying specificity on the nitty-gritty of Springsteen’s songwriting, while never shying away from the realities of his familial traumas and personal depression. It’s more than just a tour de force for its incandescent star—it’s a reminder that the reason we love this seemingly larger-than-life hero is because he’s always been palpably human. Featuring a superior supporting cast, including Jeremy Strong (as Springsteen’s longtime manager and co-producer Jon Landau), Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffmann (as Bruce’s parents), Paul Walter Hauser, David Krumholtz, and Odessa Young. The film is produced by Cooper, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson, and Scott Stuber. Tracey Landon and Zanes executive produce. A 20th Century Studios release.

“The New York Film Festival has always felt like a spiritual home for the kind of cinema I believe in,” said director Scott Cooper. “To now arrive with a film about Bruce Springsteen—an artist whose music shaped not just a country but my own sense of storytelling—is something I could never have imagined. Getting to know Bruce, to explore his world and his spirit, has been one of the most profound creative experiences of my life. To share that experience with New York audiences, in a city that defines artistic possibility, is both an honor and a responsibility I hold with deep gratitude.”

“Taking its cue from the stark majesty of Bruce Springsteen’s classic album Nebraska, Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere has an intimacy and immediacy that eludes most film biographies,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival. “Anchored by Jeremy Allen White’s revelatory performance, this year’s Spotlight Gala selection is a fitting tribute to a living legend.”

Scott Cooper is a director, writer, and actor known for his gritty, character-driven dramas that explore themes of redemption, violence, and American history. His directorial debut, Crazy Heart (2009), earned several award nominations and wins, including an Academy Award for best actor for Jeff Bridges. Additional critically acclaimed works include Out of the Furnace (2013), Black Mass (2015), and Hostiles (2017).

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF63 revivals announced - including films by Erich von Stroheim and Satyajit Ray

SOURCE

["Twelve restored features ranging from timeless classics to rediscovered rarities"]

New York, NY (August 14, 2025) – Film at Lincoln Center announces the Revivals selections for the 63rd New York Film Festival. Expanding the traditional canon, Revivals celebrates works that have been restored, preserved, or digitally remastered. Featuring rediscovered gems and influential rarities, this selection highlights 12 films that have been acclaimed for their artistic innovation and cultural significance or that were underappreciated in their time but offer fresh relevance for today’s audiences. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, NYFF63 takes place September 26 through October 13 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city.

ANGEL'S EGG (Mamoru Oshii)
THE ARCH (T’ang Shushuen)
BLACK GIRL (Ossie Davis)
CAN SHE BAKE A CHERRY PIE? (Henry Jaglom)
AYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST (Satyajit Ray)
MORTU NEGA (Flora Gomes)
OMBRES DE SOIE (Shades of Silk) (Mary Stephen)
QUEEN KELLY (Erich von Stroheim)
THE RAZOR'S EDGE (Jocelyne Saab)
ROBERT WILSON AND THE CIVIL WARS (Howard Brookner)
SHOLAY (Director’s Cut) (Ramesh Sippy)
THE WIFE OF SEISAKU (Yasuzo Masumura)

REVIVALS FEATURES & DESCRIPTIONS

Angel’s Egg / 天使のたまご
Mamoru Oshii, 1985, Japan, 73m
Japanese with English subtitles
New York Premiere of New 4K Restoration
Now recognized as a landmark work of animation, Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg is a cryptic, allegorical masterpiece, a hypnotic collage of signs and symbols, enigmatic ideas and overwhelming emotions. Inspired in part by the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and made in collaboration with legendary illustrator Yoshitaka Amano, Angel’s Egg is set in a nameless, ravaged land. A young girl scours the ruins of an abandoned city searching for food, while transporting a large egg she believes contains an angel. She then encounters a young man who wishes to crack the egg open. But the plot is, in a sense, neither here nor there: The central action of Angel’s Egg is Oshii and Amano’s astounding imagery, conjuring the vastest of sci-fi dystopias and provocative biblical motifs. Haunting, curiously intimate, and boldly experimental, Angel’s Egg is perhaps Oshii’s most personal work, and a crucially important film in anime history. A GKIDS release.
4K restoration supervised by Mamoru Oshii. Colorist Noboru Yamaguchi. Mix Supervisor Kazuhiro Wakabayashi. Sound Effects Restoration Kaori Yamada. Digital Restoration Yoko Arai, Kensuke Nakamura, Eiji Yamataka, Tajima Onodera. Presented by Tokuma Shoten Publishing.

The Arch / 董夫人
T’ang Shushuen, 1968, Hong Kong, 95m ]
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
New York Premiere of New 4K Restoration
A pioneering work of Hong Kong cinema, T’ang Shushuen’s self-financed debut feature—produced and released when the broader Chinese film industry was almost completely dominated by men—was among the first independent films to break out and garner international acclaim. Set in 17th-century China, the film follows its titular protagonist (Lisa Lu, who won a Golden Horse Award in 1971 for her performance) as she finds her heart torn between her beloved daughter and the younger man who has awoken her dormant desires. An emotionally magisterial portrait of the plight of women in Chinese society, The Arch is a film of striking visual richness and distinctive rhythms, achieved by T’ang through two notable collaborations: it was shot by Subrata Mitra (best known for his work with Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory), and edited by the great documentarian Les Blank.
The film was restored in 4K by M+, Hong Kong, in 2025, from a 35mm release print preserved at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, and Pacific Film Archive, and a 35mm release print preserved and scanned at the BFI National Archive. Conformation, restoration, and color grading were undertaken at Silver Salt Restoration.

Black Girl
Ossie Davis, 1972, U.S., 35mm, 97m
New York Premiere of Newly Restored 35mm Print
Actor and activist Ossie Davis’s third feature as director, adapted from J. E. Franklin’s popular off-Broadway play, stars Peggy Pettitt as Billie Jean, a misunderstood young Black woman attempting to build a new life by becoming a dancer. Billie Jean lives with her janitor mom, Mama Rosie (Louise Stubbs), along with her older half-sisters, their children, her grandmother, and her grandmother’s boyfriend. The stellar cast, including Claudia McNeil, Brock Peters, and Davis’s wife Ruby Dee, dig deep in every scene, creating a fiercely honest world and a poignant intergenerational portrait that captures the personal effects and rooted realities of poverty. Pettitt, a lifelong teacher working in experimental theater and bringing her skills to prisons, drug treatment centers, homeless shelters, and more, was nominated for Best Actress by the NAACP for this, her one and only screen performance. The textures and colors of this moving social drama are especially vibrant on the newly restored 35mm print, cementing Black Girl’s legacy as a vital and prescient meditation on Black femininity and the ties that bind.
Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?
Henry Jaglom, 1983, U.S., 91m
World Premiere of New 4K Restoration
New York’s Upper West Side comes to life in actor-director Henry Jaglom’s (A Safe Place, NYFF9) freewheeling fourth feature. Karen Black embodies Zee, a middle-aged woman abandoned by her husband. Wandering the streets of Manhattan and endlessly muttering to herself, she serendipitously meets Eli (Jaglom regular Michael Emil) at a coffee shop. A topsy-turvy romance ensues as they go to concerts and movies, fight and make love, and traverse city streets filled with real-life pedestrians—the filmmakers preferring to capture New York as it is over hiring extras and staging scenes. Frances Fisher and Michael Margotta round out the cast, with notable cameos from Larry David and Jaglom’s friend and business partner Orson Welles, who plays a charming movie magician. An endearing and dryly comedic portrait of the randomness of urban life, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? is humbly suffused with a sweet and tender spirit, but it’s also a captivating, invaluable document of a time and a place. A Hope Runs High Films release.
This restoration was completed from a 4K, 16-bit scan of the 35mm interpositive by Vinegar Syndrome in Bridgeport, Connecticut, via an ARRISCAN XT. Scanning Technician: Brandon Upson. Frame-by-frame manual digital restoration and color grading was completed by Marcus Johnson of Emulsional Recovery. This restoration was a collaboration between Hope Runs High and Cinématographe, supervised by Taylor Purdee of Hope Runs High and Justin LaLiberty of Cinématographe. Film materials made available through the generous cooperation of the Academy Film Archive.



Days and Nights in the Forest / Aranyer Din Ratri
Satyajit Ray, 1970, India, 116m ]
Bengali with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration
Among Satyajit Ray’s crowning achievements—albeit one ripe for reappreciation—Days and Nights in the Forest (NYFF8) is an astonishing, fully dimensional portrait of a generation of young Indian men yearning for a break with the tyranny of everyday life. We follow four bachelor friends as they decamp for a forest holiday in Jharkhand, during which they hope to cut loose and sow wild oats. But when the four cross paths with a local tribe, the dynamics grow ever more complicated—not least between the men themselves. Featuring some of the richest characterizations in Ray’s legendary oeuvre, Days and Nights in the Forest somewhat resembles the contemporaneous films of John Cassavetes, though Ray introduces profound elements of class and gender to the psychodramatic proceedings, arriving at a masterwork that’s entirely his own. A Janus Films release.
Presented and restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Film Heritage Foundation, Janus Films, and the Criterion Collection. Funding provided by the Golden Globe Foundation. Special thanks to Wes Anderson. 4K restoration completed using the original camera and sound negative preserved by Purnima Dutta, and magnetic track preserved at the BFI National Archive. Special thanks to Sandip Ray.

Mortu Nega
Flora Gomes, 1988, Guinea-Bissau, 96m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration
Flora Gomes’s debut feature is an enduringly influential work of historical ethnofiction, and for good reason: synthesizing historiography with mythology to striking, vibrant effect, Mortu Nega is a structurally fascinating and texturally engrossing meditation on revolution. We begin toward the end of the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence of the mid-1970s, following Diminga (Bia Gomes), a wounded soldier’s devoted wife, as she heads to battle to be with her husband. The war soon draws to a close, and we then follow Diminga as she struggles to extract support and dignity from a post-revolutionary bureaucratic apparatus. The rare war film that insistently poses the question “what comes next?” this singularly thought-provoking political drama pays tribute to Guinea-Bissau’s struggle for independence while remaining critical of the society to come.
Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Flora Gomes. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

Ombres de soie (Shades of Silk)
Mary Stephen, 1978, Canada/France, 62m
French and Mandarin Chinese with English and French subtitles
World Premiere of New 2K Restoration
An accomplished film editor who went on to forge a long creative partnership with none other than Éric Rohmer, Hong Kong–born Mary Stephen’s 1978 debut feature announced her as a director to watch in her own right. Suffused with alluring atmospherics and a slight air of the oneiric, Ombres de soie traces the relationship between two Chinese women in Shanghai in 1935; through glances, gestures, and confessional voice-overs, the two women negotiate the tension between their shared wish for stability and the nagging sense that there may be more to their bond than meets the eye…. An astounding low-budget achievement (in which 1970s Paris passes for 1930s Shanghai), this entrancing film evokes the Marguerite Duras of India Song, which is no accident: Stephen explicitly wished for Ombres de soie to be a counterpoint to India Song, from an Asian woman’s point of view.
Ombres de soie (Shades of Silk) was restored from a 16mm print scanned at Library and Archives Canada. The 2K restoration work was carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna in 2024, and is made possible by the generous support of M+, Hong Kong, 2024.



Queen Kelly
Erich von Stroheim, 1929, U.S., 105m
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration
A decadent late-silent masterpiece, Erich von Stroheim’s epic unfinished swan song pulls no punches. His characters contend with whippings, suicide, a German East African bordello and more in this story of a prince, the orphan girl he falls in love with, and the mad queen whose jealousy wreaks havoc on everyone involved. The great silent film star Gloria Swanson plays Patricia Kelly, the convent orphan whose life is turned upside down when Prince “Wild” Wolfram (Walter Byron) becomes obsessed with her, angering his betrothed queen. The making of the film was rife with controversy: Swanson’s then-lover Joseph P. Kennedy provided the financing that quickly spiraled out of control, and a fed-up Swanson eventually fired von Stroheim. This vital new digital reconstruction, overseen by Milestone Films’ Dennis Doros, brings von Stroheim’s original script to life, using new research and recently discovered materials. The result is Queen Kelly in its most complete and spectacular form to date, belatedly closing the circle on von Stroheim’s legendary directing career. Featuring a new orchestral score by Eli Denson. A Milestone / Kino Lorber release.
Reconstruction: Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, Milestone Film & Video, Harrington Park, NJ. Nitrate materials and stills courtesy of The George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. 4K digital stabilization, timing and cleanup by Metropolis Post, NYC. Colorist: Jason Crump. Digital restoration artist: Ian Bostick. Supervised by Milestone Films.

The Razor’s Edge / Ghazl El-Banat
Jocelyne Saab, 1985, France/Lebanon, 102m
Arabic and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration
“I’ve invented places, as if by making a work of fiction about them, I could preserve them,” the Lebanese war correspondent–turned–filmmaker Jocelyne Saab said of her interest in fiction. Her 1985 drama The Razor’s Edge takes place during the Lebanese Civil War and centers on the bond formed between Karim (Jacques Weber), a fortysomething painter, and Samar (Hala Bassam), a teenager who grew up during the war (Juliet Berto has a small but striking role as Karim’s friend). Underneath the character-driven narrative is another story, that of a place. Saab started her career as a journalist working for French television and her reporter’s eye deftly captures the destruction of war-torn Beirut and the disparate but vibrant people wandering through its rubble and ruins. Screenwriter Gérard Brach (The Tenant, Identification of a Woman) worked on the final version of the script, and the result, juxtaposing the creation of art with violence, is an arresting meditation on humanity’s struggle in the face of unthinkable horror.
Restored in 4K in 2025 by Association Jocelyne Saab in collaboration with Cinémathèque suisse and La Cinémathèque québécoise at Cinémathèque suisse and Association Jocelyne Saab laboratories, from the positive preservation copy of the original cut presented at Cannes in 1985. Funding provided by Association Jocelyne Saab and Nessim Ricardou-Saab.

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars
Howard Brookner, 1985, U.S., 94m
English, German, Italian, and Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere of New Restoration
In the early ’80s, legendary theater artist Robert Wilson (who died in July at the age of 83) set out to create an epic 12-hour opera, a collaboration between six international theater companies, that would take place during the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner, Wilson’s good friend, documents the dizzying and difficult process, and traces the history of Wilson’s hypervisual theatrical work, in this fascinating portrait of a deeply dedicated artist working at an incredibly high level. Grounded in the practical derailments—schedules, budgets, exhaustion—that often accompany ambitious artistic undertakings, the film has been long unseen, with some original materials lost to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Aaron Brookner, the filmmaker’s nephew, has spent 12 years on this invaluable new restoration of a surviving 16mm print, as well as video tapes and magnetic tapes for audio, to finally do justice to Wilson’s artistic process, as well as Brookner’s own gifts for intimate documentation. A Janus Films release.
Restored in 2025 by Pinball London – Janus Films – The Criterion Collection at Pinball London, Bando a parte, Dan Zlotnik, and Matar Studio from a 16mm print, a VHS, and the stereo 16mm optical sound. Funding provided by Howard Brookner Legacy Project, Howard Brookner Estate, Pinball London and Janus Films – The Criterion Collection. Restoration supervised by Aaron Brookner, Paula Vaccaro, and Carlos Morales/EPost.

Sholay (Director’s Cut)
Ramesh Sippy, 1975, India, 204m
Hindi with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration
Conceived as the biggest action-adventure film ever made in India, Ramesh Sippy’s deeply influential 1975 “Curry Western” remains a towering landmark in film history. Written by the legendary screenwriting duo Salim–Javid, the film stars Sanjeev Kumar as a retired cop who, in seeking revenge against a nihilistic dacoit leader (Amjad Khan), enlists the help of two slick, charismatic crooks whom he put behind bars (unforgettably portrayed by Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra). Naturally, the criminal duo soon fall in love with two local village girls, but danger remains on the horizon. A delirious four-course meal of action, musical numbers, ultramagnetic performances from Indian cinema’s most iconic actors, and jaw-dropping wide-screen 70mm cinematography, Sholay is here presented in its recently completed director’s cut, the most faithful approximation of Sippy’s original ending before it was censored by the Indian Censor Board.
Restored by Film Heritage Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Sippy Films. Funding provided by Sippy Films. Sholay was restored using the best surviving elements: an interpositive and two color reversal intermediates found in a warehouse in the U.K. and a second interpositive dating from 1978 deposited by Sippy Films and preserved by Film Heritage Foundation. The sound was restored using the original sound negative, and the magnetic soundtrack preserved by Film Heritage Foundation. The film was originally shot on 35mm and blown up to 70mm for release. No 70mm prints of the film survive. The original camera negative was severely damaged due to heavy vinegar syndrome with coils adhesion and halos, overcoat deterioration both on base side and emulsion side, and base distortion. This restoration of the film in 4K includes the original ending as well as two deleted scenes and with the original 70mm aspect ratio of 2.2:1.

The Wife of Seisaku / 清作の妻
Yasuzo Masumura, 1965, Japan, 94m
Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration
Considered a major work within Yasuzo Masumura’s remarkable and underrated filmography, The Wife of Seisaku finds the Japanese auteur again collaborating with his muse, Ayako Wakao (Daiei Studios’ top actress at the time). During the run-up to the Russo-Japanese War, Okane (Wakao), a widow, returns to her home village, only to be ostracized when she falls in love with an intensely idealistic young soldier. When he returns from the front wounded, Okane goes to extreme lengths to ensure that he won’t return to the battlefield. Masumura’s restrained, even minimalistic stylization is an elegant stage upon which Wakao enacts a psychodramatically rich and politically provocative tour de force.
The film was restored in 4K at IMAGICA Entertainment Media Services from the original 35mm negative films. For the sound, a direct print was generated from the 35mm sound negative, and the audio was digitized and restored. In this digital restoration, we aimed to repair the damage to the images and colors caused by the age-related deterioration of the materials, while at the same time restoring all of the texture and beauty that remained in the film at the time of its release. The grading was supervised by Masahiro Miyajima, a former member of Daiei Kyoto Studios' Cinematography Department, who worked for many years as chief cinematography assistant to Daiei’s legendary cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and is familiar with Daiei’s look. The method that surprised Martin Scorsese when The Film Foundation restored Ugetsu (1953) was used again this time: storyboards of all the cuts were transcribed, and the director’s and photographer’s aims were analyzed based on the cut divisions and other information.

[Chris Knipp]

TRAILER FOR JOACHIM TRIER'S 'SENTIMENTAL VALUE

It doesn't tell much, but here's a glimpse of what some are calling 'the best film of the year':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKbcKQN5Yrw

Sentimental Value / Affeksjonsverdi
Joachim Trier, 2025, Norway/France/Denmark/Germany, 134m
Norwegian and English with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his beloved The Worst Person in the World (NYFF59), Renate Reinsve burrows to the steely core of Nora Borg, an acclaimed stage actress going through the first rumblings of a personal crisis after the death of her mother. She and her devoted therapist sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), are suddenly forced to confront long-suppressed elements of their past when their estranged movie-director father, Gustav (a wonderfully restrained Stellan Skarsgård, conveying a world of regret in the smallest of gestures) returns with a script he has written for Nora. After she refuses the role, Gustav turns to an American movie star (Elle Fanning), further complicating his own attempt at reconciliation. Trier’s insightful and captivating adult drama, which won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, furthers the writer-director’s piercing exploration of the frayed ties that bind us to one another and to our creative selves. A NEON release. PREMIERE: CANNES


RENATE REINSVE, ELLE FANNING IN SENTIMENTAL VALUE

[Chris Knipp]

Here is the poster for this year's NYFF. It's by NICKEL BOYS auteur RaMell Ross



Ross explains the poster image "consolidates two ontological image perspectives, one from point of view and another from a security camera, both from my 24-hour performance piece, America(n) Jumps the Gator." More will be revealed. Beautiful.

[Chris Knipp]

How have the Main Slate films done with the critics? One has tanked - Guadagnino's! Also JAY KELLY, Clooney's aging star showpiece, won no love from European critics either. Let's see if Hollywood likes it anyway.

METACRITIC RATINGS

Opening Night: After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino) 55!
Centerpiece: Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch) 86
Closing Night: Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper) tbd
Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi) tbd
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph) tbd
Cover-Up (Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus) tbd
The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler) tbd
Duse (Pietro Marcello) tbd
The Fence (Claire Denis) tbd
Gavagai (Ulrich Köhler) 91
A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow) 88
I Only Rest in the Storm (Pedro Pinho) Tomatometer 76%
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein) 82
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi) 87
Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach) 64!
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude) 85
Landmarks (Lucrecia Martel) tbd
Late Fame (Kent Jones) tbd
The Last One for the Road/Le città di pianura (Francesco Sossai) Letterboxd 3.5/5
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason) Letterboxd 3.6/5
Magellan (Lav Diaz). tbd
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt) 79
Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold) 74
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook) 88
Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs) 81
Resurrection (Bi Gan) 82
Romería (Carla Simón) 75
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin) tbd
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) 87
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) 88
Sirât (Oliver Laxe) 82
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski) 91
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa) 85
What Does That Nature Say To You (Hong Sangsoo) tbd

I just noticed their opener AFTER THE HUNT really tanked with the critics, so I thought I'd check the others. They've done very well, mostly. JAY KELLY has tanked also. MIROIRS No. 3 didn't do super-well, which we've known for a while. (I care about Petzold though.)

A bunch of the films have not premiered yet so they have no rating. WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN got a Metacritic 48, so they were wise to avoid it.