Opening October 21

The Handmaiden / Agassi
Park Chan-wook, South Korea, 2016, 145m
Korean and Japanese with English subtitles
The acclaimed director of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and Thirst returns with his first-ever period film—a stunning crime drama set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea. Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a riveting and carnal story of young Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) and Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri), the Korean woman hired to serve as her new handmaiden—and who is secretly involved in the plot of con artist (Ha Jung-woo) to swindle Hideko. Adapting Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith, Park uses his distinct visual talent to transport the story from Victorian England to a ravishing estate in Korea, an exquisitely realized space blending European and Japanese architecture. Driven by outstanding performances and splendorous production design, The Handmaiden is a thrilling, erotic tale teeming with unexpected twists. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Ugly, Dirty and Bad / Brutti, sporchi e cattivi
Ettore Scola, Italy, 1976, 115m
Italian with English subtitles
A master of the commedia all’italiana, Ettore Scola won the best director prize 40 years ago at the Cannes Film Festival for this outrageous “satirical tragedy” about a sub-proletariat household in Rome. The sprawling extended Mazzatella family lives shoulder to shoulder in a shack that overlooks a busy highway. In an extraordinary comic performance, the great Nino Manfredi stars as Giacinto, the grizzled old patriarch who has received a one-million-lire insurance payout for the loss of his left eye—money he refuses to share with any of the two-dozen children, grandchildren, and assorted other relatives who share his cramped abode. Soon enough, the family members are plotting their revenge, only to discover that Giacinto has no plans of going gently into that good night. Returning to the screen in a beautiful new digital restoration, Scola’s film brilliantly blends hilarity and brutality in a portrait of squalor and cynicism like no other. A Film Movement Classics release. New digital restoration!

Opening October 28

Gimme Danger
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
USA, 2016, DCP, 108m
“Music is life and life is not a business,” said Iggy Pop when he and his surviving bandmates from The Stooges were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. Jim Jarmusch’s cinematic offering to the punk gods of Ann Arbor traces the always raucous and frequently calamitous history of the Stooges from inception to the present. With the help of animator James Kerr, plus glimpses of Lucille Ball and a shirtless Yul Brynner amidst a bonanza of archival performance footage, photos, and interviews, Gimme Danger has the feeling of a night at Max’s Kansas City. An Amazon Studios and Magnolia Pictures release.

Opening November 11

L’argent
Directed by Robert Bresson
1983, France, 83m
French with English subtitles
Robert Bresson’s final film, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s story The Forged Coupon, is simultaneously bleak and luminous, and sharp enough to cut diamonds. The story of a counterfeit bill’s passage from hand to hand and the resulting tragic consequences is rendered with a clean force that would be startling from a filmmaker of any age; coming from one in his early 80s, it was, and still is, astonishing. L’argent burns white hot—not with anger but with a perfect clarity of purpose: to direct us to see that habitual human callousness is what keeps us out of paradise. A Janus Films release. New 2K restoration, scanned in 4K from original negative.

Opening November 18

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
Directed by Lonny Price
USA, DCP, 95m
In 1981, Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince embarked on Merrily We Roll Along, a musical based on the 1934 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy told in reverse: the characters, played by a cast of teenage unknowns, begin as disillusioned adults and end as starry-eyed adolescents. Though the original, much-ballyhooed production was panned by the critics and closed after just 16 performances, Merrily We Roll Along would go on to attain musical theater legend status. This alternately heartbreaking and euphoric film by original cast member Lonny Price features never-before seen footage of Prince and Sondheim at work on the show and revisits many of Price’s fellow actors, all of them united by this once-in-a-lifetime experience. An Abramorama release.

Opening November 25

Evolution
Directed by Lucile Hadžihalilović
France, 2015, DCP, 81m
French with English Subtitles
On a remote island, populated solely by women and young boys, 10-year-old Nicolas plays with other children, but not in a carefree manner. And while the women may have maternal instincts, something is awry: they gather on the beach at night for a strange ritual that Nicolas struggles to understand, and the boys are taken to a hospital regularly for mysterious treatments. And water is everywhere. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, and Nicolas appears to be living out one of his own. In the follow-up to her directorial debut, Innocence, Lucile Hadžihalilović continues her exploration of growing up—where we’re going and what we’re leaving behind. As Nicolas discovers more, feelings of fear, melancholy, and also eroticism bubble to the surface. Hadžihalilović has created a dark fantasy that we are invited to explore and make our own discoveries, however macabre they may be. An IFC Midnight release.

Opening December 9

Lost and Beautiful
Directed by Pietro Marcello
Italy/France, 2015, DCP, 87m
Italian with English subtitles
Pietro Marcello continues his intrepid work along the borderline of fiction and documentary with this beautiful and beguiling film, by turns neorealist and fabulist, worthy of Pasolini in its matter-of-fact lyricism and political conviction. Shot on expired 16mm film stock and freely incorporating archival footage and folkloric tropes, it begins as a portrait of the shepherd Tommaso, a local hero in the Campania region of southern Italy, who volunteered to look after the abandoned Bourbon palace of Carditello despite the state’s apathy and threats from the Mafia. Tommaso suffers a fatal heart attack in the course of shooting, and Marcello’s bold and generous response is to grant his subject’s dying wish: for a Pulcinella straight out of the commedia dell’arte to appear on the scene and rescue a buffalo calf from the palace. With Lost and Beautiful, a documentary that soars into the realm of myth, Marcello has crafted a uniquely multifaceted and enormously moving work of political cine-poetry. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival. A Grasshopper Film release.

Opening December 16

Neruda
Directed by Pablo Larraín
Chile/Argentina/France/Spain, 2016, DCP, 107m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
Pablo Larraín’s exciting, surprising, and colorful new film is not a biopic but, as the director himself puts it, a “Nerudean” portrait of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s years of flight and exile after his 1948 denunciation of his government’s leadership. Larraín’s heady blend of fact and fancy (the latter embodied in an invented character, straight out of detective fiction, played by Gael García Bernal) is many things at once: a loving, kaleidoscopic recreation of a particular historical moment; a comical cat-and-mouse game; and a pocket epic. Featuring Luis Gnecco, a dead ringer for the poet and a formidable actor, alongside a terrific cast. Released by The Orchard.

Opening January 13

Son of Joseph / Le fils de Joseph
Directed by Eugène Green
France/Belgium, 2016, DCP, 113m
French with English Subtitles
The American-born expatriate filmmaker Eugène Green exists in his own special artistic orbit. All Green’s films share a formal rigor and an increasingly refined modulation between the playfully comic, the urgently human, and the transcendent, and they are each as exquisitely balanced as the baroque music and architecture that he cherishes. His latest movie, Son of Joseph, is perhaps his most buoyant. A nativity story reboot that gently skewers French cultural pretensions, it features newcomer Victor Ezenfis as a discontented Parisian teenager in search of a father, Mathieu Amalric and Fabrizio Rongione as his, respectively, callous and gentle alternative paternal options, and Natacha Régnier as his single mother. A Kino Lorber release.

Opening January 27

Staying Vertical / Rester vertical
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
France, 2016, 100m
French with English subtitles
Léo (Damien Bonnard), a blocked filmmaker seeking inspiration in the French countryside for an overdue script, begins an affair with a shepherdess (India Hair), with whom he almost immediately has a child. Combining the formal control of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake (NYFF 2013) with the shapeshifting fabulism of his earlier work, Alain Guiraudie’s new film is a sidelong look at the human cycle of birth, procreation, and death, as well as his boldest riff yet on his signature subjects of freedom and desire. The title has the ring of both a rallying cry and a dirty joke—fitting for a film that is, above all else, a rumination on what it means to be a human being, a vertical animal. A Strand Releasing release.

If you have any questions or concerns about the upcoming lineup, please contact
Lisa Thomas, [email protected], (212) 671-4709
Rachel Allen, [email protected], (212) 875-5423
Hannah Thomas, [email protected], (212) 875-5419