Film at Lincoln Center has announced its lineup of festival, repertory, and new release programming for the 2025 spring season, from March through early July. 

FLC’s upcoming new releases include many selections from the 62nd New York Film Festival, including Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, a 4K restoration of John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Northern Lights, Neo Sora’s Happyend, and Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude. FLC will also present two selections from this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema: Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail and Rithy Panh’s Meeting with Pol Pot. Many special guests will be returning to FLC for Q&As following select screenings.

In addition to these new releases, a special double feature of Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow on 35mm and Charlie Chaplin’s The Pawnshop will be presented on March 27 in celebration of Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes’s new book The Prop, followed by a post-screening discussion with the authors (moderated by editor Genevieve Yue) and a book signing. 

Upcoming FLC repertory series include examinations of two webs of influences on important works in recent cinematic history: in L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now, FLC invites audiences to discover the vast, vital influence that the titular group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists at UCLA in the 1970s and ’80s have exerted on the cinema of the African diaspora; and in The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us, FLC presents an interpretation of the many references in Peele’s rich sophomore feature, as outlined in the newly published Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay, through a presentation of double features, readings, in-person appearances from some of the book’s contributing writers, and never-before-seen theatrical presentations of Us.

FLC will honor two groundbreaking female figures in front of and behind the camera with Monica Vitti: La Modernista, a career-spanning tribute to the actress who helped to define one of the greatest periods in Italian and world cinema; and the most comprehensive North American retrospective to date of the films of Kira Muratova, widely considered to be the greatest Ukrainian filmmaker of the last half century and arguably one of cinema’s most influential female directors. 

Upcoming annual festivals at FLC include: New Directors/New Films (April 2–13), New York African Film Festival (May 7–13), and Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (May 29–June 5). 

In addition to this robust lineup of new releases, revivals, series, and festivals, FLC will feature a special limited presentation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice on 70mm for one week only beginning July 4, ahead of the director’s highly anticipated new feature. 

Film descriptions and additional details are listed below and on filmlinc.org. New releases and revival runs are organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson. Partner festivals are organized by Florence Almozini, Dan Sullivan, Madeline Whittle, Tyler Wilson, Katie Zwick, Manuel Santini, and Regina Riccitelli.

FILM & SERIES DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W 65th Street) or
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 W 65th Street)

March 27
The Prop: There’s Always Tomorrow + The Pawnshop

There’s Always Tomorrow

What are film props? What do they do? Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes’s new book The Prop (the first in the “Cutaways” book series edited by Erika Balsom and Genevieve Yue, published by Fordham University Press) attempts to answer these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds. On the occasion of the publication of The Prop, join FLC for a special screening of Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow on 35mm and Charlie Chaplin’s The Pawnshop, followed by an onstage conversation between Gorfinkel, Rhodes, and Yue, followed by a book signing. Tickets on sale now.

Thursday, March 27 at 7:00pm – Post-screening discussion with authors Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, moderated by editor Genevieve Yue, followed by a book signing. Copies of The Prop by Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes will be available for purchase at the event.

Opens March 28
Grand Tour
Miguel Gomes, 2024, Portugal/Italy/France, 128m
Portuguese with English subtitles

Grand Tour. Courtesy of MUBI.

In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, the uncommonly ambitious Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, Arabian Nights) takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon to tell the tale of an unsettled couple from colonial England and the world as it both expands and closes in around them. It’s 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) has escaped the clutches of beckoning marriage, leaving his bemused fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), in indefatigable pursuit. Edward gives chase from Mandalay to Bangkok to Shanghai and beyond, while Gomes responds with a splendid and enthralling series of scenes that use a magic form of cinema to situate us in these places both then and now, keeping us at a knowingly exotic traveler’s distance while also immersing us in rhythm, texture, and emotional reality. Whether black-and-white or color, zigzagging or meditative in tone, scripted or captured as documentary, Grand Tour is splendid, moving, and human-scaled. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A MUBI release.

April 2-13
New Directors/New Films
Presented in partnership with MoMA

Lurker. Courtesy of MUBI.

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, New Directors/New Films showcases new and emerging filmmakers whose distinctive visions and risk-taking works highlight the vitality and potential of cinema. This year’s ND/NF will present 24 features and nine short films, including 20 North American or U.S. premieres. Since 1972, ND/NF has maintained a commitment to its founding mission to showcase distinctive new voices and share the gift of discovery with audiences. Directors showcased in past festivals include Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kelly Reichardt, Pedro Almodóvar, Souleymane Cissé, Jia Zhangke, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, Michael Haneke, Wong Kar-wai, Agnieszka Holland, Denis Villeneuve, Luca Guadagnino, and more than a thousand other filmmakers. 

Opening this year’s ND/NF is the New York premiere of Familiar Touch, Sarah Friedland’s debut, which won three top prizes in the 2024 Venice Film Festival Orizzonti Competition and showcases an astonishing performance by Kathleen Chalfant. The festival will close with the New York premiere of Alex Russell’s feature debut Lurker, a tense thriller about the darker side of pop-star worship fresh from screenings at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. Tickets on sale March 13 at newdirectors.org. 

Organized by Dan Sullivan (Co-Chair, Film at Lincoln Center), La Frances Hui (Co-Chair, MoMA), Madeline Whittle (Film at Lincoln Center), Tyler Wilson (Film at Lincoln Center), Katie Zwick (Film at Lincoln Center), Sophie Cavoulacos (MoMA), Rajendra Roy (MoMA), and Francisco Valente (MoMA).

Opens April 18
The Shrouds
David Cronenberg, 2024, France/Canada, 119m

The Shrouds. Courtesy of Janus Film/Sideshow

In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, The Shrouds is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. 

April 25–May 4
L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now

L.A. Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement

At UCLA in the 1970s and ’80s, a group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists pioneered a new filmmaking tradition that reflected the complexity of Black experiences on screen: the L.A. Rebellion. In the decades that followed, artists from that extraordinary cohort would go on to become internationally renowned as the founding practitioners of a wholly original school of cinematic thought, justly celebrated for the bracing confluence of stark naturalism and unvarnished lyricism in evoking the rhythms and textures of an underrepresented milieu. For 10 days this spring, Film at Lincoln Center invites audiences to discover the vast, vital influence that the L.A. Rebellion and its spiritual descendents have exerted on the cinema of the African diaspora in the decades since the movement’s founding. Pairing a selection of canonical and lesser-known L.A. Rebellion films with more recent output from a vibrant new generation of artists hailing from the African continent and elsewhere in the U.S.—and placing them in conversation with canonical works from the L.A. filmmakers’ African contemporaries—the series will reflect how these disparate cinematic contexts share a similar intention: reconsidering, reframing, and reinvigorating the popular image of Black communities and Black lives for audiences around the world. 

Co-organized by Claire Diao and Madeline Whittle. “L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now” is sponsored by MUBI, the global streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema.

Opens April 25
April
Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024, France/Georgia/Italy, 134m
Georgian with English subtitles

April. Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.

Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili follows her striking debut feature Beginning (NYFF58), which told the story of a wife and mother persecuted for her religious beliefs in a provincial village, with this tenebrous, provocative drama about the precarious social position of a woman living in an isolated community. When a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery, obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) falls under suspicion for negligence, her standing in the small town further jeopardized by people’s knowledge that she also provides illegal abortion services to local women. Shot by Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All), balancing long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism, April is a complex and disquieting depiction of a caregiver in crisis, rich with haunting, metaphorical imagery that feels emanated from its maker’s subconscious. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A Metrograph Pictures release.

May 7–13
New York African Film Festival
Presented in partnership with the African Film Festival

Souleymane Cissé at 2023 New York African Film Festival

Film at Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, Inc. are excited to announce the 32nd edition of the New York African Film Festival, taking place from May 7 to 13. Since its inception in 1993, the festival has been at the forefront of showcasing African and diaspora filmmakers’ unique storytelling through the moving image. 

Opens May 9
Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke, 2024, China, 111m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles

Caught by the Tides. Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous Caught by the Tides. Assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years—a beguiling mix of fiction and documentary, featuring a cascade of images taken from previous movies, unused scenes, and newly shot dramatic sequences—Caught by the Tides is a free-flowing work of unspoken longing, carried along more by music than dialogue as it looms around the edges of a poignant love story. The film mostly adheres to the perspective of Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao) as she wanders an increasingly unrecognizable country in search of long-lost lover Bin (Li Zhubin), who left their home city of Datong seeking new financial prospects. The always captivating Zhao carries the film with her delicate expressiveness, while Jia constantly evokes cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change: of people, landscapes, cities, politics, ideas. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

May 16–25
Kira Muratova: A Retrospective

The Long Farewell. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Now widely considered the greatest Ukrainian filmmaker of the last half century—and arguably one of the most influential women directors in cinematic history—Kira Muratova (1934–2018) remained largely unknown to American audiences during her lifetime, and has only recently come into widespread international acclaim. Having embarked upon her solo filmmaking career on the cusp of the Khrushchev Thaw, Muratova was banned from filming for almost 15 years after her two early masterpieces, Brief Encounters (1967) and Long Farewell (1971), were condemned as un-Soviet and “bourgeois” by official censors, and fully returned to filmmaking only in the late 1980s, under Perestroika. The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) witnessed the collapse of the totalitarianism and moral decay that characterized Soviet society, and brought the director newfound critical recognition; yet Muratova’s genius would fully come into focus only in the context of an independent Ukraine, where she enjoyed greater creative freedom and acknowledgment. Her most significant source of inspiration during this period was the city of Odessa, a once majestic metropolis rapidly fading into a neglected province. Deeply fascinated by eccentric characters and linguistic deviations, Muratova honed a distinctive style characterized by surreal and unexpected repetitions, refracting the experience of an unstable reality by way of outré storytelling devices. Caustic and misanthropic in life, Muratova nevertheless was touchingly humanistic in her films, radiating childish wonder, defiant hope, and sparkling irony. Film at Lincoln Center is proud to present the most comprehensive North American retrospective to date of Muratova’s extraordinary body of work, featuring a robust selection of her greatest directorial achievements, both widely celebrated and historically overlooked, as well as several films in which the director herself starred in front of the camera.

Co-organized by Marta Kuzma, Professor of Art at Yale University, film scholar Ivan Kozlenko, and Madeline Whittle, in cooperation with The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, Kyiv. The retrospective is a part of Faktura 10, a program of RIBBON International. Co-presented with Janus Films.

Opens May 23
4K Restoration
Northern Lights
John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, 1978, U.S., 98m
English, Norwegian, and Swedish with English subtitles

Northern Lights. Photo by Dolores Neuman.

Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, the sui generis Northern Lights marks one of the most moving and committed works of political cinema from the late 1970s. Dramatizing the formation of the populist Nonpartisan League in North Dakota in the mid-1910s, Northern Lights captures the plight of immigrant Dakotan farmers as they toil and struggle against the combined forces of industry and finance. Amid this paroxysm of class tension, two young lovers find themselves swept up in the tide. Shot on location (on grain-rich black-and-white 16mm) in the dead of winter and featuring an astonishing cast of non-professional actors, this handmade masterpiece remains a stirring monument to collectivity. An NYFF62 Revivals selection. A Kino Lorber release.

The 4K digital restoration of Northern Lights was created by IndieCollect and Metropolis Post in collaboration with directors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson.

May 29–June 5
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema
Presented in partnership with Cinecittà

Piero Messina and Tyler Wilson at 2024 Open Roads: New Italian Cinema. Photo by Arin Sang-urai.

Open Roads: New Italian Cinema is the leading screening series to offer North American audiences a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. The series strikes a balance between emerging talents and esteemed veterans; commercial and independent fare; and outrageous comedies, gripping dramas, and captivating documentaries.  

Opens May 30
Ghost Trail / Les Fantômes
Jonathan Millet, 2024, France/Belgium/Germany, 94m
French, Arabic, Turkish, and English with English subtitles

Ghost Trail. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Two years after being released from Syrian jail, Hamid (Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge—but what’s the real price of vengeance for the person seeking it? Inspired by true events, Jonathan Millet’s deeply researched thriller excavates the too-little-examined moral dilemmas and political negligence that traumatized migrants must confront amid the struggle to rebuild their lives and take control of their destinies at the margins of contemporary French society, inviting audiences to better empathize with France’s newest residents, and to better understand their place in the world—and our own. A 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection. A Music Box Films release.

June 6–19
Monica Vitti: La Modernista

L’Avventura

Few actors in film history have embodied modernism quite as strikingly or as comprehensively as Monica Vitti. An equally magnetic and enigmatic screen presence from the outset of her career, she began acting in films in the mid-1950s, and soon thereafter began her pivotal collaboration with Michelangelo Antonioni. Their artistic partnership produced some of the 1960s’ most indelible and iconic works of film art, beginning with her breakout turn in L’avventura (1960) through to arguably her greatest performance, as an industrialist’s wife whose alienation from her harsh, polluted environment turns all-consumingly inward, in 1964’s Red Desert. But in addition to her landmark films with Antonioni, Vitti also worked across a broad swath of Italian (and international) cinema, having memorable and fruitful collaborations with such eminent directors as Ettore Scola, Joseph Losey, Mario Monicelli, and Luis Buñuel. This June, join Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà for a special career-spanning tribute to the actress who helped to define one of the greatest periods in Italian and world cinema.

Co-organized by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan of Film at Lincoln Center, and by Paola Ruggiero, Camilla Cormanni, and Marco Cicala of Cinecittà. Co-produced by Cinecittà, Rome.

Opens June 13
Meeting with Pol Pot / Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot
Rithy Panh, 2024, France/Cambodia/Taiwan/Qatar/Turkey, 112m
French and Cambodian with English subtitles

Meeting with Pol Pot. Courtesy of Strand Releasing.

In 1978, three French journalists arrived in Cambodia to survey the country and interview its leader, Pol Pot—but after a picture-perfect arrival, cracks began to emerge in the murderous regime’s facade of respectability. For Cambodian-born Rithy Panh, the damage inflicted upon his homeland by the Khmer Rouge has fueled a lifetime of innovative work in the vein of 2013’s The Missing Picture, which reconstructed the period’s events in part through clay-figurine dioramas. This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, is brought to life thanks to exemplary lead performances from Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï, meticulously conjuring the sights and sounds of 1978 Cambodia with the assistance of archival footage and more clay figurines. The result is a unique admixture—historical horror paired with a rich meditation on the impossibility of portraying it—that only Panh could make. A 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection. A Strand Releasing release.

June 20–26
The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us

Claudette Barius/Universal Pictures

Some films demand repeat viewings. Even rarer are those that inspire handbooks theorizing about their imaginary worlds. In just under six years, Jordan Peele’s Us has earned both distinctions. Hailed as “a colossal achievement” and “blissfully ambitious” upon its 2019 release, Peele’s sophomore feature plumbed everything from American isolationist fears and labyrinthine power structures to the rich lineage of the doppelgänger motif and home-invasion thrillers. It also left just as many audiences enthralled and mystified as it prompted those to obsessively pore over its coincidences, paradoxes, and symbology in the years that followed. Now with the recent publication Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay by Inventory Press, in-depth footnotes, commentaries, marginalia, and a constellation of images, definitions, and inspirations have untethered entirely new references orbiting the film—everything and everyone from W. E. B. Du Bois, C.H.U.D., Sylvia Plath, and Oscar Micheaux, to Donnie Darko, Lewis Carroll, The Twilight Zone, and more. This June, Film at Lincoln Center will interpret the cosmology outlined in this book through a presentation of double features, readings, in-person appearances from some of the book’s contributing writers, and never-before-seen theatrical presentations of Us.

Organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson in collaboration with Monkeypaw Productions and Inventory Press. 

Opens June 20
Happyend
Neo Sora, 2024, Japan/U.S., 113m
Japanese with English subtitles

Happyend. Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.

Contemporary global anxieties over the gradual slide into governmental totalitarianism find an original and touching outlet in this resonant drama about youth culture in Japan. Neo Sora, making his fiction feature debut following his elegant music tribute Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (NYFF61), sets his film in a Tokyo high school sometime in the near future. Here, two best friends since childhood, Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system after being the target of an elaborate prank. As the boys try to figure out how to align themselves within the increasingly oppressive education system, larger external forces summon further threats, including constant looming natural disasters. Sora’s absorbing and humane film tackles universal political fears, the tenuous bonds of friendship, and questions of individual will. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A Metrograph Pictures release.

Opens June 27
Afternoons of Solitude
Albert Serra, 2024, Spain, 123m
Spanish with English subtitles

Afternoons of Solitude. ©Andergraun Films, courtesy of Grasshopper.

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra (Pacifiction, NYFF60) trains a patient and poetic lens on the dazzling pomp and devastating brutality of bullfighting in his new documentary portrait of the charismatic Peruvian-born star torero Andrés Roca Rey. Intensely in-the-moment, Afternoons of Solitude expertly balances the visceral thrill of the battle inside the ring, pitting animal instinct against human technique, with a meditative filmmaking style that allows the viewer to appreciate the emotional and physical toll the violence takes on both man and beast. Unflinching yet reflective, Serra’s film is a monumental depiction of the persistence of the primitive in the present day, while acknowledging the extraordinary skill of the man who puts his life and spiritual endurance at risk as he faces down rampaging nature. Winner of Best Film at the 2024 San Sebastián International Film Festival. An NYFF62 Spotlight selection. A Grasshopper Film release.

Opens July 4 (one week only!)
Inherent Vice on 70mm
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014, U.S., 70mm, 148m

Inherent Vice. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing Thomas Pynchon adaptation is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all in as Doc Sportello, the private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston), menaced at every turn by the telegenic police detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Among the other members of Anderson’s mind-boggling cast are Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Jena Malone. For one week only, join Film at Lincoln Center to revisit this great American film on 70mm, ahead of the director’s highly anticipated new feature. An NYFF52 Main Slate selection.