Film at Lincoln Center announces its lineup of repertory, festival, and new release programming from December 2024 through March 2025.   

FLC’s repertory offerings include a series of classic noir thrillers and more by Robert Siodmak, a retrospective of Frederick Wiseman’s films, including 33 documentaries newly restored in 4K, and a collection of rarely seen works that inspired auteur Robert Eggers in making his spellbinding Nosferatu.

FLC’s winter and spring new releases are all selections from the 62nd New York Film Festival: Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door; Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths; Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia; Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation; Carson Lund’s Eephus; Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire; and Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour.

Opening on December 18, FLC is pleased to offer a special engagement of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the latest stop-motion masterpiece from the renowned Aardman Animations. Audiences of all ages are invited to journey along with the beloved dynamic duo Wallace and Gromit for their latest cracking adventure!

In March, FLC presents what promises to be an unforgettable experience, the U.S. premiere of a live performance of original scores by Oriki and Woz Kaly to accompany two films by internationally acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun and Le franc. 

Upcoming film festivals at FLC are: New York Jewish Film Festival (January 15–29) and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (March 6–16), and looking further ahead into spring we welcome the return of New Directors/New Films (April 2–13), the New York African Film Festival (May 7–13), and Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (May 29–June 5).

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, 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).

December 11-19
Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary

The File on Thelma Jordon

Of all the great filmmakers who fled Europe amid the ascent of the Nazis in Germany and turned up in Hollywood, few did more to shape our sense of film genre than Robert Siodmak. Born to German Jewish parents at the dawn of the 20th century, Siodmak spent decades honing his chameleonic sensibility and influential style across a variety of studios and national cinemas. Perhaps his most vital contributions came within the domain of film noir—such richly atmospheric and sophisticatedly hard-edged works as The Killers (1946), Criss Cross (1949), Phantom Lady (1944), and The Suspect (1942)—but each film that Siodmak directed, no matter the genre, or whether in Germany, France, or Hollywood, powerfully bears his imprint. Join Film at Lincoln Center for a retrospective dedicated to one of Hollywood’s most enduringly influential yet too-little-celebrated helmers, featuring an assortment of new 4K digital restorations of his signature films.

Organized by Dan Sullivan and Madeline Whittle.

Opens December 18
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, 2024, U.K., 79m

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Courtesy of Netflix.

Aardman’s four-time Academy Award-winning director Nick Park and Emmy Award-nominated Merlin Crossingham return with a brand-new epic adventure, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. In this next installment, Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified, when Wallace invents a “smart” gnome that seems to develop a mind of its own. When it emerges that a vengeful figure from the past—none other than Feathers McGraw, the sinister penguin from The Wrong Trousers (1993)—might be masterminding things, it falls to Gromit to battle sinister forces and save his master… or Wallace may never be able to invent again! Brimming with Park and Crossingham’s trademark wit and kinetic stop motion charm, Vengeance Most Fowl marks the highly anticipated return of these beloved characters to the big screen. A Netflix Release.

Opens December 20
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar, 2024, Spain, 106m

The Room Next Door. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Opens January 10
Hard Truths
Mike Leigh, 2024, U.K./Spain, 97m

Hard Truths. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.

Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister, Chantelle (a magnificent, gracious Michele Austin). Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A Bleecker Street release.

January 15-29
New York Jewish Film Festival
Presented in partnership with The Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center are delighted to continue their partnership for the 34th annual New York Jewish Film Festival, presenting films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. This year’s festival presents a dynamic lineup of films including narratives, documentaries, and shorts with screenings at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

January 31-March 5
Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution

Titicut Follies

Beginning with his directorial debut Titicut Follies (1967), which was banned worldwide until 1991, Frederick Wiseman has steadily constructed an unflinching, ongoing project chronicling late-20th and early-21st-century institutional life. Working with a small crew (recording sound himself alongside a cinematographer and assistant) and eschewing narration, music, or interviews, Wiseman fashioned an unassuming yet revelatory style from his peerless gift for responding quickly and intuitively to the action unfolding in his presence, no matter how contradictory and unpredictable. After shooting, he personally edits upward of 150 hours of footage into, as the filmmaker himself has put it, “fictional movies based on real, unstaged events.” But the consequences of these movies have been both immediate in their real-world reforms and monumentally influential to generations of audiences, activists, and filmmakers. Taken together, they have come to typify a cinematic practice that expresses, with unobstructed lucidity, the complexity and ambiguity of social structures and their impact on the individual, whether they are students, doctors, politicians, soldiers, fashion models, zookeepers, factory workers, Benedictine monks, or the terminally ill. Now for the first time, 33 of Wiseman’s films—from his second feature High School (1968) to State Legislature (2006)—have been restored in 4K from their original camera negatives and sound elements by Zipporah Films and overseen by Wiseman. This winter, Film at Lincoln Center is honored to present them in a robust retrospective to America’s foremost documentary filmmaker. Once limited to 16mm film prints rarely screened in theaters, these invaluable works can now be experienced in their fullest form at the Walter Reade Theater.  

Organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson.

February 5-9
Conjuring Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Presents

Nosferatu. Courtesy of Focus Features.

Across four intensely stylish, powerfully atmospheric and richly detailed feature films, Robert Eggers has established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular auteurs. His work looks to disparate historical periods, folkloric traditions, the abject and the arcane alike to craft enigmatic and utterly gripping parables about madness, the antagonism between man and nature, and desire as all-consuming compulsion. But his films, while deeply researched and steeped in worlds that themselves predate the advent of cinema, are nevertheless plainly the output of a consummate cinephile, an artist as conversant with film history as he is with the history of the occult. This is particularly evident in his latest, Nosferatu, which takes up the challenge of reinventing the story of Dracula after the seminal treatments by F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola, to name a few. Join us for a special series made up of the films that inspired Eggers’s spellbinding new take on fiction’s most famous monster, an eclectic can’t-miss array of gothic Hollywood deep cuts, rare works of Eastern European folk horror, and captivating evocations of 18th-century England, as well as a special screening on 35mm of his own Nosferatu.

Organized by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan.

Opens February 21
New 4K restoration
Compensation
Zeinabu irene Davis, 1999, U.S., 93m

Compensation. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem of the same title, Zeinabu irene Davis’s debut feature is an exploration of language, migration, illness, love, and ritual that likewise illuminates unique Black histories, cultures, and artistry. Starring Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks, the film follows two couples in different time periods between the early and late 20th century who must contend with their emotions, tensions between Deaf and hearing experiences, and the toll of structural racism on Black lives during major medical epidemics. Shot in luminous black-and-white and incorporating a rich trove of historical photos, an original ragtime score, and title cards, Compensation evokes both a sense of tragedy and a hopefulness for life that remains persistent in the hearts of Black Americans today. An NYFF62 Revivals selection. A Janus Films release.

Guided and approved by director Zeinabu irene Davis, this 4K digital restoration was undertaken by the The Criterion Collection, The UCLA Film and Television Archive, and Wimmin With a Mission Productions in conjunction with The Sundance Institute from a scan of the 16mm original camera negative. The 5.1 surround soundtrack was mastered from DAT tapes by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Newly created open captions have been implemented, designed by Alison O’Daniel in collaboration with the Compensation Caption Creative Team.

February 26-March 2 – Due to unforeseen circumstances, The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us will be rescheduled to summer 2025.
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 mystified and disoriented as it did those obsessively poring 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. Across five nights, Film at Lincoln Center will interpret the cosmology outlined in this book through a presentation of double features, secret screenings, 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. 

March 6-16
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
Presented in partnership with Unifrance

Virginie Efira on Opening Night of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2023

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema returns in 2025 celebrating its 30th anniversary, showcasing the variety and vitality of current French filmmaking. The films on display, by emerging talents and established masters, raise ideas both topical and eternal, and many take audiences to entirely unexpected places. Co-presented with Unifrance, the 30th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema will bring special guests and events and demonstrate that the landscape of French cinema is as fertile, inspiring, and distinct as ever.

Organized by Florence Almozini and Madeline Whittle, in collaboration with Unifrance.

Opens March 7
Eephus
Carson Lund, U.S./France, 2024, 98m

Eephus. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

For his gracefully accomplished debut feature, Carson Lund has fashioned perhaps the most elegiac baseball movie yet, a poignant celebration of a recent American past that already feels as though it has slipped away. Against an autumnal Massachusetts backdrop, sometime in the 1990s, the film lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down and paved over for the construction of a middle school. An afternoon of brilliant blue sky quietly fades into October twilight as the players battle and bond, trade barbs and memories, stretching their game out to extra innings, in no hurry to leave this hallowed space. Lund’s tranquil souvenir of a film captures the singular beauty of the sport itself. Recalling the work of Robert Altman and Richard Linklater, but with a touch of Tsai Ming-liang, Eephus (its title referring to a curveball so slow it confuses the batter) is a film about the passage of time—both the hours of the day and one era fading into another. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A Music Box Films release.

Opens March 14
Who by Fire
Philippe Lesage, 2024, Canada/France, 155m
French with English subtitles

Who by Fire. Courtesy of KimStim.

A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage (Genesis, New Directors/New Films 2019). Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage, who in recent years has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A KimStim release.

March 18-20
Djibril Diop Mambéty Cine-concerts by the Oriki Collective and Woz Kaly
U.S. Premiere of the Cine-concerts

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun

The Oriki Collective (Yann Salètes, Mourad Baïtiche, and Michel Teyssier), together with the Senegalese vocalist Woz Kaly (founder of Missal, sang in Touré Kunda and toured with Youssou N’Dour, among others) will perform their original, live scores accompanying the great Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty’s medium-length masterpieces: Le franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999). In Le franc, a broke musician comes upon a lottery ticket after his beloved instrument is confiscated by his landlady; in the posthumously released The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, a young girl decides to sell newspapers on the streets, despite the fact that boys have historically run that racket. Oriki’s new scores were developed at residencies in France and Senegal and beautifully layer on top of the films’ original soundtracks, creating absorbing soundscapes that expand on the magical realist works grounded in the political realities of Dakar.

The films were NYFF57 Revivals selections and are distributed by Metrograph Pictures.

Organized by Florence Almozini and Manuel Santini.

Opens March 21
Misericordia
Alain Guiraudie, 2024, France, 104m
French with English subtitles

Misericordia. Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, NYFF51), who returns with a sharp, sinister, yet slyly funny thriller. Set in an autumnal, woodsy village in his native region of Occitanie, his latest follows the meandering exploits of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-work baker who has drifted back to his hometown after the death of his beloved former boss, a bakery owner. Staying long after the funeral, the seemingly benign Jérémie begins to casually insinuate himself into his mentor’s family, including his kind-hearted widow (Catherine Frot) and venomously angry son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), while making an increasingly surprising—and ultimately beneficial—friendship with an oddly cheerful local priest (Jacques Develay). In Guiraudie’s quietly carnal world, violence and eroticism explode with little anticipation, and criminal behavior can seem like a natural extension of physical desire. The French director is at the top of his game in Misericordia, again upending all genre expectations. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

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.

Coming Spring 2025
April 2-13
New Directors/New Films
Presented in partnership with MoMA

Sebastian Stan and Aaron Schimberg. Photo by Arin Sang-urai.

Founded in 1972, the New Directors/New Films festival is jointly presented by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, showcasing a wide-ranging group of films by emerging directors working at the vanguard of cinema. Throughout its history, the festival has presented works by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Kelly Reichardt, Pedro Almodóvar, Souleymane Cissé, Euzhan Palcy, Jia Zhangke, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, Michael Haneke, Wong Kar Wai, Agnieszka Holland, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Guillermo del Toro, Luca Guadagnino, and more than a thousand other filmmakers. 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).

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

Tolu Ajayi. Photography by Arin Sang-urai.

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. 

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

Piero Messina and Tyler Wilson. 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.