Two more months of our special 50 Years of the New York Film Festival anniversary series have been set, appropriately covering the 80s in alternatively gaudy and clear-eyed fashion.

Rounding out this latest batch is Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), the director’s angry, angering debut about the collapse of his hometown of Flint, MI after its blue-collar GM backbone collapsed. For anyone who laments our current political climate, the movie proves it’s hardly new by evoking a lost “middle class” with both honest sentiment and unmistakable fury. Moore himself will be in person for a Q&A after the screening on April 24!

Clint Eastwood, a figure who recently has been part of a similar conversation, will also be featured with Bird (1988), his remarkable portrait of the saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his first film to be featured in the New York Film Festival. 

Elsewhere, the series will include several master filmmakers who were common sights at NYFF. Maurice Pialat, the subject of a complete FilmLinc retrospective upon his death in 2003, will be remembered with his complex Police (1986), starring a never-better Gérard Depardieu. A regular here in the 70s and 80s, Krzystof Zanussi will be represented with the wartime romance A Year of the Quiet Sun (1985), the story of an American in Poland investigating Nazi war crimes who falls wordlessly in love with a local.

Cited as his favorite film among his outrageously prolific oeuvre, Jackie Chan will take back the Walter Reade Theater with Police Story (1987), his breathtaking return to Hong Kong after an early, failed attempt to break into Hollywood. The film will be co-presented by the New York Asian Film Festival.

Check out the updated lineup of 50 Years of the New York Film Festival. Members can purchase a four-film package to the series for just $24 (become a member)—the pass is good for all titles listed and others that will be announced in the coming months, leading up to the landmark 50th edition of the festival this fall!

Images courtesy of the Kobal Collection.