In one of the year’s most gratifyingly ambitious American films, Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s epochal postmodern 1985 novel, long perceived as unfilmable, into a richly layered, entirely unexpected work of contemporary satire.

In her essential, urgent, and arrestingly structured new documentary, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Laura Poitras weaves two narratives: the fabled life and career of era-defining artist Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty.

Filmmaker and photographer Elegance Bratton makes his ambitious narrative debut with The Inspection, a knockout drama based on his own experiences as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training following a decade of living on the streets.

The most personal film yet from James Gray (The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z) is also one of his greatest, an exquisitely detailed coming-of-age drama that follows Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth grader who dreams of becoming an artist. Also starring Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway, and Jaylin Webb.

In one of the most assured and spellbinding feature debuts in years, Scottish director Charlotte Wells has fashioned a textured memory piece inspired by her relationship with her dad, starring Paul Mescal and Francesca Corio as a divorced father and his daughter whose close bond is quietly shaken during a brooding weekend at a coastal resort in Turkey.

Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Carla Simón’s follow-up to her acclaimed childhood drama Summer 1993 is a ruminative, lived-in portrait of a rural family in present-day Catalonia whose way of life is rapidly changing.

In this hypnotic, poignant, and beautifully crafted documentary, New Delhi-based filmmaker Shaunak Sen immerses himself with two brothers who for years have been taking it upon themselves to save the black kite, their city’s endangered birds of prey, which the general population largely sees as nuisances despite their essential role in the city’s ecosystem.

In a perceptive, nuanced performance, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) quietly dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her fortieth birthday. Marie Kreutzer boldly imagines her cloistered world with both realism and fanciful imagination.

Legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman has made a film based on the diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, structured as a series of monologues delivered with magnificent poise and gathering intensity by star and co-writer Nathalie Boutefeu—a captivating one-woman portrait of a remarkably contemporary rendering of a marriage.

In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan) burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body.

A Busan detective is increasingly obsessed with a murder suspect in a puzzling new case: a middle-aged businessman has mysteriously fallen to his death and his wife might be to blame. Park Chan-wook won the Cannes Best Director award for this twisting Hitchcockian detective thriller, one of his most enveloping and accomplished films.

A southern U.S. town’s submerged history symbolizes an entire nation’s forgotten atrocities in this poignant and cathartic documentary from nonfiction film veteran Margaret Brown, which reckons with the legacy of the Clotilda, a slave ship that brought more than one hundred people to Alabama from Africa in 1860, decades after the practice was made illegal.

In this eerie, texturally rich experience from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, an isolated middle-aged woman spends her days in enigmatic environmental study on an uninhabited, windswept, rocky island off the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, yet she’s also increasingly haunted by her own nightmarish visitations.

At age 84, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski has directed one of his spryest, most visually inventive films yet, following the travels of a peripatetic donkey named EO who begins as a circus performer before escaping on a pastoral trek across the Polish and Italian countryside.

A middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother take an eerie, emotional trip to the past when they stay at a fog-enshrouded hotel in the English countryside. The great Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir) uses this Victorian gothic scenario for an entirely surprising, impeccably crafted excavation of a parent-child relationship starring Tilda Swinton in a performance of rich, endless surprise.

Following First Reformed and The Card Counter, Paul Schrader continues his dramatic renaissance with an equally effective, startling tale about dormant violence and the possibility of regeneration, centering on a horticulturist (Joel Edgerton) who works for the imperious owner (Sigourney Weaver) of a wealthy estate.

Jafar Panahi’s risk-taking output has never slowed down even amidst his internationally condemned treatment by the Iranian government. In No Bears, another virtuosic sleight of hand, the director appears as himself, relocated to a rural border town to remotely oversee the making of a new film in Turkey, the story of which comes to sharply parallel disturbing events that begin to occur around him.

For his playful and gently thought-provoking 27th feature, Hong Sangsoo takes on the perspective of a prickly middle-aged novelist, Junhee (Lee Hye-young), whose dormant creativity is stoked following a chance encounter with a famous actress (Kim Min-hee).

The intensely poignant and deeply personal latest drama from Mia Hansen-Løve (Bergman Island) stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads, torn between the romantic desire she feels for a married man (Melvil Poupaud) and her obligation towards her sick father (Pascal Greggory).

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra reconfirms his centrality in the contemporary cinematic landscape with this mesmerizing, slow-building fever dream about a French bureaucrat (a monumental Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety.

Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days), who dramatizes the tensions of a modern Romania still beholden to dangerous traditions, returns with a gripping, mosaic-like portrait of a rural Transylvanian town riven by ethnic conflicts, economic resentment, and personal turmoil.

A young French woman finds herself spontaneously tracking down the South Korean birth parents she has never met while on vacation in Seoul. From this seemingly simple premise, Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou spins an unpredictable, careering narrative that takes place over the course of nearly ten years.

Successful journalist and author Rama (Kayije Kagame) attends the trial of a young Senegalese woman (Guslagie Malanda), who has allegedly murdered her own baby daughter. Rama’s plan to write about Laurence in a book inspired by the Medea myth increasingly unravels as she becomes overwhelmed by the case in Alice Diop’s arresting yet highly sensitive, superbly acted fiction feature debut.

One of contemporary cinema’s most versatile talents, Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden) proves again he is as comfortable in the realm of folklore as he is in creative nonfiction with this enchanting period fable that delicately interweaves realist drama, ethereal romance, and musical flights of fancy.

Continuing one of the richest collaborations in modern American cinema, director Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women) reunites with star Michelle Williams for this marvelously particularized portrait of a sculptor’s daily work and frustrations in an artist’s enclave in Portland.

In Claire Denis’s surprising contemporary thriller, a dissolute young American journalist (Margaret Qualley) and an English businessman (Joe Alwyn) with ties to the oil industry meet by chance while on different, mysterious assignments in modern-day Nicaragua and tumble into a whirlwind romance.

A young flight-attendant-in-training’s plans to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Not wanting an abortion, she hopes to give the child away after carrying it to term, while staying afloat amidst a series of dead-end jobs. Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s film is an urgent critique of a modern-day social structure that has few options for women in need of care.

The charisma and emotional precision of Cate Blanchett are put to astounding use in this deft showcase for the actor’s musical artistry, a stinging portrait of a world-famous orchestra conductor’s gradual unraveling that is the first film in sixteen years from director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children).

In her dazzling and enormously pleasurable new opus—told in 12 chapters spread across two feature films—Laura Citarella takes the viewer on a limitless, mercurial journey through stories nested within stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) and centered on the strange disappearance of a local academic.

Ruben Östlund’s wildly ambitious Palme d’Or–winning Buñuelian satire follows two hot young models (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean) who rub elbows with the super-rich on a luxury cruise gone haywire.

Anarchist and socialist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin experiences a quiet revolution in Cyril Schäublin’s complexly woven timepiece set in the hushed environs of the Swiss watchmaking town of Saint-Imier in the 1870s.

Successful middle-aged filmmaker Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) drops by to visit an old friend, Mrs. Kim (Lee Hyeyoung), the owner of a charming apartment building, only to find his life taking a series of unexpected turns. Hong Sangsoo uses a delicately radical structure in his latest exploration of the complexities of relationships, growing older, and artistic pursuit.

Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) has crafted a work of both tender fragility and feral intensity, setting corporeal horror and runaway romance against a vividly textured Americana, featuring Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as lovers with insatiable, dangerous desires.

In this deeply personal new documentary from James Ivory, the Oscar-winning filmmaker uncovers boxes of film he shot during a life-changing trip to Afghanistan in 1960. This glorious, color footage unleashes a Proustian reverie during which Ivory recounts his life as traveler, outsider, and artist.

The indefatigable Marco Bellocchio, whose last fiction feature at NYFF was his riveting mafia crime drama The Traitor, has directed a monumental six-part series about a shocking event that rocked Italy in the late seventies: the kidnapping and eventual murder of the country’s influential statesman and former prime minister Aldo Moro by the leftist Red Brigades.

American film critic Elvis Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic documentary creates a definitive narrative of the Black revolution in 1970s cinema, from genre films to social realism—a work of painstaking scholarship that’s also thoroughly entertaining, an essential archival document and testament to a period of American film history unlikely to be repeated.

Lars von Trier has directed a third season of his incomparable television series The Kingdom, and the show’s legions of fans will be delighted by his dark-comic return to the misfit world of Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet, once again ruled equally by sinister supernatural visions and at times hilarious administrative incompetence.

Martin Scorsese turns his camera on another beloved New York institution, luminously capturing a Cafe Carlyle set by entertainer David Johansen, equally celebrated as the lead singer-songwriter of the androgynous ’70s glam punk groundbreakers The New York Dolls and for his complete reinvention as hepcat lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the ’80s.

In this thrilling new drama detailing the New York Times‘ investigation that uncovered decades of sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan play journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, whose efforts would ultimately help ignite the #MeToo movement.

Often described as a Soviet response to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris is an enigmatic work of startling beauty and depth. This 50th anniversary screening features a live newly created score by Matthew Nolan and Stephen Shannon.

This tender yet fittingly irreverent portrait of the life and career of Robert Downey Sr., the fearless, visionary American director who set the standard for counterculture comedy in the sixties and seventies, is an inspired collaboration between celebrated documentarian Chris Smith (American Movie); the subject’s son, Robert Downey Jr.; and the man himself, who passed away in July 2021.

The French writer and 2022 Nobel Prize awardee Annie Ernaux, whose novels and memoirs have gained her a devoted following, opens a treasure trove with this delicate journey into her family’s memory, compiled from gorgeously textured home movie images taken from 1972 to 1981.

After her searing modern-day death-row drama Clemency, Chinonye Chukwu has traveled back to the 1950s to tell the story of Mamie Till-Mobley, the Chicago woman whose son, Emmett Till, was lynched while visiting cousins in Mississippi and whose body became an indelible image of the horrors of American racism.

Sarah Polley brings ferocious honesty and restrained urgency to her screen adaptation of Miriam Toews’s acclaimed novel about of a group of women from a remote religious community dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault perpetrated by the colony’s men.

We pay tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, who exhilarated and challenged us year after year by presenting his final film, 2018’s sprawling, dense, testament-like The Image Book (an NYFF56 Main Slate selection), on a loop and for free in the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center throughout the festival’s first week (October 1-7).

Take part in a special evening celebrating award-winning actor and artist Tilda Swinton as she takes the stage for a candid conversation.

In transgressive queer auteur João Pedro Rodrigues’s deliriously outré “musical fantasia,” a young prince shocks his riotously wealthy royal family by becoming a volunteer fireman—both to battle climate change and, it seems, to douse his own dormant desires amidst a bevy of beefcake firefighters.

Alessandro Comodin follows his breakthrough shape-shifter Happy Times Will Come Soon with a slippery, often funny, occasionally surreal slice-of-life portrait of a good-natured, contemplative policeman in a small village in northern Italy whose boring days barely conceal a growing melancholy in the town—a world whose contours are just barely discernible.

The latest from director Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama) is a sui generis work of pandemic-era interiority, tracking the anxiety and estrangement of a teenage girl (Louise Labeque, from Bonello’s Zombi Child) who appears to live alone during COVID lockdown and gradually begins to experience the dissolution of boundaries between her real and imagined zones.

In his debut feature, Lebanese visual artist Ali Cherri has constructed a riveting film about a bricklayer in northern Sudan that straddles the line between nonfiction naturalism and supernatural mysticism, merging ancient and contemporary worlds.

A lightning rod dispatch from contemporary—and maybe future—Brazil, this astonishing mix of documentary and speculative fiction takes place in the nearly postapocalyptic environs of the Sol Nascente favela in Brasilia, where fearsome outlaw Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado) leads an all-female gang that siphons and steals precious oil from the authoritarian government.

Fascinated by the male rituals and camaraderie of a crew of French Foreign Legionnaires, Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) follows them on a journey across the Mediterranean, which director and cinematographer Helena Wittmann depicts as an enigmatic reconfiguration of space and time, connecting the past and present, body and spirit, earth and water.

In this playful yet charged project from Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann (The Waldheim Waltz), a vast group of men, from teenage to nonagenarian, have volunteered to appear on camera, perched on a floral pink couch in a cavernous abandoned factory, discussing, and in some cases reading aloud from, a work of infamous erotica—a catalyst for a surprising, humorous, and nonjudgmental treatise on contemporary male sexual attitudes towards women.

Ashley McKenzie’s follow-up to her breakthrough addiction drama Werewolf charts the budding friendship of a suicidal teen and a volunteer immigrant hospital worker and creates an aesthetically audacious two-hander constructed of complex sonic landscapes and visual textures.

Finding new cinematic language to express the desire for physical contact in our increasingly isolated, mediated, and highly consumer-driven environments, Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi’s Remote follows the daily routines of a quarantined woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) in her sealed-off, ultra-modern apartment, where she falls down a rabbit hole playing an inexplicable interactive game with a community of women from around the world. Screening with Bi Gan’s A Short Story.

Using newly discovered footage from the recording of a 1969 French television interview with the legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis has constructed a gripping behind-the-scenes documentary; a subtle yet searing exposé of casual racism; and a chance to see one of the monumental geniuses of 20th-century music at work.

Contemporary cinema’s preeminent chronicler of architectural spaces and their intersection with the ever-present crisis of 20th-century modernity, Heinz Emigholz returns with a film of quiet observation and historical excavation, focusing on creation and destruction in cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia.

Filmed over two years, Tales of the Purple House is an extraordinary, expansive cinematic vision combining images of mundane observation with social and political upheaval, focusing on the experiences of Nour Ballouk, a Lebanese artist living in the house she shares with director Fahdel (her husband, who stays off-screen) in the dramatic mountainous countryside outside of Beirut.

A warm, bittersweet queer utopia bursts from the sidelines of Bolsonaro’s Brazil in Gustavo Vinagre’s loose-limbed comic marvel, set during a vibrant São Paulo one sunny afternoon amidst a peculiar pandemic that affects people’s short-term memory.

Continuing a project he began in 2011, filmmaker Daniel Eisenberg presents a dynamic triptych that patiently observes people working at three factories around the world, showing the rigorous labor as well as the intricate design and craft that go into every detail and level of production.

Jonás Trueba paints an alternately rapturous and neurotic impression of contemporary western living in his small-scale yet endlessly rich new feature in which two couples reunite after they have been kept apart from each other for months by the pandemic and major life changes. Screening with Pedro Neves Marques’s Becoming Male in the Middle Ages.

Featuring Nicolás Pereda’s Flora, Simón Vélez’s Underground Rivers, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s Watch the Fire or Burn Inside It, and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau and Natalia Escobar’s Aribada.

Featuring Ellie Ga’s Quarries, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 45th Parallel, and Sophia Al-Maria’s Tiger Strike Red.

Featuring Riccardo Giacconi’s Fingerpicking, Sara Cwynar’s Glass Life, Fox Maxy’s F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now, and Diane Severin Nguyen’s IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS.

Featuring Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition, Edward Owens’s Remembrance: A Portrait Study, Jordan Strafer’s PEAK HEAVEN LOVE FOREVER, Joshua Gen Solondz’s NE Corridor, and James Richards’s Qualities Of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold.

Featuring Josh Kline’s Adaptation, Arne Hector, Luciana Mazeto, Minze Tummescheit, and Vinícius Lopes’s urban solutions, and Meriem Bennani’s Life on the CAPS.

Featuring Angelo Madsen Minax’s Bigger on the Inside, Dani and Sheilah ReStack’s The Sky’s In There, Courtney Stephens’s Lesser Choices, Kim Salac’s Diana, Diana, Mackie Mallison’s It Smells Like Springtime, and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s Into The Violet Belly.

Featuring Eva Giolo’s The Demands of Ordinary Devotion, Ute Aurand’s Renate, Alexandra Cuesta’s Lungta, Pablo Mazzolo’s The Newest Olds, and Simon Liu’s Devil’s Peak.

Featuring Ben Russell’s Against Time, Sylvia Schedelbauer’s In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, Tiffany Sia’s What Rules The Invisible, and Lois Patiño’s The Sower of Stars.

Featuring Lloyd Lee Choi’s Same Old, Sarah Friedland’s Trust Exercises, Mark Jenkin’s 29 Hour Long Birthday, Alex Ashe’s Magic Ring, Charlotte Ercoli’s Little Jerry, and Jamil McGinnis’s as time passes.

Set in 1977 during the Lebanese Civil War, Borhane Alaouié’s melancholic, meditative docu-fiction study of longing and life is a too-little-seen masterwork of Lebanese cinema, an entrancingly personal and atmospheric film poem about human connection in troubled times.

A landmark work of militant cinema and a key film of the Cinema Novo movement, Black God, White Devil interweaves documentary elements and iconoclastic formal experimentation to yield one of world cinema’s all-time great shots across the bow.

Ablaze in breathtaking Technicolor, the first of Jacques Tourneur’s remarkable Westerns is a complex, morally ambiguous portrait of an Oregon mining community which Martin Scorsese has called “one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the Western genre ever made.”

Edward Yang observes the self-absorption of a gaggle of 20-something urbanites and once again searches for the soul of a country he no longer quite recognizes in this panoramic satire set in the material world of 1990s Taipei.

Set in a fictitious African country, Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda’s meticulously composed medium-length comedy recounts the tale of the country’s president—the founder and “first citizen” of his nation—settling in for an all-night game of checkers. Presented with Radu Jude’s The Potemkinists.

One of Portugal’s greatest filmmakers portrays one of its greatest writers in this biographical gem, following the final days in the life of the 19th-century writer Camilo Castelo Branco, tormented by his own internal tensions as his health takes a dive and the possibility of continuing to write grows ever more remote.

Cauleen Smith’s enduringly rich 1998 feature debut, a landmark in American independent cinema, follows a woman in a photography class in Oakland as she begins photographing the young black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether.

Inspired by the events surrounding a 1969 mass shooting in Pihtipudas, Finland, Mikko Niskanen’s riveting four-part mini-series, which chronicles the plight of a farmer, has been hailed as the crowning achievement of Finnish filmmaking by no less an authority than Aki Kaurismaki.

This program collects four newly restored short and medium-length films by the pioneering queer Black experimental filmmaker Edward Owens: Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme (1966); Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts (1967); Tomorrow’s Promise (1967); and Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1968-70).

Completed in 1971 but not released until perestroika in 1987, Kira Muratova’s fourth feature is a majestic psychodrama centering on the relationship between a mother and a son and rendered with a borderline avant-garde sense of aesthetic freedom and formal experimentation.

At long last presented in a striking new restoration worthy of the film’s reputation, Jean Eustache’s hard-to-see masterpiece uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics among liberated yet alienated moderns.

Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature is a radically physical cinematic journey into the shadowy (under)world of illegal cockfighting, starring Isaach De Bankole and Alex Descas as immigrants living on the outskirts of Paris who dream of a life outside the brutal environment of feathered pugilism in which they earn money.

Pedro Costa’s surprising, lushly atmospheric first feature is a beguiling fairytale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death. “O Sangue,” Costa said in a 2006 interview, “was also the beginning of my love […] for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.”

A landmark work in British avant-garde film and video, the Sankofa collective’s greatly influential first film, The Passion of Remembrance, ambitiously explores themes of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generational tensions as embodied in the reality known by a Black British family over the years.