30 of the most exciting new feature films from around the world.
New York premiere of 70mm presentation
In Mexico City in the early ’70s, a middle-class family’s center is quietly and unassumingly held by its beloved live-in nanny and housekeeper (Yalitza Aparicio). Alfonso Cuarón tells an epic, autobiographical story of everyday life while also gently sweeping us into a vast cinematic experience.
Closing Night Selection · North American Premiere · Julian Schnabel and Willem Dafoe in person at the 6pm and 9pm Alice Tully Hall screenings
Julian Schnabel’s ravishingly tactile and luminous new film takes a fresh look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh (played by Willem Dafoe, in a shattering performance) and in the process revivifies our sense of the artist as a living, feeling human being.
U.S. Premiere
In Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth completed feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking, a young woman appears to take her own life on cell-phone camera. The recipient of the video and Panahi, playing himself, investigate, and from there, 3 Faces builds in narrative, thematic, and visual intricacy.
The New York Times Critic's Pick
Jia Zhangke’s extraordinary gangster melodrama begins by following Qiao (a never better Zhao Tao) and her mobster boyfriend Bin as they stake out their turf against rivals and upstarts in 2001 Datong before expanding out into an epic, three-part narrative of how abstract forces shape individual lives.
North American Premiere · Q&A with Joel and Ethan Coen on October 4
Here’s something new from the Coen Brothers—a wildly entertaining anthology of short films based on a fictional book of “western tales”—starring Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, and others—unified by the thematic thread of mortality.
Free screening! · Pre-Screening Reception
Korean master Lee Chang-dong’s expansion of Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning” is a love triangle (linked by rising star Steven Yeun) and a tense, haunting multiple-character study that bends the contours of the thriller genre to brilliant effect.
Nominated for Three Academy Awards!
Academy Award–winner Paweł Pawlikowski follows up his box-office sensation Ida with this bittersweet, exquisitely crafted tale of a tempestuous love between a pianist and a singer as they navigate the realities of living in both Poland and Paris, in and outside of the Iron Curtain.
U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Louis Garrel, Laetitia Casta, and Lily-Rose Depp on October 7 & 8
Co-written with the legendary Jean-Claude Carrière, the sophomore feature from actor-director Louis Garrel is at once a beguiling bedroom farce and a slippery inquiry into truth, subjectivity, and the elusive nature of romantic attraction.
U.S. Premiere
Exiled Chinese director Ying Liang’s return to feature filmmaking is a characteristically precise drama following a Hong Kong–exiled director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and toddler and must avoid attracting attention. It’s a powerful work of autobiography and an empathetic snapshot of a mother-daughter relationship.
Mariano Llinás in person at the 6:30pm screenings of Part 1 on August 2 and Part 2 on August 3!
A decade in the making, Argentinian filmmaker Mariano Llinás’s La Flor is a labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing, shape-shifting from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller to a category-defying metafiction to a remake of a very well-known French classic and, finally, to an enigmatic period piece.
U.S. Premiere
Sitting in a café, typing on a laptop, Areum (Kim Min-hee) eavesdrops on three dramatic situations unfolding in her general vicinity. These create the narrative structure of Korean master Hong Sangsoo’s complexly episodic, deceptively simple film, which is filled with raw emotions.
Free screening! · Pre-Screening Reception
A throng of tobacco farmers working on an estate live in a state of extreme deprivation, but nothing is what it seems in Alice Rohrwacher’s transfiguring and transfixing fable, which touches on perennial class struggle and enters the realm of parable.
Free screening! · Pre-Screening Reception
In a powerhouse performance, Elisabeth Moss is Becky Something, the influential lead singer of a popular ’90s alt-rock outfit spiraling out of control as she struggles with her demons. The latest from Alex Ross Perry tracks Becky’s self-destruction—and potential creative redemption.
Free screening! · Pre-Screening Reception
Claire Denis’s latest film—which features some of the most unsettling passages she has ever directed, as well as moments of the greatest delicacy and tenderness—is set aboard a spacecraft piloted by death row prisoners on a decades-long suicide mission to enter and harness the power of a black hole.
U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Barry Jenkins on October 9
Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Moonlight is a carefully wrought adaptation of James Baldwin’s penultimate novel, set in Harlem in the early 1970s. Jenkins’s deeply soulful film stays focused on the emotional currents between parents and children, couples and friends.
Critic's Pick at The New York Times
With Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book, all barriers between the artist, his art, and his audience have dissolved. Predominantly comprised of pre-existing images, many of which will be familiar from Godard’s previous work, this is a film in which the relationship between image and sound is, as always, intensely physical and sometimes jaw-dropping.
U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Ulrich Köhler on September 29 & 30
Sad-sack, 40ish TV cameraman Armin awakens one morning to find the world around him entirely depopulated. Ulrich Köhler takes a disarmingly realistic and restrained approach to a fantastical premise: the eternally popular fantasy of the last man on earth.
The New York Times Critic's Pick
Bi Gan’s sophomore film is this noir-tinged film about a solitary man (Huang Jue) haunted by loss and regret. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is like nothing you’ve seen before, especially in the second half’s hour-long, gravity-defying 3-D sequence shot. An NYFF56 selection. A Kino Lorber release.
U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Frederick Wiseman on September 30 & October 1
Every new film from Frederick Wiseman, now 88 years old, seems more vigorous and acute than the last. In this tough, piercing look at the rhythm and texture of life as it is lived in a wide swathe of this country, he documents a small town located deep in the American heartland.
Q&A with Tamara Jenkins, Kathryn Hahn, Kayli Carter, and Molly Shannon on October 1
Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti are achingly real as Rachel and Richard, a middle-aged New York couple caught in the desperation, frustration, and exhaustion of trying to have a child. Tamara Jenkins’s first film in ten years is by turns hilarious and harrowing.
U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Richard Billingham on October 6 & 7
Not a second of this electrifying debut doesn’t feel 100% rooted in personal experience. English photographer and visual artist Richard Billingham’s film is grounded in the visual and emotional textures of his family portraits, particularly those of his deeply dysfunctional parents.
Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is a heartrending, profoundly human portrait of a most unusual “family”: a collection of societal cast-offs united by petty crime and a fierce love for one another. An NYFF56 selection. A Magnolia Pictures release.
North American Premiere · Q&As with Christophe Honoré & Vincent Lacoste on September 30 & October 1
An intimate chronicle of a romance and a sprawling portrait of gay life in early 1990s France, Sorry Angel follows the intertwining journeys of a worldly, HIV-positive Parisian writer confronting his own mortality, and a curious, carefree university student just beginning to live.
Q&A with Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Bill Camp on September 30 · Introduction by Dano, Kazan, and Mulligan on October 1, followed by Q&A with Dano and Mulligan
In first-time director Paul Dano’s impressive debut, a carefully wrought adaptation of Richard Ford’s 1990 novel (co-written by Zoe Kazan), a family comes apart one loosely stitched seam at a time. Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan star as the parents; Ed Oxenbould is the adolescent son trying to hold the center.
