Lovers Rock

A movie of tactile sensuality and levitating joy, Lovers Rock is part of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of decades-spanning films that alight on various lives in London’s West Indian community. Here, McQueen, in an ecstatic yet no less formally bold mode, charts the growing attraction between Martha (newcomer Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and a brooding stranger (Micheal Ward) over the course of one night at a house party.

Nomadland

Centerpiece Selection

Chloé Zhao’s richly textured follow-up to her acclaimed The Rider recounts a year in the life of Fern (Frances McDormand), a stoic, stubbornly independent widow who, having spent her adult life in a now-defunct company town, repurposes an old van and sets off in search of seasonal work. Mixing professionals and non-actors, Nomadland is a road movie for our precarious times.

French Exit

NYFF58 Closing Night Selection

Michelle Pfeiffer is entirely bewitching as an imperious, widowed New York socialite who, facing financial insolvency, relocates to a friend’s empty apartment in Paris with her dyspeptic son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges), and their mercurial cat, and begins to grimly plan for an impossible future. Azazel Jacobs’s adaptation of the best-selling novel by Patrick deWitt is a rare American film of genuine eccentricity, with a brilliant central performance.

Atarrabi and Mikelats

The sacred Atarrabi and the profane Mikelats follow wildly divergent paths in Eugène Green’s tale of two brothers, a modern-dress take on Basque myth perched on the line between earnest spirituality and sly satire.

Beginning

In her striking feature debut, Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili tells the devastating story of a persecuted family of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries in a remote village from the perspective of a traumatized wife and mother.

The Calming

In Song Fang’s film of arresting beauty and tranquility, a young director makes her way around Japan, China, and Hong Kong after the dissolution of a relationship, presenting her work, engaging with friends and artists, and dealing with the realities of aging parents.

City Hall

In his latest kaleidoscopic look at the function and practice of community, policy, and civic engagement in American life, Frederick Wiseman trains his camera on the inner workings of the city of Boston to get at larger ideas about a country’s steps toward inclusivity and social reform.

Days

In one of Tsai Ming-liang’s best and sparest works, Lee Kang-sheng plays a variation on himself, wandering through a lonely urban landscape and seeking treatment for a chronic illness; at the same time, a young Laotian immigrant working in Bangkok goes about his daily routine. The lives of these two solitary men eventually converge.

The Disciple

Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane’s much-anticipated follow-up to Court is a finely crafted labor of love set in the world of Hindustani classical music, starring singer—and remarkable first-time actor—Aditya Modak as a man living in Mumbai who tries to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a maestro in the Khayal raag music tradition.

Gunda

Entirely wordless, Gunda boasts immersive natural sound design and crisp, pastoral black-and-white cinematography to paint an unprecedented portrait of animal life.

I Carry You With Me

Among the most emotionally resonant and innovatively conceived cinematic love stories in years, I Carry You With Me unexpectedly and brilliantly incorporates documentary elements into the tale of a burgeoning romance between two men who cross the border from Mexico to the U.S.

Isabella

Never has Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro’s art been more graceful or structurally complex than in his latest, in which he again uses a Shakespeare text to anchor a loose yet intellectually rigorous examination of life’s loves, labors, and futile pursuits.

Malmkrog

A turn-of-the-20th-century Christmas Eve gathering among five members of the European elite at an elegant Transylvanian estate becomes the setting for an increasingly intense succession of conversations in Cristi Puiu’s pristine, sometimes terrifying vision of the simmering violence beneath the colonialist’s veneer of politesse.

Mangrove

An epic piece of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, Mangrove tells the true story of Frank Crichlow, the Trinidad-born owner of a café in Notting Hill who was arrested for protesting the police’s intimidation and brutality. This is a vivid and gripping dramatization of these events and the resulting landmark 1970 court case of Crichlow and the other defendants, who came to be known as the Mangrove Nine.

MLK/FBI

Throughout his history-altering political career, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was often treated by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement like an enemy of the state. In this virtuosic documentary, veteran editor and director Sam Pollard lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

Night of the Kings

Paying homage to the tradition of the griot in West African culture, this original vision from breakout Ivory Coast filmmaker Philippe Lacôte tells the story of a pickpocket (Koné Bakary), newly arrived at a correctional facility in the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, who, in order to stay alive, must keep his fellow inmates entertained with wild tales over the course of a night.

Notturno

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi returns with an immersive work of nonfiction; shot over the course of three years along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, Notturno is a nighttime ramble through a region rocked and shattered by catastrophe and violence.

Red, White and Blue

In Steve McQueen’s vivid adaptation of a true story set in the early ’80s, John Boyega gives an impassioned yet nuanced performance as Leroy Logan, a member of the London Metropolitan police force who both witnessed and experienced first-hand the organization’s fundamental racism.

The Salt of Tears

Handsome Luc (Logann Antuofermo) aggressively courts Djemila (Oulaya Amamra) on a Paris suburb metro. But in veteran filmmaker Philippe Garrel’s pinpoint precise and economically told moral tale, she isn’t destined to be his one and only.

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

In his evocative new documentary, Jia Zhangke gathers three prominent authors—Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—in Shanxi province, where he grew up, to create a tapestry of testimonies about the drastic changes in Chinese life and culture that began with the social revolution of the 1950s.

Time

The tireless 20-year campaign of Louisiana woman Fox Rich to secure her husband’s release after he received a 60-year prison sentence for robbery becomes a delicate work of nonfiction cinematic alchemy in the hands of filmmaker Garrett Bradley.

Tragic Jungle

In the 1920s, Agnes (Indira Andrewin) escapes from the white British landowner she doesn’t want to marry into the deep thickets of the tropical forest along the Rio Hondo River. Mexican filmmaker Yulene Olaizola immerses the viewer in a richly drawn, tactile experience that works as both a gripping adventure and a contemplative rumination on the brutality and splendor of nature.

The Truffle Hunters

This revelatory, earthy documentary immerses the viewer in the forests of Northern Italy where dogs, accompanied by their elderly and often irascible human owners of modest means, seek the precious white Alba truffle.

Undine

Now playing!

German director Christian Petzold (Phoenix, Transit) injects a mythological element into a lush melodrama about a pair of star-crossed lovers—Undine (Paula Beer), a historian and museum tour guide specializing in urban development, and Christoph, an industrial diver—linked by an affinity for the water.

The Woman Who Ran

Divided into three casually threaded yet distinct sections, Hong Sangsoo’s latest delight follows Gamhee—played by the director’s regular collaborator Kim Minhee—as she travels without her husband for the first time in years, reconnecting with a succession of friends, on purpose and by chance.