New Directors/New Films starts April 3! Get tickets >>

Spotlight

NYFF’s showcase of sneak previews, gala events, screenings with live elements, and other special evenings.

All In: The Fight for Democracy

  • Lisa Cortés, Liz Garbus
  • 2020
  • USA
  • 102 minutes
Candid interviews with the Democratic Party’s rising star Stacey Abrams anchor this invigorating and rigorous primer on the history of voter suppression in the United States. It’s a film of clarifying urgency, especially in an election year in which the very process of voting has come under threat from those determined to stay in power.

David Byrne’s American Utopia

  • Spike Lee
  • 2020
  • USA
  • 105 minutes
Spike Lee’s film of David Byrne’s acclaimed Broadway show is an exhilarating record of a seismic theater event as well as a momentous work of cinema in its own right. Both joyous and politically engaged, it’s a reckoning of these dark times through music and togetherness, with a galvanizing rendition of Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout” that’s destined to be one of the year’s most talked-about screen moments.

Hopper/Welles

  • Orson Welles
  • 2020
  • USA
  • 130 minutes

Now playing!

In November 1970, two movie mavericks, one already a legend (Orson Welles) and the other on his way to mythic status (Dennis Hopper), met for an epochal conversation, sharing their candid thoughts and feelings about cinema, art, and life. This entertaining and revealing footage, never before seen in full, has been resurrected by producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski.

The Human Voice

  • Pedro Almodóvar
  • 2020
  • Spain
  • 30 minutes
  • English and Spanish with English subtitles
Tilda Swinton swallows up the screen as a woman traumatized by the end of a relationship in Pedro Almodóvar’s new short film. An impeccably designed yet combustible adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play The Human Voice, it marks the Spanish director’s English-language debut.

The Monopoly of Violence

  • David Dufresne
  • 2020
  • France
  • 86 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
In this essential and timely documentary about police violence in contemporary France, filmmaker and journalist David Dufresne examines the ways in which a government justifies brutal acts against its own citizens, enacting totalitarian methods to keep the populace under its control.

On the Rocks

  • Sofia Coppola
  • 2020
  • USA
  • 95 minutes
In Sofia Coppola’s lighthearted but poignantly personal comedy about aging, marriage, and the tenuous bond between parents and grown children, New York author and married mother-of-two Laura (Rashida Jones) has become suspicious that her career-driven husband (Marlon Wayans) may be having an affair with a coworker—a speculation encouraged by her caddish, bon vivant father (Bill Murray).