Ends Thursday!

  • Nominated for Best Feature, Best Director, Best Lead Performance (Natalie Portman), Best Supporting Performance (Charles Melton), and Best Screenplay – Film Independent Spirit Awards
  • Top 10 Film of 2023 – Film Comment, IndieWire, Vanity Fair

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a popular television star, has arrived in a tight-knit island community in Savannah. Here, she will be doing intimate research for a new part, ingratiating herself into the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she’ll be playing on-screen, and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), to better understand the psychology and circumstances that more than 20 years ago made them notorious tabloid figures. As Elizabeth attempts to get closer to the family, the uncomfortable facts of their scandal unfurl, causing difficult, long-dormant emotions to resurface. From the sensational premise born from first time screenwriter Samy Burch’s brilliant script, director Todd Haynes (Safe, Carol) has constructed an American tale of astonishing richness and depth, which touches the pressure and pleasure points of a culture obsessed equally with celebrity and trauma. It’s a feat of storytelling and pinpoint-precise tone that is shrewd in its wicked embrace of melodrama while also genuinely moving in its humane treatment of tricky subject matter. Boasting a trio of bravura, mercurial performances by Moore, Portman, and Melton, May December is a film about human exploitation, the elusive nature of performance, and the slipperiness of truth that confirms Todd Haynes’s status as one of our consummate movie artists. A Netflix release.

 Please note: Open caption screenings of the film will play on  Jan. 12 at 9pm and Jan. 16 at 9pm.

Film at Lincoln Center’s programming is generously supported by Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg.

  Closed captions and audio descriptions are available with our capti-view devices for all screenings in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

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