Main Slate is the core of the program, a selection of the most exceptional new films from around the world.
Ends Thursday!
Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a popular television star, is 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. From a sensational premise, the consummate film artist 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.
Centerpiece · North American Premiere
Sofia Coppola, who in her remarkable filmography has so often returned to intimate portraits of women living complicated lives behind closed doors, has found a subject exquisitely tailored to her interests in Priscilla Presley, whose love affair and marriage to Elvis kept her in the public eye before she had truly experienced the world.
Closing Night · North American Premiere • Q&A with Michael Mann on Oct. 13 at 6pm screening and intro at 9pm screening
Michael Mann brings his astonishing command of technique and storytelling to bear on his thrilling new film, an emotional, elegantly crafted dramatization of the life of the legendary car manufacturer and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari at a professional and personal fulcrum, starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz.
U.S. Premiere
Spanish director Víctor Erice’s fourth film in 50 years, Close Your Eyes is the culmination of one of the most legendary careers in modern cinema, an elegiac personal epic about time, memory, and the movies, in which an aging filmmaker (Manolo Solo) tries to unlock the mystery of an actor who disappeared and left an unfinished film in his wake.
U.S. Premiere
Among the most radical filmmakers working today and one of the few unafraid to diagnose our absurd evils and moral blind spots, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude follows a day in the life of a severely overworked film production assistant who drives around Bucharest on her latest gig: filming work accident victims auditioning to be in a safety equipment video by a German multinational corporation.
North American Premiere • Q&A with Lisandro Alonso, Alaina Clifford & Sadie Lapointe on Oct. 10 & 11
The protean Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Jauja) continues to shapeshift, delight, and challenge with his marvelous and immersive new film, which takes the viewer on an unexpected journey through three stories set in wildly different terrain, each of them reflecting lives haunted by the specter of colonialist violence, featuring Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni.
Ends Thursday!
In his potent and foreboding new film, Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller with the tale of a serene rural village that’s about to be disrupted by the construction of a glamping site for Tokyo tourists.
Finland's Oscar Entry
This enchanting, Cannes Jury Prize–winning love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians, grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart.
U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Agnieszka Holland on Oct. 4 & 5
In this harrowing, urgent drama from veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland, a Syrian family leaves the violence of their country behind, hoping to cross from Belarus into Poland and then onto the safe haven of Sweden, only to get caught in a political maelstrom, demonized by the Polish government and press and used as pawns in an inhumane, deadly border game.
North American Premiere
A youthful trio has convened off-season on the desolate yet beautiful Jeju Island to shoot a film, yet the subject matter remains unclear. As the young director’s movie gradually makes itself clear on screen, so does Hong’s vision of the often all-consuming pursuit for artistic meaning.
Ends Thursday!
Set in 1991 in rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that follows young Lacy the summer before sixth grade, as she quietly observes her mother Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives.
Ends Thursday!
Catherine Breillat proves that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels with her incendiary new drama starring Léa Drucker as Anne, a middle-aged lawyer who inexplicably finds herself sexually drawn to her husband’s estranged 17-year-old son Théo.
Q&A with Paul B. Preciado on Oct. 3 & 4
Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is both historical anchor and hopeful North Star of writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s first film, a sweeping yet intimate documentary that takes a panoramic look at past and present trans lives.
Q&A with Koji Yakusho and Takuma Takasaki on Oct. 11 & 12
As in his finest movies, Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas) here locates the magnificence in the everyday, casting the incomparable Koji Yakusho as the taciturn, good-natured Hirayama, who goes about his solitary hours working as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo.
Q&A with Yorgos Lanthimos, James Price, Shona Heath, Jerskin Fendrix, and Holly Waddington on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1
In his boldest vision yet, iconoclast auteur Yorgos Lanthimos creates a punkish update of the Frankenstein story set in an alternate 19th century on the cusp of technological breakthrough, in which a peculiar, childlike woman named Bella (Emma Stone) embarks on a journey of self-actualization.
North American Premiere • Q&A with Martín Rejtman on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1
Leading light of the New Argentine Cinema, Martín Rejtman returns with his first film in nearly a decade, a sardonic yet loving immersion into a world of wellness retreats and physical and spiritual self-improvement about an Argentinean yoga instructor in Chile struggling to keep his business and body afloat after he separates from his wife.
North American Premiere • Q&A with Zhang Lu on Sept. 30
Set in contemporary Beijing, Zhang Lu’s elegiac film about middle age—its confusions and complications, as well as its beauty and grace—follows the compelling, distinctly human rhythms of Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing), an aging divorcé who has abandoned his love of poetry writing to become a food critic and whose connection with a young photographer opens the possibility of reconciliation to his past.
U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Wang Bing on Oct. 1 & 2
The latest epic work of observational nonfiction from Wang Bing furthers the filmmaker’s ongoing chronicle of the economic, social, and personal upheavals happening across a transforming China, a remarkable account of young rural migrant workers employed in textile factories, shot over the course of five years.
Q&A with Jonathan Glazer, Christian Friedel, and Sandra Hüller on Oct. 8 & 9
In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality: the domestic routine of a Nazi Commandant, his wife, and their kids, while death and violence occur against those imprisoned in Auschwitz over the wall from their idyllic house. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
North American Premiere
In 1966, two legendary filmmakers, in town for the 4th NYFF, took a walk through Times Square. Armed with 16mm color film, Agnès Varda captured Pier Paolo Pasolini. A year later, she edited the footage and recorded his brief commentary track, discussing the uses of documentary filmmaking, Christianity, and the nature of reality. Precedes La Chimera and Pictures of Ghosts.
