Spotlight expands the vision of the Main Slate, showcasing a selection of the season’s most anticipated and significant films.
Spotlight Gala · North American Premiere
A tour de force for director and star Bradley Cooper, Maestro dramatizes the public and private lives of legendary musician Leonard Bernstein with sensitivity, visual ingenuity, and symphonic splendor, depicting the complicated yet devoted decades-spanning relationship between Leonard and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan).
U.S. Premiere • Intro by Harmony Korine on Oct. 7 & 8
Harmony Korine’s hallucinatory trance film, shot entirely in retina-scorching infrared and set to an intoxicating Araabmuzik score, casts Jordi Molla and rapper Travis Scott in a feverish, transporting action-movie miasma of skulls and swords, masks and machine guns, strippers and mobsters, horned demons and hot cars. Preceded by David Cronenberg’s Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection.
North American Premiere • Q&A with Yorgos Lanthimos · Presented on 35mm
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s entrancing black-and-white silent film, Emma Stone gives a mesmerizing performance as a young widow who, along with her late husband (Damien Bonnard), embarks on a singularly unclassifiable journey through sex, death, and resurrection. This 35mm screening will feature live accompaniment by an ensemble of musicians and a choir and be followed by a conversation with Lanthimos.
U.S. Premiere
While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother’s tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother; as he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger. The first film in a decade from Hayao Miyazaki is a ravishing, endlessly inventive fantasy that is destined to be ranked with the legendary animator’s finest, boldest works.
World Premiere
In this brilliantly discomfiting collaboration between Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, Fielder and Emma Stone play married entrepreneurs (don’t call them gentrifiers!) who flip houses and convert them into eco-friendly homes for the struggling residents of Española, New Mexico—all for an HGTV-style reality show. The New York Film Festival is pleased to premiere the first three episodes of this genre-defying series.
World Premiere • Q&A with Garth Davis on Sept. 30
In this superbly rendered, sensationally acted science-fiction drama set in 2065, a married midwestern couple (Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal) are given the chance to transcend their climate-change-destroyed world. Building to a devastating climax, director Garth Davis (Lion) expertly interrogates essential questions of our time about environmental apocalypse and the rise of artificial intelligence.
Q&A with Nikki Giovanni, Joe Brewster, and Michèle Stephenson on Sept. 30
This beguiling, Sundance-awarded documentary portrait follows poet and activist Nikki Giovanni as she approaches 80, exploring her Afrofuturist-feminist philosophical outlook and her poignant relationship with her family with audacity and eloquence.
U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Richard Linklater on Oct. 3 & 4
Richard Linklater’s peppy sunlit neo-noir is a continually surprising delight. Glen Powell, in a wily and charismatic star turn, plays strait-laced philosophy professor Gary Johnson, who moonlights as an undercover hit man for the New Orleans Police Department, inhabiting different guises and personalities to catch hapless criminals hoping to bump off their enemies. Based on an improbable true story, with a few wild embellishments.
U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Frederick Wiseman on Oct. 7 & 9
Frederick Wiseman brings his camera into a three-star Michelin restaurant in rural central France—La Maison Troisgros, located in the Roanne commune in Loire—and the results are as expansive, delectable, and provocative as one would hope: a patient, kaleidoscopic documentary portrait of the demand for perfection.
Q&A with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter on Oct. 1
Steve McQueen’s four-and-a-half-hour documentary is a mammoth confrontation with a shameful historical legacy that draws parallels to our contemporary world, recounting in prismatic fashion and with startling sobriety the realities of life in Amsterdam during World War II under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, using newly shot images of the city’s forever haunted spaces.
Q&A with Errol Morris on Sept. 30
Pioneering documentarian Errol Morris applies his signature aesthetic to a riveting, thriller-like portrait of John le Carré, whose novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy forever changed the way we perceive espionage in popular culture and the world.
Ends Thursday!
As a final gift to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances, an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo.
Extended Conversation with Pedro AlmodĂłvar
Almodóvar’s dazzling new short is an unexpected, hyper-male Western melodrama of vivid colors and explosive homoeroticism starring Ethan Hawke as a small-town sheriff who, after 25 years, rekindles a sexual relationship with a former lover, played by Pedro Pascal.
North American Premiere
Smack in the middle of a high school trip to our nation’s capital, self-possessed teen Lillian (the remarkably poised Talia Ryder) breaks off from her classmates, kicking off a journey straight down the rabbit hole of the New Weird America. The directorial debut for cinematographer Sean Price Williams and screenwriter Nick Pinkerton is a deranged and hilarious autopsy of contemporary U.S. life.
Ends Thursday!
Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture, and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work of epicurean cinema, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmet chef she has been working with for 20 years.
