RaMell Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida adopts an ingenious visual approach to the novel’s exercise in subjectivity. Ross’s first fiction feature confirms his status as a visionary cinematic artist.

Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker.

This authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg by the Germans during World War II, about a working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) separated from her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) to ever more impressive levels.

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness by Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut about three working-class women dealing with professional and romantic disruptions.

Sean Baker’s screwball comedy about sex, love, and money stars Mikey Madison as an exotic dancer from Brighton Beach thrust into the lap of luxury when she’s whisked away on a whirlwind romance with a wealthy young customer. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

When a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery, obstetrician Nina falls under suspicion for negligence, her standing in the small town further jeopardized by people’s knowledge that she provides illegal abortion services to local women. Dea Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to her debut Beginning balances long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism.

An accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in the U.S. and enters the orbit of an obscenely wealthy captain of industry (Guy Pearce) in Brady Corbet’s richly detailed, brilliantly acted recreation of postwar America.

Chu Sieon, a retired professional director, arrives at a university to direct a short theater piece at the invitation of his estranged niece, rebuilding his bond to her and forging a new one with an admiring female professor in this deeply affectionate rendering of the constant process of self-actualization.

The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with Caught by the Tides, assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years. The always captivating Zhao Tao carries this marvelous film about cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change.

Mati Diop documents the voyage home of 26 treasures of the African kingdom of Dahomey after having been plundered by French colonial troops, centering her brilliant, magical film around contemporary questions of belonging in our postcolonial world. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival.

A regiment of battle-fatigued Union soldiers makes its way west, forging ahead to survey the forbidding landscape of the Northwest frontier, in this transporting, existential Civil War drama from Roberto Minervini.

Set in autumnal Massachusetts, sometime in the 1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant and gracefully accomplished debut feature lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league baseball teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down for the construction of a middle school.

In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, Arabian Nights)—winner of this year’s Best Director prize at Cannes—takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon as the world both expands and closes in around an unsettled couple from colonial England.

Contemporary global anxieties over the gradual sliding into governmental totalitarianism find an original and touching outlet in this resonant drama set sometime in the near future in a Tokyo high school, where best friends Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system.

Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) in a gutsy, excoriating performance as a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger.

Rich in atmospherics and thematic resonance, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s new film, starring Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling and adapted from the acclaimed novel by British writer Jim Crace, takes place in a remote village in medieval England marked by superstition and the scapegoating of outsiders.

This overwhelming, richly realized political drama from Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) stays tightly wedded to the perspective of Eunice Paiva (a shattering Fernanda Torres), searching for the truth about what happened to her husband, who was kidnapped by the Brazilian government for criticism of its military dictatorship.

The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, NYFF51), who returns at the top of his game with a sharp, sinister, slyly funny thriller about a young man who returns to his small hometown in rural France and insinuates himself into the lives of a series of acquaintances.

American filmmaker Julia Loktev, born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.

This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military.

In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays a celebrated documentarian at the end of his life who has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer.

A middle-aged man’s sudden death brings about a reckoning with the past for an extended Zambian family in Rungano Nyoni’s scalding drama, which balances domestic realism and expressionistic absurdity with precision.

A fascinating, strange but true tale told from the perspective of a sentient hippo—which once belonged to murdered drug lord Pablo Escobar—at the moment of its death, Pepe poses provocative questions about the ever-shifting ecological stakes of life on earth and the nature of being.

A young married couple’s baby daughter goes missing and suspicion falls on their voyeur neighbor (Lee Kang-sheng, the star of Tsai Ming-liang’s films) in Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s riveting and unsettling thriller about contemporary surveillance culture and the mysteries of the human heart.

In September 1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. Moore holds the center of this fleet and compelling nonfiction drama from protean filmmaker Robinson Devor, who lends it the feel of a 1970s thriller.

Isabelle Huppert is a nomadic Frenchwoman named Iris who drifts into the lives of a disconnected group of people in a Seoul suburb in her third delightful outing with Hong Sangsoo, a gentle exploration of human motivation and the surprising connections between people despite—or because of—language barriers.

Winner of a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards at the Cannes Film Festival after its director escaped a prison sentence from Iran for criticizing the government, Mohammad Rasoulof’s searing drama is an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction about a judge’s investigator at odds with his progressive daughters.

In David Cronenberg’s sly and thought-provoking latest, techno-entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger), Karsh uncovers a potentially vast conspiracy.

The only survivor of a plane crash, a young girl is used by her missionary father as a faith healer. Just as she is beginning to have a will of her own, another crisis emerges when loggers encroach on the land, threatening the local tribe in Pia Marais’s mesmerizing morality tale.

Two young coal miners enjoy secret moments of physical embrace before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to another country. From this personal drama, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation.

A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage, who has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes.

In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang Bing deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation’s economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management.

Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories as they plan to go to their remote hometowns to visit their families and celebrate the festivities for New Year’s break.

Luca Guadagnino’s wildly ambitious adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s cornerstone of transgressive gay literature finds the Italian director in formidable, gutsy mode, casting Daniel Craig in a transformative performance as Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, pursuing his erotic desires among American expatriates in post-World War II Mexico City.

Albert Serra trains a patient and poetic lens on the dazzling pomp and devastating brutality of bullfighting in his new documentary portrait of torero Andrés Roca Rey, expertly balancing the visceral thrill of the battle inside the ring, pitting animal instinct against human technique, with a meditative filmmaking style.

In this gripping and urgent follow-up to her Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy, Petra Costa dramatizes the chilling rise of the far right in Brazil. Apocalypse in the Tropics focuses on how the evangelical movement paved the way for the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and poses the threat of a national theocracy.

Cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), having drifted apart over the years, attempt to reconnect on a pilgrimage to the Polish hometown of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg’s work of compassion and maturity alternates nimbly between anxious comedy and meditative drama.

Filled with revealing interviews and rare archival material, this rousing, intensely personal documentary offers keen insight into the life and career of a legendary musician marked by soaring highs and crushing lows, and contemplates a legacy defined equally by advocacy and artistry.

Jacques Audiard’s most ambitious and exuberant film to date, Emilia Pérez is at once a darkly funny crime drama and a jaw-dropping musical, powered by a quartet of superb actors—Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz—who shared the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, in addition to the film’s Jury Prize.

This deeply fulfilling adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s beloved, slyly shape-shifting National Book Award winner features Naomi Watts as a novelist who finds her comfortable, solitary New York life thrown into disarray after her closest friend and mentor (Bill Murray) commits suicide and bequeaths his beloved Great Dane to her.

In his new film, French cinema firebrand Leos Carax lovingly evokes the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard, paying aptly cheeky respect to the late New Wave master, his own career, and cinema itself, rummaging through a century of movies to situate his work within a continuum of the medium. Followed by a conversation with Leos Carax.

In an all-consuming performance at once poignant and imperious, Angelina Jolie becomes Maria Callas, the American-born, Greek opera singer whose voice and intensely dramatic life captivated millions before her death from a heart attack at the age of 53. From the director of Jackie and Spencer.

Fueled by a sardonic, tricky sense of humor, Alex Ross Perry’s very funny sorta-documentary about beloved indie rock band Pavement shows little patience for hagiography—or any other orthodoxy—taking a nonlinear, absurdist approach while evincing a deep love for its subject.

The world’s wealthy democratic world leaders have come together for the annual G7 summit, yet a major crisis looms on the horizon: potential human apocalypse. This sci-fi pulp satire finds Canadian trickster extraordinaire Guy Maddin and fellow Manitoban co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson in a particularly wacky mood.

Two years after his death, the world has been gifted two more “last films” by the great Jean-Luc Godard: a quintessential, complexly layered Godard work, concluding with an overwhelmingly poignant appearance by the filmmaker himself the day before his death, and a documentary shot the previous year that affords a remarkable glimpse into the maestro’s agile mind at work.

It’s August 1965, and the Beatles have descended upon New York for a sold-out concert at Queens’ massive Shea Stadium. Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică has constructed a poignant, distinctive film about that hot summer weekend made up entirely of archival material, from news station broadcasts to 8mm film diaries.

For their immersive and absorbing documentary, Brett Story (The Hottest August) and Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment) follow the day-to-day struggles of the newly formed Amazon Labor Union and capture the events that led to their historic 2022 vote.

In the meditative and expansive new film from Jem Cohen (Museum Hours), an Austrian astronomer named Karl, who has been re-evaluating his work and life after turning 70, travels to a mountaintop on a Greek island in search of the darkest sky against which to view the cosmos.

Accompanied by a small filming crew, Pierre Creton and Mark Barré follow paleobotanist Mark Brown across the Pays des Caux region in Normandy as he seeks out native plants from which an ancient garden could be created and explains, with the loving tenderness of a true expert, the etymology, beauty, and scientific properties of the region’s flora.

Overshadowed by her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire was a feminist activist as well as a member of the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s. For this bold project of reclamation, filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich burrows to the complex truths about a woman, artist, and mother forgotten to history.

A film of deep tranquility permeated by sensations of desire and uncertainty, the latest reverie from Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky transmits the tense unfolding of young adulthood by following two women as they move through their day, a physical part of their urban environment yet set apart in emotional isolation.

This detailed portrait of the intricate processes of a political eco-activist group in France, a collaboration between American experimental filmmaker Ben Russell and French artist Guillaume Cailleau, is a work of striking, meaningful duration that shows the stakes, pitfalls, and reverberations of taking a militant stance against the injustices of our times.

Present politics collide with global contemporary art in this epic portrait of the making of the controversial 2017 edition of the influential art exhibition documenta. This fully engrossing documentary follows the curators over two volatile years of inspiration, negotiation, and herculean planning, and reveals how the exhibition itself became a political battleground.

In the feature debut of Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus, a peasant community of vineyard workers at harvest time become characters in a timeless myth. Hiding high in the branches of oak trees from a dangerous runaway bull, they escape into dreams and memories.

In November 1948, James Baldwin left New York and, thanks to a fellowship grant, relocated to Paris. In his first feature, photographer-filmmaker Yashaddai Owens imagines Baldwin’s first experiences in Paris in impressionistic fashion, shooting in black-and-white on 16mm film.

Nicolás Pereda, whose films elegantly balance wry, naturalistic interpersonal comedy and surreal transcendence, returns with a marvelous inquiry into art-making, storytelling, and the fragile bonds of friendship that takes his blend of the theatrical and the mundane to a new level.

That loquacious cynic known as “Old White Male,” played by John Erdman in Heinz Emigholz’s 2020 film The Lobby, returns in this delirious, sci-fi-comic follow-up that covers an even wider spectrum of human absurdity and wrestles with the biggest question mark of all: The Future.

Two young coal miners enjoy secret moments of physical embrace before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to another country. From this personal drama, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation.

With deadpan, absurdist charm, Manitoban filmmaker Matthew Rankin, inspired by humanistic Iranian films of the 1970s, triangulates a group of interconnected storylines set in a wintry, bleakly beautiful Winnipeg with surreal, Tati-esque humor.

The tragic romantic relationship between ancient Greek poet Sappho and the siren goddess Britomartis becomes the starting point for Matías Piñeiro’s elegantly constructed exercise of research, performance, and interpretation by a group of contemporary women.

Featuring Adam Piron’s Black Glass, Miranda Pennell’s Man number 4, Jordan Lord’s An All-Around Feel Good, and Cauleen Smith’s The Deep West Assembly.

Featuring Track_ing by Chanyeol Lee, Hanna Cho, Samgar Rakym, and Ali Tynybekov, James Richards and Tolia Astakhishvili’s I Remember (depth of flatten cruelty), Morgan Quaintance’s Efforts of Nature, and John Smith’s Being John Smith.

Featuring Zuza Banasińska’s Grandmamauntsistercat, Maiko Endo’s Jizai, Sebastián Schjaer’s Like an Outburst, and Danielle Dean’s Hemel.

Featuring Christina Jauernik and Johann Lurf’s Revolving Rounds, Laura Kraning’s ESP, Lei Lei’s re-engraved, Rhayne Vermette’s A Black Screen Too, Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s The Land at Night, and Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya.

Featuring Pablo Marín’s Vibrant Matter, Pascal Viveros and Luciana Merino’s Towards the Sun, Far from the Center, Jordan Strafer’s No Spank, Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling, and Rosalind Nashashibi’s The Invisible Worm.

Featuring Simon Liu’s Refuse Room, Karimah Ashadu’s Machine Boys, Maryam Tafakory’s Razeh-del, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Practice, Practice, Practice, and Francisco Rodríguez Teare’s October Noon.

A fierce work of quasi-neorealist melodrama that melds pop cinema instincts and political indignation, Lino Brocka’s 1980 feature endures as a lively, searing parable on the plight of Filipino women under the Marcos dictatorship.

Depicting a too-little-known tragedy from the immediate post-WWII period in Senegal, Camp de Thiaroye was banned in France for more than a decade, yet the film endures as one of cinema’s most precise portraits of both war and colonial racism.

Inspired by a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zeinabu irene Davis’s first feature is uniquely bilingual, employing American Sign Language and title cards reminiscent of the silent era to tell parallel stories of two couples across two different time periods in Chicago.

One of the most astute historical films ever made, Ardak Amirkulov’s staggering epic (co-written by Aleksei German) concerns the intrigues and turmoil preceding Genghis Khan’s systematic destruction of the lost East Asian civilization of Otrar.

Perhaps Bresson’s most underrated film, Four Nights of a Dreamer captures a series of meetings across consecutive nights between two young strangers, surrounded by the still-smoldering remains of May ’68, conjuring the majesty and mystery of human connection.

Brimming with perverse sexual tension and exquisitely gross practical effects, one-of-a-kind horror/fantasy author Clive Barker’s singular and iconic first feature creates a wholly unique and powerfully visceral world unto itself.

In this pivotal work, Frederick Wiseman sets up shop in New York City’s Zoli modeling agency, housed in a townhouse in the East 60s, exploring each and every angle behind the institution of fashion modeling.

Marguerite Duras’s filmmaking debut, co-directed with Paul Seban and adapting her own one-act play, captures a delicate and devastating dance among three characters whose paths cross in a small northern French town. Preceded by Chantal Akerman’s J’ai faim, j’ai froid.

Action is distilled into an eerie series of moods in Robina Rose’s beguiling film, which takes place in a small hotel over the course of one desk clerk’s night shift, and indelibly conjures a nocturnal state of mind.

Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, this handmade masterpiece and stirring monument to collectivity dramatizes the formation of the populist Nonpartisan League in North Dakota in the mid-1910s and their struggles against the combined forces of industry and finance.

Having begun his singular career as a photojournalist, documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon trained his focus on the press agency he founded in this thought-provoking work on the mutually parasitic (and frequently unrewarding) relationship between photographer and subject.

The earliest surviving Iranian film directed by a woman, Marva Nabili’s astonishing debut is a deftly observant and sensually attuned work that conjures the everyday plight of the female subject under the stifling patriarchy of village life in southwestern Iran.

For the fourth edition of the Amos Vogel Lecture, we are proud to welcome legendary auteur Jia Zhangke, whose latest feature, Caught by the Tides, screens in the NYFF62 Main Slate.

Join Pavements director Alex Ross Perry and TWST / Things We Said Today director Andrei Ujică for a wide-ranging conversation about musical fandoms across generations, cultural memory and mythmaking, and how experiments with documentary cinema can produce new ways of understanding archival materials and affective histories.

Join The Damned director Roberto Minervini and My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow director Julia Loktev for a conversation about crafting cinematic depictions of war, the experience of moving between narrative and documentary modes of storytelling, and their perspectives as filmmakers.

This free talk will bring directors Payal Kapadia and Miguel Gomes—both practitioners of artful docufiction—together for a conversation about their influences, aspirations, and methods. 

Three newcomers to this year’s NYFF Main Slate—Neo Sora (Happyend), Trương Minh Quý (Việt and Nam), and Yeo Siew Hua (Stranger Eyes) converse about their careers, their inspirations, and the new directions of Asian cinema today.

NYFF invites directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham for an in-depth conversation about the making of their film No Other Land, shooting and editing a film in volatile and dangerous circumstances, and the role of documentary in the face of political violence.  

This panel brings together exergue director Dimitris Athiridis and subjects Adam Szymczyk, D14 artist Naeem Mohaiemen, and curator and writer Serubiri Moses in a conversation moderated by curator and NYFF Currents programmer Rachael Rakes.

Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross joins Barry Jenkins, another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach, for a wide-ranging conversation.

The Friend and The Room Next Door author Sigrid Nunez joins us to talk about the experience of seeing her creative work adapted into other mediums, and cinema’s alchemical capacity to both translate and transform a novel’s meaning.

Join Compensation director Zeinabu irene Davis and The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich for a conversation about the influences and inspirations behind their debut features, both hauntingly lyrical portraits of brilliant Black women navigating personal relationships and political commitments with unflinching grace and conviction.

Moderated by Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, this panel will bring together the filmmakers of Northern Lights and Union for a discussion on the practical, formal, and political considerations of making films about people power.

Every year, as the festival draws to a close, a group of critics gathers together for a spirited wrap-up discussion with Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute about the movies they’ve seen in the NYFF lineup.

Looking for a chance to win tickets to most of the most-anticipated sold-out screenings at this year’s festival? Film at Lincoln Center is proud to bring back Cinephile for a can’t-miss live trivia event featuring a mix of movie trivia and other popular Cinephile.

Join IndieWire’s Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Ryan Lattanzio for a special live edition of Screen Talk, the independent news site’s weekly podcast.

Decades in the making and even longer in the dreaming, Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature in 13 years is an epic as visually arresting as it is intellectually ambitious, a formidable capstone in one of the greatest careers in American cinema. With a vivid ensemble cast including Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, and Dustin Hoffman.

Through never-before-accessed records and archives, historical footage, expert commentary, and interviews with residents, San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood traces the neighborhood’s rise and fall and explores the vibrant people, arts, and culture whose enduring legacy still resonates today.