Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with FLC Programmer Madeline Whittle about the 13th edition of Scary Movies. Taking place at Film at Lincoln Center from August 15-21, Scary Movies is New York City’s premier showcase for the best in new genre (and genre-bending) cinema from around the globe alongside spine-tingling classics and rediscoveries conjured from the dark recesses of midnight-movie lore. To view the full screening schedule and to purchase tickets to this year’s edition of Scary Movies, please visit filmlinc.org/scary Scary Movies XIII is sponsored by MUBI, the global streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with cinematographer Fred Murphy as he discusses Hoosiers. Hoosiers screened as part of our recently concluded retrospective celebrating the career of the late, great Gene Hackman. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler WIlson. Few sports films land with the clarity, grit, and emotional lift of Hoosiers. Gene Hackman brings flinty, lived-in authority to Norman Dale, a disgraced coach seeking a second act in 1950s Indiana, where basketball is practically a religion. Directed with unflashy conviction by David Anspaugh and shot in real Hoosier gyms, this underdog story favors restraint over bombast, with Jerry Goldsmith’s elegiac score and a quietly shattering turn by Dennis Hopper as a washed-up assistant adding unexpected weight. At its core is one of Hackman’s most cherished performances—contained, weathered, and quietly magnetic—in a film that’s less about victory than the long, uncertain work of earning it.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of New Directors/New Films with No Sleep Till director Alexandra Simpson. No Sleep Till is now in select theaters, courtesy of Factory 25. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle. The slice-of-life indie is alive and well in Alexandra Simpson’s feature debut, recipient of a Special Mention from the jury at the 2024 Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week. While a looming hurricane spells doom for a sleepy Florida town, citizens carry on: two friends pull pranks and ponder life; another pair captures terrifying footage of the storm; a young woman harbors a deep crush. Through this fleet exploration Simpson keeps audiences on their feet, no two stories told at the exact same tempo and no composition easily anticipated. And backgrounding it all is a sun-soaked, palm tree-lined Florida that has seldom looked as beautiful as it does in No Sleep Till.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a legendary Japanese director celebrated for films like Cure and Pulse, shares insights about his new film, Cloud. He discusses the chilling realities of the hustle economy and the societal impact of online culture, drawing parallels to his earlier work, Pulse. Kurosawa elaborates on the complexity of crafting action films in Japan, balancing realism with genre conventions. Additionally, he shares creative choices, such as minimizing music in action scenes, to heighten authenticity, offering a fascinating glimpse into his filmmaking process.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between film scholars Shana L. Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor in NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies, as they discuss a double feature of Oscar Micheaux's 1925 silent film Body and Soul and Jordan Peele's 2019 sophomore feature Us. Hailed as “a colossal achievement” and “blissfully ambitious” upon its release, Jordan Peele’s 2019 feature Us plumbed everything from American isolationist fears and labyrinthine power structures to the rich lineage of the doppelgänger motif and home-invasion thrillers. Now with the recent publication Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay by Inventory Press, in-depth footnotes, commentaries, and a constellation of images, definitions, and inspirations have untethered entirely new references orbiting the film. This past June, Film at Lincoln Center was thrilled to interpret the cosmology outlined in this book through a presentation of double features, supplementary reading material, in-person appearances from some of the book’s contributing writers, and never-before-seen 35mm presentations of Us.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from the 52nd New York Film Festival in 2014 with Inherent Vice director Paul Thomas Anderson and his very large and talented cast. For one week only from July 4-10, join Film at Lincoln Center in revisiting this great American film on 70mm film, ahead of the director’s highly anticipated new feature One Battle After Honor. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/vice This conversation was moderated by Kent Jones, former Director of the New York Film Festival. Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing Thomas Pynchon adaptation is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all in as Doc Sportello, the private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston), menaced at every turn by the telegenic police detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Among the other members of Anderson’s mind-boggling cast are Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Jena Malone.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Afternoons of Solitude director Albert Serra. An NYFF62 Spotlight selection, Afternoons of Solitude opens at Film at Lincoln Center on June 28. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/solitude This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Albert Serra trains a patient and poetic lens on the dazzling pomp and devastating brutality of bullfighting in his new documentary portrait of the charismatic Peruvian-born star torero Andrés Roca Rey. Intensely in-the-moment, Afternoons of Solitude expertly balances the visceral thrill of the battle inside the ring, pitting animal instinct against human technique, with a filmmaking style that allows the viewer to appreciate the emotional and physical toll the violence takes on both man and beast. Unflinching yet reflective, Serra’s film is a monumental depiction of the persistence of the primitive in the present day, while acknowledging the extraordinary skill of the man who puts his life and spiritual endurance at risk as he faces down rampaging nature.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with cinematographer Peter Deming, who recently joined us for two special screenings of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, courtesy of Deming’s personally owned 35mm film print. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. Most of Lynch’s later films straddle (at least) two realities, and their most ominous moments arise from a dawning awareness that one world is about to yield to another. In Lost Highway we are introduced to brooding jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) while he lives in a simmering state of jealousy with his listless and possibly unfaithful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). About one hour in, a rupture fundamentally alters the narrative logic of the film and the world itself becomes a nightmare embodiment of a consciousness out of control. Lost Highway marked a return from the wilderness for Lynch, and the arrival of his more radical expressionism—alternating omnipresent darkness with overexposed whiteouts, dead air with the belligerent soundtrack assault of industrial metal bands, and the tactile sensation that everything is really happening with the infinite delusions of schizophrenic thought. Lost Highway is a Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Meeting with Pol Pot director Rithy Panh and journalist Elizabeth Becker, moderated by FLC’s Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Meeting with Pol Pot will open at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, June 13 with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/polpot In 1978, three French journalists arrive in Cambodia to survey the country and interview its leader, Pol Pot—but after a picture-perfect arrival, cracks begin to emerge in the murderous regime’s facade of respectability. For Cambodian-born Rithy Panh, the damage inflicted upon his homeland by the Khmer Rouge has fueled a lifetime of innovative work in the vein of 2013’s The Missing Picture, which reconstructed the period’s events in part through clay-figurine dioramas. This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, is brought to life thanks to exemplary lead performances from Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï, meticulously conjuring the sights and sounds of 1978 Cambodia with the assistance of archival footage and more clay figurines. The result is a unique admixture—historical horror paired with a rich meditation on the impossibility of portraying it—that only Panh could make. A Strand Releasing release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Ghost Trail director Jonathan Millet. Ghost Trail is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/ghost This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini. Two years after being released from Syrian jail, Hamid (Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge—but what’s the real price of vengeance for the person seeking it? Inspired by true events, Jonathan Millet’s deeply researched thriller excavates the too-little-examined moral dilemmas and political negligence that traumatized migrants must confront amid the struggle to rebuild their lives and take control of their destinies at the margins of contemporary French society, inviting audiences to better empathize with France’s newest residents, and to better understand their place in the world—and our own. A Music Box Films release.