Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation with Hugh Jackman on his latest film, The Son, which recently played in our theaters exclusively for FLC Patrons. If you're interested in supporting FLC by becoming a member and exploring member benefits, go to filmlinc.org/members. For a limited time, get 30% off Memberships with the promo code HOLIDAY30; available for Contributor-level Memberships and above. A cautionary tale that follows a family as it struggles to reunite after falling apart. The Son centers on Peter (Hugh Jackman), whose hectic life with his infant and new partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby) is upended when his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) appears with their son Nicholas (Zen McGrath), who is now a teenager. The young man has been missing from school for months and is troubled, distant, and angry. Peter strives to take care of Nicholas as he would have liked his own father to have taken care of him while juggling work, his and Beth's new son, and the offer of his dream position in Washington. However, by reaching for the past to correct its mistakes, he loses sight of how to hold onto the Nicholas in the present. Sony Pictures Classics will release The Son on January 20, 2023.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation between The Eternal Daughter director Joanna Hogg and filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The two talked about discovering each other's filmography, Hogg’s lifelong friendship with Tilda Swinton, and the process of creating art out of grief.  The Eternal Daughter follows a middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother who take an eerie, emotional trip to the past when they stay at a fog-enshrouded hotel in the English countryside. The great Joanna Hogg uses this Victorian gothic scenario for an entirely surprising, impeccably crafted excavation of a parent-child relationship starring Tilda Swinton in a performance of rich, endless surprise. The NYFF60 selection plays  daily in our theaters. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/eternal.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmers preview of our Yoshimitsu Morita retrospective and a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival between filmmakers Joanna Hogg & Kelly Reichardt.  First up, listen to programmers Dan Sullivan and Aiko Masubuchi dive into the career and films of Yoshimitsu Morita, one of the most fascinatingly idiosyncratic and prolific directors in modern Japanese cinema. Our Yoshimitsu Morita retrospective takes place through December 11 with special introductions during opening weekend. Get tickets and All-Access Passes at filmlinc.org/morita.  After the preview, we’re revisiting an NYFF60 conversation with The Eternal Daughter director Joanna Hogg and Showing Up director Kelly Reichardt. Two of the leading auteurs of contemporary cinema, Joanna Hogg and Kelly Reichardt have built acclaimed bodies of work that stand out for their epic existential scope and intimate emotional textures. With The Eternal Daughter and Showing Up, respectively, Hogg and Reichardt take their filmmaking into new territories, exploring the poetic and prosaic imbrications of life and art, particularly in the personal and professional worlds of female artists.  We were pleased to bring Hogg and Reichardt together for a conversation about their singular career trajectories, their distinctive approaches to writing and directing, and the process of translating personal experience into universally resonant stories of women on the verge of creative transcendence. NYFF60 Talks were presented by HBO. Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is now playing in our theaters. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/eternal

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring two conversations: the first with director Jerzy Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska on the NYFF60 selection, EO, and the second with director Nikyatu Jusu and producer Nikkia Moulterie on the ND/NF51 selection Nanny. At age 84, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski has directed one of his spryest, most visually inventive films, following the travels of a peripatetic donkey named EO. After being removed from the only life he’s ever known in a traveling circus, EO begins a journey across the Polish and Italian countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom. Skolimowski imagines the animal’s mesmerizing journey as an ever-shifting interior landscape, marked by absurdity and warmth in equal measure, putting the viewer in the unique perspective of the protagonist. Skolimowski has constructed his own bold vision about the follies of human nature, seen from the ultimate outsider’s perspective. EO, a New York Times Critic's Pick, is now playing in our theaters. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/eo Next, we’re revisiting a conversation from the 51st New Directors/New Films with Nanny director Nikyatu Jusu and producer Nikkia Moulterie. A riveting Anna Diop commands nearly every frame of director Nikyatu Jusu’s feature debut, a breakout at this year’s Sundance, where it won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize. In this psychologically complex fable of displacement tinged with supernatural horror, Diop plays Aisha, a woman who recently emigrated from Senegal and is hired to care for the adorable daughter of an affluent couple (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector) living in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. Increasingly unsettled by the family’s volatile home life, though desperate to make enough money to bring over her young son from Senegal, Aisha begins to unravel, finding her life in America to be more nightmare than dream. Mixing domestic melodrama with American genre elements and West African folklore, Nanny is a spellbinding experience that defies expectation. Nanny, a New York Times Critic's Pick, is now playing in our theaters for one week only, with a special holiday promotion: buy one ticket, get one free for all screenings through November 27. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nanny

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a talk from the 60th New York Film Festival with photographer, artist, and activist Nan Goldin, moderated by NYFF programmer Rachael Rakes. In the NYFF60 Centerpiece selection All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, documentarian Laura Poitras takes as her subject Nan Goldin. An era-defining artist who rose from the New York “No Wave” underground to become one of the great photographers of the late 20th century, Goldin put herself at the forefront of the battle against the Sackler family and their pharmaceutical empire, both as an activist at art institutions around the world that had accepted millions from the Sacklers and as an advocate for the destigmatization of drug addiction. This intimate, career-spanning conversation with Goldin dove into the personal and political roots of her creative practice, the radical humanism of her photography, and the defiant intertwinings of her art and activism.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed opens on November 23 in our theaters. Don’t miss our Q&A with director Laura Poitras and P.A.I.N. activist Harry Cullen on November 26. Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/beauty All NYFF60 Talks are presented by HBO.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special introduction from Martin Scorsese ahead of the premiere of Personality Crisis: One Night Only at the 60th New York Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with directors Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, subject David Johansen, Executive Producer Mara Hennessey, producer Margaret Bodde, and Leah Hennessey, moderated by FLC Programmer Dan Sullivan. Continuing his vibrant and invaluable documentaries about iconic American artists and musicians such as George Harrison: Living in the Material World, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, and the Fran Lebowitz portrait Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese turns his camera on another beloved New York institution: the singular David Johansen. Equally celebrated as the lead singer-songwriter of the androgynous ’70s glam punk groundbreakers The New York Dolls and for his complete reinvention as hepcat lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the ’80s, the chameleonic Johansen has created an entire genre unto himself, combining swing, blues, and rock for something at once mischievous and deeply personal. In Personality Crisis: One Night Only, Scorsese and co-director David Tedeschi (The 50 Year Argument), with the help of cinematographer Ellen Kuras (American Utopia), luminously capture the entertainer’s January 2020 Cafe Carlyle set, where he performs as Poindexter singing the Johansen songbook, bringing downtown irreverence to this storied uptown joint. Presented alongside new and archival interviews, the concert is marvelously intimate and a testament to both a lost New York and a performer who remains as fresh and exciting as ever. All NYFF60 documentaries were sponsored by HBO.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival, moderated by Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish. This talk brought together the directors behind two stunning works of autofiction in the NYFF60 lineup. One Fine Morning by leading French filmmaker (and NYFF staple) Mia Hansen-Løve and Aftersun, the debut feature by Charlotte Wells, both center on father-daughter relationships drawn from the directors’ own lives, exploring tenderness and trauma, love and loss with formal ingenuity and emotional force. Both films also feature powerhouse performances—Paul Mescal in Aftersun and Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning—that challenge and reinvigorate routine cinematic portrayals of femininity, masculinity, and intimacy.  Hansen-Løve and Wells partook in an extended conversation about the process of making art out of one’s life, giving filmic shape to the workings of memory and time, reimagining the contours of “women’s cinema,” and more. NYFF Talks were presented by HBO. Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun is now playing daily in our theaters. For showtimes and tickets, go to filmlinc.org/aftersun.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we're revisiting a special conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival with director Park Chan-wook and actor Park Hae-il on the season's biggest hit, Decision to Leave. Moderated by NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. Busan detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) finds that he’s increasingly obsessed with a puzzling new case: a middle-aged businessman has mysteriously fallen to his death during a rock climbing expedition. Upon discovering photos of his abused wife, a Chinese national named Seo-rae (Tang Wei), Hae-joon begins to suspect it wasn’t an accident, all the while becoming emotionally and erotically drawn to her. From this Hitchcockian situation, director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) weaves a swelling, expanding, ever more complex tale about a possible black widow and the investigator who just might be fashioning his own web. One of Park’s most enveloping and accomplished thrillers, which earned him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Decision to Leave is a constantly surprising, elegantly constructed film that builds in power to a truly haunting denouement. Decision to Leave is now playing in our theaters! Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/decision

Director Elegance Bratton and cast members Jeremy Pope, Gabrielle Union, and Raúl Castillo, and producers Effie Brown and Chester Algernal Gordon present and discuss The Inspection, the Closing Night selection of this year’s festival, with NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. Known for his affecting and dynamic documentary Pier Kids, about homeless queer and transgender youth in New York, and the Viceland series My House, on underground competitive ballroom dancing, filmmaker and photographer Elegance Bratton has made his ambitious narrative debut with The Inspection, a knockout drama based on his own experiences as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training following a decade of living on the streets. In a breathtaking first cinematic starring role, Tony– and Emmy–nominated actor Jeremy Pope is run through an emotional and physical gauntlet as a young man dealing with the intimidation of a sadistic sergeant (Bokeem Woodbine), his desire for a sympathetic superior (Raúl Castillo), and his complicated feelings toward the mother who rejected him (a revelatory Gabrielle Union). Bratton’s film is a nuanced portrait of American masculinity and evocation of the military during the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell era, as well as a forceful, electric work of autobiography. An A24 release.

Director Maria Schrader, screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, cast members Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, and Ashley Judd, and New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey discuss She Said, a Spotlight selection and World Premiere at NYFF60, with NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. In 2017, New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke a story that would change the world. Uncovering decades of sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, Kantor and Twohey boldly took on an establishment that had too long been allowed to systematically protect abusers. This thrilling new drama based on Kantor and Twohey’s best-selling book about their hard-fought investigation is directed by Maria Schrader (director of I’m Your Man and the acclaimed TV series Unorthodox) from a screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida). She Said stars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan in wonderful performances as the two intensely committed reporters whose efforts would ultimately help ignite the #MeToo movement. Schrader’s film, in the tradition of All the President’s Men and Spotlight, is a tribute to the art and importance of investigative journalism, as well as a moving portrait of two women whose personal lives couldn’t be put on hold even as they navigated a labyrinth of NDAs, legal double binds, and frightened witnesses. She Said’s remarkable supporting cast includes Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, Samantha Morton, and Jennifer Ehle. A Universal Pictures release. NYFF60 screenings of She Said were presented by Citi.