Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

Director Steve McQueen joins NYFF62 Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Blitz, the Closing Night selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Blitz opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 1st. Tickets are now on sale: filmlinc.org/blitz An authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg, Blitz pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen to ever more impressive levels. Working on a vast scale, McQueen sets things at human eye level, telling his original tale from the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. Alternately overwhelming and tender, McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London too infrequently seen on screens.

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, author Sigrid Nunez, and cast members Naomi Watts, Sarah Pidgeon, Carla Gugino, Noma Dumezweni, Constance Wu, Owen Teague, and Bing join NYFF62 programmer Florence Almozini to discuss The Friend, a Spotlight selection at the 62nd New York Film Festival. This deeply fulfilling adaptation of 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.

On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director Jesse Eisenberg, cast members Kieran Culkin and Jennifer Grey, and producers Emma Stone and Dave McCary discuss A Real Pain, a Spotlight selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In A Real Pain, cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (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. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director David Cronenberg discusses The Shrouds with NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim at its U.S. Premiere. 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. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Luca Guadagnino, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, costume designer Jonathan Anderson, and cast members Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey to discuss Queer, the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Written in the early 1950s yet not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. In his wildly ambitious adaptation, Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55) expertly evokes the book’s post–World War II time period and cinematically translates Burroughs’s iconoclasm with panache. In a transformative role, Daniel Craig immerses himself into Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a habitual heroin user luxuriating in freedom and desiccation among a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he swoons into a headlong love affair, commencing an odyssey that will take them all the way to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high. Buoyed by go-for-broke performances from Craig and Starkey, and rollicking, unexpected supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, Queer is a dazzling showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s a film that finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet, a universal love story featuring expressionistic flights of fancy, gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism, and surprising tenderness. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. Queer opens in theaters on November 27, courtesy of A24.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Paul Schrader and cast members Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli to discuss their film Oh, Canada, which made its U.S. Premiere in the Main Slate of this year's festival. The discussion was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins. In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. Oh, Canada will be released in theaters on December 6, courtesy of Kino Lorber.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Leos Carax to discuss his film It’s Not Me, in an extended conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and director Annie Baker. In his new film, the French cinema firebrand 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. To learn more and get tickets for this year's New York Film Festival, visit filmlinc.org. Enjoy this conversation with Leos Carax and Annie Baker.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we present the press conference from this year's Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door, featuring director Pedro Almodóvar and cast members Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and John Turturro, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. The Room Next Door will open at Film at Lincoln Center on December 20. Tickets on sale soon.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, director Alex Ross Perry, producer/editor Robert Greene, and members of the band Pavement (Stephen Malkmus, Scott Kannberg, Mark Ibold, Steve West, and Bob Nastanovich) join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Pavements at its North American Premiere. Fueled by a sardonic, tricky sense of humor, Alex Ross Perry’s very funny sorta-documentary about the beloved indie rock band integrates archival footage of Pavement at the height of their cult popularity, newly shot material following them during their recent comeback tour in 2022, and a kaleidoscope of semi-scripted contemporary scenes about the shooting of a movie within the movie starring Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Nat Wolff, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, and a hilarious Joe Keery as an actor seeking awards glory. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, Jacques Audiard and cast members Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Édgar Ramírez discuss Emilia Pérez, a Spotlight selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF programmer Justin Chang. From the moment it introduces its titular antiheroine, a Mexican drug-cartel boss seeking gender-affirming surgery, this boldly genre-dissolving tour de force is predicated on the power of astonishing transformations. The most ambitious and exuberant film to date by Jacques Audiard, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, 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—whose fearless performances defy every expectation. Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where its four leads also shared the Best Actress prize. A Netflix release. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.