Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross and Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk director Barry Jenkins. The Opening Night selection of NYFF62, Nickel Boys is now playing in select theaters, courtesy of Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios. Director RaMell Ross has crafted something of a new American masterpiece with the NYFF62 Opening Night selection Nickel Boys. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teens at a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida (inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys), Nickel Boys brings Ross’s extraordinary felicity and radical sense of perspective as a photographer of Black life in the South to a historical fiction that is as much about the trauma of racism in the U.S. as about the politics of subjectivity and spectatorship. We were thrilled to welcome RaMell Ross for a wide-ranging conversation with Barry Jenkins—another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach to depicting Blackness and the American South onscreen, including in his own Colson Whitehead adaptation, 2020’s The Underground Railroad series. NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO. This Free Talk between RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins was sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Oh, Canada director Paul Schrader. Oh, Canada is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Kino Lorber. In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Wracked with cancer, Leonard has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé (Michael Imperioli) in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Cinema becomes a confessional space as Leonard, accompanied by his stalwart wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman), excavates his own past, facing down regrets and guilt, and interrogating his own career, personal life, and political courage. 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. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Room Next Door director Pedro Almodóvar and cast members Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro. The Room Next Door opens at Film at Lincoln Center on December 20th. Get tickets a filmlinc.org/room 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. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. 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. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, 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. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Hard Truths director Mike Leigh and cast members Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Tuwaine Barrett. Hard Truths opens at Film at Lincoln Center for an exclusive one-week running beginning December 6. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/truths Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister. Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins.