Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) announces the 34 films selected for the Main Slate of the 63rd New York Film Festival (NYFF63), taking place September 26 through October 13, 2025.
Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, the New York Film Festival is an annual celebration of the most significant films from around the world. Since its inception in 1963, NYFF has played a pivotal role in shaping film culture, presenting a curated selection of films that define the year in cinema, with new works by acclaimed directors alongside emerging talents.
This year’s Main Slate showcases films from 26 countries, among them two world premieres, eight North American, and 13 U.S. premieres. Acclaimed films from festivals worldwide include Cannes prizewinners: Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (Palme d’Or); Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (Grand Prix); joint Jury Prize winners Oliver Laxe’s Sirât and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (Best Director, Best Actor); and Bi Gan’s Resurrection (Special Award). At this year’s Berlinale, Rose Byrne won the Silver Bear for best leading performance for Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and Radu Jude won the Silver Bear for best screenplay for Kontinental ’25. Of the Main Slate films, 11 are set to premiere at the 82nd Venice Film Festival across various sections—including Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kent Jones’s Late Fame, and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice.
NYFF63 world premieres include Gavagai by Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), an astute drama in which a film adaptation of Medea becomes the center of cross-cultural tensions, and Closing Night selection Is This Thing On?, a keenly observed comedic drama by Bradley Cooper (Maestro, NYFF61 Spotlight Gala) about a couple navigating their recent separation. Filmmakers making their Main Slate debut are Mary Bronstein, Bradley Cooper, Kent Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Milagros Mumenthaler, Mark Obenhaus, Hlynur Pálmason, Pedro Pinho, Mascha Schilinski, and Francesco Sossai.
NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim stated: “Anyone who cares about film knows that it is an art in need of defending, like many of our core values today. Across all sections of the festival, the movies we have selected this year suggest that this safeguarding can take many guises: acts of rejuvenation and refusal, expressions of unease and joy, feats of imagination and commemoration. I am particularly struck by the diversity of approaches and forms among the films in this Main Slate, which affirms that the art of cinema is more than capable of thriving, even in difficult times.”
This year’s program explores a wide range of themes that reflect the complexities of the world today. Family dynamics are the focal points of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains, Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, Carla Simón’s Romería, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You. A gamut of social and political concerns—from economic precarity to life under authoritarian rule—emerge in Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, and Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors, while Claire Denis’s The Fence, Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, Lucrecia Martel’s Landmarks, and Lav Diaz’s Magellan revolve around colonial histories and legacies. In a lineup that features dramas, comedies, documentaries, thrillers, and forays into horror and science fiction, several films test the limits and subvert the conventions of genre—like Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, and Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada—and several could be said to invent genres of their own, such as Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Bi Gan’s Resurrection, and Oliver Laxe’s Sirât.
NYFF63 films are screened in theaters at Lincoln Center and at four venues across the city: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens).
The NYFF Main Slate selection committee is chaired by Dennis Lim, NYFF Artistic Director, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen. Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, and Antoine Thirion are NYFF program advisors.
NYFF63 is generously supported by Festival Co-Chairs Imelda and Peter Sobiloff and Nanna and Dan Stern; Vice-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, and Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg; and Supporters Hillary Koota Krevlin and Glenn Krevlin, and Ari Rifkin.
63rd New York Film Festival Main Slate
Opening Night: After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)
Centerpiece: Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)
Closing Night: Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper)
63rd New York Film Festival Main Slate Films & Descriptions
Opening Night
After the Hunt
Luca Guadagnino, 2025, U.S., 135m
North American Premiere
In his razor-sharp new drama, the prolific Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55; Queer, NYFF62) plunges with refreshing abandon into the murky seas of contemporary morality—and gives Julia Roberts one of the most complex and gratifying starring roles of her career. Roberts embodies chilly, seemingly self-assured Yale philosophy professor Alma Olsson, whose comfortable professional career and domestic life with her mercurial husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) are thrown into chaos after her PhD candidate protégée Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Alma’s longtime colleague and friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. As a result, the air of rarefied academic privilege on campus begins to dissolve, and Alma must navigate minefields of gender, sexuality, race, and institutional power, all while trying to reconcile her own difficult choices with the demons of her past. From a trenchant, tightly plotted script by Nora Garrett, and with the aid of a sensational cast (also including Chloë Sevigny as Kim, a colleague of Alma’s), Guadagnino teases out a genuine provocation with no easy answers, inquiring where our true selves lie when every decision we make is thrown into the court of public opinion. An Amazon MGM Studios release.
Centerpiece
Father Mother Sister Brother
Jim Jarmusch, 2025, U.S., 110m
North American Premiere
For years, Jim Jarmusch has written, directed, and produced delicate, character-driven films, including Stranger Than Paradise, Only Lovers Left Alive, Paterson, and Down by Law. Father Mother Sister Brother is a perceptive study in familial dynamics, a feature film carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three chapters all concern the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents, which take place in the present, and each in a different country. Siblings Jeff and Emily (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) check up on their hermetic father (Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey; sisters Lilith and Timothea (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett) reunite with their guarded novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin; and twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) return to their Paris apartment to address a family tragedy. Father Mother Sister Brother is a kind of anti-action film, its subtle and quiet style carefully constructed to allow small details to accumulate—almost like flowers being carefully placed in three delicate arrangements. As always, Jarmusch brings his worlds to life with the essential assistance of his collaborators, including two masterful cinematographers, Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, and the brilliant editor Affonso Gonçalves. A MUBI release.
Closing Night
Is This Thing On?
Bradley Cooper, 2025, U.S., 124m
World Premiere
In a pair of galvanizing, deeply honest performances, Will Arnett and Laura Dern play Alex and Tess Novak, whose marriage has reached an impasse. With amicable sorrow, the couple—parents of two young boys—mutually agree to split up. Yet in director Bradley Cooper’s keenly observed comic drama, their separation leads to unpredictable midlife self-reckonings, most dramatically in Alex’s wild career pivot to become a confessional stand-up comedian in New York City’s West Village, where he finds new direction and camaraderie. This seemingly outlandish scenario—in a script by Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell inspired by the true story of British comedian John Bishop—is never played for easy laughs, while Cooper uses his penchant for naturalism to give the actors space to find their complicated centers. In his beautifully lived-in third feature following A Star Is Born and Maestro (NYFF61), Cooper confirms his dexterity for representing the complexities of human relationships, constructing a film that is both lacerating and sweet-souled, funny and tender. Is This Thing On? features a stacked, stellar supporting cast, including Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds, Sean Hayes, Peyton Manning, and Amy Sedaris, as well as charming assistance from New York stand-up standbys such as Chloe Radcliffe, Reggie Conquest, and Jordan Jensen, supplying the film its downtown authenticity. A Searchlight Pictures release from Lea Pictures and Archery Pictures.
Below the Clouds / Sotto le nuvole
Gianfranco Rosi, 2025, Italy, 114m
Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The great Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno, NYFF58) specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors in recent years. In this volatile environment, Rosi finds archeologists reckoning with both uncovered ancient artifacts and the wreckage of tomb raiders, squads of diggers descending into long abandoned tunnels, emergency centers already at breaking points, and a populace experiencing a generalized daily disquietude, fearful of an eruption like the one that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. Linking modern and ancient life, Below the Clouds alights on a specific region yet feels connected to everyone’s contemporary moment—the contemplation of the unimaginable nestled within our daily existence.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Kahlil Joseph, 2025, U.S., 107m
New York Premiere
Visual artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS debuted in galleries and museums across the country in 2019, immersing viewers in the imagined world of a Black television news network. After expanding this concept into a short film, Joseph has developed it even further into a feature film, and the result is a celebration of Black life that reconceptualizes and remediates common, corporate notions of journalism. Joseph’s sprawling film is an uninterrupted gush of ideas, mixing newly shot footage and extant media, leaping from fantastical images to historical narratives, collapsing boundaries that often separate documentary and fiction. A multidimensional work of vision and ambition, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions offers an alternately riotous and meditative compendium of the Black experience. A Rich Spirit release.
Cover-Up
Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, 2025, U.S., 117m
English, Vietnamese, and Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
For the past six decades, Seymour Hersh has been at the front lines of political journalism in the United States. Hersh’s breakthrough reportage has brought to the public’s attention many of the most damning constitutional wrongdoings and cover-ups, from the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam to the CIA’s involvement in plots to assassinate foreign leaders to the Iraq invasion and systematic tortures at Abu Ghraib. In many cases, the revelations of his work have led to governmental reckonings and legal ramifications, yet Hersh, now 88 and surrounded by boxes of files from decades of tireless work, sees himself not as a crusader but as a citizen just doing his job. In this arresting documentary, Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, NYFF60) and Mark Obenhaus tell the wide-ranging story of Hersh (whose career has not been free of controversy itself). Though a decades-in-the-making project for the filmmakers, Cover-Up couldn’t have come at a more crucial moment, when freedom of the U.S. press is increasingly under fire by those in power.
The Currents / Las Corrientes
Milagros Mumenthaler, 2025, Switzerland/Argentina, 104m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
While on a work trip in Switzerland, where she’s being fêted for her storied fashion career, designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) plunges herself, without warning, into an icy winter lake. After surviving the shocking ordeal, Lina returns to her hometown of Buenos Aires, yet a transformation has taken place within her, and she finds it impossible to readjust to her former life as a wife, mother, and artist, distancing herself from her husband (Esteban Bigliardi) and career. Acclaimed Argentinean filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler (Back to Stay) has constructed a compelling existential puzzle, a work of psychological interiority that, with its oblique narrative and complexly layered soundscape evoking a woman’s enigmatic dissociation, recalls the work of Lucrecia Martel and Todd Haynes, yet with its own singular emotional perspective and aesthetic sophistication.
Duse
Pietro Marcello, 2025, Italy, 123m
Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Bringing the same intellectual and muscular energy to the historical biopic as he did with his momentous Jack London adaptation Martin Eden (NYFF57), Pietro Marcello depicts the late career of legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse, incarnated by the wondrously expressive Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. The diva emerges vulnerable yet undeterred from the cataclysm of World War I, taking the stage again in her sixties despite a tubercular condition and a knotty relationship with her resentful daughter (Noémie Merlant), even as world politics and the aesthetics of theater itself are on the verge of changing forever. Epitomizing the full-bodied emotional materiality of his subject, Marcello goes beyond the formal and structural limitations of the biographical film, examining how acting itself can be a reflection of modernity and how performing brought Duse closer to becoming a radical political being. As always, Marcello brings both great flourish and historical realism to his work, incorporating mesmerizing early-20th-century archival color footage into this fictionalized portrait of the life of the artistic mind.
The Fence / Le Cri des Gardes
Claire Denis, 2025, France, 92m
English and Yoruba with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The absorbing new drama from Claire Denis (Beau Travail, NYFF37) is centered around a fascinating, intractable tête-à-tête. On a white-run construction site in an acrid, dust-strewn town in West Africa, a local man named Albouny (the riveting Denis regular Isaach De Bankolé) has arrived to demand the immediate return of the dead body of his brother Nouofia, killed in a mysterious work accident. The site’s anxious foreman, Horn (Matt Dillon), protected behind the perimeter fence, yet ruffled by Albouny’s defiance and unflappability, is clearly hiding a terrible truth from the man. Set primarily throughout one unrelenting night, Denis’s film, based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, also drifts on the neurotic vibrations of Horn’s alienated younger wife (Mia McKenna-Bruce), just arrived from London, and his live-wire right-hand man (Tom Blyth), to whom Horn owes a secret debt. All these simmering tensions converge in Denis’s unpredictable and intimate film, with which the French director returns to the subjects of colonialism and racial segregation so central to her unparalleled filmography.
Gavagai
Ulrich Köhler, 2025, Germany/France, 91m
French, English, German, and Wolof with English subtitles
World Premiere
In this charged, unexpected metacinematic drama from German director Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), a radical new movie production of Medea, drastically altered from Euripides’s original play, becomes the center of a series of unresolvable contemporary tensions. Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) and Maja (Maren Eggert) embody Jason and Medea on-screen, tussling with the film’s high-anxiety director (Nathalie Richard) during the shoot in Senegal, all the while negotiating an adulterous romance off-set. Later, at the film’s premiere in Berlin, Nourou, unresolved in his personal and professional life, has a rattling run-in with a racist security guard, which throws his—and the film’s—world off its axis. Köhler specializes in cunning, tonally surprising films about cross-cultural disconnection, and Gavagai is his most ambitious and expansive film yet—a pinpoint-accurate account of moral crises and social biases, modern and ancient, internal and external.
A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow, 2025, U.S., 112m
North American Premiere
At a remote military outpost, an unidentified incoming missile is detected, setting in motion an escalating series of actions and reactions across all levels of the United States government. With her trademark dynamic kineticism, Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days, NYFF33 Centerpiece) puts the viewer in the center of a crisis in which decisions must be made in limited time, based on incomplete and evolving information and untested protocols. Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim construct a frighteningly plausible scenario in which a multitude of dilemmas—practical and personal, bureaucratic and existential—overlap in real time and at a mounting rate. The film’s prismatic structure allows for a broad-scale thriller that entangles intimate dramas with an unfolding world-historic event, and the terrific ensemble cast, which includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, and Tracy Letts, conjures vivid characters with muscular efficiency, bringing emotional depth to this taut, thought-provoking exploration of an all-too-believable nightmare. A Netflix release.
I Only Rest in the Storm / O Riso e a Faca
Pedro Pinho, 2025, Portugal/Brazil/France/
Portuguese and Creole with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The charming, well-meaning environmental engineer Sergio (Sérgio Coragem) has traveled from Lisbon to Guinea-Bissau to meet with locals and research the possibility of his European company constructing a road that will connect the city areas to rural villages. While drifting through his revelatory trip, Sergio tentatively makes friends and lovers, talks to people who either embrace or abhor the possible project, and falls into conversations and confrontations about his place in this world: friend or interloper, lover or enemy? Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho’s epic yet scrappy—and sexually fluid—I Only Rest in the Storm is a playful and loose-limbed portrayal of the contemporary postcolonialist liberal mindset that cleverly cuts to the bone in one entertaining scene after another, and features an outstanding supporting performance by Cleo Diára (who won Best Actress in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) as a local businesswoman and bar owner who suffers no fools.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Mary Bronstein, 2025, U.S., 113m
New York Premiere
The nightmarish stresses of motherhood and work are pushed to their absurdist extremes in Mary Bronstein’s stellar piece of cinematic anxiety, starring a bravura Rose Byrne as a woman on the verge of something far beyond a nervous breakdown. A therapist whose life has become one crisis after another, Linda (Byrne) and her young daughter (who requires a feeding tube due to a mysterious illness) have had to relocate to a motel following a cataclysmic ceiling leak in their house. Meanwhile, her own therapist and colleague (Conan O’Brien, unlike you’ve ever seen him) has reached his own boiling point, her toughest patient (Danielle Macdonald) is a needy bundle of nerves that’s spilling over into Linda’s personal life, and her belligerent husband (Christian Slater) is unhelpfully away on a business trip. Bronstein’s breathless, pressure-cooker visual approach and Byrne’s fearlessly committed performance (which earned her the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlinale) contribute to a full-throttle film that depicts life as a series of never-ending fires—without losing its sense of fanciful humor. An A24 release.
It Was Just an Accident / Un simple accident
Jafar Panahi, 2025, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 105m
Persian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Jafar Panahi (No Bears, NYFF60) reaffirms his status as one of this century’s great cinematic heroes with perhaps his bravest film yet, which won him the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Ever since he was arrested, imprisoned, and banned from making movies by the Iranian government 15 years ago, Panahi has found ways of producing films in secret and without official permission. Showing his political risk-taking as well as his confident command of craft, It Was Just an Accident is his most explicit attack on his country’s repressive regime, a cutting and darkly humorous thriller that concerns a mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who believes he has reencountered by chance the government intelligence officer, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), who had tortured him while under detainment. As Vahid enlists the services of acquaintances whose lives were also forever altered by Eghbal’s cruelties, the thirst for revenge and the sense of danger escalate—as do questions of moral choice and culpability. A NEON release.
Jay Kelly
Noah Baumbach, 2025, U.K./U.S./Italy, 132m
New York Premiere
In his most captivating film role in years, George Clooney is cast—fittingly—as the last great movie star. Jay Kelly is at a crisis point: uninspired by his work, reeling from the loss of his mentor, and tormented by a run-in with a haunting figure from his past, he does the unthinkable, backing out of a big new production at the 11th hour in order to run off to Europe and catch up with his college-bound daughter in France before attending a career tribute in Italy. Unable to entirely shed his Hollywood skin, he finds himself trailed by his entourage, including his long-suffering manager (played by a marvelously fragile Adam Sandler). At once introspective and raucous, the stellar character study Jay Kelly peeks at Hollywood narcissism with curiosity rather than judgment. Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, NYFF57 Centerpiece) and co-writer Emily Mortimer walk a delicate balance between industry parody and heartfelt sentiment, moving in and out of Jay’s past and present, fantasy and reality, probing the professional, familial, and moral life of a man for whom “all my memories are movies”—and who may be harboring more regrets than he cares to admit. A Netflix release.
Kontinental ’25
Radu Jude, 2025, Romania, 109m
Romanian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Following his recent triumphs Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (NYFF59) and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (NYFF61), Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude further confirms his status as the preeminent satirist of our contemporary sociopolitical miasma with this sly, gutting tale of a modern crisis of conscience. In the city of Cluj, located within the country’s Transylvania region, a bailiff named Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) evicts the homeless Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) from the unused cellar of a local house to make way for the construction of the Kontinental boutique hotel. Her fateful decision proves to have great consequences, and Jude tracks her subsequent guilt trip with merciless humanity, echoing Rossellini’s Europa ’51. Rather than rely on simplistic caricature, Jude tells this story of Eastern European economic expansion, berserk nationalism, and the inability to create meaningful change with crushing relatability. Jude won the Silver Bear for best screenplay at this year’s Berlinale. A 1-2 Special release.
Landmarks / Nuestra Tierra
Lucrecia Martel, 2025, Argentina/U.S./Mexico/France/
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In October 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province, tried to defend himself and his people from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local landowner and two police officers. As a result, the 68-year-old man was shot and killed, and two other community members were wounded. In her expansive and enlightening first feature documentary, the great Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (Zama, NYFF55) takes a sweeping approach to this tragic true story, triangulating the murder trial of the three men, the lives of Chocobar and his fellow Chuchagasta people, and the centuries-old, colonialist legacy of land and property theft across Latin America. With a ravishing, at times vertiginous visual approach to filming the natural beauty of the contested land, Martel pays cinematic tribute to people whom history has systematically tried to erase.
The Last One for the Road / Le Città di Pianura
Francesco Sossai, 2025, Italy/Germany, 100m
Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Aimlessly if coolly navigating the absurdities of middle age, Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlo (Sergio Romano) make for delightful company in Italian director Francesco Sossai’s genial, wistful hangout movie. The two best friends, who can never seem to make that “one last drink” truly the last, imbibe and bicker and trade anecdotes as they traverse the Venetian countryside, befriending an anxious architecture student, Giulio (Filippo Scotti), who’s cramming for an upcoming design exam. Imparting their screwball wisdom to Giulio, and even roping the younger man into some of their half-baked capers, Doriano and Carlo are welcome emissaries from an increasingly lost generation, disillusioned and adrift in our mercenary world yet holding on to the fleeting joys of life. Sossai has created a freeform, energetic comedy that echoes work by Aki Kaurismäki and Richard Linklater yet has its own beautiful sense of rhythm and revelation.
Late Fame
Kent Jones, 2025, U.S., 96m
North American Premiere
A wonderfully introspective Willem Dafoe lends his delicate gravitas to the role of Ed Saxberger, a once-upon-a-time New York poet who has worked at a post office for nearly four decades, his work now largely forgotten. After an eager and flattering young fan (Edmund Donovan) appears on his doorstep one night, Saxberger is welcomed into a new coterie of twentysomething admirers who hope to make him the central figure in an emerging literary salon. Intoxicated by the attention—and the presence of the wannabe tragedienne Gloria (a sinuous, Kurt Weill–crooning Greta Lee)—Saxberger nevertheless must reckon with the authenticity of this newfound circle of aspirants. Kent Jones’s thoughtful and marvelously witty second feature adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s recently rediscovered novella Late Fame (in a sly, hugely entertaining script by Oscar-nominated May December writer Samy Burch), updating the Austrian writer’s take on turn-of-the-century Vienna for a wistful yet unromantic look at a lost idea of downtown New York.
The Love That Remains / Ástin Sem Eftir Er
Hlynur Pálmason, 2025, Iceland/Denmark/Sweden/France, 109m
Icelandic, English, Swedish, and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Charting the gradual evolution of a family in the midst of an irreparable fracture, The Love That Remains is a poignant, crisply pointillistic domestic drama that observes life’s changes with humor and whimsy, set against the majestic, ever-shifting Icelandic landscape. Visual artist Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and fisherman Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason) were teenage sweethearts but have recently grown apart, and Magnús has moved out of the house. As long as the newly estranged parents put on a good face, the children—and their adorable sheepdog Panda (who won the prestigious Palme Dog award at Cannes)—seem to take the split in stride. Yet as Magnús becomes increasingly alienated from his domestic life, harsh reality can’t help but bubble to the surface. Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his austere 19th-century drama Godland is a constantly surprising film with an immaculate sense of framing and pacing—and an evocative, dulcet piano score by Harry Hunt—dotted with idiosyncratic flights of fancy that never detract from the central emotional authenticity. A Janus Films release.
Magellan / Magalhães
Lav Diaz, 2025, Portugal/Spain/France/
Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Every astonishing visual composition carries historical and political weight in the monumental new film from singular Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (Norte, The End of History, NYFF51). Gael García Bernal brilliantly subordinates his stardom to Diaz’s discerning camera, disappearing into the role of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who, at the start of the 16th century, navigated a crew to Southeast Asia after convincing the Spanish crown to fund his journey. Rather than retell the mythical, received narratives of the Age of Discovery, Diaz mounts an impressive and absorbing story of colonial conquest and obsession, depicting Magellan’s charted course to the Malayan Archipelago as a pitiless reckoning with human frailty and brutal violence as much as an evocation of overwhelming natural beauty. A Janus Films release.
The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt, 2025, U.S., 110m
New York Premiere
In early-1970s Framingham, Massachusetts, taciturn family man James (Josh O’Connor) makes the rash, largely inscrutable decision to orchestrate a heist at the local art museum, absconding with a selection of modern paintings—without much of a plan. This autumnal, restrained, and often quite funny anti-thriller from Kelly Reichardt (Showing Up, NYFF60) sets this low-key criminal enterprise against a Nixon-era backdrop of alienation and political disillusionment. As always, Reichardt’s impeccable craft is front and center: the film’s naturalism and remarkable period detail creating a portrait of unerring authenticity and psychological mystery. Whether driven by social apathy or artistic passion, James—effortlessly played by O’Connor with hangdog elegance—registers as a compelling update of the ’70s American male loner archetype for another dispiriting, directionless time. A MUBI release.
Miroirs No. 3
Christian Petzold, 2025, Germany, 86m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In the haunting new film from esteemed German director Christian Petzold (Transit, NYFF56), his regular star Paula Beer plays Laura, a pianist from Berlin who finds herself in a transitory state. After surviving a violent car crash that kills her boyfriend, Laura is immediately taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), a mysterious middle-aged woman who lives alone in an isolated house in the countryside. Strangers to one another, the two women build a quiet, respectful life together, though the reemergence of Betty’s estranged husband and son sheds light on the tragic past that explains the murky present. The pleasurable enigma of Miroirs No. 3, named for a Ravel piano suite, returns Petzold to the metaphysical ambiguity of earlier films like Yella (2007) and the themes of doubling in his cherished Phoenix (2014), yet with a distinctive ethereality all its own: It’s an economical and beautifully crafted work about the mystery of human interaction. A 1-2 Special release.
No Other Choice / Eojjeol suga eopda
Park Chan-wook, 2025, South Korea, 139m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In his diabolical new thriller, Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave, NYFF60) crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture and the domestic desperation for material comfort. In a fine tightrope-walk of a performance, Lee Byung-hun brings humor and likability to the tricky role of Man-soo, a middle-aged husband and father who has been laid off from the paper manufacturing company to which he has devoted decades of his life. After an extended and increasingly worrisome period of unemployment, Man-soo begins to take merciless measures toward solidifying his standing with a potential new employer, leading to wild—and ever more absurd—acts of violence, crafted by Park in his inimitable and extravagant pitch-black comic style. Adapted from the Donald E. Westlake novel The Ax, updated for our precarious moment in time, Park’s No Other Choice is enthralling all the way to its brilliant bitter pill of an ending. A NEON release.
Peter Hujar’s Day
Ira Sachs, 2025, U.S., 76m
New York Premiere
The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs (Passages). Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Sachs’s film is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors. With this engrossing and wholly unexpected film, Sachs shuttles us back to a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene that lives on in words as much as images. A Janus Films release.
Resurrection / 狂野时代
Bi Gan, 2025, China/France, 156m
Chinese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This phantasmagoric dream machine from visionary Chinese director Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, NYFF56) is an elusive yet monumental love letter to a century of cinema. Unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles, Resurrection is a cascade of imagery united by a luminous mythopoetic conceit: in a sci-fi-coded world where people have lost the desire to dream in the hopes of prolonging life, rogue “fantasmers” continue to stoke their imaginations and exist within unreality. From this magical premise, the film sends its ever-morphing protagonist (Jackson Yee) through a series of genres, from Méliès-inflected silent fantasy to wartime thriller to con-artist buddy picture to millennial vampire romance—the latter depicted in one of Bi’s customary, and ever astonishing, single takes. Even within genre parameters, the director never takes the road well-traveled, offering jolts and marvels around every corner. Resurrection is one of the most audacious and ambitious gifts for cinematic thrill-seekers in many a moon. A Janus Films release.
Romería
Carla Simón, 2025, Spain/Germany, 112m
Spanish, Catalan, and French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Amidst the jagged cliffs and summery, sun-kissed shores of Vigo, on the Atlantic coast of Galicia in Spain, 18-year-old Marina (the arresting Llúcia Garcia) has arrived on a deeply personal mission. Having lost both of her parents at a very young age, the orphaned young woman has set off on a journey to meet her paternal grandparents and extended family for the first time. While connecting with her affectionate, teeming new clan, Marina also is forced to reconcile with the past, negotiating her idealized memories of her parents and difficult truths that have been long buried. Alternating between 2004 and the early 1980s, evoked in hallucinatory, grainy flashbacks, Romería achingly dramatizes the processes of creating new memories and holding onto fleeting ones. Carla Simón (Alcarràs, NYFF60) proves again with this delicate, naturalistic, and poignantly autobiographical film that she is an essential voice in international cinema.
Rose of Nevada
Mark Jenkin, 2025, U.K., 114m
U.S. Premiere
The singular Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin (Enys Men, NYFF60) brings his distinctive and bold storytelling approach to his most expansive work yet. Again immersing the viewer in the uncanny environments of the small towns along the coast of Cornwall, Jenkin spins a sci-fi-tinged tale of dislocation and regeneration. In a tiny, sparsely populated fishing village, a boat that had been lost at sea 30 years ago, the Rose of Nevada, suddenly reappears portside, fully intact and without its long-missing crew. Two local neophyte fishermen desperate for work (George MacKay and Callum Turner) take jobs on the boat as it sets out for a good-luck return voyage. When they return, all is no longer what it once was. Shot on 16mm, this earthy, psychological portrait of a working-class community’s cyclical existence is an atmospheric plunge into the eerie.
The Secret Agent / O Agente Secreto
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025, Brazil/France/Netherlands/
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who has gifted us such breathtakers as Aquarius (NYFF54) and Bacurau (NYFF57), returns with a thrillingly unpredictable, empowering political fable about people swept up in forces beyond their control. A dynamic, shape-shifting epic set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, The Secret Agent earned him the Best Director award at Cannes. Wagner Moura was also deservedly honored as Best Actor at the festival for his magnetic performance as a widowed former university researcher whose life has been violently upended by the greed and vengeance of a government bureaucrat. On the run and living under an alias during the country’s military dictatorship, he tries to escape, while also reconnecting with the young son he had to leave behind. Even this brief description cannot fully prepare the viewer for the zigzagging subplots and delights of Mendonça’s eccentric and affectionate ode to the movies and the Brazil of his youth—and to maintaining individuality amid abuses of power. A NEON release.
Sentimental Value / Affeksjonsverdi
Joachim Trier, 2025, Norway/France/Denmark/Germany, 134m
Norwegian and English with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his beloved The Worst Person in the World (NYFF59), Renate Reinsve burrows to the steely core of Nora Borg, an acclaimed stage actress going through the first rumblings of a personal crisis after the death of her mother. She and her devoted therapist sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), are suddenly forced to confront long-suppressed elements of their past when their estranged movie-director father, Gustav (a wonderfully restrained Stellan Skarsgård, conveying a world of regret in the smallest of gestures) returns with a script he has written for Nora. After she refuses the role, Gustav turns to an American movie star (Elle Fanning), further complicating his own attempt at reconciliation. Trier’s insightful and captivating adult drama, which won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, furthers the writer-director’s piercing exploration of the frayed ties that bind us to one another and to our creative selves. A NEON release.
Sirât
Oliver Laxe, 2025, France/Spain, 115m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The glorious and forbidding Moroccan desert provides the backdrop for this extraordinary psychological journey from Oliver Laxe (Fire Will Come, NYFF57), a Galician filmmaker of startling ambition. Sergi López plays middle-aged Luis, whose worry over the disappearance of his daughter Mar has brought him, along with his young son, to Morocco. He believes she has fallen in with a group of nomadic thrill-seekers who are in pursuit of the next big rave in the desert. Tagging along with them in a makeshift caravan in the hopes he will find Mar, Luis is pushed toward emotional and physical extremes that extend far past his everyday comprehension. Even beyond the pulsing techno soundtrack and the majestic desolation of the landscape, Sirât (the title referring to the Islamic term for the razor-thin bridge between heaven and hell) creates a sensory experience of audacity and shock that touches the sublime. Joint winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A NEON release.
Sound of Falling / In die Sonne schauen
Mascha Schilinski, 2025, Germany, 149m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
You can feel the presence of ghosts in the rooms and environs of a rural farmhouse in German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski’s highly accomplished multigenerational saga. Sound of Falling skips back and forth through time, alighting on moments of both horror and grace across a century in the lives of four women—adolescent and adult—inhabiting the same unsettled spaces. Using a fragmentary, collage-like approach that unites characters from different eras, from the turn of the 20th century to the post–World World II era to the years of GDR rule and on to the present, Schilinski treats history like a constant haunting. Both sobering and dreamlike, with moments of genuine tenderness, her film bears witness to cycles of trauma and creates a devastating indictment of historical patriarchal abuse. Above all, it confirms the arrival of a major new talent, whose visionary narrative technique creates a fresh and striking cinematic grammar. Joint winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release.
Two Prosecutors
Sergei Loznitsa, 2025, France/Germany/Netherlands/
Russian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, NYFF48) is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov) to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world. A Janus Films release.
What Does That Nature Say to You / 그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니
Hong Sangsoo, 2025, South Korea, 108m
Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Over the winding course of one languorous day, a good-natured thirtysomething poet, Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), visits the suburban home of his girlfriend, Junhee (Kang Soyi), and is introduced to her parents (Kwon Haehyo and Cho Yunhee) and sister (Park Miso) for the first time. Dazzled by the size of the home and the beauty of its rural environs, Seoul-dweller Donghwa bonds with the family, especially the benevolent patriarch, for whom family, tradition, and filial devotion seem paramount. Yet as the hours drift by—and, of course, the makgeolli flows—Donghwa’s anxieties gradually surface. Combining the casual familiarity of a meet-the-parents scenario with the lo-fi visual experimentation of his recent work like In Water (NYFF61), Hong Sangsoo’s latest keeps revealing new emotional layers, finally offering a rich examination of economic anxiety and contemporary alienation. A Cinema Guild release.
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