On Film

Drawn from a treasure trove of footage, this Oscar-winning documentary explores a watershed moment for one of the world’s greatest athletes—an international spectacle that revealed the complexities of black identity.

Newly renovated and expanded, New York’s Museum of Modern Art integrates the story of cinema into its history of modernism.

Songbook

Hong Kong pop icon Faye Wong made her screen breakthrough in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, a film that also features her hypnotic cover version of the Cranberries’ hit “Dreams.”

Did You See This?

Maurice Pialat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Béla Tarr, Robert Eggers, and Disney’s most notorious feature make for a rough and tumble week.

Two series offer a wide range of thematic and historical perspectives on the Japanese capital.

Deep Dives

In one of his most underrated gems, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Bengali master explored the futility of words and the power of a look.

This month’s round includes new critical assessments of Bresson and Rohmer, Hollywood memoirs, and interviews with living legends.

Decades before the witch became a staple of horror cinema, Benjamin Christensen used this gothic figure to explore the oppression of women in different historical periods.

Integrating fact, fiction, objective reality, hallucination, and different levels of representation, this silent masterpiece invented what decades later would be known as the essay film.

After breaking through in Medium Cool, Forster floundered until Quentin Tarantino plucked him from undeserved obscurity nearly thirty years later.

Did You See This?

Highlighted this week are an alternative history, the state of the documentary, and the influence of Antonioni and Pialat.

Dark Passages

Pessimism, melancholy, and corruption come in with the tide in the greatest seaside noirs, including classics by Josef von Sternberg, Ingmar Bergman, and Marcel Carné.

The rights to Jonathan Lethem’s novel were secured twenty years ago, and now that film is finally rolling out, reviews are mixed.

This year’s program has taken NYFF attendees to Soviet Russia, Lebanon, Chile, back home to the Big Apple, and behind bars.

Daniel Hendler plays a man who freely admits that his trade is “the root of all evil.”

One Scene

The director of Audition and First Love dives into the haunting moral ambiguity of Akira Kurosawa’s crime masterpiece.

Critics respond to the New York Film Festival’s selection of new moving image art.

In their stillness and melancholy, the B-movie masterpieces of one of Hollywood’s most ingenious producers pushed against the official optimism of American culture during World War II.

Did You See This?

Artists’ and amateurs’ videos, Ida Lupino, and TIFF Cinematheque programmers’ notes all figure in this week’s round.

Charlie Chaplin earned a remarkable level of autonomy at the height of his career, but he also cultivated a team of loyal collaborators who helped him bring his dreams to the screen.

The director reunites with writer Jonathan Raymond and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt for a quiet tale set in the Oregon Territory of the 1820s.

Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield opens this year’s bounteous edition.

Retrospectives in New York and on the Criterion Channel mark the hundredth birthday of the pioneering filmmaker.

Veteran French director Bertrand Tavernier reflects on how one of his greatest mentors fused two seemingly contradictory influences—that of the Resistance and of American genre filmmaking—into a remarkably cohesive body of work.