NYFF Unveils Main Slate With Cannes Winner ‘It Was Just an Accident’

New York Film Festival, has unveiled the Main Slate of its 63^rd edition with prize winners from top fests led by Cannes from Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (Palme d’Or) and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (Grand Prix) to Oliver Laxe’s Sirât and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (joint Jury Prize winners), Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (Best Director, Best Actor), and Bi Gan’s Resurrection (Special Award).

From Berlin, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Silver Bear for best leading performance for Rose Byrne) and Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 (Silver Bear for best screenplay). Eleven Main Slate films are set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival including Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice.

NYFF’s 34 Main Slate films from 26 countries feature two world premieres, Gavagai by Ulrich Köhler and Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, eight North American and 13 U.S. premieres.

“​​Anyone who cares about film knows that it is an art in need of defending, like many of our core values today,” said NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. “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 the complexities of the world today from If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, to Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains, Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, Carla Simón’s Romería and Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You. Social and political concerns from economic precarity to life under authoritarian rule emerge in It Was Just an Accident, Kontinental ’25, No Other Choice, 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. The lineup features dramas, comedies, documentaries, thrillers, horror science fiction and several films that 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.

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, said the fest.

NYFF63 run from September 26 through October 13 at Lincoln Center, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens).

\As reported, the Opening Night selection is the North American premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt; the North American premiere of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother is the Centerpiece selection; and the world premiere of Is This Thing On? is the Closing Night selection.

The NYFF Main Slate selection committee is chaired by Lim, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen.

Main Slate

Opening Night: After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)

Centerpiece: Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)

Closing Night: Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper)

Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi)

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph)

Cover-Up (Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus)

The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler)

Duse (Pietro Marcello)

The Fence (Claire Denis)

Gavagai (Ulrich Köhler)

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)

I Only Rest in the Storm (Pedro Pinho)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach)

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)

Landmarks (Lucrecia Martel)

Late Fame (Kent Jones)

The Last One for the Road (Francesco Sossai)

The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold)

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)

Resurrection (Bi Gan)

Romería (Carla Simón)

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Sirât (Oliver Laxe)

Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)

Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)

What Does That Nature Say To You (Hong Sangsoo)

Festival descriptions:

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 specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has in recent years experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors. 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 television news network from a Black perspective. 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-gestating 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 over the course of 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/Romania, 211m
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 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 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/Netherlands/Denmark, 122m

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/Philippines/Taiwan, 160m

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. 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