#661 - Yeon Sang-ho on Train to Busan

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 51st New York Film Festival in 2013 with The Immigrant director James Gray and lead actor Joaquin Phoenix, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In James Gray’s richly detailed period tragedy The Immigrant, set in a dusty, sepia-toned 1920s Manhattan, a young Polish immigrant (Marion Cotillard) is caught in a dangerous battle of wills with a shady burlesque manager (Joaquin Phoenix). James Gray returns to the New York Film Festival with this year’s Opening Night selection Paper Tiger. NYFF64 tickets will go on sale this Tuesday, Sept. 15 at noon, with pre-sale access for FLC members and Pass holders. Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from 2022 with the great British filmmaker Mike Leigh as he discusses his 1993 film: the NYFF31 selection Naked. Mike Leigh returns to the New York Film Festival with his final film, Tender Loving Care, at the 64th New York Film Festival this September and October. Secure your seats with an NYFF64 Pass at filmlinc.org/passes The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Mike Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life. The story concerns Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, awarded Best Actress at Cannes), a working-class white woman whose personal and interpersonal lives are transformed when she learns that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior. Created, like Leigh’s other films, after long months of intensely collaborative improvisation, Secrets & Lies is remarkable for its lived-in warmth and humor, and above all for its unflinching honesty in capturing the everyday evasions and deceptions that can define our lives.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with the directors and lead actress of Chronovisor, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Tyler Wilson. Chronovisor will be opening at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, September 4 with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/chronovisor Ahead of the film’s release, don’t miss Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor (taking place August 28–September 3), a curated anthology of features and shorts that brilliantly wring suspense, humor, and terror from seemingly undramatizable subjects. The series serves as a great preface to Chronovisor. View the full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/bibliomania Inspired by the true story of a “fake” invention, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s Chronovisor follows a Columbia professor deep into a Borgesian labyrinth of textual clues pointing to a time-travel device rumored to have been suppressed by the Vatican.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from Opening Night of Scary Movies, the popular horror festival that just concluded its spooky 14th edition, with Buddy director Casper Kelly, producers Rafi Margules & Tyler Davidson, and lead actress Delaney Quinn, moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Buddy will be opening in select theaters beginning August 28th, courtesy of Roadside Attractions. Viewers might know Casper Kelly as the mad-genius Adult Swim auteur responsible for 2014’s viral sensation Too Many Cooks, among other fever-dream spoofs of vintage pop-culture weirdness. With his first foray into big-screen feature filmmaking, Kelly embraces a larger canvas, applying his gleefully deranged sense of humor to the uncanny, oppressive cheerfulness of a ’90s soundstage-set kids’ TV show. The plucky young live-action characters of “It’s Buddy!” pass their days (or rather, episodes) laughing and learning in a brightly-hued analog playhouse—until the titular host, a charismatic orange unicorn, turns unexpectedly violent, and the show’s hermetically sealed fantasyland descends into gore-spattered mayhem. The result is an unhinged satire in which Kelly’s trademark flair for surreal black comedy reaches dazzling new heights, here abetted by a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that includes Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, and the voice-acting talents of Keegan Michael Key and Patton Oswalt. Now please enjoy the conversation with Buddy director Casper Kelly, producers Rafi Margules & Tyler Davidson, and lead actress Delaney Quinn, moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Scary Movies XIV was sponsored by MUBI.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations: first, a special programmer’s preview of Scary Movies XIV (the popular horror festival taking place at FLC through August 20) with FLC programmer Madeline Whittle, and then we transition to a conversation about the NYFF63 Main Slate selection Late Fame featuring director Kent Jones and cast members Willem Dafoe and Edmund Donovan, moderated by the great Martin Scorsese. Late Fame is currently playing at FLC. View showtimes and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/fame Scary Movies XIV is currently running through August 20. View showtimes and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/scary Scary Movies XIV is sponsored by MUBI, the streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with The Samurai and the Prisoner director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, moderated by film critic Siddhant Adlakha. The Samurai and the Prisoner is currently playing daily at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Janus Films. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/samurai In 16th-century Japan, Lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) turns against Oda, the warlord he once served, and is besieged inside his own castle, where inexplicable crimes begin to look to Murashige and his frightened advisors like signs of divine judgment. As Oda’s invading army tightens its grip outside and suspicion infiltrates the stronghold, Murashige is forced to consult Kanbei (Masaki Suda of Cloud), the cunning strategist he has locked in the dungeon, while his wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka) and his generals try to keep the court from devouring itself. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s stately jidaigeki—adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s best-selling, Naoki Prize–winning novel and selected at this year’s Cannes Film Festival—is a tense and metaphysical whodunit with the director’s characteristic philosophical overtones, bringing the winding investigations of Cure and Serpent’s Path into a meticulously composed period piece about the manipulation of terror.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2026 edition of the New York Asian Film Festival with Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho on the tenth anniversary of the film’s release, presented on this particular evening in a new 4K restoration. Ten years later, Train to Busan is still a monster with an angry engine. Yeon Sang-ho’s breakout transforms a zombie outbreak aboard the KTX into one of the great modern action-horror rides: brutal, sentimental, and made for packed movie theaters. Gong Yoo plays a self-absorbed, divorced fund manager taking his young daughter to Busan for her birthday. Before they leave Seoul, the outbreak reaches the station, a bitten passenger makes it onto the train, and the trip becomes a car-by-car fight for survival, with fear spreading almost as fast as the virus. Ma Dong-seok became an international fan favorite here as the passenger everyone wanted on their side.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of New Directors/New Films with Lost Chapters lead actress Ena Alvarado, moderated by ND/NF selection committee member Tyler Wilson. Lost Chapters is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Several Futures. When a letter nestled deep inside her father’s library details the writing of an unknown author, the young, ambitious bibliophile Ena sets off to find his work. Is the fabled book real? Did the author even exist? Where most movies might use this to kick off a treasure hunt, Lost Chapters opens a door to Venezuela’s rich cultural history and troubled present. A master class in composition and sound design that leaves no detail to chance, Lorena Alvarado’s feature debut achieves a remarkable sense of emotional warmth from her real-life sister, father, and grandmother, whose on-screen naturalism never once lapses into mannerism.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between legendary filmmaker Elaine May and producer Julian Schlossberg as they discuss a new 4K restoration of the 1976 feature Mikey and Nicky for the film's 50th anniversary this year. Elaine May’s third feature stands apart from the rest of her oeuvre in a number of ways, not least of which is the fact that it finds her working with another paradigm-shifting actor/director in John Cassavetes. Here Cassavetes plays opposite his frequent collaborator Peter Falk, the former playing a Philly gangster who has run afoul of his boss and gone underground due to a fresh contract on his life; the latter playing his childhood friend who—unbeknownst to him—is helping with the assassination plot. Set entirely across one anxious night, Mikey and Nicky remains an eminently potent, emotionally tremulous portrait of male friendship (and male betrayal) that crackles with the raw energy of three of the era’s most indelible and uncompromising American film artists working together.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2026 edition of New Directors/New Films with Do You Love Me director Lana Daher, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Dan Sullivan. Do You Love Me is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Icarus Films. A portrait of Lebanon assembled entirely from archival footage, Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me stitches together a poetic, expansive vision of a country fragmented by military, social, and economic turmoil, turning individual documents into collective memory. It is being hailed as one of the great cinematic discoveries of 2026.