Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

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.