Every note hits ⚡, I added a tiny insight on my profile 🎶.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with director Martin Scorsese, whose new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, is currently playing in theaters worldwide courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Apple Original Films. 

In this conversation with Scorsese, the director discusses his early '70s masterpiece, Mean Streets, co-starring his Killers of the Flower Moon supporting actor Robert De Niro. De Niro’s lasting partnership with Scorsese began with the filmmaker’s breakthrough third feature, an electrifying and unforgettable depiction of small-time thugs in Little Italy that established much of what was to come in both artists’ careers. Harvey Keitel, an alum of Scorsese’s student feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, is Charlie, an aspirant gangster seeking a middle ground between his profession and his efforts to lead a morally upright life. But his irrepressible friend Johnny Boy (De Niro) complicates matters with his anarchic behavior and debts to loan sharks. Raising hell as soon as he arrives on screen, De Niro is entirely at home as Scorsese’s young id of Mulberry Street—equal parts funny, ferocious, and frightening.

This conversation was moderated by former NYFF Associate Director of Programming, Scott Foundas.

#497 - Martin Scorsese on Mean Streets

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen, the two lead actors of the NYFF61 Main Slate selection Fallen Leaves from director Aki Kaurismäki.

Sweet-souled in story, scalpel-sharp in filmmaking precision, this enchanting love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart. Evoking dark-comic romances from his early career such as Shadows in Paradise and Ariel (NYFF27), the sardonic yet exquisitely melancholic Fallen Leaves devotes its wry, humane gaze to grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who commence an on-again, off-again relationship of extreme tentativeness, while seeking employment and stability. As with the greatest of Kaurismäki’s films, everyday details register as grand, meaningful cinematic gestures. This filmmaker has scrupulously carved another fictive universe out of a handful of specific, vivid locations, yet Fallen Leaves very much takes place in the world we’re living in, which makes its surrender to hope all the more affecting. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Finland’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. A MUBI release.

This conversation was moderated by The Wrap's Tomris Laffly.

#501 - Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen on Fallen Leaves

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 13th edition of the recently concluded Scary Movies with Rabbit Trap director Bryn Chainey. Rabbit Trap opens in select theaters this Friday, September 12, courtesy of IFC Films. 

This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle.

Joining the likes of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie among the great troubled marriages of genre cinema, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen disappear into the roles of Darcy and Daphne Davenport, a sound engineer and his experimental musician wife, freshly decamped from London and taking up residence in an isolated cottage deep in the Welsh countryside in search of creative renewal and acoustic inspiration. When the couple set about exploring their new environs, recording instruments in tow, Darcy stumbles upon a “fairy circle” that emits a strange, unidentifiable frequency; this odd discovery is followed closely by the appearance on their doorstep of an otherworldly child who claims to live nearby and is eager to befriend the Davenports. Soon the child has become a fixture in their household, alternately ingratiating himself and raising suspicions, and exposing unacknowledged rifts and unexamined secrets that threaten to wreak psychological and spiritual havoc in the lives of his makeshift adoptive parents. Bryn Chainey has crafted a sensorially vivid, darkly beguiling debut feature that’s steeped in regional folklore, harnessing the uncanny undercurrents of occult tradition and mythology to illuminate obscure, irreducible mysteries of the human condition that stubbornly resist the flattening certainties of modernity.

#605 - Bryn Chainey on Rabbit Trap

The Film at Lincoln Center Podcast is a weekly podcast that features in-depth conversations with filmmakers, actors, critics, and more.

#605 - Bryn Chainey on Rabbit Trap

Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

Recent comments

Sincere Dunbar

Related tracks