Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who has gifted us such films as Aquarius (NYFF54) and Bacurau (NYFF57), returns with the thrillingly unpredictable The Secret Agent.

A dynamic, shape-shifting epic set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, The Secret Agent won Best Director award at Cannes. Wagner Moura was also deservedly honored as Best Actor at the festival for his magnetic performance as a widowed former university researcher whose life has been violently upended by the greed and vengeance of a government bureaucrat.

On the run and living under an alias during the country’s military dictatorship, he tries to escape, while also reconnecting with the young son he had to leave behind. Even this brief description cannot fully prepare the viewer for the zigzagging subplots and delights of Mendonça’s eccentric and affectionate ode to the movies and the Brazil of his youth—and to maintaining individuality amid abuses of power.

From director Kaouther Ben Hania comes The Voice Of Hind Rajab, a powerful new docudrama based on real events that is one of the most talked-about films of the 2025–26 festival and awards season.

January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A five-year old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.

The film premiered in competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and received a record-breaking standing ovation, one of the longest in festival history.

It’s as real as the feelings you feel.

This season, we honor the extraordinary legacy of Rob Reiner with some screenings of one of his most beloved films: the timeless and irresistibly funny fairy-tale adventure The Princess Bride.

When young Buttercup (Robin Wright in a luminous breakout performance) loses her true love Westley (Cary Elwes), she vows never to love again. Until fate, pirates, politics, giants, miracles, and rodents of unusual size intervene, of course. Told through the framing device of a grandfather (Peter Falk) reading a bedtime story to his skeptical grandson (Fred Savage), the film becomes a celebration of imagination itself.

Few filmmakers moved so effortlessly between genres as Rob Reiner. From coming-of-age classics to sharp-edged comedy to pulse-pounding thrillers, his filmography is a tour of American movie magic. But The Princess Bride remains his most universally cherished creation. 

Anytime. Anywhere. Anyone. 

We’re heading to the coldest corner of horror history with a short run of John Carpenter’s The Thing–now in a new 4K restoration! 

What begins as a simple rescue mission at a remote Antarctic outpost quickly dissolves into a nightmare of shape-shifting terror. When a mysterious organism infiltrates U.S. research station Outpost 31, it doesn’t attack its victims–it becomes them. With no way out and no way to tell who’s human, the team must confront an enemy capable of wearing any face…including their own.

What can be said about The Thing that hasn’t already been said? This 1982 masterpiece redefined paranoia horror, practical effects (by the incredible Ron Botin and his team), and the art of keeping an audience on the very edge of its seat in only a way that the master of horror, John Carpenter, can do.