The Electrifying Performances of Gene Hackman at Lincoln Center

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Previews

Published on Wednesday, 23 July 2025 15:03

Written by Brad Balfour

One of the greatest American actors, Gene Hackman’s work has spanned decades across the films of renowned directors. Now Film at Lincoln Center celebrates his work with Gene Hackman: A Week with the Gene Genie featuring 18 of his films. Running July 25 to 31, the series will be presented almost entirely on 35mm with films from Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Wes Anderson, Sydney Pollack, Mel Brooks, and more. Sometimes filled with swagger, sometimes a warm charm, or a violent temper, or all of the above, Hackman’s performances left a unique mark on cinema.

Films being shown are:

Bonnie and Clyde
Arthur Penn, 1967, U.S., 35mm, 111m
Arthur Penn’s explosive reinvention of the gangster film stunned audiences in 1967 with its tonal whiplash and operatic finale—giving the cinematic antihero, at the height of the counterculture, a new and unmistakably modern face. It also earned Hackman his first Oscar nomination. Set in the depths of the Great Depression, the film begins when small-town waitress Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) meets ex-con Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), and the pair hit the road on a crime spree that soon draws in Clyde’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck’s skittish wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their getaway driver C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard). Hackman cuts through the film’s mythic undertow with a performance that’s loud, funny, and just crazy enough to feel dangerous.
Friday, July 25 at 1:30pm
Thursday, July 31 at 9:00pm

The French Connection
William Friedkin, 1971, U.S., 35mm, 104m
Gene Hackman won his first Oscar as Popeye Doyle, a porkpie hat–wearing narcotics detective whose bravado masks a volatile, deeply compromised sense of justice. With Roy Scheider as his steadier partner, he barrels through a grimy, unvarnished New York in pursuit of a heroin pipeline—culminating in a car chase beneath Bensonhurst’s elevated subway that remains the genre’s benchmark few have crossed since. Modeled on real NYPD detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso (who granted Friedkin unprecedented access), The French Connection explodes the myth of the clean-cut cop, replacing square-jawed stoicism with brute obsession. Friedkin’s procedural, shot on the fly and seemingly without permits, is jittery, jarring, and impossible to replicate.
Friday, July 25 at 6:15pm
Tuesday, July 29 at 4:00pm

Cisco Pike
Bill L. Norton, 1971, U.S., 35mm, 95m
A portrait of L.A. burnout at the blurry end of the counterculture, Cisco Pike follows a washed-up musician (Kris Kristofferson, in his screen debut) coerced into one last drug deal by a desperate narcotics cop, played with a mixture of twitchy menace and weariness by Gene Hackman. Shot the same year as The French Connection but set on the opposite coast, the film trades New York grit for California drift, floating through a city sun-bleached and slack with disillusionment. Derided on release—Vincent Canby claimed it “took all the discipline [he] could muster not to walk out”—Cisco Pike now plays like a woozy dispatch from the last gasps of the ’60s, and an early glimpse of Hackman’s gift for channeling power into desperation.
Friday, July 25 at 4:00pm
Sunday, July 27 at 8:15pm

The Poseidon Adventure
Ronald Neame, 1972, U.S., 117m
Part religious parable, part disaster movie, all superior entertainment, The Poseidon Adventure turns New Year’s Eve into a fight for survival aboard a luxury liner flipped upside down by a rogue wave. Leading the climb through the capsized wreckage, Gene Hackman—by his own admission, doing it for the paycheck—still gives a performance of fierce conviction as a fists-first preacher whose crisis of faith plays out in real time. His brooding charisma and explosive self-sacrifice give the film its soul within a whirling spectacle of Oscar-winning effects: flooded ballrooms, fiery shafts, collapsing ceilings. Also starring Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, and, as the hapless captain, Leslie Nielsen (who would later lampoon his role in Airplane!).
Monday, July 28 at 6:15pm
Wednesday, July 30 at 1:30pm

Scarecrow
Jerry Schatzberg, 1973, U.S., 35mm, 112m
A wounded, boozy road trip through post-Vietnam America, Jerry Schatzberg’s Palme d’Or winner pairs Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in one of the great road movies of the 1970s. Bound for Pittsburgh with plans to open a car wash, gruff ex-con Max (Hackman) strikes up a wary bond with Lion (Pacino), a clowning, soft-hearted sailor en route to reunite with his estranged wife and child in Detroit. Hackman—who called this his favorite role—channels a combustible masculinity that slowly gives way to something more fragile, as Max is forced to confront the limits of his anger and the tenderness it hides. Shot with golden-hour melancholy by Vilmos Zsigmond, Scarecrow captures a frayed American landscape in motion.
Saturday, July 26 at 8:30pm
Tuesday, July 29 at 1:30pm

The Conversation
Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, U.S., 113m
At the height of his stardom, Gene Hackman turned inward for one of his most enigmatic roles: Harry Caul, a reclusive surveillance expert hired to record a seemingly mundane conversation that slowly unravels him. As he pores over fragments of sound, professional detachment gives way to guilt, obsession, and the creeping fear that he’s complicit in something he can’t fully grasp. A kind of sonic cousin to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, The Conversation is a taut, formally exact thriller of paranoia and moral confusion, shaped by David Shire’s minimalist score and meticulously engineered sound design that vibrates with lonely dread. A landmark of defeatist ’70s American cinema, with Hackman at his most restrained and riveting.
Friday, July 25 at 8:30pm
Wednesday, July 30 at 4:00pm

Young Frankenstein
Mel Brooks, 1974, U.S., 106m
“Cigars!”
Saturday, July 26 at 1:00pm

Night Moves
Arthur Penn, 1975, U.S., 35mm, 100m
As Harry Moseby, a washed-up football player turned L.A. private eye, Gene Hackman gives one of his most piercing performances—combative, searching, quietly falling apart. What begins as a routine missing-person case drifts off course, dragging Moseby from Hollywood backlots to the swamps of the Florida Keys, through dead ends, bitter affairs, and his own eroding sense of control. Directed with simmering precision by Arthur Penn (his second collaboration with Hackman), Night Moves is less a whodunit than a why-bother: a sun-drunk, morally spent neo-noir steeped in the creeping sense that everything means less than it should.
Sunday, July 27 at 6:00pm
Monday, July 28, 1:15pm

Eureka
Nicolas Roeg, 1983, U.K., 35mm, 130m
Loosely inspired by the real-life murder of tycoon Sir Harry Oakes, Nicolas Roeg’s fever-dream epic begins in the frozen goldfields of the 1920s Yukon, where prospector Jack McCann (Gene Hackman) strikes it unimaginably rich, then leaps two decades ahead to his private Caribbean island, where wealth has curdled into paranoia. Pressured by mobsters, exploited by his own family, and stalked by a sense of dread, McCann comes undone in a story that channels Citizen Kane as much as it anticipates There Will Be Blood. With a staggering cast that includes Rutger Hauer, Mickey Rourke, Joe Pesci, and Joe Spinell, alongside Roeg’s signature shifts in tone and tempo, Eureka is a visionary descent into frontier capitalism and a fracturing psyche—anchored at every turn by Hackman’s blistering, haunted performance.
Sunday, July 27 at 3:15pm

Hoosiers
David Anspaugh, 1986, U.S., 35mm, 114m
Few sports films land with the clarity, grit, and emotional lift of Hoosiers. Gene Hackman brings flinty, lived-in authority to Norman Dale, a disgraced coach seeking a second act in 1950s Indiana, where basketball is practically a religion. Directed with unflashy conviction by David Anspaugh and shot in real Hoosier gyms, this underdog story favors restraint over bombast, with Jerry Goldsmith’s elegiac score and a quietly shattering turn by Dennis Hopper as a washed-up assistant adding unexpected weight. At its core is one of Hackman’s most cherished performances—contained, weathered, and quietly magnetic—in a film that’s less about victory than the long, uncertain work of earning it.
Monday, July 28 at 8:45pm

Another Woman
Woody Allen, 1988, U.S., 35mm, 81m
Too often sidelined in both Hackman’s and Allen’s filmographies, Another Woman is a taut, interior psychodrama with a quietly accumulating force. Gena Rowlands plays a philosophy professor whose tightly ordered life begins to crack when she overhears another woman’s (Mia Farrow) therapy sessions—an intrusion that opens a floodgate of buried regrets. In a key supporting role, Gene Hackman brings warmth and melancholy as the ex-lover she lets slip away—a turn so quietly affecting it throws the film’s emotional geometry into stark relief. Shot by Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist in a palette of softened light and muted space, Another Woman is a haunting study in emotional containment and what seeps through.
Tuesday, July 29 at 6:30pm
Thursday, July 31 at 1:30pm

Mississippi Burning
Alan Parker, 1988, U.S., 35mm, 128m
Few studio films from the late ’80s hit harder than Mississippi Burning, Alan Parker’s incendiary civil rights thriller loosely based on the 1964 murders of three activists in Mississippi. Gene Hackman is ferocious as a former small-town sheriff turned FBI agent, paired with Willem Dafoe’s buttoned-up idealist as they square off against the Klan in a town roiling with hate. Shot on location in Mississippi and Alabama and charged with a volatile sense of urgency, the film plays like a moral powder keg—bravura genre filmmaking pitched at full fury. Hotly debated on release for centering white investigators in a Black freedom struggle, it nonetheless helped spark a wave of Hollywood reckonings with American racism. Gripping, provocative, and rarely revived for the big screen today.
Sunday, July 27 at 12:30pm

Unforgiven
Clint Eastwood, 1992, U.S., 35mm, 131m
Clint Eastwood’s masterwork reloaded the Western for a new era and gave Gene Hackman one of his most emblematic roles. As Big Whiskey’s sadistic sheriff, he burns with folksy menace and corruption, the perfect foil to Eastwood’s hollowed-out ex-killer, drawn reluctantly into violence alongside a quietly devastating Morgan Freeman. Winner of four Academy Awards including best picture, director, and supporting actor for Hackman, Unforgiven strips the genre of its romance and finds something starker in its place. Shot in windswept Alberta and scored with mournful restraint, it plays like a last word on the American gunslinger, and the brutal cost of every act of violence. “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Saturday, July 26 at 5:45pm
Monday, July 28 at 3:30pm

The Firm
Sydney Pollack, 1993, U.S., 35mm, 154m
This sleek, paranoia-laced adaptation of John Grisham’s bestseller helped redefine the legal thriller in ’90s Hollywood. Tom Cruise is Mitch McDeere, an ambitious young attorney lured to a high-paying firm in Memphis only to discover it’s a front for organized crime, where clients never leave and whistleblowers disappear. Gene Hackman, fresh off his Oscar for Unforgiven, is quietly mesmerizing as his mentor: a charming, compromised senior partner whose moral seams begin to split. With an uncredited script polish by Robert Towne and a razor-sharp supporting cast (Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Jeanne Tripplehorn), The Firm is an impeccable blend of suspense, white-collar panic, and peak ’90s studio swagger.
Thursday, July 31 at 6:00pm

Crimson Tide
Tony Scott, 1995, U.S., 35mm, 116m
A nuclear crisis, an incomplete launch order, and two men locked in a battle of wills aboard a U.S. missile sub—Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide is a pressure-cooker thriller where the fate of the world hinges on chain of command. Gene Hackman is all bark, bite, and brinkmanship as Captain Frank Ramsey, who demands a missile strike on Russian rebels threatening nuclear war; Denzel Washington is his principled XO, urging restraint until the order is confirmed. As the USS Alabama veers toward mutiny, the film crackles with moral ambiguity and star-powered tension. With a thunderous Hans Zimmer score and a Tarantino-punched-up script full of comic-book debates and real-world stakes, Crimson Tide stands as a late high-water mark of the military thriller era.
Tuesday, July 29 at 8:30pm

Twilight
Robert Benton, 1998, U.S., 35mm, 94m
Old secrets don’t die quietly in Robert Benton’s moody, late-’90s neo-noir with Paul Newman as a retired private eye living in quiet exile on the Hollywood estate of his longtime friends, fading movie stars Jack (Gene Hackman) and Catherine (Susan Sarandon). Years after being shot in a family dispute involving their runaway daughter (Reese Witherspoon), Harry survives on their guilt and generosity until a routine errand pulls him into a blackmail plot that dredges up a decades-old disappearance. Newman is indelible in one of his final leading roles, matched by Hackman in a sly, slippery turn as a man with too much to lose. Less a whodunnit than a meditation on aging, loyalty, and the shadows cast by old fame, Twilight is a slow-burn sunset noir—gorgeous, grown-up, and quietly devastating.
Wednesday, July 30 at 8:45pm

Heist
David Mamet, 2001, U.S., 35mm, 107m
One of Gene Hackman’s final performances finds the legendary actor in razor-sharp form as Joe Moore, a professional thief whose luck, and patience, is running out. After a botched job lands him on a security tape, his fence (Danny DeVito) withholds payment, his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) may be playing both sides, and he’s strong-armed into pulling one last score with a crew he doesn’t fully trust. Written and directed by master of misdirection David Mamet, Heist is a taut, deceptively lean throwback layered with crackling dialogue, sleight-of-hand twists, and hard-boiled cool. The ensemble is impeccable—Delroy Lindo as Joe’s rock-steady partner, Sam Rockwell as a live-wire wildcard—and Hackman radiates the kind of grizzled command that makes every move feel earned.
Wednesday, July 30 at 6:30pm

The Royal Tenenbaums
Wes Anderson, 2001, U.S., 35mm, 110m
As Royal Tenenbaum, the estranged patriarch of a once-extraordinary family of child prodigies now undone by failure, betrayal, and arrested development, Gene Hackman is riotously charming and unmistakably human, anchoring the film’s deadpan melancholy with blustery warmth. When Royal fakes a terminal illness to reunite with his wife (Anjelica Huston) and their now-grown children (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson), what follows is a winter’s tale of dysfunction, reconciliation, and elusive grace. With a peerless supporting cast (Danny Glover, Bill Murray) and a pitch-perfect blend of New York wistfulness and Andersonian symmetry, The Royal Tenenbaums is a lovingly etched comedy about failure, forgiveness, and the long road back to family. One of the defining films of 21st-century American cinema, and Hackman’s unforgettable bow.

Saturday, July 26 at 3:15pm
Thursday, July 31 at 3:30pm

To learn more, go to: https://www.filmlinc.org/

Gene Hackman: A Week with the Gene Genie
July 25 - 31, 2025

Film at Lincoln Center - Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023

• < Prev
• Next >