Widely hailed as one of this century’s great directorial debuts, Jordan Peele’s era-defining Get Out injected new life into horror with its witty subversion of racial politics and elitist social mores. Two years later, his wildly entertaining Us plumbed everything from isolationist fears and late-capitalist power structures to the rich lineage of the doppelgänger motif and home-invasion thrillers. NOPE, his celebrated latest from 2022, might be his most stylistically adventurous yet: a big and kinetic, yet tightly controlled, Western-inflected UFO movie probing America’s legacy of exploitation and the spectacle of cinema itself. Indeed, few filmmakers working today are as skilled as Peele at leveling real-time social critiques within the look and textures of high-concept genre cinema, mixing the uncanny with the personal, and turning even the most bizarre into essential truths about living in the United States today. Join Film at Lincoln Center in the new year as we celebrate NOPE, featuring 70mm screenings with Peele in person and more: Peele has also handpicked an assortment of films that serve as a guide to understanding NOPE’s thematic interests—from Blaxploitation and America’s mythologized West to the moral implications of image-taking and child stardom.