Dead Man’s Wire. 2025. Directed by Gus Van Sant

Film

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Held on Thu, Nov 6, 2025, 7:00 p.m.

Followed by a conversation with Gus Van Sant

MoMA, Floor T1, Theater 1

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

Dead Man’s Wire. 2025. USA. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Courtesy Stefania Rosini SMPSP

Dead Man’s Wire. 2025. USA. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Screenplay by Austin Kolodney. With Bill Skarsgård, Colman Domingo, Al Pacino. DCP courtesy Row K Entertainment. 104 min.

Gus Van Sant is in peak form with this terrifically entertaining, true-life hostage caper, a throwback to Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and Vanishing Point in its portrayal of mad-as-hell Tony Kiritsis, who on February 8, 1977, attached a “dead man’s wire” to a sawed-off shotgun and kidnapped Richard Hall, the president of Meridian Mortgage, demanding justice for himself and other victims of the company’s predatory loans. Comparisons with the Luigi Mangione story are inevitable, but Kiritsis also comes from a long line of scheming, delusional “losers” in the Van Sant family tree, from Matt Dillon’s drugstore cowboy to Nicole Kidman’s fame-seeking, mariticidal TV reporter in To Die For.

Tickets are available to members at the Explore category and above beginning two weeks before each screening date. Additional tickets will be released to members and the general public one week before each screening date. Please note that space is extremely limited and tickets will be in high demand. Tickets can be reserved at moma.org/contenders beginning at 10:30 a.m. ET.

For the Contenders series, due to limited availability, members at the Explore category and above receive two free tickets per membership.

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This film accompanies The Contenders 2025.

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