It’s January, which means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches, interviews, and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2024 edition. For the next week, we’ll be gathering the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast. On today’s episode, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish is joined by critic and programmer Monica Castillo (The Jacob Burns Film Center) and critics Robert Daniels (RogerEbert.com) and Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker) for a documentary-centric discussion of festival selections including DEVO, Eno, Power, Union, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, along with the narrative feature Kneecap. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2024/

It’s January, which means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches, interviews, and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2024 edition. For the next week, we’ll be gathering the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast. On today’s episode, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Justin Chang (Los Angeles Times), Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker), and FC contributor Madeline Whittle to discuss festival selections A Different Man, A Real Pain, Sujo, Good One, and Black Box Diaries. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2024/

It’s January, which means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches, interviews, and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2024 edition. For the next week, we’ll be gathering the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast. Today, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Abby Sun (Documentary), Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker), and FC contributor Madeline Whittle to discuss festival selections War Game, Realm of Satan, Love Lies Bleeding, Presence, Stress Positions, Girls Will Be Girls, and more. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2024/

It’s January, which means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches, interviews, and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2024 edition. For the next week, we’ll be gathering the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast. Today, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Robert Daniels (rogerebert.com), Guy Lodge (Variety), and FC contributor Madeline Whittle to discuss their recent viewing, including I Saw the TV Glow, It’s What’s Inside, Between the Temples, Love Me, and Brief History of a Family. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2024/

It’s January, which means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches, interviews, and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2024 edition. For the next week, we’ll be gathering the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast. To kick things off, Film Comment co-editor Devika Girish invited critics Lovia Gyarkye (The Hollywood Reporter) and Guy Lodge (Variety) to chat about the films we caught during the first few days of the fest—including Freaky Tales, Handling the Undead, Skywalker: A Love Story, Girls State, God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, and Ghostlight. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2024/

More than thirty years ago, director Nancy Savoca premiered what the New York Times described as a “miracle” of a film. Household Saints was adapted from a novel by Francine Prose about three generations of an Italian-American family navigating faith and modernity in post–World War II New York City. The movie brought together an incredible ensemble cast, including Tracey Ullman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lili Taylor, and Michael Imperioli, and told a strange and charming tale of fanatically headstrong women who were unlike any other characters to grace the movie screens of the 1990s. It all begins when Joseph, a handsome butcher (D’Onofrio), wins the stubborn Catherine (Ullman) as his wife in a game of pinochle. The first half of the film follows their relationship, which is plagued by the superstitions of Joseph’s bitter mother, while the second half follows their daughter, Teresa (Taylor), who becomes consumed by a saintly devotion to a Catholic God. Last year, after a long and arduous effort to recover and restore the movie’s materials, a new restoration premiered at the New York Film Festival, and introduced contemporary audiences to what still feels like a cinematic novelty. With a restored Household Saints in theaters now, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish interviewed Savoca and her star, Vincent D’Onofrio, to talk about making the film, how they infused it with their own Italian-American upbringing, and the daring mix of sex and religion that the movie explores.

Every January, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute like to take stock of holiday multiplex offerings with an episode they call "New Year, New Releases." For the 2024 edition, they invited FC podcast veteran Alissa Wilkinson, staff critic at the New York Times, and first-time guest Robert Daniels, an editor at RogerEbert.com. They started off this year’s haul with a pair of sports movies about bad dads and the perils of masculinity: The Iron Claw, directed by Sean Durkin, about the Von Erich family of pro-wrestlers; and Ferrari, by Michael Mann, about Enzo Ferrari, and his F1 racing ambitions. Then they discussed the new book-to-movie-to-stage-to-movie adaptation, The Color Purple, and The Book of Clarence, a befuddling Jesus comedy starring Lakeith Stanfield.

Last night, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish headed a panel of special guests—Bilge Ebiri (critic, Vulture), and Amy Taubin (critic and FC contributing editor)—for a real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate) about the films as they were unveiled—and now it’s here in Podcast form, for your home-listening pleasure. Consider it a holiday gift from us to you, our loyal listeners. Read the full list, plus Best Undistributed Films, individual ballots, and more, here: https://www.filmcomment.com/best-films-of-2023/

In the epigraph to his new book, writer-slash-film programmer-slash-performance artist Stanley Schtinter succinctly describes his project: “Last Movies is a dedication to the absence of choice, to chance. If there is any bias in the cast-list it is a bias coded into the tell-ing of the first century of cinema (that I parasitise); the result, a forensic of the last earthly dance of a star, and the pause they took (if indeed they did) to catch a movie.” Conceived of as both a writing project and an epic durational film program, Last Movies explores the seemingly morbid subject of the final films watched by a selection of twentieth century luminaries. Delving into the lives and ultimate viewings of figures from Franz Kafka to John F. Kennedy to Kurt Cobain to the Heaven’s Gate cult, the book maps a strange and surprising cultural history from a seemingly arbitrary scatter plot. Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Schtinter and critic Erika Balsom, who wrote the book’s forward, to discuss the many layers of Last Movies, how the project is actually life-affirming, why the author dressed up like a cop for a recent Q&A in London, and much more. Last Movies is available now from Tenement Press: https://tenementpress.com/Last-Movies

This year’s Berlinale saw the filmmaking debut of acclaimed philosopher Paul B. Preciado with the feature, Orlando, My Political Biography. Born in Spain and based in France, Preciado is the author of a number of groundbreaking texts about gender and sexuality—including his 2008 work of "auto-theory," Testo Junkie, in which Preciado weaves reflections on his experience of taking testosterone with ruminations on how the body and its desires are formulated, controlled, and regulated by society. Precaido’s first film is as much of an exuberant formal invention as that book was. He was invited to make a documentary about his life, and instead, enlisted a diverse ensemble of trans individuals to interpret their lives through the text of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography, which details the centuries-spanning adventures of an aristocrat who magically changes gender overnight. Blurring the boundaries between self and other, documentary and fiction, fantasy and reality, and past and present, Preciado crafts a work that explodes binaries not only in content, but also in form. On today's episode, Film Comment editor Devika Girish interviews Preciado about the making of Orlando, My Political Biography, his decision to make a collective portrait rather than a biopic, and about the violence that cinema has inflicted on trans people across history—and how we can use moving images to pave the path for a different future. Orlando, My Political Biography is currently in theaters.

After a three-year hiatus induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival returned this year with a new curatorial team and a robust lineup of independent and art-house work from all over South Asia and beyond. One of the major international film festivals in the region, MAMI (as it is colloquially known) is a unique combination of corporate glitz and die-hard indie cinephilia. Sponsored in large part by Reliance Industries, the company owned and run by the richest family in India, and boasting major Bollywood figures on its board, the festival is nevertheless an oasis for formally and politically bold filmmaking in a cultural landscape dominated by commercial blockbusters and constrained by censorship policies. Devika attended the festival for the first time this year, as did curator and Film Comment contributor Inney Prakash. On today’s episode, they discuss their experience in Mumbai and some of the highlights of the South Asia selection, including The World Is Family by Anand Patwardhan, Against the Tide by Sarvnik Kaur, Which Colour? by Shahrukhkhan Chavada, a program of short films by Amit Dutta, and more.

Midway through the new documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, actor and singer Billy Porter says something that distills one of the film’s major themes: “In the face of insurmountable challenges, sometimes simply existing is a revolutionary act.” The film, directed by the multi-hyphenate filmmaker Lisa Cortés, tells the story of one of the great American artists, a global celebrity whose simple existence as a Queer Black man was a direct challenge to the status quo. A studied deep dive into the archive, filled with incendiary performances and biographical detail, I Am Everything is also a challenge to pop music history, and an effort to finally afford Little Richard his place as both the progenitor of rock ’n’ roll and a groundbreaking cultural force unto himself. Film Comment’s Clinton Krute spoke with Cortés about the contradictory nature of a man who swung between libertine impulses and religious conviction his entire life, how she reads his work and life as a utopian and cosmic project, and her own remarkable and varied career in the entertainment industry.

It’s once again that time of year when ghosts, ghouls, and goblins are on the prowl. That’s right: it’s Halloween. And as much as we are scared to admit it, that means it’s also time for another Halloween Hangover episode of the Film Comment Podcast, where co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute confront one of their greatest fears—horror movies—with the help of some masters of the macabre. For this year’s festivities, they invited two horror experts to inflict some fear—FC contributor Nicholas Russell, and Clyde Folley, curator of the ’90s Horror series currently haunting the Criterion Channel. The two selected a pair of freaky favorites: Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, an early-’90s remake of the classic sci-fi chiller, and Michael Powell’s 1960 serial killer masterpiece, Peeping Tom. Where Powell’s film lived up to its reputation as an endlessly fascinating text, rich with commentary on the inherent violence of visual culture, Ferrara’s streamlined variation on an oft-told tale opened up surprising questions about identity, family, and conformity. Listen to the end for some bonus, bone-chilling picks!

The 61st New York Film Festival closed up shop last weekend, which means that it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute convened an all-star team of critics—Molly Haskell, Adam Nayman, and Kelli Weston—for a spirited wrap-up discussion about the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF60 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discuss and debate Todd Haynes’s May December, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Thien An Pham’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, and and many other noteworthy selections. Find all of our coverage of NYFF61 here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/nyff/nyff-2023/

“Every film is a documentary of its own making,” Jacques Rivette famously said, pointing to the mix of fabrication and truth that lies at the heart of every movie. As images increasingly permeate our lives, these questions are ever more complex. What constitutes truth when the camera intervenes? How do we decide to accept—or question—what we see? Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined on stage at the 61st New York Film Festival by World Records editor Jason Fox and NYFF61 filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts), Rosine Mbakam (Mambar Pierrette), and Frederick Wiseman (Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros) for a discussion about the ways in which filmmakers engage both documentary and narrative techniques to invite and challenge viewers’ trust in images. This panel expanded on the ideas in Trust Issues, a new audio series by World Records. Watch a video of this event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cH06adWHQs

As this year’s historic strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have shaken up the entertainment industry and film festivals, they’ve brought to the forefront a truth sometimes elided by cinema’s glamorous facade: that movies are made by workers. In a business increasingly dominated by massive corporations, what is the role—and value—of the labor of acting, writing, and other craftswork? This panel—moderated by Film Comment editor Devika Girish and FC contributor Madeline Whittle—brought together Lisa Takeuchi Cullen (President, WGA East), Rebecca Damon (SAG-AFTRA Executive Director, New York Local), and Alissa Wilkinson (Senior Correspondent, Vox) for a deep-dive into the circumstances that led to the strikes, the needs of actors and writers working in Hollywood today, and the history and contemporary role of labor organizing in the American film industry.

“To be Black is the greatest fiction of my life. Yet I’m still bound to its myth.” The filmmaker and photographer RaMell Ross shares this excerpt from an artist statement in a conversation with Jason Fox, the editor of nonfiction journal World Records, in a new audio series called Trust Issues. Produced by World Records, the series explores how images can both bring us together and alienate us from each other. The first episode, featuring RaMell, focuses on the historical role of nonfiction cinema in teaching us to see, inhabit, and police race. How do documentaries both reflect and actively reshape the lived experiences of people of color? Last week, at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine, Devika moderated a panel discussion with Jason, RaMell, and Milisuthando Bongela (director of CIFF selection Milisuthando) expanding on some of the core ideas of the series—including the responsibilities of the maker, the critic, and the viewer in how nonfiction images construct and reinforce ideas of racial difference. Listen to the end for a surprise cameo from the filmmaker Kirsten Johnson! P.S.: This conversation was recorded live with an audience. Please excuse the occasionally spotty audio quality!

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 7 to 17. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our fourth (and final!) podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Lovia Gyarkye (The Hollywood Reporter) and Alex Barasch (The New Yorker) to talk about festival selections Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour, Ellen Kuras's Lee, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, and many more.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 7 to 17. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our second podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by local critics Adam Nayman (The Ringer, Cinema Scope, and elswhere) and Saffron Maeve (Cinema Scope and elsewhere). They kick things if with a focus on Canadian films, including Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils, Chloé Robichaud’s Days of Happiness, and Michael Snow’s Standard Time, before expanding their scope to encompass Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Pedro Almódovar’s Strange Way of Life, and Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast. Watch this space for more podcasts from TIFF 2023.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 7 to 17. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our second podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Adam Nayman (The Ringer, Cinemascope, and elswhere)and Chloe Lizotte (MUBI Notebook and elsewhere) to talk about festival selections Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Evil Does Not Exist, Dumb Money, and The Boy and the Heron. Watch this space for more podcasts from TIFF 2023.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 7 to 17. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our first podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch to talk about Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, The Human Surge 3, Laberint Sequences, God Is a Woman, and The Mother of All Lies. Watch this space for more podcasts from TIFF 2023!

Film Comment just happens to be next-door neighbors with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, whose film and video collection is filled with treasures. On August 31, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited our neighbors over for a special, Labor Day–themed screening of 16mm shorts from the NYPL’s collection. The program was curated by Elena Rossi-Snook, the film specialist at the library, who chose four fascinating shorts that captured microhistories of labor organizing across different industries in the ’60s and ’70s. The films offered a window into the history of the American labor movement and also spoke to the worker struggles currently roiling the film industry. To dig into the films and these themes, Devika and Clint sat down after the screening with Elena and filmmaker Brett Story, who reflected on her own experience making a forthcoming film about unionizing efforts at an Amazon facility in Staten Island. For more on the films screened, check out the event page, here: https://www.filmlinc.org/events/film-comment-live-labor-day-with-the-nypl/

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Film Comment participated in a fascinating experimental event called “A Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence.” Curated by Rafael Dernbach in collaboration with the Università della Svizzera italiana and Locarno Film Festival BaseCamp, the event began at sunset on August 9 and ended at sunrise on August 10, and involved a series of talks and workshops about the many connotations of “intelligence,” how A.I. is changing our relationships to ourselves and the world, and how dreams may offer up keys to our future. The event was co-hosted by Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish. This week’s episode is an excerpt from her moderating shift, featuring a conversation with A.I. scholar Andrea Rizzoli and critic Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts, about the history of artificial intelligence, and its limitations and possibilities vis-à-vis art. Check out last week’s episode for another excerpt from “A Long of Dreaming About the Future of Intelligence,” featuring Stanford University scholar Shane Denson on the brave new world of “post-cinema.”

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Film Comment participated in a fascinating experimental event called “A Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence.” Curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Università della Svizzera italiana, the event began at sunset on August 9 and ended at sunrise on August 10, and involved a series of talks and workshops about the many connotations of “intelligence,” how A.I. is changing our relationships to ourselves and the world, and how dreams may offer up keys to our future. The event was co-hosted by Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish. This week’s episode is an excerpt from her moderating shift, featuring a lecture and Q&A with Shane Denson, a Stanford University scholar who explores the terrain of “post-cinema”—the brave new world of digital images untethered to classical notions of time, space, and reality. Check back next week for another episode from “A Long of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence,” featuring A.I. scholar Andrea Rizzoli and critic Kevin B. Lee.

Over the course of his storied career, filmmaker Steve James has delved into the many ways in which individuals—frequently residents of his native Chicago—are subject to the whims of history, society, and life itself. Whether detailing the struggles of young athletes in his watershed 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, the heroic efforts of anti-violence activists in 2011’s The Interrupters, or the daily experience of high schoolers in his 2018 series America to Me, James has combined sharp social analysis with striking warmth and sympathy for his subjects. His latest documentary, A Compassionate Spy, might seem on the surface to be a departure. The film tells the story of Ted Hall, a physics prodigy who, at age 18, was invited to join the Manhattan Project. Perceptive beyond his years, Hall found himself haunted by the implications of his work and, in 1944, made the decision to share nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union. As compelling as this tale of espionage is, James’s film becomes, in the director’s words, “a love story,” with Ted’s widow Joan taking center stage as she recounts their life together, sharing the burden of her husband’s secret. For today’s episode, Film Comment editor Clinton Krute called up the director to discuss the impetus behind A Compassionate Spy, the film’s surprising use of recreations, and how Ted Hall’s fascinating story might complement—or offer a counter to—the themes of a certain summer blockbuster about atomic weapons. (Hint: it’s not Barbie.)

If you’re a follower of contemporary world cinema, chances are, you’re a fan of Franz Rogowski. Known for his distinctive screen presence and extraordinary physicality, the German actor has blazed a trail through some of the most well-regarded movies of the last few years, including Michel Haneke’s Happy End, Christian Petzold’s Transit and Undine, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, Angela Schanelec’s I Was At Home, But…, to name only a few. His latest role is as the lead in Passages, a new film by Ira Sachs. Rogowski stars Tomas, a diva-esque filmmaker and very indecisive queer man, who vacillates erratically between his husband, played by Ben Whishaw, and a new love interest, played by Adele Exarchopoulos. It’s a role of chaotic contradictions that seems made for Rogowski: Tomas is self-absorbed, brilliant, repulsive, sexy, vulnerable, and malicious all at once—and Rogowski brings to him a truly unselfconscious, combustible sense of humanity. For today’s episode, Film Comment co-editor Devika Girish called up Rogowski on Zoom to chat about his inspirations as an actor and how he crafted his firecracker performance in Passages. Please note that because Rogowski is not a member of SAG-AFTRA, he is not currently on strike.

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Oppenheimer, a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the key leaders of the Manhattan Project, has sold out movie theaters all over the country. With its three-hour runtime, notoriously large 70mm IMAX reels, and star-stuffed cast, it is nothing less than an epic. The film spans nearly four decades, from Oppenheimer’s days as a physics student in Europe, to his time teaching at UC Berkeley during World War II, to his days developing the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Laboratory, and, subsequently, to the investigation into his possible communist ties during the McCarthy era. Amid all that plot is plenty of awe-inspiring spectacle and musings on the ethics of war and the perils of genius. On today’s episode, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch for a discussion about Nolan’s opus. The group was evenly split between fans and skeptics, and the result was a lively conversation—which, of course, is what the movies are all about.

Last February, the magazine The New Republic invited a host of film critics to participate in a new poll, curated by esteemed critic and longtime Film Comment contributor J. Hoberman: a list of the 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time. Not best or favorite political films, mind you—most significant. The New Republic unveiled the results of the poll on June 22, along with an essay by Hoberman analyzing the results. Topped by The Battle of Algiers, the final list is both a fascinating snapshot of what political cinema means to critics today, and the limits of such exercises in ascertaining consensus. On today’s podcast, we invited Jim for a deep-dive into the impetus behind the poll; the surprises, disappointments, and notable entries in the list, from The Birth of a Nation to La Chinoise to Hour of the Furnaces to All the President's Men; and how notions of political cinema have changed over time. For show notes and a list of the movies discussed, go to filmcomment.com/podcast.

Musician, filmmaker, and  wearer of (many) hats Boots Riley has a new series streaming on Amazon Prime Video, called I’m a Virgo. It’s as bizarre, serious, and original as his breakout feature, 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, a workplace comedy set in a telemarketing office that unfurls as a scathing satire of life under late capitalism. I’m a Virgo is also about the urgent need to redistribute wealth, though it begins as a strange, sweet coming-of-age tale about a 13-foot-tall Black man named Cootie, played by Jharrel Jerome. Having been raised in hiding by his protective aunt and uncle, Cootie stumbles, in the series's opening, into a world of drugs, sex, and radical politics with a ragtag crew of youngsters, navigating an Oakland that is only slightly more dystopian than reality. Riley draws on a wide range of sources, from comic books and superhero movies to T.V. commercials and socialist propaganda, for a tale that is as much a furious critique of the failures of capitalism as it is a rollicking joyride. (There’s also cameo from Slavoj Zizek.)  Riey joined us for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on the CIA funding of Abstract Expressionism, the history of the Communist Party of the USA, the Writers Guild of America strike, and the challenge of making politically engaged art in an industry dominated by corporations.

This week, we take a peek into the world of Robert M. Rubin, a New York–based collector of film scripts. An architectural and art historian by trade, Bob began buying rare and historical significant screenplays seriously in the 1990s, and has now amassed an archive of what he calls “exformation”—that is, the ephemera that was often discarded in the process of moviemaking, but now reveals hidden and forgotten histories.  Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Bob and bibliographer Erin McGuirl, who manages the collection, to leaf through some of these treasures. These include variant copies of classics like Citizen Kane and Notorious, editor Louis Lombardo’s working scripts for Robert Altman’s films, Ben Gazzara’s personal copies of the script for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and much more. They delved into the ways in which this material—with its pictures, notations, and scribbles—challenges our understanding of auteurism and sheds light on the crucial roles played by script supervisors, secretaries, and writers in Hollywood. Stay tuned for supplementary photos of the collection, included in this week’s edition of The Film Comment Letter. Subscribe here: https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

You may know Trinh T. Minh-ha from her groundbreaking films, like Reassemblage (1982) and Sur Name Viet Given Name Nam (1989); from her foundational books, like Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality on Feminism (1989) and When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (1991); or her wide-ranging scholarship and multimedia projects, which have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide. In a body of work spanning decades, the multi-hyphenate theorist and artist has challenged and reshaped how we think of documentary, visual culture, feminism, nationalism, and race. A new artist book by Minh-ha, titled The Twofold Commitment, traces all of these threads in her film Forgetting Vietnam, which was released in 2015, 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War. Published by Primary Information, the book features the film’s script, paired with creatively arranged stills, as well as conversations between Minh-ha and various scholars. To mark the launch of The Twofold Commitment in May, Minh-ha joined us on the podcast for a rich discussion about the genesis of the book; the different functions of voice, text, and image in her practice; how she turns familiarity and alienness into productive ways of looking at the world; and more.

If you've been following the podcast and the Film Comment Letter, you'll know that for the last two weeks, we've been reporting from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Before the festival ended last Sunday, Devika Girish, Co-Deputy Editor of FC, gathered Justin Chang, Dennis Lim, and Rachel Rosen—all of whom serve on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival—for a look back at the Cannes that was. As experienced festival veterans, the three reflected on the trends of this year's festival, including the preponderance of long films, experiments with historical representation, and hybrids of fiction and documentary. They also discussed some of the festival's late premieres, including films by Catherine Breillat and Hong Sangsoo. We hope you enjoy the conversation—and keep your eyes on filmcomment.com for more Cannes wrap coverage, coming later this week: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/cannes/cannes-2023/

Cannes 2023 has wrapped—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. As the tide of cinema ebbs from the shores of the Riviera, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by Frédéric Jaeger (editor at critic.de and programmer), Caitlin Doherty (editor at the New Left Review), and critic James Wham to discuss later-day standouts including Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, Ken Loach’s The Old Oak, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2023 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. For our latest episode from the shores of the Riviera, critics Mark Asch, Miriam Bale, and Kevin B. Lee join FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish for a discussion of their recent festival viewing, through which they trace a thematic thread of performance. The four touch on Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2023 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. On today’s episode, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish is joined by Dennis Lim, Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival, for a special joint interview with Todd Haynes, whose new film, May December, is one of the unanimous favorites of this year’s lineup. The film was inspired by one of the great scandals of the 1990s: Julianne Moore plays Gracie, a woman who, twenty years ago, was convicted of having an affair with a 13-year-old, a lover (played by Charles Melton) with whom she now lives a cozy married life. Natalie Portman plays an actress who arrives at Gracie’s home to do research for a movie based on the affair and starts probing into the couple’s lives, slowly pulling down bother both their and her own façades. Haynes turns the tabloid-fodder source of the script into a remarkably witty, dark, and intelligent meditation on the ways in which we construct and consume identity. Devika and Dennis talked to Haynes about his references for the movie, his thoughts on the term camp, why he loves zooms, and much more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2023 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. Our latest episode covers Cannes 2023 as it crosses the midpoint, with critics Lovia Gyarkye, Abby Sun, and Kelli Weston joining FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish to discuss some of the festival’s buzziest films, including Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Todd Haynes’s May December, Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2023 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. On our latest episode from sunny shores of Southern France, critics Jonathan Romney and Giovanni Marchini Camia join FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish to discuss two of the festivals most fascinating films: Jonathan Glazer’s much-anticipated The Zone of Interest, and Lisandro Alonso’s mysterious western Eureka. Listeners be advised: spoilers abound—along with our critics’ typically insightful, in-depth analysis. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

On today’s episode, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish sits down with Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose new documentary Occupied City was one of the early standouts at the festival. It’s a more than four-hour opus that combines a voiceover drawn from a book written by Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s collaborator and spouse, about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, with footage of the city shot by McQueen in the last three years. The result is a haunting superimposition of the past and the present that makes us think about the ways in which the spaces we occupy today are resonant with history. Devika talked to McQueen about the genesis of the film, the experience of making it during the pandemic, and why it feels so crucial to revisit history right now. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2023 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. For our second episode from the Riviera, critics Beatrice Loayza and James Wham and programmer and critic Inney Prakash join FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish discuss some recently screened high-, low-, and in-between–lights, including Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Wim Wenders’s Anselm, and Wang Bing’s epic Youth (Spring). Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2023 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. First up, critics and frequent FC contributors Jordan Cronk and Jessica Kiang join FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish  to open the proceedings with some lively discussion of early festival films—including Maïwenn's Jeanne du Barry, Steve McQueen's Occupied City, Marie Amachoukeli's Ama Gloria, and Cédric Kahn's The Goldman Case—before previewing this year’s lineup. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

The 30th edition of the New York African Film Festival runs May 10 to 16 at Film at Lincoln Center, with a showcase that spans the historic past and the vital present of cinema from Africa. Last weekend, the festival hosted a special conversation in tribute to the great filmmaker Safi Faye, who passed away in February. Faye is best known as the first woman from Sub-Saharan Africa to ever direct a commercial feature film—1976’s Kaddu Beykat—but the Senegalese pioneer’s accomplishments and groundbreaking influence extend far beyond that landmark. Introduced to the world of cinema via an acting role in Jean Rouch’s Petit à petit (1971), Faye went on to create a monumental body of work that includes award-winning shorts and features, including Selbe: One Among Many (1983), and Mossane, which won the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997. Through both documentary and fiction modes, Faye sought to capture the agency, subjectivity, and beauty of African women, and bring to vivid life the everyday realities of rural Senegal.  To explore Faye’s legacy and lasting influence on African women’s cinema today, NYAFF brought together the filmmakers Nuotama Bodomo, Jessica Beshir, Akosua Adoma Owusu, and Johanna Makabi for a roundtable led by the scholar and critic Yasmina Price. Film Comment is thrilled to share the conversation on today’s episode in collaboration with the festival. Find out more about the NYAFF30 lineup here: https://www.filmlinc.org/festivals/new-york-african-film-festival/#films

Writer Malcolm Harris has a new book out called Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. It’s as sweeping as the title suggests: a lively biography of the author’s hometown that covers nearly two centuries. In the book, Harris traces the connections between the settling of California and the advent of the railroad, the establishment of Stanford University, the technological boom of the long 20th century, and own data-driven present.  What you may not expect is that the book is also, in many ways, a history of the cinema: as Malcolm details, Eadweard Muybridge developed his pioneering equine motion studies under the patronage of railroad baron Leland Stanford, who wanted to figure out how to raise better race horses. So on today’s episode, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Malcolm to join them for a conversation about his new book and California’s decades-spanning nexus of technology, capital, and the moving image. From Muybridge, they moved to several other movies that Malcolm cites in the book, including Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow, Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing, the dot-com era thriller Antitrust, and more.

This week we’re celebrating the recipient of Film at Lincoln Center’s 48th Chaplin Award, one of America’s preeminent actresses: Viola Davis, who has dazzled us for over three decades on the stage and the screen, and whose life story is as inspirational as her craft. A couple of days ago, I sat down with Davis to dig into some of the most memorable on-screen moments from her career, and how she shapes her formidable performances by being a keen observer of life. We discussed her iconic turns in Denzel Washington’s Fences, Steve McQueen’s Widows, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, and some deeper cuts, like her early role in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight.

The last few years have seen several new restorations of the films of Peter Greenaway, the British director known for classics like The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. His films are formally exacting and erudite, yet full of play and perversion, and are as provocative today as they were upon release. The latest Greenaway film to receive a restoration is Drowning by Numbers, which has just been re-released by Severin Films on Blu-Ray. Made in 1988, the film is a metaphysical puzzle, equal parts fairy tale and process piece. The story follows three women—a mother, her daughter, and her niece—all named Cissie Colpitts, as they drown their husbands one by one. They cover up their crimes with the help of local coroner Madgett and his son Smut, both of whom are obsessed with games of all stripes—moral, athletic, mathematical. Shot by Greenaway’s frequent collaborator Sacha Vierny, Drowning by Numbers is one of the best of the director’s 80s features, as clinical as it is maximalist. A couple weeks ago, FC Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute called up Greenaway on Zoom for a freewheeling conversation about his memories of making the film, his long career, and his thoughts on mortality and art.

Kelly Reichardt’s latest feature, Showing Up, is a delicate, witty, yet deeply profound film about the messy ways in which living and surviving can get in the way of art-making. The film follows a ceramics artist, Lizzy (Michelle Williams), who prepares for an upcoming gallery show while wrangling family issues, the interpersonal politics of her day job at an art school, and problems with her landlord, who happens to be none other than her more successful colleague, Jo (Hong Chau). Not to mention the injured pigeon that Lizzy is suddenly forced to care for... It’s a new riff on themes familiar from Reichardt’s work, like friendship and the ways in which precarity impinges upon community, but it’s also the director's funniest film yet, one that finds joy and comedy in its milieu of eccentric, sometimes petty, yet infectiously passionate artists. With Showing Up arriving in theaters this week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish interviewed Reichardt about the making of the film, the casting of Williams and Chau, the work of Cynthia Lahti, Michelle Segre, and the various other artists who are featured in the film, and much more.

Every spring the New Directors/New Films festival at Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA puts on an exciting showcase of movies by the best emerging filmmakers around the world. It’s always a reliable sign of the trends to come and the talents to look out for—past editions have featured early films by Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Kelly Reichardt, and others. Over the past few years, Film Comment has established our own annual tradition of previewing the best movies in the New Directors/New Films lineup with local critics. This time around, editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by Vadim Rizov and Beatrice Loayza for a rundown of some of the gems in the 2023 edition, including Earth Mama, Arnold Is a Model Student, Safe Place, The Face of the Jellyfish, and more.

This year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema festival (March 2-12), Film at Lincoln Center’s annual showcase of contemporary French filmmaking, was something of a Louis Garrel convention—the French actor and director appeared in three movies in the lineup. He directed and stars in The Innocent, a comedy inspired by his own life, about a young man whose mother marries a heist robber newly released from prison. He also stars along with his sisters, Esther and Lena Garrel, in their father Philippe Garrel’s Silver Bear–winning new feature, The Plough, a melancholic, understated drama about a family of puppeteers grappling with the decline of their patriarch and their traditions. And Louis appears as the theater director Patrice Chéreau in Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Forever Young, about a group of young initiates at Les Amandiers, a famous acting school in Paris. Last week, FC Co-Deputy Editor called up Louis on Zoom—while he was in the middle of a shoot for a film about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince—for a conversation about the autobiographical inspirations of all three films, the differences between his and his father’s directing styles, their collaboration with the legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, and more.

Last weekend, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was at the True/False Film Festival: an annual documentary festival in Columbia, Missouri that has, over the years, become an exciting site to discover the latest developments in nonfiction cinema. This year, a prominent trend in the lineup was personal filmmaking—films in which directors drew upon on their memories, families, and relationships to craft something universal or even political. Two films in particular exemplified this trend, though in different ways. Forms of Forgetting, by the filmmaker Burak Çevik, turns conversations between two of the filmmaker's friends about their memories of their relationship into a broader reflection on the link between remembrance and one's sense of place, the city, and the nation. In Milisuthando, the artist Milisuthando Bongela combines archival footage, recollections, and interviews with friends and family to reflect on her childhood in the Transkei, which was an all-Black, segregationist South African state sanctioned by the apartheid regime. On today's podcast, Burak, Milisuthando, and Jonathan Ali, a programmer for True/False, joined to delve into the making of these films and the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of personal filmmaking.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently winding down. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Giovanni Marchini Camia (Fireflies Press), Victor Guimarães (freelance), and Frédéric Jaeger (critic.de). Before getting into a broader conversation about German cinema at the Berlinale, the four discuss some of the highlights from the festival’s waning days, including Music by Angela Schanelec, In Water by Hong Sangsoo, Bad Living and Living Bad by João Canijo, Ramona by Victoria Linares Villegas, and Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything by Emily Atef. Stay up to date with all of our Berlin 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/berlin/berlin-2023/

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editor Devika Girish is joined by programmers Inney Prakash (Prismatic Ground) and Edo Choi (Musuem of the Moving Image) and critic Caitlin Quinlan to discuss the buzziest premieres from the festival’s second half: Lila Avilés’s Tótem, Lois Patino's Samsara, Christian Petzold’s Afire, Philippe Garrel’s The Plough, and James Benning’s Allensworth.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-deputy editor Clinton Krute sat down with writer/director Dustin Guy Defa and actor Michael Cera to discuss The Adults, which just had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale. The film tells the story of Eric, a youngish man returning for a quick visit to the upstate New York town where he grew up. As he struggles to reconnect with his two sisters, played by Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis, his obsession with poker, and his drive to beat every player in town, keeps prolonging his stay. The nuanced performances of the three leads, along with Guy Defa’s precise dialogue, pull the film off center, destabilizing what might otherwise have been a fairly familiar drama of family reconciliation. Instead, The Adults is something far stranger and resonant.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by curator and critic Antoine Thirion and critic (and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma) Jean-Michel Frodon to discuss some recent viewings from the festival's mid-point: Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy, John Trengove’s Manodrome, Bas Devos’s Here, Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert, and Manthia Diawara’s AI: African Intelligence. Stay up to date with all of our Berlin 2023 coverage here.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by FC contributor Ela Bittencourt and Jonathan Ali, Director of Programming at the Third Horizon Film Festival. They discuss some of the recent premieres at the Berlinale, including Claire Simon's Our Body, Moyra Davey's Horse Opera, and Aaron Kaufman and Sean Penn's Superpower; Turkish retrospective selection Black Head (1979), by Korhan Yurtsever; as well as films from the Berlin Critics' Week's "Artistic Differences" program, which included Lavra dor (1968), O tigra ea gazela (1977), The White Death of the Black Wizard (2020), and The Secret Formula (1965).

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today's episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by FC contributor Erika Balsom and B. Ruby Rich, Editor-in-Chief of Film Quarterly to discuss the haul of the first couple days: Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography, Tina Satter's Reality, Matt Johnson's Blackberry, Luke Fowler's Being in a Place - A Portrait of Margaret Tait, and Tatiana Huezo's The Echo.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection.  A couple days ago, before the festival kicked off, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish attended the opening conference of the Berlin Critics’ Week—an autonomous sidebar to the Berlinale, organized independently by a collective of German critics, including Amos Borchert, Elena Friedrich, Petra Palmer, and Dennis Vetter. The topic of the conference was “Cinema of Care - Who Looks After Film Culture?” which included a panel discussion moderated by Devika, and featuring a stellar lineup of guests: curators Abby Sun and Marek Hovorka, and the filmmaker Claire Denis. The four had a provocative, in-depth conversation about what care looks like on the level of aesthetics, in filmmaking, and in film programming, and how we might build a sustainable and collective film culture. We’re very grateful to Berlin Critics Week for letting us share the conversation on the podcast.

With an award-winning filmography that includes the epochal Civil Rights series Eyes on the Prize, 2020’s MLK/FBI, and 2021’s Citizen Ashe, among many others, documentarian Sam Pollard has changed the way we read history. Pollard is also an editor and producer, working with filmmakers like Spike Lee and Bill Gunn. Simply put, the guy is a legend. Which brings us to his latest film, the new two-part documentary Bill Russell: Legend, which digs deep into the life and career of one of the greatest basketball players of all time. The winner of a record 11 championships with the Boston Celtics from 1956 to 1969, including two as a player coach, Bill Russell broke many boundaries, both on the court and off. Pollard’s film is a remarkably nuanced portrait of a complex figure who, as a record-breaking athlete and active participant in the Civil Rights movement, stood at the intersections of sports, celebrity, and race in America. FC co-deputy editor Clinton Krute invited Pollard on the podcast to discuss his new film with scholar Samantha N. Sheppard, whose 2020 book Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen is an expansive analysis of sports documentaries and representations of Blackness on screen. We discussed the intensive research process behind the film, how the genre of the sports documentary can be used to rewrite history, and the legacy and life of Russell, who passed away in July 2022.

On our final podcast from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, FC co-editor Devika Girish talks to filmmakers Deborah Stratman, Mary Helena Clark, and Mike Gibisser about their fantastic new films, which premiered in the festival’s New Frontier section. Stratman’s Last Things explores the history of our universe through the point of view of rocks. She combines stunning images of rocks with interviews with a geoscientist and excerpts from various sci-fi texts—read by the filmmaker Valerie Massadian—to craft a narrative of the past and the future that decenters humans, and invites us to think beyond ourselves. Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser's A Common Sequence, explores how our ideas of the commons have changed in our capitalistic, tech-driven present. The film uses three case studies: the first focuses on efforts to conserve and study the achoque salamander in Mexico, known for its regenerative properties; the second explores the use of artificial intelligence in apple picking and harvesting; and the third digs into the ways in which genetics is fast becoming a prime site for data mining.  The filmmakers joined for a wide-ranging conversation about the ideas behind their films, how they approach questions of time and perspective, and what it felt like to be an experimental filmmaker at Sundance. It turns out that Clark and Gibisser were once students of Stratman’s—so the three had much to say about each other’s work. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2023/

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Dessane Lopez Cassell (SEEN), Poulomi Das (The Playlist), and Jessica Kiang (Variety) join FC’s Devika Girish for another round of Sundance conversation. This time around, the critics discuss festival selections Passages, Shortcomings, A Thousand and One, and Milisuthando. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2023/

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Miriam Bale (Indie Memphis Film Festival) and Abby Sun (International Documentary Association) return for another round of Sundance conversation with Film Comment’s Devika Girish. This time, they discuss festival selections Fair Play, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Rye Lane, and The Tuba Thieves. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2023/

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish talks to critics Justin Chang (The Los Angeles Times and Fresh Air) and Jessica Kiang (Variety and elsewhere) about Sundance selections Eileen, You Hurt My Feelings, Past Lives (pro-side this time), and Cat Person. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here.

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Film Comment’s Devika Girish talks to Vadim Rivov(Filmmaker Magazine) and Dan Sullivan (Film at Lincoln Center) about Sundance selections Fremont, Gush, Polite Society, and A Common Sequence. They also dig into the festival’s New Frontier section and whether or not there’s such a thing as a “Sundance film.” Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2023/

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Film Comment’s Devika Girish talks to Miriam Bale (Indie Memphis Film Festival) and Abby Sun (International Documentary Association) about Sundance selections Earth Mama, Past Lives, Against the Tide, Little Richard: I Am Everything, and Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Film Comment’s Devika Girish invited FC friends and critics Alissa Wilkinson (Vox), Sam Adams (Slate) and Kayla Myers (Indie Memphis Film Festival) to chat about the buzzy titles of Day Two, including Justice, Earth Mama, To Live and Die and Live, Mami Wata, Animalia, the documentary shorts program, and more.

With the Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returning to in-person screenings this year, your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering each day's new highlights and lowlights. To kick things off, FC editor Devika Girish invited Abby Sun (International Documentary Association) and Alissa Wilkinson (Vox) to talk about some of the opening night films, including The Longest Goodbye, Kim’s Video, and The Pod Generation, and the titles they're most excited to see in the coming days.

Last week, ThousandSuns Cinema, an online screening initiative by the Media City Film Festival, launched a unique virtual series devoted to Indigenous cinema. Co-presented with the artist-run collective COUSIN, the program brings together a vibrant selection of short and feature-length works by Indigenous filmmakers—all of which are free to stream online until January 30. The series features landmark films by established directors like Alanis Obomsawin, as well as more recent, dynamic work from emerging artists like Fox Maxy. Though the films are eclectic, with a variety of forms and themes on display, they’re united by one principle: they center Indigenous audiences and decenter the white gaze. On today’s episode, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute interview two members of COUSIN Collective, filmmakers Adam Piron and Sky Hopinka, about the series, the origins of their collective, and the community of artists that they’ve cultivated.

Every January, to ring in the new year, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute take a look at some of the major new releases of the holiday season. This year, they were joined by critics Sam Adams and Nicholas Russell to run down some of the blingier titles that have recently graced the marquees of multiplexes and streaming sites alike, including Avatar: The Way of Water, Babylon, Glass Onion, and the A.I.-horror flick M3GAN. Needless to say, opinions ran as hot as the blood of a vengeful space whale.

Happy new year to our listeners, and thanks for joining us for another year of writing and talking about movies. We’ll dive into the new year’s new releases very soon, but today’s podcast is about one of 2022’s late but great entries: No Bears, the latest meta-fictional masterwork from Jafar Panahi. In the film, Panahi plays a slightly fictionalized version of himself, as a controversial filmmaker holed up in an Iranian border-village, trying to evade the surveillance of the authorities while remotely directing a film set in nearby Turkey. What starts as a seemingly gentle satire becomes a timely reckoning with the moral dilemmas faced by people—especially women—living under a patriarchal and dictatorial regime. Though Panahi tragically remains imprisoned in Tehran since his arrest last July, we were glad to be able to speak to the film’s lead actress, Mina Kavani, about her riveting performance as an Iranian exile in Turkey. We discussed Kavani’s own experiences of living in exile, what it was like to work with Panahi, and the women-led movement that continues to reverberate throughout Iran.

Last night, we sat down with a panel of special guests—Alissa Wilkinson (critic, Vox), Bilge Ebiri (critic, Vulture), and Inney Prakash (curator, Maysles Documentary Center and founder, Prismatic Ground film festival)—for a real-time countdown of the results of our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate!) about the films as they were unveiled—now it’s here in podcast form, for your holiday home-listening pleasure! Consider it a gift from us to you, our loyal listeners.

A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away... Well, actually, just a few weeks ago, right here on the good old internet, our esteemed colleague, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, tweeted out two simple words: TÁR WARS. He was referring, of course, to the swirl of controversy around TÁR, one of this year’s most talked-about films. The movie, directed by Todd Field and featuring a central performance from Cate Blanchett, tracks the gradual downfall of one Lydia Tár, the egomaniacal and possibly predatory conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Though a likely lock for many end-of-year lists, TÁR has been fairly divisive among critics. So for today’s podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute took inspiration from Mr. Brody’s tweet and invited two well-matched gladiators—the valiant Jessica Kiang on the pro-side and the courageous Nathan Lee on the con—to debate the relative merits and demerits of TÁR. Two critics enter, one critic leaves… May the best critic win!

2022 marks the birth centenary of the great filmmaker, writer, and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini. To celebrate his legacy, Fireflies Press has published a new book, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper, featuring reflections from Mike Leigh, Helena Wittman, Alexandre Koberidze, Jia Zhangke, Angela Schanelec, and many other filmmakers on the powerful influence the auteur continues to exert on contemporary cinema. To discuss the book and reflect on Pasolini’s life and work, Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Giovanni Marchini Camia, co-publisher of Fireflies Press, and filmmaker Radu Jude, one of the contributors to Writing on Burning Paper. Among other great insights, Giovanni reveals how the title of the book—and in fact, the name “Fireflies Press” itself—was inspired by Pasolini’s writings, and Radu recalls his first encounters with Pasolini’s work at the Romanian Cinematheque in Bucharest in the early ’90s.

This week’s podcast is about one of America’s favorite genres: cop movies. The episode takes inspiration from a series that recently screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, titled “Watch the Cops: Policing New York in the Movies,” curated by scholar Pooja Rangan and filmmaker Brett Story. The program included a small but eclectic range of films, including big-budget genre flicks Copland and Dog Day Afternoon, which show how ambivalence about policing is often resolved in pop culture; the documentary Making “Do the Right Thing”, a behind-the-scenes record of the Spike Lee classic and a glimpse into how movie-making impacts local communities; and the activist film, The Torture of Mothers: The Case of the Harlem 6, a docu-fiction about a famous 1965 case of police brutality and wrongful conviction. Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Brett and Pooja to discuss the thinking behind their selections and to guide them through the thought-provoking ideas underpinning the program. Check out the show page on filmcomment.com for links to several must-see films featured in the series.

It’s the time of year when ghosts, ghouls, and goblins are on the prowl. That’s right: it’s Halloween. Or, if we’re getting technical, the day after Halloween. And as much as Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are scared to admit it, that means it’s also time for another Halloween Hangover episode of the Film Comment Podcast, where the two confront one of their greatest fears—horror movies—with the help of some masters of the macabre. This year, Clint and Devika asked Kelli Weston, who literally holds a PhD in horror cinema, and Steven Mears, a critic and Film Comment’s famously nocturnal copyeditor, to inflict two movies of their choice upon us. Kelli chose the 1976 slasher flick Alice Sweet Alice, and Steve picked Jack Clayton’s Henry James adaptation The Innocents. Both movies were ultimately more goofy than scary, but they yielded a truly rich conversation about the role of religion, class, children, and more in horror.

The leaves are changing color, and there’s a chill in the air. That means, of course, that List Season is upon us. This year is special: Sight & Sound is publishing their Greatest Films of All Time list. Every decade since 1952, the British magazine polls critics, programmers, and filmmakers from all over the world to compile a definitive ranking of the best movies ever made.  At last month’s Getting Real conference, organized by the International Documentary Association, Film Comment co-presented a critics panel exploring the relevance of such lists especially when it comes to documentary films. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by critics Nick Bradshaw, Emerson Goo, Girish Shambu, and Kelli Weston to ask questions like: Are lists still useful in an age of democratizing cinema? What is the relationship between list-making and canonization? How can we collectively remake a more diverse and inclusive canon? And, of course, the fun part: which documentaries are likely to make this year’s Sight & Sound list? Listen to the end to hear our panelists’ best guesses! Read a transcript of this panel discussion here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mn6K6agPkLdRmYkIZc47QhVGSEzspynCvi5Aw6YdZQI/edit

The 60th New York Film Festival closed up shop last weekend, which means that it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute convened an all-star team of critics—Phoebe Chen, Molly Haskell, and Kelli Weston—for a spirited wrap-up discussion about the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF60 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed Todd Field’s controversial TÁR, Alice Diop’s consensus favorite Saint Omer, Paul Schrader’s less-well-regarded Master Gardener, Joanna Hogg’s hall-of-mirrors The Eternal Daughter, and many other noteworthy selections.

In his Cannes 2022 dispatch, Jonathan Romney wrote “Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO is a flamboyant, visionary work: its execution—including drone shots set to blazing red filters—and wayward, fragmented narrative showed an energy shared by that little else at the festival. Corny but true: the wildest, youngest film in the lineup was made by an 84-year-old director up for anything.” With EO making its US premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, we sat down with Skolimowski over Zoom to discuss his radical re-imagining of Bresson, which follows a pure-hearted donkey adrift in a cruel world. Though the filmmaker—known for such classics as Walkover, Deep End, Moonlighting, and many more—wasn’t able to attend this year’s festival in person, he was happy to field our many questions about his latest, a powerfully empathetic work of striking beauty and visual imagination.

Taking its title from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, this talk explores the role of critique and criticism in the arts and beyond. Does critique represent a negative attitude to the world, or is it in fact an optimistic practice, one that allows us to imagine and work toward alternative and better realities? (Brecht, again: “Criticizing the course of a river means improving it, correcting it.”) Is criticism always a response to art, or can it be a form of art-making in itself? Can one effectively critique an institution or system while also living within it? Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute delved into these questions with a roundtable of directors—Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), Elvis Mitchell (Is That Black Enough for You?!?), and Tiffany Sia (What Rules the Invisible)—whose films from the NYFF60 lineup are as stunning as works of art as they are incisive as critiques—whether of history, society, or art itself.

2021 marked the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. To mark this occasion and honor Vogel’s path-blazing legacy, last year the festival inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. For this second edition of the Lecture, NYFF welcomed the filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith, whose landmark 1998 debut feature, Drylongso, screened in a new restoration in the Revivals section of this year’s festival. Known for the political rigor and intrepid formal experimentation of her film and multimedia practice, Smith epitomizes both the ethics of care and the commitment to subversion that guided Vogel’s mission. Smith’s address is followed by a Q&A with Jacqueline Stewart, the director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a Turner Classic Movies host, and is presented here for the first time. The 2022 Amos Vogel Lecture is sponsored by Turner Classic Movies. NYFF Talks are presented by HBO.

“Cinema is never on time,” wrote the great critic Serge Daney. That statement never seemed to apply to Jean-Luc Godard, an auteur who was always of his time and ahead of it—a relentless interrogator of the present who also sought the horizons of a new future. This week, as we mourn the recent passing of one of our greatest artists, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited two critics and Godard experts for a talk about the filmmaker’s life and career. Richard Brody writes about movies for The New Yorker and is the author of the must-read Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, and Blair McClendon is a film editor, regular Film Comment contributor, and author of a beautiful remembrance of Godard published by n+1. The four discussed Godard’s vast and protean filmography, from foundational works like Breathless and La Chinoise to masterful essay films like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book, and the ways in which Godard’s films awakened them, in their formative cinephilic years, to the aesthetic and political potentialities of cinema.

As we head into the last weekend of the 2022 Toronto Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes Adam Nayman (critic and certified Toronto native), Vadim Rizov (director of operations at Filmmaker Magazine), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor at the Criterion Collection) to talk about some of the major titles from this year's lineup, including The Fabelmans, Dry Ground Burning, Women Talking, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, The Whale, and the Bulgari ad directed by Paolo Sorrentino that plays before every TIFF screening.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our third podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch to talk about Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and Bloodshed, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People's Children, Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, and more.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s screening, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our second dispatch from the Tim Horton–studded mean streets of Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes Cristina Nord (head of the Berlinale Forum), Chloe Lizotte (editorial manager at MUBI Notebook), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor at the Criterion Collection) to talk about some of their favorites from the fest, including Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Lars von Tier’s The Kingdom Exodus, Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, Moyra Davey’s Horse Opera, Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking, and more.

Hold Me Tight, the latest directorial venture from actor and filmmaker Mathieu Amalric, is a riveting, kaleidoscopic entry to the canon of movies about women on the verge. The film, which opened on September 9, features Vicky Krieps as Clarisse, a young mother on the run who may—or may not, depending on your reading of the story—be going through indescribable grief. The actor turns in a performance of mesmerizing fluidity and mystery, as Amalric’s elliptical storytelling keeps the audience guessing about the nature of Clarisse’s reality.  Last week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish welcomed the director and star for a Film Comment Live talk about their new movie, the narrative and cinematic balancing act of depicting a mind in flux, the film’s imaginative use of music, and much more.

Once again we’ve arrived at that special time of year known as festival season. Today we kick off our coverage of one of the fall’s major film events, the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from this year’s lineup, alongside our rotating crew of critics and special guests. First up, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes critics and programmers Jordan Cronk, Inney Prakash, and Bedatri Choudhury to discuss Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, the experimental Wavelengths shorts program, and more. Stay tuned for more from the Tim Horton–studded mean streets of Toronto!

This week, Clint surveys the wealth of cinematic delights on offer this fall across repertory calendars, both in person in New York City and online. To guide him through the thicket of newly rediscovered gems, lost classics, and thematic programs, he is joined by three experts: critic and filmmaker Gina Telaroli; Inney Prakash, programmer and founder of the Prismatic Ground festival; and Steve Macfarlane, programmer at Spectacle Theater and department assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. They discuss Anthology Film Archives’ ongoing Imageless Films series, the upcoming Hugo Fregonese and Beth and Scott B retrospectives at MoMA, the online series Spectral Grounds: Black Experimental Film, and much more. Check the show notes on filmcomment.com for more information.

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish participated in a fascinating experimental event called “The Future of Attention”, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera italiana. A continuous 24-hour live talk moderated by three hosts—including Devika—and involving a new guest each hour, the event began at noon on August 10 and went on all the way to noon on August 11. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience as and when they wished. The idea was to not just discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture, but also to actively experience and challenge the various forms our attention may take over a sustained period of time. We hope you’ve been following along the last two weeks as we’ve shared excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, featuring conversations with filmmaker Helena Wittman, curator Giovanni Carmine, this year’s Golden Leopard–winner Julia Murat, and others. Our final episode is with a guest who has a job like no other: it’s Kevin B. Lee, Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Locarno Film Festival and USI. Kevin joined Devika to close out the 24-hour event with a fascinating discussion on how labor, pleasure, and the special state of attention that we call cinema. Listen to the complete series here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/podcast/the-future-of-attention/

Welcome to the Film Comment Podcast! I'm Devika Girish, the Co-Deputy Editor of Film Comment. Recently, I was at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where I participated in a fascinating experimental event called The Future of Attention, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera Italiana. It was a continuous 24-hour live talk, moderated by 3 hosts—including yours truly—and involving a new guest each hour. The event began at noon on August 10, and went on all the way to noon on August 11, with attendees invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience when they wished. The idea was not just to discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture but also to actively experience and challenge the various ways in which we pay attention over a sustained period of time. We hope you’ve been following along the last two weeks as we’ve shared excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, featuring conversations with filmmaker Helena Wittman, curator Giovanni Carmine, this year’s Golden Leopard–winner Julia Murat, and others. Next up is a very exciting guest: artist, filmmaker, and critic, Hito Steyerl, who talks about teaching on Minecraft during the pandemic, maintaining techno-optimisim in very pessimistic times, and the distinction between attention and voyeurism.

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish participated in a fascinating experimental event called “The Future of Attention”, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera italiana. A continuous 24-hour live talk moderated by three hosts—including Devika—and involving a new guest each hour, the event began at noon on August 10 and went on all the way to noon on August 11. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience as and when they wished. The idea was to not just discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture, but also to actively experience and challenge the various forms our attention may take over a sustained period of time. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, which featured some exciting guests: filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari; curator Giovanni Carmine; this year’s Golden Leopard–winner, Julia Murat; artist Hito Steyerl; and scholars Kevin B. Lee and Noa Levin, among others. Today's episode features the Brazilian filmmaker Julia Murat, whose film, Rule 34, won this year’s Golden Leopard. Check back here for our next episode from “The Future of Attention” at the Locarno Film Festival, featuring filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl.

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish participated in a fascinating experimental event called “The Future of Attention”, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera italiana. A continuous 24-hour live talk moderated by three hosts—including Devika—and involving a new guest each hour, the event began at noon on August 10 and went on all the way to noon on August 11. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience as and when they wished. The idea was to not just discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture, but also to actively experience and challenge the various forms our attention may take over a sustained period of time. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, which featured some exciting guests: filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari; curator Giovanni Carmine; this year’s Golden Leopard–winner, Julia Murat; artist Hito Steyerl; and scholars Kevin B. Lee and Noa Levin, among others. Today’s conversation explores the spaces and infrastructures of attention with Levin and Carmine, the director of Kunsthalle St. Gallen and the curator of Art Basel's Unlimited Section.

At this year's Locarno Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish participated in a fascinating experimental event called “The Future of Attention”, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera italiana. A continuous 24-hour live talk moderated by three hosts—including Devika—and involving a new guest each hour, the event began at noon on August 10 and went on all the way to noon on August 11. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience as and when they wished. The idea was to not just discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture, but also to actively experience and challenge the various forms our attention may take over a sustained period of time.  Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing excerpts from Devika's hosting shift at the event, which featured some exciting guests: filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari; curator Giovanni Carmine; this year's Golden Leopard–winner, Julia Murat; artist Hito Steyerl; and scholars Kevin B. Lee and Noa Levin, among others. Today's episode features Aljafari, who discusses his new short, Paradiso XXXI, 108, and the ways in which his filmmaking draws attention to what he calls the “camera of the dispossessed.”

At this year's Locarno Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish participated in a fascinating experimental event called “The Future of Attention”, curated by Rafael Dernbach, a researcher at the Universita della Svizzera Italiana. A continuous 24-hour live talk moderated by three hosts—including Devika—and involving a new guest each hour, the event began at noon on August 10 and went on all the way to noon on August 11. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, or even sleep in the audience as and when they wished. The idea was to not just discuss the workings of attention in contemporary film and media culture, but also to actively experience and challenge the various forms our attention may take over a sustained period of time.  Over the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing excerpts from Devika's hosting shift at the event, which featured some exciting guests: filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari; curator Giovanni Carmine; this year's Golden Leopard–winner, Julia Murat; artist Hito Steyerl; and scholars Kevin B. Lee and Noa Levin, among others.  First up is Wittmann, who talks about her new film, Human Flowers of Flesh, and the ways in which her practice is rooted in embodied and communal experiences of time and space.  Check back here for our next episode from “The Future of Attention” at the Locarno Film Festival, featuring Kamal Aljafari.

This week's podcast initially began as a sequel to our episode about Irma Vep from a few weeks ago, in which Adam Nayman and Beatrice Loayza joined us to discuss Olivier Assayas's new HBO series. We had only seen four episodes at the time, and we wanted to reconvene our guests, now that the miniseries has finished its run of eight episodes. But as we dug into the film-within-a-film rabbit holes of Irma Vep, its commentaries on auteurism and autofiction, and how it blurs the lines between reality, narrative, and fantasy, we realized that it echoed the themes of another series everyone has been talking about recently: The Rehearsal, by Nathan Fielder. So this episode brings you a double dose of meta: Irma Vep and The Rehearsal, and the ethics of making movies about oneself, other people, and movie-making itself.

This week we have a special treat for listeners: a conversation with avant-garde filmmaking legends Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, and programmer and Light Industry co-founder Thomas Beard. Thomas, along with Film at Lincoln Center programmer Dan Sullivan, has curated New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema, an upcoming series spotlighting the rise of what Jonas Mekas described as the "New American Cinema." Opening on July 29, the series takes place in conjunction with related programs at the Jewish Museum and Film Forum. In a wide-ranging conversation about a pivotal moment in American film history, Dorsky—whose Ingreen (1964) screens as part of the FLC series—and Hiler regaled us with anecdotes about their partnership in life and filmmaking, the state of moviegoing and movie-making in the New York of the '60s, and the culture-shifting exploits of Jonas Mekas, Gregory J. Markopoulous, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, and others. We also chatted about Hiler's fascinating in-progress project about medieval stained glass, "Cinema Before 1300," and a new book, Illuminated Hours. Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, which was published in Spanish earlier this year and will be available soon in English.

In a recent Film Comment Letter interview, Academy Film Archive preservationist Mark Toscano said: “to me, restoration has a variable definition, because it’s not embodying any specific technique or approach. It is more of a conceptual process by which you’re making sure that the film retains its qualities as a work that was made by a person—especially experimental work made by an individual.” Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish wanted to dig a little deeper into Mark’s comments, and into the technically and philosophically challenging ins and outs of film preservation and restoration, so they invited two experts to join the podcast and guide them through the subject: critic and media conservator Ina Archer and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder and director of the Film Heritage Foundation. Both also provide details on some exciting projects they’re engaged in: Ina talks about preserving Robert Goodwin’s independent blaxploitation flick Black Chariot and Jessie Maple’s 1981 drama Will, while Shivendra breaks down the restorations of two major works by Indian filmmaker Govindan Aravindan, Kummatty and Thamp̄.

This week, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish talk to a cinematographer who’s worked with everyone from Agnès Varda to Wim Wenders to Eliza Hittman to Alice Rohrwacher. Over the last three decades, Hélène Louvart has acquired a reputation for her gorgeous lensing of women’s stories and her ability to capture movement with rare immediacy and grace. Hélène’s talents are on striking display in Murina, a new coming-of-age film directed by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic. Murina tells the story of a Croatian teen (played by newcomer Gracija Filipović) navigating a treacherous passage to adulthood in an intensely patriarchal milieu. With intimate close-ups, breathtaking underwater sequences, and beautiful shots of the island where the film is set, Hélène’s images give arresting form to the protagonist’s awakening to her own desires. The cinematographer called in from her home in Paris to talk about how she crafted the film’s visual language, the care required to capture women as both subjects and objects of the gaze, and the technical challenges and pleasures of shooting underwater.

This week sees another episode of our Movie Gifts podcast. It’s like Secret Santa but for movies—each participant picks a title for another that the recipient hasn’t seen. It’s a fun way to share enthusiasms and gain new insights on old favorites. For this round, Film Comment co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited FC contributor Nathan Lee and former FC editor Gavin Smith, two longtime friends, who were eager to assign each other movies. For Gavin, Nathan selected Paul W. S. Anderson’s action-packed 2008 remake Death Race. For Nathan, Gavin chose Larry Cohen’s 1976 apocalyptic sci-fi stunner God Told Me To. Devika and Clint were a little less considerate to each other: Clint gifted Devika the toxic 1979 football drama North Dallas Forty, while Devika gifted Clint her childhood favorite, Baby’s Day Out, a madcap live-action cartoon about a sadistic baby running wild in the streets. Movie Gifts, or Movie Torture? Listen to find out. MUBI is offering a 30-day free trial for all Film Comment listeners. Get access to the special offer here: https://mubi.com/promos/flc?utm_source=film%20at%20lincoln%20center&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=us_mubigo_flcargento_filmcomment And be sure to learn more about how you can get a free ticket to a theater each week with MUBI GO, included with your subscription, here: https://mubi.com/go/us?utm_source=film%20at%20lincoln%20center&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=us_mubigo_flcargento_filmcomment

Today’s podcast is spurred by something Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish wrote in her dispatch from Cannes a few weeks ago: “the undeniable thrills and pleasures of Top Gun: Maverick … are not entirely separable from the American-exceptionalist fervor of its narrative or the military resources poured into its making. It isn’t “a good film but with bad politics”; it’s a good film in part because of its bad politics.” This thought was the catalyst for on ongoing conversation about the questions Tom Cruise’s world-dominating blockbuster raises—about nationalistic movies, star power, and the responsibilities of criticism and cinephilia. So this week, Devika and her fellow Co-Deputy Editor Clinton Krute invited two ideal interlocutors to join the conversation and help pick apart the Top Gun phenomenon: editor and critic Blair McClendon, and Ed Halter, whose brilliant review of the sequel appeared in 4Columns.

Two episodes in, Olivier Assayas’s new, mind-bendingly metatextual HBO series, Irma Vep, has already proven to be catnip for cinephiles. An audacious expansion and reinvention of Assayas's 1996 film of the same title—in which an aging French filmmaker attempts to remake Louis Feuillade’s classic silent serial, Les vampires, with Maggie Cheung as the criminal vamp Irma Vep—the eight-part series features a nearly dizzying mise-en-abyme structure. Here, a neurotic filmmaker (seemingly modeled on Assayas) recreates Feuillade’s serial for a contemporary, binge-TV audience. Alicia Vikander plays Mira Harberg, an American pop heroine who is cast as Irma Vep among a glossy, transnational crew of actors. In the four episodes available to critics so far, Irma Vep engages with its multiple sources, its medium, and the lives of its creators in increasingly surprising and thought-provoking ways. On this week’s podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critics Adam Nayman and Beatrice Loayza to dig into the series’ endless rabbit holes and riffs on the history of serials, cinema, and, err, "content."

Léa Seydoux had an enviable and prolific 2021 with standout turns in Cary Fukunaga’s No Time to Die, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Ildikó Enyedi’s The Story of My Wife, Bruno Dumont’s France, and Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception. At this year’s Cannes, she continued her streak with starring roles in two excellent, very different movies: One Fine Morning by Mia Hansen-Løve, where Seydoux plays a young mother grieving the cognitive decline of her father; and Crimes of the Future by David Cronenberg, where the actress is a dystopian performance artist alongside Viggo Mortensen. For our latest podcast, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish sat down with Seydoux for a windswept conversation on a rooftop on the Croisette (with a surprise cameo by Viggo Mortensen!). Seydoux discussed her experiences working with Hansen-Løve and Cronenberg, the intricacies of being an object versus a subject as an actor, her thoughts on beauty in cinema, and more.

With Cannes 2022 winding to a close, the last stretch has proved especially rich with standouts. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish sat down with Dennis Lim (artistic director of the New York Film Festival), Jean-Michel Frodon (critic and former editor in chief of Cahiers du Cinéma), and Antoine Thirion (curator and critic) to discuss the festival that was. They talk about Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker, Annie Ernaux’s The Super 8 Years, and much more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of festival coverage at filmcomment.com

With Cannes 2022 beginning to wind down, the last stretch has proved especially rich with standouts. One of these eleventh-hour highlights is Albert Serra’s latest feature, Pacifiction. An epic yet elliptical political thriller, the film follows a high commissioner in French Polynesia, played by Benoît Magimel, as he snakes his way through a dense, sensorially overwhelming landscape, schmoozing with locals, activists, and other politicians, while never quite revealing his true colors. After the film’s premiere at Cannes yesterday, Dennis Lim, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival, sat down with Serra for a special Film Comment Podcast interview. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter at filmcomment.com to catch up on all of our festival coverage.

With Cannes 2022 winding to a close, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish talks to FC Podcast superstars Jonathan Romney and Jessican Kiang about the festival’s denouement, touching on Baz Luhrmann’s batshit Elvis; the latest slice of la vie quotidienne from the Dardenne Brothers, Tori and Lokita; the devisive new Claire Denis film The Stars at Noon; and two films from Ukraine: Maksym Nakonechnyi's Butterfly Vision and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s Pamfir. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of festival coverage at filmcomment.com

With Cannes 2022 in full swing, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film world’s grandest annual event. For today’s podcast, Devika sits down with critic Mark Asch and Miriam Bale, artistic director of the Indie Memphis Film Festival, for an conversation that gravitates, like a mosquito to a well-toned ab, toward the festival’s thirst traps, including David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Louis Garrel’s The Innocent, Serge Bozon’s Don Juan, João Pedro Rodrigues’s Will-o’-the-Wisp, Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself, and more. Catch up on all our daily Cannes 2022 podcasts at filmcomment.com.

With Cannes 2022 in full swing, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film world’s grandest annual event. On today's podcast, Devika is joined by Justin Chang, film critic of the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s “Fresh Air”, for a conversation about about David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N., Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, and more. Catch up on all our daily Cannes 2022 podcasts here. And keep your eyes (and ears) on this space for more soon...

With Cannes 2022 kicking off this week, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Publisher Eugene Hernandez sits down with Arianna Bocco, President of IFC Films, to take the temperature of Cannes, mid-way through. The two talk about her history with festival, how Cannes’ role in the film industry has evolved over the years, and how seeing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days from Cristian Mungiu (director of this year’s standout drama R.M.N.) changed her career. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts, at filmcomment.com.

With Cannes 2022 in full swing, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by FC contributors Jordan Cronk and Giovanni Marchini Camia to discuss some recent highlights from the fest, including James Gray’s Armageddon Time, Ruben Östland’s Triangle of Sadness, Christian Mungiu’s R.M.N, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

With Cannes 2022 in full swing, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by Inney Prakash (programmer and founder of the Prismatic Ground Festival) and Vadim Rizov (director of editorial operations at Filmmaker Magazine), to discuss some recent highlights from the fest, including Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister, Jerzy Skolimowsk’s EO, and more. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

With Cannes 2022 kicking off this week, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish found a quiet corner to chat with frequent FC contributors Jessica Kiang and Jordan Cronk about their hot takes from the first three days of the fest. They discuss Kirill Serebrennikov’s Tchaikovsky's Wife, Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet, Michel Hazanavicius’s Coupez!, and Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

With Cannes 2022 kicking off this week, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, Film Comment Publisher Eugene Hernandez sits down with Lizzie Francke(producer and Editor at Large at the BFI) to provide an inside-the-industry take on this year’s festival. They also touch on some lesser known films that they’re excited about (including Charlotte Well’s Aftersun) before diving into Franke’s long history with the festival, recent upheavals in the festival ecosystem, and the recent and refreshing increase in the number of women directors in UK cinema. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to our daily Cannes coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

Cannes 2022 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. First up, we welcome FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and frequent FC contributor Jessica Kiang on the podcast to preview this year’s lineup. We talk about the history of the festival—and how it’s changed over the years—before discussing some of the films we’re most excited to see, including David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Claire Denis’s The Stars at Noon, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, and others. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today at filmcomment.com for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2022 edition.

Everything you always wanted to know about Hong Sangsoo… but were afraid to ask! To celebrate Film at Lincoln Center’s two-part retrospective of the films of Hong, we hosted a special live conversation with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim about the playful, profound, and soju-soaked filmography of one of world cinema’s most influential and ingenious artists.  Dennis, the author of a forthcoming monograph on Hong’s Tale of Cinema from Fireflies Press, had his expertise put to the test with a series of preselected questions from Film Comment contributors about the South Korean auteur’s elliptical, endlessly generative body of work. And of course, in keeping with the spirit of the films, drinks were be served before and during the conversation. Read an exclusive excerpt from Dennis’s book here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/tale-of-cinema-dennis-lim-excerpt/

This week's special two-parter episode spotlights a pair of upcoming must-see programs in New York City. In the first half, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute chat with the critic, scholar, and former Cahiers du Cinema editor Jean-Michel Frodon, who has curated a revelatory series for the Museum of Modern Art, “Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave.” In an enlightening conversation, Jean-Michel tells us about the origins and mutations of the term nouvelle vague, the influence of the Algerian War and anti-colonial movements in that period, the intermixing of documentary and fiction in New Wave practice, and more.  In the second part of the episode, Devika and Clint interview Inney Prakash, the founder of Prismatic Ground, a new festival for experimental documentary. Inney began Prismatic Ground last year amid the upheavals of the pandemic as an attempt to reimagine film festivals from a more radical, ethical, and global perspective. Inney discusses his curatorial philosophy, why it was important for him to have the festival stream online all over the world for free, and some highlights from this year’s program, including The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton, Declarations of Love by Tiff Rekem, Squish! by Tulapop Saenjaroen, and more. For links to films and more, check out the show notes at filmcomment.com

After 2019’s Portrait of a Lady of Fire, we were eagerly awaiting Céline Sciamma’s next feature. Her new film, Petite Maman, is now finally in theaters, and it’s something of a surprise: a sweet, magical-realist story about a little girl who meets and befriends a younger version of her grieving mother. It’s a more modest film than the swooning period romance of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but Petite Maman is just as profound in its play with gender roles and women’s inner worlds. As Amy Taubin writes in an essay in this week’s Film Comment Letter, “All of Sciamma’s films contain autobiographical elements, but none are as revealing as Petite Maman’s portrait of the filmmaker as a fledgling tomboy writer/director, already eager to claim all roles on-screen and off that only have been bestowed on men.” FC Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with the director over Zoom to dig into those autobiographical elements, the film’s deceptive simplicity, Sciamma’s love of classic children’s films, and much more.

Every year, Film at Lincoln Center honors a luminary of the film industry with the Chaplin Award. This year’s recipient, the 47th, is an actress who has essayed some of the most iconic performances of the last quarter-century, and whose nearly superhuman versatility is matched by the consistency of her craft: Cate Blanchett. In an in-depth tribute essay, the scholar Amy Herzog writes that “Blanchett’s almost otherworldly range has generated certain tropes in reviews of her work: she is often described as ‘chameleonic,’ or said to ‘disappear into the character. But these takes, which suggest an innate and natural ability for imitation, or even an erasure of the self, don’t capture the careful calibrations of Blanchett’s craft.” A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Blanchett to dig into those calibrations and the process behind some of the most interesting performances of her career. We discussed her iconic turns in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, and some deeper cuts, like her early roles in the Australian miniseries Bordertown and Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (which was written by Krystof Kieslowski).

For this week’s podcast, Film Comment co-deputy editor Clinton Krute sat down with filmmakers Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, the duo behind the 1979 documentary The Wobblies. The film tells the story of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical labor union that nearly brought American industry to its knees in the early years of the 20th century. With The Wobblies, Stewart and Deborah painted a moving, and eye-opening portrait of a movement. Weaving together remarkable oral histories with stunning archival material, the film stands out as much for its subtle formal innovations as for the history it details—much of which still retains the power to shock. With a new restoration coming to theaters on May 1, or International Workers’ Day, and the film’s recent induction into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, The Wobblies is once again in the public eye, and the story it tells remains as relevant as ever.

We look forward to the Art of the Real festival every year, and 2022 is no exception. In fact, a spotlight on the work of French filmmaker Alice Diop makes this year’s roundup of groundbreaking nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking especially exciting. Diop’s We (2021),  a perceptive and beautifully wrought exploration of national identity, was a highlight of last year’s festival circuit. Her previous films, screening as part of the spotlight, are no less revelatory. For today’s podcast, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics Leo Goldsmith and Chris Boeckmann to join us for an overview this year’s Art of the Real, opening March 31 at Film at Lincoln Center. We kicked off the conversation with Diop’s early films ​​Towards Tenderness and The Death of Danton, before turning to other standouts including Jacquelyn Mills’s Geographies of Solitude, Sharlene Bamboat’s If from Every Tongue It Drips, David Easteal’s The Plains, Peter Tscherkassky’s Train Again, and more.

With Ahed’s Knee, the rawest, most autobiographical entry in Nadav Lapid’s blistering filmography (The Kindergarten Teacher; Synonyms), the director crafts a stylized and self-lacerating portrait of an Israeli filmmaker railing at the censorship, hypocrisy, and violence of his government. Last week, we welcomed Lapid for a Film Comment Live Talk exploring Ahed’s Knee and the questions it raises about state censorship of cinema, the politics of self-critique, and the political role and responsibility of the artist. We were also joined by Jamsheed Akrami, scholar of Iranian cinema and director of several documentaries, including A Cinema of Discontent. Listen all the way to the end for Jamsheed’s translation of a recent viral video in which the legendary Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui excoriates government censorship.

The ongoing horrors of war in Ukraine have raised questions for art communities around the world: How can we meaningfully respond to this crisis? How can we support and defend artists and art in the face of cultural and material destruction? And how can art, and cinema in particular, help us grapple with our collective past and present? To delve into these questions, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited two scholars, Anastasiya Osipova and Lukas Brasiskis, to the podcast. Lukas, a curator at e-flux, recently programmed films by the contemporary Ukrainian artists Piotr Armianovski and Mykola Ridnyi as a fundraiser event. With these two films as a starting point, Osipova and Brasiskis describe the cinema of Ukraine—from the archival documentaries and searing fictions of Sergei Loznitsa, to the work of Sergei Parajanov, Larisa Shepitko, and many more—and its relevance to the current moment. The two also discuss ongoing efforts by the Dovzhenko Film Center to protect the material culture of Ukraine, and much more. For a list of resources, links, and suggestions for donations, visit: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-ukrainian-cinema

A common term in nonfiction filmmaking and criticism, “point of view” connotes a number of different meanings: a perspective on the world, a camera position, an assertion of subjectivity. Last week, at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, FC co-editor Devika Girish led a special Film Comment Live Talk with filmmakers Reid Davenport (I Didn't See You There) and Joe Hunting (We Met in Virtual Reality) to explore the material, aesthetic, and political implications of a cinematic point of view, and how documentaries make and unmake our ways of seeing.

The work and legacy of the late Jonas Mekas have been on our minds even more than usual, with a recent retrospective of his films at Film at Lincoln Center and an ongoing exhibit at the Jewish Museum. So, for today’s podcast, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish wanted to discuss a form of which Mekas was a true master: the Diary Film. Devika and Clint welcomed Anthology Film Archives Archivist John Klaccsman and critic and FC–contributor Gina Telaroli for a conversation about films that document their makers’ intimate lives. They discussed Mekas’s kaleidoscopic As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, Ed Pincus’s influential Diaries, films by Anne Charlotte Robertson and Jim McBride, as well as a the work of a more contemporary diarist: John Wilson, of the critically acclaimed HBO show.

Against all odds, the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival returned to cinemas this year after last year’s virtual edition. For this week’s podcast, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited two of FC’s Berlinale correspondents, Jessica Kiang and Edo Choi, to discuss (and debate) some of the highlights from the festival. Our spirited conversation touched upon some highly anticipated titles like Claire Denis’s Fire and Bertrand Bonello’s Coma, as well as some surprise standouts: Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini, Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest, Alain Guiraudie’s Nobody’s Hero, and more. For more on this year’s Berlinale, including dispatches from Jonathan Romney and Erika Balsom, subscribe to the Film Comment Letter on filmcomment.com

This week, Film Comment co-editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sit down with Steven Soderbergh, whose latest film, KIMI, premiered on HBO Max last week. The film follows an agoraphobic tech worker played by Zoë Kravitz as she uncovers evidence of a crime and becomes ensnared in an increasingly deadly corporate conspiracy.  KIMI takes narrative and aesthetic cues from paranoid classics like Rear Window, The Conversation, and Blow Up. But Soderbergh’s typically sleek, imaginative thriller is also utterly contemporary, capturing a world where the twin threats of COVID and surveillance have become part of the fabric of our everyday lives. Clint and Devika chatted with Soderbergh at length about his productive pandemic, his collaboration with screenwriter David Koepp, how Big Tech can make bad ideas even worse, and much more. They also got a little insight into Steven’s next project: Magic Mike’s Last Dance.

For the last week and a half, your intrepid Film Comment crew has been watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock from this year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival. We hope you’ve been enjoying our coverage so far. More is on its way this week! For today’s episode, the final one in our Sundance 2022 series, editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited Film Comment contributors Abby Sun and Violet Lucca to join for an overview of the festival that was. They talked about standouts like We Met in Virtual Reality, Dos Estaciones, I Didn’t See You There, Leonor Will Never Die, Every Day in Kaimuki, and more. Find all our coverage of Sundance coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/

The Sundance Film Festival is once again in full swing, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew are watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock to bring you coverage of the annual showcase for independent cinema. Though we had hoped to be reporting live from the snow-covered streets of Park City, this year’s edition is all online. But not to worry: for the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering the virtual festival right from our homes, with some help from our trusty correspondents. For today’s conversation, Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by two hardened Sundance vets: Alissa Wilkinson, film critic at Vox, and Violet Lucca, web editor at Harper’s Magazine and a longtime friend of the podcast. With Alissa and Violet’s expert guidance, they sifted through some of the festival’s standout fiction features, including Nanny, Master, and The Cathedral, as well as some more under-the-radar fare, including Sirens, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, Emily the Criminal, a new short film from Sky Hopinka, and more. To stay up to date on all our Sundance 2022 coverage, keep your eyes on this space, and subscribe to the Film Comment Letter.

The Sundance Film Festival is once again in full swing, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew are watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock to bring you coverage of the annual showcase for independent cinema. Though we had hoped to be reporting live from the snow-covered streets of Park City, this year’s edition is all online. But not to worry: for the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering the virtual festival right from our homes, with some help from our trusty correspondents. For our second podcast envoi from the festival, Film Comment Publisher Eugene Hernandez sat down with Sundance Director of Programming Kim Yutani. The two discuss their long history with Sundance, its larger role in the film ecosystem, as well as the unique circumstances under which this year’s festival is taking place. To stay up to date on all our Sundance 2022 coverage, keep your eyes on this space, and subscribe to the Film Comment Letter.

The Sundance Film Festival is once again in full swing, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew are watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock to bring you coverage of the annual showcase for independent cinema. Though we had hoped to be reporting live from the snow-covered streets of Park City, this year’s edition is all online. But not to worry: for the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering the virtual festival right from our homes, with some help from our trusty correspondents. To kick things off, we invited official FC friends and otherwise renowned critics Cassie Da Costa and Abby Sun to dig into some of the standouts from the opening weekend, including docs like Fire of Love, Riotsville, USA, and Mija, along with some of the buzzier fiction features like Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick and Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World. To stay up to date on all our Sundance 2022 coverage, keep your eyes on this space, and subscribe to the Film Comment Letter.

This week's episode is inspired by the recent release of The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour docuseries about the making of the band’s 1970 album, Let It Be. The flurry of conversation provoked by the series—about its length, its restored archival footage, and the ways in which it captures the process of music-making and rehearsal—got Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute thinking about music documentaries more generally. What makes them good, beyond the music itself? How do concert documentaries differ from artists’ portraits? And which documentaries truly capture—and maybe even re-envision—the craft of their subjects?  To dig into these questions, they invited Geeta Dayal, a noted music, art, and film critic, and Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection. Their conversation covers a number of documentaries: The Velvet Underground, Milford Graves Full Mantis; Ornette: Made in America, Sisters with Transistors, and of course, Get Back. For links to the film and show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-music-documentaries/

With the holidays behind us and a new and exciting year of cinema on the horizon, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute caught up on some major recent releases. They were joined on their journey through the last few weeks of Hollywood movies by frequent guest A.S. Hamrah, critic for the Baffler, and Simran Hans, critic for the Observer and a first-time visitor to the Film Comment Podcast. They discussed blockbusters The Matrix Resurrections, Don’t Look Up, and Being the Ricardos, as well as more unusual big-ticket fare including Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter and Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. P.S.: Don’t miss Scott’s under-the-radar picks from last year, with more than a few unexpected choices.

Drumroll, please! Film Comment’s highly anticipated Best Films of 2021 list, voted on by nearly a 100 critics and colleagues the world over, is finally out. Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish unveiled the results live at a special Film Comment Talk, featuring hearty discussion and debate with all-star panelists Bilge Ebiri (film critic, Vulture and New York magazine), Edo Choi (assistant curator of film, Museum of the Moving Image), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor, the Criterion Collection).  Read the full Best of 2021 lists (including newly commissioned writing from a host of critics!), including best undistributed films and individual ballots from our invaluable voters, at filmcomment.com.

The arrival of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria has been one of the film events of the year. Six years after 2015’s Cemetery of Splendour, the filmmaker has returned to the big screen with his first feature set outside Thailand and his first collaboration with a bona fide movie star: Tilda Swinton. Swinton plays a British visitor in Colombia who finds herself afflicted with exploding head syndrome—a condition that causes her to hear mysterious and sudden booming sounds. Apichatpong and Swinton turn this uncanny premise into an elusive and elliptical exploration of alienation, the slippery nature of communication, and the specters of history. During the New York Film Festival last fall, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with the director and the actress to chat about their collaboration, the autobiographical origins of the film, and Apichatpong’s interest in re-enchantment through cinema.

This week's conversation focuses on David Fincher—a director whose decade-spanning body of gritty Americana—from the grim moral drama of Se7en to the revisionist Hollywood tale of the recent Mank—has inspired reams of divisive analysis A new book by Adam Nayman, David Fincher: Mind Games (out November 23), offers a canny and timely appraisal of the director’s filmography. Adam writes that, “Over the past thirty years, Fincher has cultivated and maintained a reputation that precedes him of formal rigor and technocratic exactitude, of moviemaking as a game of inches.” Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Adam and critic, filmmaker, and former NYFF director, Kent Jones—who’s written about Fincher many times over the years for FC—for an illuminating deep-dive into the Fincherverse.

2021 marks the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. As part of its centenary celebrations this fall, the NYFF inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema.  For the first edition, NYFF welcomed Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra, known for singular and transgressive films like The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté. An avowed fan of Vogel, Serra also wrote the foreword for the French edition of Film as a Subversive Art. Serra’s original lecture was followed by a conversation with NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim, and is published here for the first time. We hope you enjoy the lecture. And don’t miss our previous podcast, a roundtable discussion on the extraordinary life and work of Amos Vogel, featuring programmers and writers Richard Peña, Tom Waibel, and Edo Choi.

This year marks the centenary of Amos Vogel, a programmer, writer, and educator very dear to Film Comment—he was one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, and an abiding influence on New York’s film culture with his legendary Cinema 16 film society. In addition to his many contributions to the pages of Film Comment over the decades, Amos is also widely known for his classic book Film as a Subversive Art, an encyclopedic analysis of underground, avant-garde, and otherwise uncategorizable cinema. The 58th NYFF launched a celebration of Amos’s legacy which has since continued with tribute programs across repertory cinemas in the city and a brand-new edition of Film as a Subversive Art by Film Desk Books. At Film Comment, we’re continuing this celebration with our own week of Vogelmania. To kick things off, editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited a panel of Vogel experts—Richard Peña, the former Director of the New York Film Festival; Tom Waibel, Custodian of the Amos Vogel Library at the Austrian Film Museum; and Edo Choi, the Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image. The conversation reckons with Amos’s ideals of cinema as a space for dialogue, communal contemplation, and political subversion. Be sure to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter to read this week’s special edition, dedicated to the extraordinary work and life of Amos Vogel: https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Every year, as Halloween approaches, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are forced to confront one of their greatest fears: horror movies. For this year’s festivities, they invited two horror experts—Violet Lucca, web editor at Harper's Magazine, and Maddie Whittle, Programming Assistant at Film at Lincoln Center—to inflict some scary movies upon them. Violet and Maddie selected a couple underground favorites: Mohammed Shebl’s bonkers 1981 Egyptian horror musical Fangs and Andy Milligan’s low-budget sleaze-fest The Body Beneath (1970). As it turned out, these vampire outings aren’t all that frightening, but they challenge and expand commonplace notions of horror cinema with their play with genre, sexuality, and political commentary. The group also talked about some other picks: Mahakaal, an ’80s Bollywood remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, Sandor Stern’s Canuxploitation classic Pin, and more.

This Friday, a new restoration of the 1989 indie classic Chameleon Street opens at BAM. Wendell B. Harris’s utterly unique satire follows a real-life compulsive conman, Douglas Street, whose increasingly risky scams demonstrate both a sociopathic genius and a deep pathos. Wendell not only wrote and directed the film, but, like his hero Orson Welles, also played the lead character, with all of the dangerous charm of a man who conned his way into a surgical theater. On today’s podcast, Wendell joins FC Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish for a fascinating oral history of the making of Chameleon Street, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He also revealed that he’s pulled some cons of his own: in 1978, he scored an interview with classic Hollywood actor Hurd Hatfield by pretending to be a Film Comment reporter. Wendell, when you find the tape, please send it our way! Better late than never.

In an NYFF lineup with a record number of new and emerging filmmakers, Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider—both sophomore features—stood out for their sui generis approaches to cinematic narrative and form. Formally assured and intellectually audacious, the two films, in their own unique ways, electrify the quotidian with currents of desire, romance, and modern myth. During the festival last week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish sat down with Silvan Zürcher and Koberidze—who are old friends from their time together at the the renowned DFFB (the German Film and Television Academy Berlin)—for an in-depth talk. The conversation covered the two directors' filmic inspirations and aspirations, their trajectories within Swiss and Georgian cinema, the whimsical play with time and place in their movies, and much more. A special thanks to HBO, the presenting partner of all NYFF Talks.

Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup take us back to the ‘60s heyday of the New York avant-garde: in the Main Slate, Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground offers a revelatory portrait of the milieu that gave rise to the eponymous band and its boundary-pushing music, while in Revivals, Ed Lachman’s Songs for Drella captures Lou Reed and John Cale in concert, paying tribute to the late Andy Warhol with riveting intimacy. On Sunday, October 3, Film Comment editor Devika Girish and Clinton Krute joined Haynes, Lachman, critic Amy Taubin, and the editors of The Velvet Underground, Affonso Gonçalvez and Adam Kurnitz, for a roundtable talk. In our wide-ranging conversation on the stage of Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center. We touched on the making of the two films, as well as the enduring legacy of the historic moment of artistic innovation they so vividly evoke. Stay tuned to filmcomment.com for more coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival, both on the podcast, and in the Film Comment Letter.

This week we're reporting from the 59th New York Film Festival. One of the most anticipated films in this year's lineup is The Souvenir Part II—Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her remarkable 2019 coming-of-age drama, The Souvenir. Following Honor Swinton Byrne’s Julie, a film student, in the aftermath of her boyfriend’s death-by-overdose, the new film deepens the predecessor’s exploration of the boundaries between art and life with tender reflection, wry humor, and some dazzling moments of meta-auto-fiction. We caught up with Joanna while she was in New York for the festival, while Honor joined the conversation from Edinburgh via Zoom. Our lively chat touched upon the film’s layered approach to autobiography, its precisely contrived naturalism, and how the film’s soundtrack draws from Hogg’s memories of youth.

Established in 2020—and picking up where the late, lamented Projections section left off—Currents is the New York Film Festival's home for films with more offbeat, experimental, or hybrid sensibilities. This year’s lineup does not disappoint, with a selection of groundbreaking features and shorts from new and established filmmakers like Matías Piñeiro and Lois Patiño, Claire Simon, Kevin Jerome Everson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and many more. For this conversation I sat down with critics Chloe Lizotte and Ela Bittencourt to highlight some of our favorites from the section, including Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Tsugua Diaries, Kiyoshi Sugita’s Haruhara-san’s Recorder, Kiro Russo’s El gran movimiento, and Ted Fendt’s Outside Noise, among other features and shorts. Stay tuned for more coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival, both on the podcast, and in the Film Comment Letter. https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

As we enter the thick of fall festival season, it seems that every week brings with it a full slate of amazing new films from all over the world. This week, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute rang up two of their favorite critics, Adam Nayman and José Teodoro, for a look at the 2021 edition of Toronto International Film Festival, which just wrapped this past weekend. José and Adam had much to report on from their hometown fest. They kicked things off with a discussion of some of the bigger movies on offer, including Dune, Spencer, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, and Terence Davies’s Benediction, before diving into films like Silent Land, Sundown, Bergman Island, and more.  And don’t miss José’s dispatch from TIFF in this week’s Film Comment Letter. Sign up today at filmcomment.com.

This week Film Comment is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival, both virtually and in-person. One of the most anticipated films at this year’s festival is Benediction, the latest feature by British master Terence Davies. It’s a biopic of the English anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon—although, biopic is a bit of a misnomer. Like A Quiet Passion, Davies’s 2015 film about Emily Dickinson, Benediction is a beautifully impressionistic, personal, and indeed poetic account of Sassoon's very colorful life. Davies jumps back and forth in time, melds archival footage and arch scenes of drama, and stages some stunning tableaux that tune us into the ups and downs of Sassoon’s life as a gay man, and the despair that haunted him and his poetry after his stint in World War I. Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish chatted with Davies about the film as well as an eclectic range of subjects: beauty, eternity, poetry, Catholicism, the power of silence, his experiences in the U.K’s gay scene, the horrors of reality television, and more. We hope you enjoy the conversation, and make sure you subscribe to the podcast and to the Film Comment Letter so you can keep up with all our upcoming Toronto coverage. This episode is sponsored by Kino Lorber, presenting Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Wife of a Spy, now in theaters: bit.ly/wifeofaspy

In a 2007 Film Comment essay, Amy Taubin wrote in praise of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, a documentary about the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the communities that bore its brunt. For Amy, “Lee makes it possible for their stories to be inscribed in history. It is left to us not to forget them.” The same could be said of Lee’s epic new mini-series NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½, a deep-dive into New York City’s recent history of trauma and resilience, from the September 11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic. On today’s podcast, FC editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Amy as well as critic, artist, and archivist Ina Archer to discuss the fascinating sprawl of the show, a highly personal tribute to the spirit of Lee’s hometown.

The summer and fall festival seasons bring a flurry of buzzy premieres at glamorous locales: Cannes, Venice, New York, Toronto. But as most film critics will attest, some of our best festival experiences are at the smaller venues and events that often fly under the radar. These include regional festivals that cater to local audiences, festivals that spotlight newer filmmakers, and lineups focused on specialized programs.  To discuss the role of these festivals and some selections from recent editions, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with one of Film Comment’s most trusted festival correspondents—curator and critic Jordan Cronk. Jordan talked about some of his favorite small festivals, including Black Canvas, RIDM, and True/False, and discussed the prize-winners from the recent edition of FIDMarseille, including Outside Noise and Haruhara San’s Recorder. They also discussed picks from an upcoming archival film festival organized by Arsenal Berlin, and some of Jordan’s personal highlights from Locarno.

On today’s podcast we’re talking about a long-running preoccupation of cinema: sex work. From Taxi Driver to Pretty Woman, sex workers have frequently appeared in the movies as both tragic and romantic figures, but rarely as, well, workers. Two recent releases offer a different, more complex perspective: Lizzie Borden’s 1986 cult classic Working Girls, which was restored and released in July, and Tsai Ming-liang’s latest feature, Days.  We sat down with critics So Mayer and Sarah Fonseca to talk about the ways in which these films reflect on questions of labor, representation, performance, and care. The conversation quickly branched out to many more films, including Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Antonio Pietrangeli’s Adua and Her Friends, Fassbinder’s Querelle, and others.

This week’s podcast features a conversation with Ira Deutchman, the director of the new documentary, Searching for Mr. Rugoff. The film explores the life and work of the infamous movie-theater impresario Don Rugoff. In a 1975 Film Comment profile, Stuart Byron writes that Rugoff might be best remembered as the man who "made Manhattan's Upper East Side rather than Times Square the prime area for motion picture exhibition in New York, substituted Colombian coffee for popcorn, and—to the chagrin of critics like Andrew Sarris and the delight of those like John Simon—turned 'movies' into 'films.'" Ira, a longtime producer and distributor, has a secret Film Comment connection: in the '90s, he penned the magazine’s anonymous industry column, Grosses Gloss. To pick Ira’s brain about his days working for Rugoff, his extensive knowledge of the New York City exhibition landscape, and the transformation of the indie business over the last half century, we invited a special guest host: Film Comment publisher and industry veteran Eugene Hernandez.

As the dog days of summer loom, we’ve been pining for the crisp, air-conditioned darkness of the cinema. Fortunately, as theaters across the country have begun to re-open, seeing a favorite old movie in the dark, with other people, is no longer a distant dream. For this week’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Clinton Krute sat down with two programmers and writers, Abby Sun and Steve Macfarlane, for wide-ranging conversation about the current repertory landscape—about what’s changed over the past year, for the better and for the worse, and where things might be headed in the near future. They discuss the rapid evolution and proliferation of virtual rep offerings during the pandemic, as well as the programming of the latest Flaherty Seminar and several choice offerings at Film Forum and elsewhere.

After a Cannes-less 2020, we were glad to welcome back cinema’s grandest event this year. Film Comment followed the much-awaited 2021 edition’s superb lineup with the help of an on-the-Croisette crew of contributors—you can read their thoughtful dispatches and interviews here. On today’s podcast—the second of an epic two-parter—Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and critic and programmer Miriam Bale to talk about some of the festival’s biggest films. They dug into Memoria, Annette, Drive My Car, The Souvenir Part II, Bergman Island, Vortex, and more. Don’t miss the first part of the conversation, covering Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or–winner Titane, Bruno Dumont’s France, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, and more: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-cannes-2021-part-1-jonathan-romney-miriam-bale-titane-julia-ducournau/

After a Cannes-less 2020, we were glad to welcome back cinema’s grandest event. Film Comment followed the festival’s stellar lineup with the help of an on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast—the first of an epic two-parter—Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and critic and programmer Miriam Bale to dish on some of their festival viewing. They talked about Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or -winner Titane, Bruno Dumont’s France, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Compartment No. 6, Red Rocket, La Fracture, Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, and more. Stay tuned for part two of the conversation, covering Annette, Memoria, The Souvenir Part II, and many more.

As the good old U. S. of A. celebrated yet another year around the sun, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critic A.S. Hamrah to hold forth on the varied, colorful, and often bleak visions of America on the screen. They asked him to pick some movies that evoked the stars and stripes, or the spirit of ’76, and Scott responded with 13 picks—one for each of the original colonies.  Each one of Scott's choices—which include The Wolf of Wall Street, Kajillionaire, Good Time, Leave No Trace, Class Relations, and Trash Humpers—sparked a spirited conversation about the state of the nation. Devika and Clint added in some of their own picks: John Sayles’s The Brother From Another Planet, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and more. See the full list of movies in the show notes at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-happy-birthday-america-a-s-hamrah/

In the introduction to her new book on James Benning’s 2004 film, Ten Skies, critic and scholar Erika Balsom writes: “there are films that present themselves as complex objects but which are in fact quite simple … And then there are films—rarer altogether—that appear simple but harbour tremendous complexity. Such is the deception, the allure, of Ten Skies—a film messier and more profuse than my immediate love for it had allowed.” Balsom joined me to talk about the book (out now from Fireflies Press) and the many-sided approach she took to writing about one of the most deceptively simple—and beautiful—films in Benning’s fantastically varied body of work. We also discussed where Ten Skies fits into his filmography, the ways in which Benning plays with his own identity, how ten static shots of clouds can be a powerful political statement, and much more. Balsom will introduce a screening of Ten Skies at Light Industry in Brooklyn on July 1.

A couple weeks ago, I (Devika) visited the Artists Space gallery in downtown Manhattan to check out the ongoing exhibit, "Feel at Home Here," by New Red Order—a “public secret society” with rotating members who creates exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and re-channel our relationships to indigeneity. As I walked into the gallery, the lobby welcomed me with an assortment of marketing paraphernalia: a poster advertised “Savage Philosophy™”; a red landline invited me to call a hotline; and a screen played a video of a white man exhorting me to “never settle” and to realize my "fullest potential” by joining his organization, New Red Order.  Was this the merchandise section of the gallery? A marketing or recruitment video? Or a parody? I couldn’t quite tell at first. This slippage between satire and fact, which constantly reminds us of the all-too-real absurdity of the settler colonial project, is the modus operandi of New Red Order. As I walked further into the exhibit, one wall featured a sardonic timeline of the history of the Improved Order of Red Men, a whites-only political society that New Red Order riffs on subversively. One section of the room was modeled as a real-estate office for “Giving Back™" land. And the centerpiece featured a rotating video installation, which included New Red Order’s ongoing feature-film-slash-recruitment-campaign, Never Settle. To dig into the exhibit’s provocative plays with time, futurity, guilt, ownership, and desire, I spoke to New Red Order’s “core contributors," as they describe themselves: Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil. Today’s podcast presents a short excerpt of our conversation, featuring Adam and Jackson, but look out for the full interview in the Film Comment Letter on Thursday, June 24. For show notes, go filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-new-red-order

This week, we sat down with critics K. Austin Collins and Mayukh Sen—to talk about one of the most enduring motifs in movie history: the double.  We delved into a hand-picked selection of mirroring movies, including Brian de Palma’s underrated Femme Fatale, Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé, and Bimal Roy’s Madhumati, a film released the same year as—and with some eerie similarities to—that urtext of double features, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  As we discovered, doubles, mirrors, and dubious impersonators can be found in nearly every era and genre of cinema, with the trope generating an apparently endless variety of themes, narrative forms, and interpretations.

Last year’s hybrid New York Film Festival was an oasis amid the movie desert of the pandemic, but we sorely missed seeing the selections in the dark of Film at Lincoln Center’s theaters. So we were overjoyed when a “redux” version of the festival was announced for this summer, with much of the 2020 lineup playing on the big screen. To dig into the highlights of this encore edition and the films that must be seen big (or seen again,) we sat down with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan and curator and critic Steve Macfarlane. We discussed some underseen gems from the Revivals section, including William Klein’s Muhammad Ali: The Greatest and Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbes or Virtue, and went long on Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s Slow Machine and some standout episodes from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology.

This week on the podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute went to school with two learned FC veterans: Nellie Killian, curator and FC contributing editor, and Ina Archer, artist, critic, and media preservationist at the National Museum of African-American History & Culture. Each of them assigned the group a movie to watch. We’re calling this episode “homework,” but fear not, their selections were far from a chore!  Ina selected Murder at the Vanities (1934), Mitchell Leisen’s madcap Pre-Code caper, while Nellie suggested Honey Moccasin, a 1998 experimental gem by Indigenous filmmaker Shelley Niro. Both selections were zany, incredibly inventive, and very much of their times. They made for a great double feature. We learned a lot from the conversation and hope you will, too. Pop quiz coming up soon! For links to the films and more, go to the show notes at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-homework/

In an essay on the militant films of the Palestine Film Unit for The New York Review of Books, the critic Kaleem Hawa writes that, “Palestinian cinema has always been saddled with the psychic weight of colonization. (...) Film offers liberatory possibilities, then: with the projection of moving images onto a screen, a people can imagine something different, something other.” This week on the podcast, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Kaleem (who’s also a Film Comment contributor) to discuss our recent home-viewing—which, as it turned out, included a lot of Palestinian cinema. From the agit-prop of Mustafa Abu Ali’s 1974 film They Do Not Exist, to the diasporic longing of Basma AlSharif’s Home Movies Gaza, to the biting satire and media criticism of Elia Suleiman, our conversation covered a lot of fascinating ground. Links to the movies are in our show notes at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-at-home-palestinian-cinema-edition/.

On this week’s podcast, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish speak to Barry Jenkins, Oscar-winning director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, about his latest project, The Underground Railroad. It’s a lush, 10-hour epic that marries Jenkins’s distinctive cinematic sensibilities with the historical fiction of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, which imagines the underground railroad as a real-life network of trains and tunnels. Over 10 episodes, all directed by Jenkins, the show traces the odyssey of a young enslaved woman named Cora after her escape from a plantation in antebellum Georgia. As Cora is pursued from state to state by a seemingly possessed slave catcher, Jenkins combines bracing and often brutal realism with moments of thrilling fantasy and beauty. Film Comment sat down with Jenkins to discuss five key scenes from the series, and the ideas and intricate craft that went into each. Listeners beware! The conversation touches on crucial plot points, so if you're averse to spoilers, please press pause and watch the series first.

This week on the podcast, we went long on an American filmmaker like no other: Melvin Van Peebles. Known for groundbreaking classics like Watermelon Man and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, Van Peebles invented entirely new cinematic languages while offering trenchant visions of Black American life and masculinity. In 1968, the director made his feature debut with The Story of a Three Day Pass, a dazzlingly multi-layered film about an African-American soldier’s dalliance with a white French woman in Paris. With the film returning to screens this week in a brand-new restoration, we reached out to two Van Peebles superfans: filmmaker Ephraim Asili, director of The Inheritance, and writer and film editor Blair McClendon. We discussed Van Peebles' work and fascinating life, and even got a peek into Ephraim’s extensive collection of Melvin Van Peebles ephemera. Don’t forget to sign up for the Film Comment Letter! It’s a free digital newsletter that will deliver original writing by Film Comment contributors directly to your inbox every Thursday. Sign-up today at filmcomment.com.

“The people are all pale as mushrooms, blending in with the ashen cityscapes, sterile white rooms, and drab, half-empty restaurants. Stuck in meticulously composed dioramas, they enact miniature comedies and tragedies—sometimes it is hard to say which—filled with deadpan humor and haunting bleakness. We could only be in a Roy Andersson movie.” Imogen Sara Smith wrote these words about Andersson’s latest, About Endlessness, which graced the cover of Film Comment’s May-June 2020 issue. The global pandemic was just starting to take hold back then, and the Swedish filmmaker’s work seemed to offer an uncannily apt vision of life in 2020. With About Endlessness finally opening in theaters, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed Imogen and another long-time FC contributor, Jonathan Romney, for a conversation about the film and its place in Andersson’s utterly distinctive filmography. Don’t forget to sign up for the Film Comment Letter, launching on May 6! It’s a free digital newsletter that will deliver original writing by Film Comment contributors directly to your inbox every Thursday. Sign-up today at filmcomment.com and receive a free digital download of a Film Comment back issue of your choice.

This last year has been a drought for movie-lovers by most standards. But if you’re looking for silver linings, you could do worse than noting that there’s a fresh edition of the New Directors/New Films festival happening a mere four months after the 2020 edition. This year is extra special: it returns the festival to theaters alongside virtual screenings, and it also marks the 50th anniversary of New Directors/New Films. It’s a nice reminder that despite all the doom-saying, cinema’s future remains as vibrant as its past. To preview the lineup, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by critics Vadim Rizov and Chloe Lizotte—both veterans of our 2020 New Directors talk— for a live taping of the podcast. The four discussed festival highlights including Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta, James Vaughan’s Friends and Strangers, Fern Silva’s Rock Bottom Riser, Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden, Mani Kaul's Duvidha, and more. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

“A film that centers on a transgender person or storyline enters the culture like any other movie. The difference lies in the discourse around it.” So writes Caden Mark Gardner in a recent essay in the Criterion Collection’s online publication, the Current. “Trans people in movies are written and talked about as if they were abstract concepts, anomalies. For years, it’s been clear that very little attention is being paid (by filmmakers, critics, or marketers) to the ways in which a trans audience might see and react to these attempts at putting their lives in front of the camera, and the cisgender majority continues to control the conversation.” On this week's episode, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute brought together a roundtable of writers and artists who are reframing this conversation: critics Caden and Willow Maclay, and filmmakers Isabel Sandoval and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. We asked the panel to respond to a number of excellent questions submitted by the Film Comment community, including: How does one define trans cinema? Are visibility and representation important, or should questions of labor be foregrounded? And which classic movies do our panelists consider to be “covertly” trans? The rich and wide-ranging conversation touched upon a number of movies and articles. For show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-trans-cinema-roundtable. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

On this week's episode, editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish were joined two excellent writers, both first-timers on the Film Comment Podcast: A. S. Hamrah, film critic at The Baffler, and writer and film editor Blair McClendon, whom you may know from his work on 2020's The Assistant. The original plan was to chat about our recent home viewing, but the conversation kept returning to that age-old fountain of springtime small talk: the Academy Awards. The group focused on a handful of notable nominees—Sound of Metal, Minari, Judas and the Black Messiah, and Nomadland, among others—and also dug into the massive Oscars marketing apparatus, ’90s zine culture, the phenomenon of professional “Oscarologists,” and much, much more. To top it off, the discussion was interrupted by a brief visit from New York’s finest. Fear not! Everyone is safe. Though Margaret, if you’re listening, please be advised. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by: Amazon Studios, presenting Sound of Metal and One Night in Miami. Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. For your consideration. Learn more here: amazonstudiosguilds.com/films Kino Lorber, presenting Charlène Favier's Slalom. Now playing in select theaters and virtual cinemas nationwide: kinomarquee.com/slalom

For years, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has been crafting eloquent correctives to Eurocentric and capitalist histories through acclaimed films like Lumumba (2000), I Am Not Your Negro (2016), and The Young Karl Marx (2017). His latest opus takes that project to its limit: Exterminate All the Brutes is a four-part HBO documentary series that retells the story of our world from a perspective rarely centered in such narratives—that of the colonized. Drawing from three books—Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist, which borrows its title from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; and Silencing the Past by Haitian-American scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot—Peck crafts a sweeping historical documentary that feels at once intimate and sweeping, familiar and new. In this episode of the podcast, Film Comment editor Devika Girish chatted at length with Peck about assembling this expansive series, confronting the gaps in colonial archives, and drawing continuities with the contemporary crises of fake news and historical amnesia. Listen to the full conversation and read an excerpt on filmcomment.com. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by: - MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment. - Amazon Studios, presenting Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and Time. Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. For your consideration. Learn more at amazonstudiosguilds.com/films.

A few weeks ago, the British documentarian Adam Curtis debuted his newest mega-project online: a six-episode, eight-hour BBC series titled, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. It's the latest in Curtis’s 30-year run of documentaries that stitch together found footage drawn largely from the BBC’s archives into epic origin stories of our political and cultural times. Available in its entirety on YouTube, Can’t Get You Out of My Head traces associative connections between a number of figures across history—including Jiang Qing, Michael X, Afeni and Tupac Shakur, Edouard Limonov, and others—to craft a dizzying account of the emergence of the global economy, the rise of individualism, and the spread of conspiracy theories. In this week's episode, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish debate Curtis’s aesthetic strategies and political arguments with two old friends: Film at Lincoln Center assistant programmer Dan Sullivan, and Violet Lucca, a former Film Comment editor (and the original host of this podcast!) who now works as web editor at Harper’s Magazine. They take on a number of questions in a lively, often impassioned conversation. Is Curtis a journalist, a filmmaker, or a propagandist? Who is the audience for his films? Do his grand theories hold water? And much more. For show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

On this week's episode, we bring back a beloved Film Comment Podcast format of yore: Movie Gifts. It’s like Secret Santa but for movies—each participant picks a movie for another that the recipient hasn’t seen. It’s a fun way for us to share our enthusiasms, gain new insights on old favorites, and fill in some long-standing blindspots.  And who better to join us in the spirit of gift-giving than our two erudite guests: K. Austin Collins, film critic for Rolling Stone; and Adam Nayman, writer for The Ringer, contributing editor to CinemaScope, and author of Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks. Kameron and Adam joined Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute to unwrap some fantastic presents, including Cinda Firestone's Attica, Allan King's Warrendale, Abbas Kiarostami's First Case, Second Case, and Elaine May's A New Leaf. For show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-the-return-of-movie-gifts. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

In case you missed the exciting news: we just relaunched the Film Comment Podcast last week after a yearlong hiatus. We’re glad to be back, and in this episode, we’re looking at one of the big developments that the film world has grappled with while we were away: the emergence of virtual film festivals. As the pandemic shut down cinemas and made travel impossible, festivals adopted a variety of strategies to keep bringing movies to their audiences. Some, like Cannes, were cancelled; others went fully online; and many, like the New York Film Festival, Sundance, and the Berlinale, experimented with hybrid formats. These new models have opened up a host of questions. Is it really a festival if you’re not in a cinema? What does the virtual format expose about the mechanics of festivals? And as theaters start to reopen, are these changes here to stay? In this episode, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited two festival veterans—curator Abby Sun (DocYard; My Sight Is Lined With Visions), and critic Jessica Kiang (Variety, The Playlist)—to dig into these questions and more. This episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.

Welcome back to the Film Comment Podcast. After a months-long hiatus prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic, we are thrilled to kick off the return of Film Comment with one of our favorite ways to connect with our audience: our weekly podcast. We've missed talking about movies with our whip-smart friends and fellow critics, and we're excited to be back here, bringing you insightful commentary on the latest in film culture. Check this space every Tuesday for new episodes. For our first new episode, we delved into the lineup of the 2021 Berlinale. Like several other festivals, this year’s edition is taking a hybrid approach, with two staggered parts—a virtual Industry Event, which took place March 1-5, and an in-person event scheduled for June. To dig into some highlights from the (very strong) slate screened online last week, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by two of our favorite critics: scholar Erika Balsom, who writes for Artforum, CinemaScope, and other publications, and Ela Bittencourt, a longtime Film Comment contributor. They discussed Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider, Radu Jude’s Golden Bear-winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Celine Sciamma’s highly anticipated Petite Maman, and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, among other films.

It’s been a while since we did a new episode in our Film Comment Podcast: at Home series. Let me assure you that’s not because we’ve stopped watching movies or even left the house for that matter. So FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold got together again with my colleagues to talk about the latest selection of home viewing that’s been occupying our pandemicized brains. We discussed the shock of the present moment and how it’s changed, and then we talked about movies spanning cinema verite and what used to be called cyberspace, as well as a fair share of animals on screen. I was joined by all-star Film Comment editorial colleagues: Film Comment Digital Editor Clinton Krute and Assistant Editor Devika Girish. We discuss films like the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman, Hong Sangsoo’s Tale of Cinema, The Matrix, Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers, Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin, Roar, and, um, Tiger King, among others. Stay safe, and thank you for all of your support. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

In more normal times, this week’s podcast might have been a Rep Report, reviewing some of the riches screening in New York’s art-house theaters. I’ve spent more happy hours than I could possibly count at those theaters, with certain years defined by landmark retrospectives and rare screenings of one sort or another. Film Comment has been lucky to count many of the programmers at these theaters as contributors to the magazine and the podcast. And so for our latest episode, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold checks in with two keepers of the flame: Eric Hynes, curator at Museum of the Moving Image, and writer of our Make It Real column on nonfiction; and Ashley Clark, director of film programming at BAM in Brooklyn. The three talk about steering theaters through this difficult time, and the movies and the 25-year-old baseball games that have kept them in good spirits. And fair warning: there is talk about Tron. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

We’re always happy to welcome two outstanding scholars to the Film Comment Podcast, and you’ve probably already read their criticism or heard them on a DVD or streaming commentary. David Bordwell last joined us to discuss his book Reinventing Hollywood, and of course his books are staples of film studies courses and his regular film blog with Kristin Thompson is a sharp and inquisitive resource. Critic Imogen Sara Smith is our other returning guest, a regular contributor to Film Comment and an all-star contributor at Criterion and elsewhere. Among her beautifully composed and observed essays, she’s written about Christian Petzold for us and on the podcast, reflected on the phenomenon of ghosts in cinema. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold welcomed David and Imogen back for a discussion that ranges from fascinating rediscoveries in Japanese cinema to the inflammatory film The Hunt. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

An inspiring development during the pandemic has been watching people pull together to help one another and especially those hit hardest. One such effort was the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund, which raised nearly $80,000 in 10 days for out-of-work movie theater employees. For our latest edition of The Film Comment Podcast at Home, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold caught up with programmer-critics Ed Halter and Nellie Killian, who spearheaded the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund alongside Thomas Beard and filmmaker Sierra Pettengill. Halter, a critic in residence at Bard College, is also co-curator of Light Industry with Thomas Beard, and Killian is a contributing editor of Film Comment. Halter and Killian last appeared together on an incredible podcast talking about Projections, the experimental film slate of the New York Film Festival. This time, the three talked about the effects of the crisis on how we watch movies, what we’ve been watching, and the interesting overlaps between our ultra-mediated existence and experimental cinema. Films discussed include Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Listen to Britain, Fail Safe, The Day After, and more. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

We begin another week with The Film Comment Podcast at Home, keeping ourselves distracted and hopefully our listeners too. One big way the crisis is affecting the movie business is that it’s also another week without new theatrical releases. That might be the least of our concerns, but it’s definitely been food for thought among critics and other moviegoers. On this episode, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief talked to our weekly critic, Jonathan Romney, who has been adapting his output for the current situation, and that goes for his intake. Nic reached him in London, where he’s weathering the crisis at home like the rest of us with a liberal mix of movies and television. The two discuss Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy, Bojack Horseman, The Larry Sanders Show, Babylon Berlin, and Zia Anger's My First Film, among others. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

Right now, movie theaters are temporarily closed, and we’ll have to wait a while before we can all sit together again and look up at the big screen. But before the curtain dropped on moviegoing, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold made his annual pilgrimage to the True/False Film Fest. True/False is a reliably energizing festival of nonfiction film, curating the best from around the world. It’s also a place to take the Film Comment Podcast on the road, taking part in Toasted, the late-night event that closes out the festival. This year, Rapold spoke with another rotating lineup of filmmakers, critics, and film professionals, about movies at the festival as well as the nitty-gritty of filmmaking and working with people in front of and behind the camera. Among the films discussed are Garrett Bradley’s Time; Khalik Allah’s IWOW I Walk on Water; Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Viewing Booth; Daniel Hymanson’s So Late So Soon; and Sky Hopinka’s Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore. Rapold was joined by an ever-changing lineup including Hymanson and Hopinka, critic Dessane Lopez Cassell, filmmaker Mustafa Rony Zeno, and more. Finally Please bear in mind that this was recorded before a live audience at Cafe Berlin. Special thanks to Em Downing of True/False for keeping the show running. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

Staying at home is a global phenomenon in these difficult times, as we all find ourselves with a lot more indoors time and anxiety on our hands. For our latest daily edition of Film Comment Podcast at Home, we go to Brazil. Critic and programmer Ela Bittencourt wrote our interview feature on Bacurau in our March-April issue, and now, the film’s story of collective action, state of siege, and inequality feel ever more urgent. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Assistant Editor Devika Girish talked about the situation in Brazil and also what Ela has been watching. In addition to Bacurau, we also discuss Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Joseph Losey’s The Servant and Mr. Klein, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Mani Kaul’s Our Daily Bread, and Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is Purest White. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

For our latest daily edition of the podcast, we reached out again to a filmmaker for a report from another corner of the world. Nadav Lapid is the director of The Kindergarten Teacher, The Policeman, and most recently, Synonyms, which played in The New York Film Festival and before that won the top prize at Berlin. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold interviewed Nadav about The Kindergarten Teacher at its premiere in Cannes, and in our July-August 2019 issue, the director sat down with Jordan Cronk for a conversation about Synonyms. The filmmaker spoke to us from Tel Aviv this time about working on his next feature under the current circumstances, and a couple of movies that came to mind in the process. I was joined by Devika Girish, assistant editor. And as we enter another week of the pandemic, we hope that all of our listeners are staying safe. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

In an article in The New York Times, the critic Manohla Dargis wrote about what we’re missing right now: “There is nothing like watching a movie, leaving the world while being rooted in it alongside friends, family and everyone else.” It’s a feeling that means so much to all of us, and on this podcast, we’ve been doing our best to stay virtually connected with each other and with movies. We’ve had the pleasure of welcoming Manohla Dargis on the podcast in our festival editions, and in these extraordinary times, she joins us once again. For this episode, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Assistant Editor Devika Girish talked to Manohla about the impact of the cinema shutdown, what’s unique about the movies, and why old Hollywood movies can hold a special pleasure. We discuss Hollywood classics like 42nd Street and The Great McGinty as well as more recent films including Bong Joon Ho’s Okja and Sudanese documentary Talking About Trees. Please note that our necessarily remote connection may mean some variable audio quality If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

On the past few episodes we’ve posed the same essential question to critics, a filmmaker, and a curator: what’s the view from where you’re sitting? That’s come to mean a couple of things: what are you watching these days, but also what’s life like from your perspective of the film world? For this installment, we looked within our own organization, Film at Lincoln Center, and spoke with our colleague, Eugene Hernandez. Eugene is the deputy executive director at Film at Lincoln Center, director of the New York Film Festival, and publisher of Film Comment. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold joined Clinton Krute and Devika Girish to talk with Eugene about his observations on our film community in these troubled times. And of course, we also discussed the movies we’ve been watching, including Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, Robert Smigel’s The Week Of, and Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

Last weekend, the box office report for new releases looked very different: it was glaringly empty. As with so much of the world, the pandemic has left its mark on film: for now, new theatrical releases are in a kind of holding pattern. Our latest guest on The Film Comment Podcast at Home series is regular contributor Nick Pinkerton, and he’s been wondering how this cinematic break is affecting film culture and the very idea of contemporary cinema. Nick has also been watching a ton of movies, everything from Bunuel’s Simon of the Desert to Virtuosity. For this episode, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Assistant Editor Devika Girish spoke with Nick about his voracious viewing and what isolation means for all of us as moviegoers with no place to go. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: https://purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

Every year, the New Directors/New Films festival introduces audiences to fresh and adventurous cinema from around the world. It’s presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, and for many New York moviegoers, it’s a lovely prelude to the spring. This year, the 49th edition has been postponed, and so we thought it would be nice to sit down with MoMA’s chief curator of film, Rajendra Roy, for another installment in the Film Comment Podcast: At Home. We talked about a couple of Raj’s comfort food movies—including David Lynch’s Dune and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve—and we also discussed how an institution like MoMA plans to adapt its film programming to the current moment. Also joining FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold were Clinton Krute, FC digital editor, and FC Devika Girish, assistant editor. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: https://purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

For the past week we’ve been doing a special daily edition of the podcast where we talk about what we’ve been watching at home. It’s a new week now and the world still seems to get a bit scarier every day, so we’re going to keep doing this to distract anyone who needs distraction. For this episode, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Assistant Editor Devika Girish, Digital Editor Clinton Krute, and a very special guest: Los Angeles-based filmmaker and novelist Sandi Tan, director of Shirkers. We were pleased to welcome Sandi for a Film Comment Talk when Shirkers came out, and this time around, we had a terrific time discussing a number of great movies. We started with one agreed upon title, Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang, starring Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche, and ranged on from Zodiac to Fellini’s Roma. If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times: https://purchase.filmlinc.org/donate/contribute2

In case you’re just joining us, this is another edition of the Film Comment Podcast at Home. Every day we’re talking about what we’re watching. For this episode, we check in with Sheila O’Malley, one of our regular columnists, who writes the Present Tense column. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold joined digital editor Clinton Krute to talk with Sheila about a classic Hollywood star she’s been returning to: Jean Arthur, well known from several Frank Capra movies as well as Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings. Sheila also chose another film which we don’t want to spoil because it testifies to the great variety of movies we’re all watching right now. As usual, we’re providing links on Film Comment’s website, including where to watch the next movie we’ll focus on next episode: we’ll be talking about Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang, starring Juliette Binoche and Denis Levant. And we’ll have a very special guest joining us that episode, posting Monday. You’ll also find more information and a link for supporting the publisher of Film Comment, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times. Also don’t miss details on the new streaming availability of Bacurau. Thank you for listening, and let’s go now to our conversation with Sheila and Clint.

Today we continue our special homebound version of the podcast, as we all do our best to stay connected and stay sane. As before, we’re talking about what we’ve been watching and how being stuck at home is leading us to try some new movies as well as return to comfort food. We hope you enjoy our latest selection, and we'd love if you watched along with us—you'll find links below to titles under discussion. For our latest episode, I’m joined by Soraya Nadia McDonald, culture critic for The Undefeated and contributing editor to Film Comment, and by Devika Girish, our assistant editor. On this episode, we discuss Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground, Matt Wolf’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Thomas Heise’s Heimat Is a Space in Time, Legally Blonde, and Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Also, a special treat: If you listened to the last episode, you’ll recall our own Michael Koresky promising some new music for the podcast. He came through with a dramatic performance of Michel Legrand’s “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”, which you can hear on today’s intro.

“NO NEW ‘MOVIES’ TIL INFLUENZA ENDS“ read the October 10, 1918, headline in The New York Times, during the global flu pandemic one century ago. Then as now, theaters nationwide were temporarily closing, leaving moviegoers without any movies to go to. “WE MISS OUR MOVIES” went another newspaper headline that same October, atop an article that marveled at the impact of this young popular art form: “In a few years, and so gradually as to be almost imperceptible, the custom of watching them has grown upon individuals of all mentalities to a greater extent than they realized until they suddenly were deprived of them.” The “movies” are a bit more familiar now, but we’re definitely feeling deprived of moviegoing, the community that cinemas provide, and, well, just plain getting out of the house and seeing people. So we’ve begun our Film Comment Podcast at Home series, gathering together (remotely!) to talk about the movies we’re watching at home. While we can’t do anything about the stir-craziness, or the dread, we can at least share movies and keep each other company. Without further ado, please enjoy our latest installment, where I’m joined by Film Comment critical stalwart, Michael Koresky, and my editorial colleagues at the magazine, Devika Girish and Clinton Krute. We hope you’ll follow along and watch with us. On this episode, we discuss Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours, Columbo, The Big City, Stuff and Dough, The Green Fog, Vertigo, Crimes of the Heart, The Truth, If We Say That We Are Friends, Ridge and more.

You don’t need us to tell you that we’re living in extraordinary times, and consequently, many of us are spending our time indoors these days. And with all that extra time inside, we’ve been talking with folks and hearing that it might be nice to listen to some friendly talk about movies—and maybe give us something else to think about. So we will be doing special editions of The Film Comment Podcast where we talk about what we’ve been watching, and wherever possible, we’ll be providing relevant links so you can watch too or read more. Call it The Film Comment Podcast at Home. For our first installment, Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with his editorial colleagues—remotely, don’t worry!—Digital Editor Clinton Krute and Assistant Editor Devika Girish, to talk about their recent viewing habits and, of course, vent some general concerns about the movies. Some of the movies discussed include Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, Dušan Makavejev’s A Man Is Not a Bird, and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Bacurau is the new film from Brazilian filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, and it has a pulp thriller premise with a radical heart: a small rural community becomes the target of a mysterious, heavily armed group of foreign white tourists. But the Bacurau residents don’t give up, and the result is what Ela Bittencourt calls, in our March-April issue, “a blistering portrait of resistance.” You might know the filmmakers from their prior work on Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius. For their latest, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Bittencourt on her recent visit to New York and discussed the film’s resonance with Brazilian history and the filmmakers’ consistently thoughtful and dazzling technique. You can also read Bittencourt’s interview with Mendonca Filho and Dornelles in the same issue, and our special interview podcast from the New York Film Festival.

First Cow is the movie on the lovely cover of our March-April issue, directed by Kelly Reichardt. The setting of the movie is an Oregon frontier town in the 1820s, when newcomers are busily trying to get a foothold in life and in business. Two such newcomers are at the center of First Cow, a cook named Cookie and a fugitive he befriends named King Lu. It’s another chapter in Reichardt’s richly imagined vision of America, a portrait of outsiders and of friendship which also accounts for the unruly forces of commerce and greed. First Cow is now in theaters and it screened last year in the New York Film Festival, where FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold spoke with Reichardt between events at Film at Lincoln Center. She generously went into detail about images and the sounds that compose the film’s historical snapshot, as well as the artistic influences. Be sure to check out our features on First Cow in the print magazine as well as our discussion on last week’s podcast.

In the cover story of our March-April issue, out now, Film Comment Digital Editor Clinton Krute writes “Kelly Reichardt’s deceptively modest epic First Cow opens with a wide, static shot of a barge, heavy with consumer goods, pushing down the Columbia River. Like the story that follows, this shot is deceptively straightforward, gesturing toward one of the themes—nature vs. society, with the human being somewhere in-between—that the filmmaker has been worrying since her 1994 debut, River of Grass. With First Cow, Reichardt has managed to weave together the various concerns—social, philosophical, economic, and cinematic—that have haunted her films to date, producing a work of remarkable beauty and startling complexity.” Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Krute and Phoebe Chen, a regular contributor, to talk about Reichardt’s career and her latest, in theaters this week.

The Berlin International Film Festival is now over, but there were a few more films we wanted to share with you. We’ve talked about highlights such as new films from Christian Petzold and Hong Sangsoo. For our final Berlinale episode, we’re discussing new work from Tsai Ming-liang; the Golden Bear award-winner, There Is No Evil, from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof; and a couple of films that will be appearing in New Directors / New Films here in New York, The Trouble with Being Born and Los Conductos. This podcast also has a bonus feature for you: our conversation about documentary ethics with Orwa Nyrabia, artistic director of IDFA, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. For this episode, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Devika Girish, assistant editor at Film Comment.

This week we have been reporting from the Berlin International Film Festival. And without a doubt, very high on the list of favorites has been Christian Petzold’s new film, Undine. You might know Petzold from his previous features such as Transit, Barbara, and Phoenix. Undine is the story of a museum guide who moves on from a breakup to a relationship with a new man. But there are undercurrents of something mysterious to this romance, which draws on the age-old myth about a water nymph. In Berlin, our assistant editor Devika Girish sat down with Christian Petzold, an inveterate storyteller, to talk about Undine.

This week, The Film Comment Podcast reports from the Berlin International Film Festival, straight from, you guessed it, Berlin. It’s one of the year’s major festivals, and the 2020 edition has been highly anticipated because of its new leadership and impressive slate. We’ll be talking about the highlights including new films from Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo, and Abel Ferrara, as well as Natalia Meta’s El Prófugo and Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined on this episode by FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish and FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney, to discuss Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel’s DAU. Natasha, Hong Sangsoo’s The Woman Who Ran, Fabio & Damiano D'Innocenzo’s Bad Tales, and Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern’s Delete History.

This week, The Film Comment Podcast reports from the Berlin International Film Festival, straight from, you guessed it, Berlin. It’s one of the year’s major festivals, and the 2020 edition has been highly anticipated because of its new leadership and impressive slate. We’ll be talking about the highlights including new films from Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo, and Abel Ferrara, as well as Natalia Meta’s El Prófugo and Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined on this episode by FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish and Jessica Green, programmer and Artistic Director of the Houston Cinema Arts Society, to discuss Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra’s All the Dead Ones, Ferrara’s Siberia, Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli, and Bastian Günther’s One of These Days.

This week, The Film Comment Podcast reports from the Berlin International Film Festival, straight from, you guessed it, Berlin. It’s one of the year’s major festivals, and the 2020 edition has been highly anticipated because of its new leadership and impressive slate. We’ll be talking about the highlights including new films from Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo, and Abel Ferrara, as well as Natalia Meta’s El Prófugo and Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda. Film Comment Editor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined on this episode by FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish, and a few special guests. Also check out our website for more in-depth coverage on the festival and filmmakers. Let’s go now to our latest conversation in Berlin.

Last fall saw the release of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, which joins a long tradition of marital dramas while adding its own fresh sense of candor. After featuring the film in our September-October 2019 issue, we launched our hit podcast series Marriage Stories. Actually, we’ve only done one so far, but we are excited to present another installment. The premise is simple: we invite couples on the podcast to talk about movies relating to marriage. So for the latest installment, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with R. Emmet Sweeney, a regular contributor to Film Comment, and Andrea Janes, a writer, entrepreneur, and past contributor to the magazine.

Last fall saw the release of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, which joins a long tradition of marital dramas while adding its own fresh sense of candor. After featuring the film in our September-October 2019 issue, we immediately thought, why not invite married couples on the podcast to talk about movies about marriage? We’re calling the series Marriage Stories, and the results have been wonderfully illuminating conversations freely weaving together critical and personal experiences across a wide selection of movies. For this special Valentine’s Day episode of Marriage Stories, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Chris Wisniewski, who wrote an essay on film education for FC last fall, and FC regular Michael Koresky. Be sure to look out for more Marriage Stories coming soon to The Film Comment Podcast.

The achievements of actors and actresses of color have long gone under-recognized in Hollywood. It’s a fact of the industry that has only gotten more glaring as the years go by. For the latest Film at Lincoln Center Talk hosted by Film Comment magazine, we gathered together to celebrate the craft of our favorite performers of color from current cinema. We also talked about key figures and overlooked talents from across film history. Our critical appreciation of specific actors naturally gave rise to a range of topics including issues of authenticity and gatekeeping. For the discussion, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Soraya Nadia McDonald, writer for The Undefeated and contributing editor at Film Comment; Mayukh Sen, James Beard Award–winning food and culture writer; and Devika Girish, assistant editor at Film Comment.

As you may have noticed, Film Comment went to the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah. We recorded a series of podcasts and now at last we have our thrilling conclusion. For our final episode in Park City, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Manohla Dargis of The New York Times; Amy Taubin, contributing editor at Film Comment; and Devika Girish, our assistant editor. We talked about several movies including Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, Benh Zeitlin’s long-awaited Wendy, and the documentary On the Record about accusations against hip hop mogul Russell Simmons. Plus, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, Michael Almereyda’s Tesla, and more. For more on Sundance, be sure to listen to our previous podcasts and check our website for features. Let’s go now to our conversation.

This week we have been recording at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, talking about the highlights in its film lineup. One of the most anticipated movies there was the new film from Kirsten Johnson. Johnson’s first feature was the incredible Cameraperson, assembled partly from images she shot while working as a cinematographer on other films. Her new feature is called Dick Johnson Is Dead, and it’s innovative in a different way. It’s a portrait of her father and her relationship with him as he faces the challenges of growing old. But part of how Johnson expresses this coping process is through staged scenes, sometimes showing her father in heaven, sometimes having imaginary accidents. The result brings us closer to both the filmmaker and her father and to the inevitable horizon of mortality. At Sundance, after the film’s premiere, Film Comment Assistant Editor Devika Girish sat down with Johnson for a fascinating discussion of Dick Johnson Is Dead.

Welcome back to our ongoing series podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. As we near the festival’s end, we’ve redoubled our efforts to bring our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Ashley Clark, Director of Film Programming at BAM, and FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish, for a discussion of Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs, Radha Blank’s The 40-Year-Old Version, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro, and more.

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. We’re bringing our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Ela Bittencourt (critic and FC contributor), Eric Hynes (FC columnist and curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image) and FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish, for a discussion of Steve James’s City So Real, Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven, the New Frontier program, Michael Almereyda’s Tesla, and more.

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. We’re bringing our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with filmmaker and critic Sierra Pettengill and Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, for a discussion of Kitty Green’s The Assistant, Garrett Bradley’s Time, Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, and more.

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival! We’ll be bringing you daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Abby Sun, programmer and FC contributor, and Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, for a discussion of Shirley, Time, Yalda, małni—towards the ocean, towards the shore, and more.

This week we are at the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah, sending regular dispatches about the highlights in its independent film lineup. One of the most highly anticipated movies here is called The Last Thing He Wanted, from filmmaker Dee Rees, who previously directed Mudbound and Pariah. The Last Thing He Wanted is an adaptation of the Joan Didion novel, which centers on a journalist who gets caught up in shady international business when her ageing father gets sick. The time period is the high-Reagan 1980s, and the story involves malfeasance in Central America, gun running, family challenges, and the CIA. Anne Hathaway plays the journalist, Willem Dafoe is her father, Rosie Perez is a fellow journalist. Rees takes a kaleidoscopic approach to adapting Didion’s typically complex narration, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with the director at Sundance to discuss her process as well as pick her brain about the movie’s ideas about modernity and identity. The Last Thing He Wanted premieres here on January 27 and will be available through Netflix in February.

Welcome back to our series of podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival! We’ll be bringing you daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Sam Adams, senior editor at Slate and editor of Slate’s culture blog Brow Beat, and FC Assistant Editor (and podcast regular) Devika Girish. Films discussed include Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Zola, Boys State, Into the Deep, and Jumbo.

We’re back, reporting from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Where others may have balked, we brave the dangerously crowded, ice-packed streets of Park City, Utah to bring you critical conversations about all the highlights from the festival. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined for this episode by Assistant Editor Devika Girish and podcast regular Eric Hynes, Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss the films Crip Camp, Bad Hair, Miss Americana, and This Is Not a Burial, It Is a Resurrection.

It’s January, which means it’s time once again to see some movies in the snowy wilderness of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Once again, the Film Comment Podcast will be on the scene, recording regular episodes, with the latest on the festival, the movies, and the filmmakers. We’re kicking things off with a preview of the 2020 edition’s offerings, talking about the movies we’re most looking forward to, and providing some context to the festival and what’s changed over the years. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined for this discussion by Amy Taubin, contributing editor, and Devika Girish, Assistant Editor.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about the 2010s and asking some questions as part of our Decade Project. What were the key movies of the decade, which filmmakers were doing innovative work, and what were the major shifts and big issues in the artform and the industry? We brought our discussion of the decade to our latest Film Comment Talk at Film at Lincoln Center. Joining Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for our discussion were Ashley Clark, Director of Film Programming at BAM; Devika Girish, Assistant Editor of Film Comment; Eric Hynes, Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image; and Alissa Wilkinson, Film Critic at Vox.

Vitalina Varela, the beautiful new film from Pedro Costa, is the cover of our January-February issue. Jordan Cronk spoke with Costa about the film’s story of a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina who comes back to Lisbon for the funeral of her estranged husband. As Cronk put it in his feature: “Costa has been developing his approach into a new kind of dramatic portraiture . . . He has become a touchstone for an entire movement of contemporary art cinema ranging from documentary to the avant-garde.” Vitalina Varela next screens in the Sundance film festival, followed by an exclusive theatrical run at Film at Lincoln Center, where it showed in the main slate of the New York Film Festival. Last fall, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold spoke with Pedro Costa at Film at Lincoln Center about crafting his deeply moving and technically virtuosic film.

Throughout her pioneering career, Agnès Varda has inspired countless filmmakers with her work and her groundbreaking career and style. At Film Comment, we leapt at the opportunity to put her on the cover when Faces Places was released. More recently, to celebrate the final weekend of the Varda retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, Film Comment presented a conversation with another generation of filmmakers in honor of Varda. They talked about what Varda has meant to them and which movies from her oeuvre influenced them. For this discussion, Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was pleased to be joined by Ashley Connor (cinematographer, Madeline’s Madeline and Feast of the Epiphany), Anna Rose Holmer (director, The Fits, ND/NF 2015), and Akosua Adoma Owusu (Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us, NYFF; 2020 recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists.

Uncut Gems, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, and starring Adam Sandler, is a full-throttle portrait of a diamond dealer in New York’s Diamond District. It’s been a wild success since it opened in December, and in our November-December issue, Michael Koresky wrote about the movie, praising how the Safdie brothers “capture the bustle and pace of rapid-fire economic exchange, filtering it through an increasingly panicky wild ride.” The neighborhoods of New York are central to the energy of Uncut Gems (as well as their previous films like Good Time). So we decided to invite Josh and Benny Safdie to chat about New York movies. Film Comment contributor Nick Pinkerton sat down with the filmmakers at Film at Lincoln Center, to talk about New York on screen and which particular movies influenced their vision of their hometown.

Little Women is without question one of the best movies of the recently-ended year, and it’s a wonderful triumph for director Greta Gerwig. That’s why we put it on the cover of our November-December issue, featuring Gerwig’s delightful interview by Devika Girish. But there’s even more to say about the movie and its intelligent, complex, and visually rich adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. So Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Devika and Amy Taubin, contributing editor to FC, to talk about what makes Little Women a great and important movie that shouldn’t be missed in the hustle of the new year.

Welcome to another episode in our Decade Project series where we look back at the past 10 years and talk about our favorite filmmakers, major changes and trends, and the movies that made a difference. This week, we’re talking about acting and performance in the 2010s—actors that made their mark, and tendencies we’ve noticed. Joining Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold are Michael Koresky, Film Comment regular, and Shonni Enelow, a Fordham professor and Film Comment contributor who wrote about a certain restrained acting style that’s taken shape for our September-October 2016 issue.

With the 2010s on the way out, we thought that this very recent history could use a road map. Each installment of the Decade Project will look at key developments, pivotal movies, groundbreaking film artists, and so on. This week, we’re looking at filmmakers but specifically everyone but the director. We’re as guilty as anyone of referring to movies in terms of their directors. So we wanted to look back and choose a few favorite cinematographers, and editors, and costume designers who were doing outstanding work in the 2010s. Joining Film Comment Editor-in-Chief for this conversation are two programmers, Eric Hynes, curator of the Museum of the Moving Image, and Ashley Clark, director, film programming, at BAM.

It’s that time of year again! Film Comment has made a list and we’ve checked it twice: the best films of 2019, chosen through a poll of our contributing writers. And according to our new annual tradition, we announced the results live at a special Film Comment Talk. This year, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined to unveil and discuss the films by Amy Taubin, longtime contributing editor at Film Comment; Soraya Nadia Macdonald, who writes for The Undefeated and is a contributing editor at Film Comment; Michael Koresky, all around Film Comment all-star; and Devika Girish, assistant editor at Film Comment. You can read the full Best of 2019 list online, including best unreleased films, and don’t forget to follow along with our special podcast series The Decade Project, about the 2010s. But now, our Best Films of 2019 countdown.

By any measure, the 2010s have been a confusing and turbulent and also exciting time. That goes for both movies and the world at large, and that’s saying a lot after the 2000s. At Film Comment, part of our goal is to offer a critical chronicle of the movies as they’re happening, putting things in historical perspective, pointing out the bold and the beautiful in the art and craft of film, and hopefully offering an insight or two along the way. That’s often hardest to do with contemporary history, and so to grapple with the 2010s, we’re starting a series of Film Comment podcasts we’re calling The Decade Project. We’ll look at the movies from different angles and do our best to map out a vivid but often hard to characterize time. This week, we’ll talk about some of the major shifts and changes that happened over the last ten years, and some of the decade’s pivotal movies. It’s also an opportunity to talk about the big picture in movies, which probably means having a healthy skepticism about thinking in terms of decades altogether. Joining FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for this discussion are longtime contributing editor Amy Taubin; FC regular Michael Koresky, who is co-editor of the Reverse Shot book, Martin Scorsese: He Is Cinema; and Nick Pinkerton, who’s written a number of essays for us looking at the big picture. Stay tuned for more of The Decade Project with guests Ashley Clark, Sheila O’Malley, Andrew Chan, Molly Haskell, and more. Let’s go to the beginning of our conversation.

Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman has been out in theaters since the beginning of November, which you probably know unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (or were buried under Giants Stadium). Scorsese’s story follows the life of mob fixer Frank Sheeran and his close relationship with mob boss Russell Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters leader. The movie’s release is the perfect time to talk about Scorsese and his work, and explore exactly where The Irishman takes us. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Shonni Enelow, associate professor at Fordham University and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; Molly Haskell, critic and author whose books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films; and Film Comment regular Michael Koresky, co-editor of the Reverse Shot book, Martin Scorsese: He Is Cinema.

It’s a busy couple of months for moviegoers as hits from festivals make their way into cinemas. That means it’s time for another New Releases episode, where talk about some highly anticipated titles. Film Comment Editor-in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor of Film at The City College of New York. Among the movies discussed are Atlantics, The Irishman, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is coming soon in December.

Dark Waters is the new film from Todd Haynes, and it’s a change of pace from his last feature, Wonderstruck, and much of his work generally. Dark Waters is a whistleblower drama about Rob Billott, a lawyer who began investigating the chemical company DuPont, which his own firm was doing business with. To discuss the movie, contributing editor Amy Taubin sat down with Haynes for an extended interview. They cover the challenges of making political work today, the connections Dark Waters has with his previous films, details about shooting the movie, and more.

Some of the most exciting movies being made today are tackling class tensions and the role of work in our lives. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, our cover story last issue, is one major example, with its twisty upstairs-downstairs thriller set-up. But many other films have been taking up the subjects of work and class in a variety of different ways: Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Stephen Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and Greta Gerwig’s upcoming movie Little Women (the cover of our latest issue). For our latest Film Comment talk at Film at Lincoln Center, we were delighted to discuss work and class with veteran independent filmmaker John Sayles, whose film about striking miners, Matewan, is now available in the Criterion Collection. Also joining Sayles and FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was Teo Bugbee, a contributor to Film Comment and The New York Times who also works as an organizer for Writers Guild of America East. Starting off with how Matewan was conceived, we covered a lot of ground, spanning decades at the movies and in American history.

This week we celebrate two different strands of Indian cinema, looking at the past and the vibrant present. First, we look at the landmark Film at Lincoln Center retrospective for Ritwik Ghatak, director of The Cloud-Capped Star, A River Called Titas, and other films. For that part of the discussion, we’ll be joined by two of the series' programmers, Moinak Biswas and former Film at Lincoln Center director of programming Richard Peña. For the second half of the episode, we’ll be talking about the Tamil filmmaker Vetri Maaran with R. Emmet Sweeney, who wrote about the director’s bloody portraits of South India in our November-December issue. Our special guest host for the episode is FC assistant editor Devika Girish.

Horror movies are the usual choice for Halloween viewing. But we here at Film Comment got to wondering: what are the scariest movies that are not horror films? There are many ways a movie can get under your skin, and it’s not always through gore or the supernatural. To discuss this notion, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold got together with Film Comment regular Michael Koresky and Ashley Clark, senior repertory programmer at BAM. Each chose one or two movies (including Cabaret, Bamboozled, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) that frightened them but don’t fall into the horror genre, leading to an intriguing discussion of how movies get under your skin. And sleep tight!

The Lighthouse is the mind-bending new movie out from Robert Eggers, a director who’s making a career out of revisiting America’s primal past in vividly imagined period films. In 2015, Eggers won the Best Directing Award at Sundance for The Witch, a chilling piece of horror set in a colonial New England settlement. In The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as two lighthouse keepers, a grizzled old-timer and his new apprentice, in 19th century Maine. For our latest Film Comment Talk at Film at Lincoln Center, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold spoke with Eggers about the art, craft, and angst of making the movie, fleshing out the details of its setting, and what he’d do with an unlimited budget.

At Film Comment, we love it when we get behind a movie and then see other movie-goers share the love. Parasite, the funny and fierce thriller from Bong Joon Ho, was on the cover of our September-October issue, but wasn't released in theaters until mid-October. But what a release! Audiences are packing the theaters. To talk about the movie’s appeal and Bong’s masterful filmmaking, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with contributing editor Amy Taubin, who wrote out September-October feature on Parasite, and FC columnist and critic Michael Koresky. And don't miss the essay on Parasite by Midsommar filmmaker Ari Aster, also available in our latest issue.

Mister America is the new film starring Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington. It’s a documentary-style satire about an first-time political candidate named Tim Heidecker, that is, the character Heidecker has played for years now alongside Turkington as part of their movie show On Cinema at the Cinema. In case you don’t already know, Heidecker and Turkington have created an incredible comedic universe involving their two movie-guy characters which spans a vanity spy show, Twitter, and now Mister America. FC Editor-in-Chief sat down with the duo to talk about how they put it all together, where cinema verité comes into it, and what they think of Alan Partridge.

For the festival’s final week, contributing critics and editors gather together for a spirited discussion with Film Comment‘s Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold about the movies they’ve seen in the NYFF57 lineup. Panelists include programmer and FC contributing editor Nellie Killian; Michael Koresky of Film Comment and Reverse Shot; Amy Taubin of Film Comment and Artforum; and critic Phoebe Chen. The panel discusses Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth, Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro’s Endless Night, among many others.

Every year at the New York Film Festival, Film Comment brings together a group of intrepid filmmakers whose work is screening in the festival. It’s a rare chance to share stories about the art, craft, and angst of filmmaking, and to compare notes on inspirations and what makes a good collaboration. This year, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief spoke with an all-star lineup of filmmakers from across the festival: Pietro Marcello, director of Martin Eden, Corneliu Porumboiu, director of The Whistlers, Justine Triet, director of Sibyl, and from the Projections program, Akosua Adoma Owusu, director of Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us, and Luise Donschen, director of Entire Days Together.

The new film Bacurau centers upon the residents of a remote Brazilian village who gradually discover that they’re being hunted by a group of Western tourists. Part class-warfare satire, part thriller, the movie gripped audiences at the New York Film Festival and it marks a major achievement by its directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. In this episode, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold joins FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish in a conversation with Mendonça Filho and Dornelles where they discuss five key scenes from the film. These include the opening scene, which takes us via drone shot and truck drive into the film’s remote setting; a psychotropic interlude in which the residents of Bacurau dance the capoeira in preparation for battle; and finally a climactic action sequence that occurs in a local museum. They also discuss a memorable exchange between Udo Kier, who appears here as the icy-cruel leader of the Western mercenaries, and Brazilian acting legend Sonia Braga, who plays the village matriarch. Listen ahead for details on the making of each scene.

Think of it as a festival within the festival: every year, the annual Projections program brings the latest and greatest of experimental film to the New York Film Festival. Projections is a crucial and consistently popular snapshot of the boundary pushing part of cinema that is embedded in the DNA of the New York Film Festival, by way of co-founder Amos Vogel. To navigate this year’s rich offerings, I brought together two leading critics in the field: Ed Halter, a critic in residence at Bard and co-director of Light Industry, and Film Comment contributing editor Nellie Killian, who teaches at Pratt. The conversation starts with a broad look at today’s experimental scene before spotlighting favorites from this year’s Projections. Tune in for more Film Comment fun at the New York Film Festival with our Filmmakers Chat director showcase on Saturday, October 5th, and our critics wrapup on Wednesday, October 9, both free events at Film at Lincoln Center.

Every year at the New York Film Festival, Film Comment puts on a slate of special events, including public talks and a screening presentation. Our first NYFF talk this year was titled State of the Nation, a wide-ranging conversation about the complex interplay between politics and cinema. How do filmmakers grapple with the challenge of portraying current events and recent history on screen? And how successfully are movies reflecting the political complexities of a fast changing world? FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with a variety of voices to discuss these questions from different angles: Scott Z. Burns, writer-director of The Report and writer of The Laundromat; Jamsheed Akrami, professor at William Paterson University, director of Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution, and author of our Jafar Panahi interview feature from March-April; and Devika Girish, Assistant Editor of Film Comment, who wrote a cover story for FC last year about Black Panther.

The New York Film Festival is here! And there’s a lot to talk about. Film Comment will have three onstage talks during the festival, as well as special screenings of the much-anticipated Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But first we wanted to dip our toe into the lineup by talking with two recent guests at Film at Lincoln Center: Ashley Clark, Senior repertory and specialty film programmer at BAM; and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold welcomed the two to talk about Mati Diop’s Atlantics, Bertrand Bonello Zombi Child, Diao Yinan’s Wild Goose Lake, Michel Gondry’s Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Elia Kazan’s America, America , and others.

One of the highlights of the fall, and this year’s New York Film Festival, is the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, Pain and Glory. Our new September-October issue features an essay by Michael Koresky about the film and it’s fearless autobiographical story. Koresky writes, “There has been no clearer onscreen representation of the filmmaker’s essence than the main character of Pain and Glory, played with exquisite middle-aged restraint by Almodóvar’s longtime muse, Antonio Banderas.” To discuss the director, his new film, and his beloved career, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat with Koresky and Film at Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez. Also: pick up the new issue of Film Comment to read Koresky’s essay as well as an article by Almodóvar himself about the literary inspirations behind his cinematic achievements.

For our third roundup of all the on-screen goings-n at TIFF 2019, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sits down with critic and FC contributor Michael Koresky and Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, to discuss Waves, Jojo Rabbit, Africa, Two of Us, Uncut Gems, Marriage Story, Saturday Fiction, Color Out of Space,and others.

For our second dispatch from the not-yet-frozen tundra of Toronto, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold welcomes back Devika Girish (FC Assistant Editor) and programmer and critic Abby Sun for a rundown of highlights, including Lina from Lima, Just Mercy, Synonyms, Terminal Sud, Blood Quantum, and Simple Women.

After a whirlwind tour of Venice (don't forget to check out those episodes!), we dive right into the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sits down with guests Devika Girish (Assistant Editor at Film Comment), Jessica Green (programmer and Artistic Director of the Houston Cinema Arts Society) and Eric Hynes (curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image)to discuss some highlights from the festival, including Knives Out, Collective, The Lost Okoroshi, Martin Eden, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and others.

In our third and final dispatch from the Venice Film Festival, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Jay Weissberg, film critic for Variety, and Christina Newland, writer for Sight & Sound and Little White Lies. They discuss a packed line-up of films: Olivier Assayas's Wasp Network, Pietro Marcello's Martin Eden, David Michôd's The King, Pablo Larraín's Ema, Roy Andersson's About Endlessness, and some picks from the festival's sidebar sections.

In our second dispatch from the Venice Film Festival, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, to discuss some much-anticipated titles, including Todd Phillips' Joker, Nate Parker's American Skin, and Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat. Plus: our new Which Movie quiz, in which critics try to find some order in the chaos of festival-viewing.

This week The Film Comment Podcast reports on the latest premieres at the Venice Film Festival, already in full swing with the fall’s first wave of highly anticipated titles. Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold joins FC contributing editor and veteran international correspondent Jonathan Romney at an undisclosed alfresco location for an in-depth discussion of festival highlights. These include James Gray’s Ad Astra, Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, Haifaa al-Mansour’s The Perfect Candidate, and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Stay tuned for another edition of our Venice podcast series.

The 76th Venice International Film Festival opens today, kicking off a jam-packed fall festival season. Before heading off to the Lido, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish to discuss the films in the lineup—by auteurs both established and new—that we're most excited about. They speculate about Haifa Al-Mansour's The Perfect Candidate (which has the dubious distinction of being one of the only two Competition films directed by women), Roy Andersson's About Endlessness, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, Ciro Guerra's Waiting for the Barbarians, Lou Ye's Saturday Fiction, and James Gray's Ad Astra, amongst others. Check back over the course of Venice for a regular stream of new episodes diving into these and other films.

Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, Before Sunset and beyond—it’s hard to match Richard Linklater when it comes to movies basically about how we find our way through life. And probably a lot of us found our way with the help of Linklater’s thoughtful, restless movies. His latest film Where’d You Go Bernadette adds another chapter to his work with the story of a woman rediscovering a creative self she left behind when she started a family. It’s a terrific, nervy, and funny performance by Cate Blanchett, with a touching portrait of a mother-daughter relationship. So for our latest Film Comment talk at Film at Lincoln Center, we were extremely happy to feature Linklater alongside his producer Ginger Sledge. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with the two for a conversation on Bernadette and beyond.

This week, the Film Comment podcast reports on location from the 2019 Locarno International Film Festival. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Jessica Green, programmer and Artistic Director of the Houston Cinema Arts Society, and programmer and FC contributor Jordan Cronk, for a discussion of festival highlights. These include Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s doc Space Dogs, Ja'Tovia M. Gary’s The Giverny Document, Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winkler’s A Voluntary Year, Nadège Trebal’s Twelve Thousand, and a selection of films from the festival’s retrospective program which shined a spotlight on black cinema.

Welcome to another edition of the Rep Report, our regular roundup of retrospectives, repertory cinema, and other film series in New York. This week, we focus on the series Another Country: Outsider Visions of America, currently running at Film at Lincoln Center. The program looks at America through the eyes of a wide range of artists born abroad: Chantal Akerman (News from Home) Lars Von Trier (Dogville), John Woo (Face-Off), Jane Campion (In the Cut), and many more. Each filmmaker brings something distinctive and personal to America’s inspiring myths and its strange, wonderful, as well as brutal realities. To discuss the series, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by one of its organizers, Thomas Beard, Programmer-at-Large at Film at Lincoln Center and co-founder of Light Industry, and Becca Voelcker, FC contributor and doctoral student at Harvard. Flash Sale: Save 50% on a subscription to Film Comment through our limited-time-only sale, starting August 9! Go to filmcomment.com/subscribe for more information.

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood is the subject of the cover story for our July-August issue. Tarantino’s latest made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival, and now it’s finding great success in theaters. All of that despite being a change of pace for the director. The film is set in the twilight period of 1969, in a small world of Hollywood actors, bit players, and movie and TV productions, alongside more fringe elements of society represented by the Manson Family. Though the specter of the murderous cult leader lurks throughout, Once Upon a Time is a largely affectionate movie, with a lot of room to hang out in, and terrific actors to hang out with: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie, among others. To discuss the film, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Michael Koresky, longtime FC contributor and co-editor of Reverse Shot, and Maddie Whittle, programming assistant at Film at Lincoln Center. Listeners beware: in order to talk about the movie’s accomplishments and significance, we do talk about the story in full, including parts of the plot that have, to date, been kept under wraps.

We tend to agree on the classic films of the past, from Breathless, to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, to Tokyo Story. A new series at Film at Lincoln Center looks to more recent history with a survey of outstanding debut films from the 21st century so far. The series includes Medicine for Melancholy from Barry Jenkins (director of Moonlight), The Forest for the Trees from Maren Ade (director of Toni Erdmann), and many more. For the latest Film at Lincoln Center talk, Film Comment put together a critical discussion of these works and their place in cinema. The participants were Florence Almozini (associate director of programming at Film at Lincoln Center), Eric Hynes (curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image), Devika Girish (assistant editor at FC), Ashley Clark (senior repertory and specialty film programmer at BAM), and FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold.

Welcome back to the second installment in our monthly series covering new releases. This week, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by critic Emily Yoshida, who has written for Vulture and Vanity Fair, and frequent FC contributor Devika Girish. The three sat down to discuss Lulu Wong’s The Farewell, which has already received a fair amount of attention for its sweet story about a family reacting to the illness of a beloved grandmother in China. They also talk about two lesser known films that recreate vivid moments from the past in Argentina and England, Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo and Richard Billingham’s Ray & Liz, before wrapping up with The Art of Self-Defense, starring Jesse Eisenberg.

One of summer’s most anticipated films is Midsommar, from filmmaker Ari Aster. The director joined us last summer for a talk at Film at Lincoln Center to discuss his previous feature, the unforgettable Hereditary, and we were delighted to welcome him back for another Film Comment chat on Tuesday, July 10. In front of a packed house, Aster sat down with author and Film Comment mainstay Michael Koresky for a discussion about his Swedish countryside-set horror film, working with star Florence Pugh, and favorite movies such as 45 Years. Also, listen up for a few details on the forthcoming director’s cut of Midsommar, and don’t forget to read about Aster’s inspirations for the film in the July-August issue of Film Comment.

A big part of Film Comment’s mission is to bring well-informed insights and original voices to the rich heritage of movies. One beautiful example of this is our regular column, Queer & Now & Then, written by Michael Koresky. With every column, Michael picks a single movie from a specific year for a discussion in terms of queerness, as part of what he calls, “a conversation with himself and the movies.” For our latest Film Comment roundtable talk at Film at Lincoln Center, we invited several critics to join Michael for a talk about the interconnections between their experiences and memories of movies and their sense of identity. This podcast is record of this insightful, funny, and candid conversation between Koresky, Melissa Anderson of 4Columns, best-selling author and critic Mark Harris, Wesley Morris of The New York Times, and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman.

As summer officially begins and vacations mount, more and more find themselves stranded on remote, unspoiled beaches, far from the nearest cinema. We decided to throw those unfortunate souls a lifeline with a podcast focusing on new and upcoming movies. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by FC contributors Devika Girish and Maddie Whittle for an in-depth (and occasionally spoiler-adjacent) conversation about the latest and greatest films currently and imminently gracing the big screen, including Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists, and Eva Trobisch’s All Good.

For a while now, we’ve been wanting to do an episode on the curious art form known as the TV movie. For a lot of people, the TV movie couldn’t be less of an art form, the term itself having become a byword for hokey or schlocky storytelling, even long after TV movies were being made in any great number. But why do so many remember these movies vividly for so many years afterward? And what might they have in common with other forms historically regarded as “less than serious,” like the melodrama? And what makes TV movies—including those directed by Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, and George Cukor, to name a few—different from, just, a movie? Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold turns to Soraya Nadia McDonald, culture critic at The Undefeated, and FC contributor Shonni Enelow for help answering the vexing question: What was the TV movie?

Welcome to another edition of the Rep Report, our regular roundup of retrospectives, repertory cinema, and other film series in New York. This week, we turn our attention to a remarkable series at Film Forum titled The Hour of Liberation: Decolonizing Cinema, 1966–1981. The series looks at landmark works from around the world that pushed cinema and political critique into bold new directions, and includes rarely screened films by Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, Sara Gómez, Glauber Rocha, and many others. FC Editor-in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Elspeth Carroll, the curator of the series and Repertory Programming Associate at Film Forum, and Ashley Clark, Senior Repertory and Specialty Film Programmer at BAM.

In her feature on Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir in the May-June issue of Film Comment, Sheila O’Malley writes,“The autobiographical origins of The Souvenir are obvious (Hogg doesn’t try to hide them), yet she allows for free-floating associations, creating a kind of space where connections are possible, where there can be a wincing kind of recognition, a remembrance of first love and first heartbreak. The response is a not always comfortable: ‘Yes. My God, I know that. That is so true.’’’ The film, a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman, is a complex and multi-layered exploration of first love, heartbreak, creativity, family, and class. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with O’Malley (also author of the FC column Present Tense) and FC contributor and columnist Michael Koresky to discuss the The Souvenir and how Hogg’s previous films Unrelated (2008), Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013) inform her latest.

For our latest Film Comment Free Talk, the director of I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho sat down for a conversation about at her latest, Charlie Says. The film looks past the mythology of the Manson Family murders to focus on the experiences of three women under the charismatic cult leader’s spell, both at the time of the crimes and in prison. Harron and FC Editor-in-Chief discuss the genesis of the film, the director’s background as a punk-era music journalist, and her depictions of violence—both physical and psychological—on screen.

The end is nigh! For our final salvo from the Riviera, we welcome guest Manohla Dargis, critic for the New York Times, for a wrap-up of all the festival goings-on. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Dargis to discuss a Cannes line-up that was widely considered a success. The two run through their highlights of the festival, including Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s phantasmagorical Bacurau, the fascinating flawed jewel that is Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, and Mounia Meddour’s Algerian ’90s coming-of-age drama Papicha. They also discuss the lowlights, including Abdellatif Kechiche’s much maligned three-and-a-half-hour ogle Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo. Other topics include TV Westerns of the ’60s and ’70s, movie stars and press junkets, the politics of what plays in competition, and much more.

The Film Comment Podcast takes you into the closing weekend of Cannes with guest Rasha Salti, programmer for the Marrakesh International Film Festival. Salti joins FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a closer look at Middle Eastern and African films, including Alaa Eddine Aljem’s The Unknown Saint, Amin Sidi-Boumédiène’s Abou Leila, Ala Eddine Slim’s Tlamess, as well as Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, Rebecca Zlotowski’s The Easy Girl, and many others.

We're back from Cannes, this time with a recording of a live Film Comment event at the American Pavilion. Joining Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold on the stage were Film at Lincoln Center Deputy Director Eugene Hernandez, FC contributing editor Amy Taubin, and FC contributor Jonathan Romney. Through the fog of ”baguette overdose,” the four take a big-picture look at the festival and discuss the 2019 entries they believe will stand the test of time. The films discussed (and debated) include Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don't Die, Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse, Abel Ferrara’s Tomasso, and many more.

It’s two-fer Tuesday! We’re back with a fresh-out-of-the-oven special episode on two of the most anticipated films at the festival: Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by critic and programmer Giulia d'Agnolo Vallan and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, for a conversation on Tarantino’s post-Summer-of-Love comedown and a (somewhat) heated debate on Malick’s meditation on war and ethics.

The Film Comment Podcast returns for another day of fun, sun, and Cannes-versation from the French Rivieria. For day 7, Italian critic Carlo Chatrian, recently named Artistic Director of the Berlin Film Festival, sat down with Film Comment Editor-in-Chief to discuss Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, Albert Serra’s literally Sadistic Liberté, Bruno Dumont’s Joan of Arc, and Corneliu Porumboiu’s unclassifiable The Whistlers and gestures toward genre at Cannes.

Welcome back for day 6 of our podcast from Cannes. We’re kicking the week off with guests Dennis Lim, director of programming at Film at Lincoln Center, and Film Comment contributor Jonathan Romney. They join FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a discussion of three Cannes sensations: Corneliu Porumboiu’s dream-like The Whistlers, Albert Serra’s “radical,” La Liberté, and Robert Eggers’s “intensely physical” The Lighthouse.

We’re back from Cannes with day 5 of our podcasts covering all the cinematic goings-on in the south of France. For today’s episode, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by FC contributing editor Amy Taubin and Justin Chang, critic at the Los Angeles Times. The three kick things off a conversation about Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory before taking a look at Mati Diop’s Atlantique, Mounia Meddour's Papicha, Michael Angelo Covino’s The Climb, and Jessica Hausner's Little Joe, one of the most anticipated entries at the festival. Check out all of our Cannes coverage: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/cannes/

We’re back from Cannes for day four of our series of podcasts on the cinematic goings-on on the Riviera. For today’s episode, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Brazil-based critic and FC contributor Ela Bittencourt. The two discuss the young Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole, which tells the story of two young women navigating the ruins, both emotional and environmental, of post-War Leningrad. The two also return to Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau, discussed in our previous episode, and touch on Franco Lolli’s Litigante, a look at the trials and tribulations a single mother and lawyer living in Bogota, Colombia.

Welcome back for day 3 of our podcasts from Cannes 2019. Joining us on the Riviera for today’s episode are Bruno Dequen, critic and Director of Programming at Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal and Eric Hynes, Film Comment contributor and Curator of Film at the Musuem of Moving Image. Along with host and FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, the two dive into the depths of Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacarau, which Dequen describes as “The Most Dangerous Game if it were co-directed by Reygadas and Robert Rodriguez.” They also discuss Mati Diop’s Atlantique, a love-story focused on the intertwined lives of North African immigrants to Europe, Monia Chokri’s A Brother’s Love, and the documentary programming (or lack thereof) at the festival.

For day 2 at Cannes, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sits down with Eugene Hernandez, Deputy Director of Film at Lincoln Center, to chat about a handful of the most impactful films they've seen so far. The two take a look at the breakout immigration drama Les Misérables, from Cannes rookie Ladj Ly. The film, set in a rough Parisian banlieue, builds to an explosive confrontation between authorities, community leaders, and a group of intrepid, angry teens. They also discuss Bull—the first feature from director Annie Silverstein—a coming-of-age story set in rural Texas, and the line-up of movies by young filmmakers at the festival.

Let the games begin! We’ve touched down in Cannes and, for our first of many podcasts from the festival, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold found a quiet corner with FC contributing editor Amy Taubin to talk over some of the titles—both big and small—that we’re most excited about. On this episode, we focus on the opening film, Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, and chat about the expectations surrounding Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. We also touch on Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, Mati Diop’s Atlantiques, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, and many others. Check back over the course of Cannes for a regular stream of new episodes diving into these and other films. And, in case you missed it, be sure to check out Taubin’s interview with Jim Jarmusch, posted yesterday: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/cannes-interview-jim-jarmusch/

In our May-June issue (out now!), Aliza Ma writes about the new film Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, a comedic portrait of a Paris literary set struggling to adapt to the digital age. Her essay begins, “In the cinema of Olivier Assayas, we find a laboratory of the world.” We had the good fortune to visit that laboratory in a new interview with the director. Film Comment contributor (and Curator of Film at the Museum of Moving Image) Eric Hynes sat down with Assayas for a conversation that expands on the ideas about technology and human relationships contained in Non-Fiction, and which bubble up throughout the director’s movies, such as Irma Vep, Personal Shopper, and Le destinées. Non-Fiction is in theaters now, including at Film at Lincoln Center.

The Rep Report is our regular roundup of current retrospectives and film series. This week, we're focusing on an important and fun series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music called Black ’90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema. It's a carefully curated look at major works by black filmmakers in the 1990s, such as the late John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger, Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou, Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., and Hype Williams’s Belly, as well as lesser known works like Zeinabu Irene Davis’s Compensation and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa, among many others. The programmer of the series, Ashley Clark—who has written for Film Comment about Burnett and Ava Duvernay, among others—joined FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for an in-depth conversation about Black ’90s and the riches on offer throughout the series.

In our March-April issue, Michael Koresky writes about history of a movie magazine with a humble name: Films and Filming. Koresky writes about the importance of this long-defunct publication as both a classic movie journal and a cultural phenomenon for gay readers. He writes, “Our culture instills mighty shame in us for knowing what we want, and that shame has long been magnified to the point of obscenity even stigma, when that desire is gay. The shamelessness of the magazine’s appeal, and the way it so rudely bound sexual desires to movie love, felt like a rich, purposeful affront.” Jumping off from this feature, Koresky joins Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a wide-ranging discussion of the role of desire in our love of movies. We were delighted to also bring in Aliza Ma, programmer at Metrograph, and Andrew Chan, Web Editor at the Criterion Collection.

For our latest Film Comment Free Talk, Claire Denis and Robert Pattinson joined FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold to discuss their singular new film High Life, which graces the cover of Film Comment’s March-April issue. In his feature on the film, Nick Pinkerton writes that, “While High Life is the biggest and most expensive movie that Denis has ever made, it gives little indication of its scale having been bartered for at the sacrifice of freedom—or with the stymieing of the go-with-the-gut intuition that has produced a sui generis body of work, created with enormous craft but a total disdain for the rules of the ‘well-made’ film, elliptical in approach and full of jarring tonal shifts.” In this conversation, the filmmaker and actor discuss working together to bring High Life to the screen, as well as Denis’s remarkable eye for physicality, encountering the taboo, considerations of genre, and much more.

New Directors/New Films has always been a vital for, well, new directors and new films. Over the course of its nearly 50 years, the festival has introduced audiences to filmmakers like Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Bi Gan, Valerie Massadian, Gabriel Mascaro, RaMell Ross, and Kelly Reichardt. The 2019 edition continued in this tradition, bringing a bracing selection of films, many still without distribution, to screens in New York. This week, we take a closer look at ND/NF 2019, paying particular attention to a few of our favorites this year, including Clemency, Joy, Genesis, and Fausto, among others. Film Comment Editor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Rosa Morales, development and membership coordinator at SFFILM, Sebastian Rea, founder of the 30UNDER30 Film Festival, and Abby Sun, FC contributor and programmer at True/False Film Fest to reflect on this year's festival, and to dig a little deeper into some standout selections.

They say that "democracy dies in darkness," but a handful of new films, including Mike Leigh's Peterloo and Jordan Peele's Us, argue otherwise, providing evidence that the subject is alive and well in darkened theaters across the country. This week, we discuss how these films—along with the work of Agnès Varda, Agnieszka Holland, and Frederick Wiseman—portray democracy on screen. Film Comment Editor in Chief Nicolas Rapold, contributing editor Amy Taubin, and FC contributor Shonni Enelow convene a committee to explore how these filmmakers and films approach the often messy, non-linear, and multi-faceted process of collective governance.

The Rep Report returns with an in-depth conversation about the upcoming Nelly Kaplan retrospective at the Quad Cinema, along with other rep highlights. This week, Film Comment Editor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by FC contributing editor Nellie Killian and first-time guest Chris Wells, director of repertory programming at Quad Cinema for a look at an underappreciated filmmaker whose work is primed for reappraisal. The fascinating Nelly Kaplan was something of a polymath, variously a journalist, documentary filmmaker, writer of surrealist fiction, screenwriter, and film critic and theorist (and occasional contributor to Film Comment). Under discussion here is the series of politically probing, playful, and ferociously feminist features which the Paris-based Kaplan began making in the late ’60s. In addition to the Kaplan series, which opens April 12 at the Quad, we also touch on Film Forum's upcoming Fay Wray and Robert Riskin series and pay tribute to the Nitrate Picture Show at the George Eastman Museum.

High Life, the new movie from Claire Denis, comes to theaters on April 5. With a cast featuring Film Comment cover subject Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, and André Benjamin as members of a group of death-row convicts trapped on an experimental, interstellar journey, High Life tells a story of intimacy, isolation, and taboo. Though it touches on themes of family and group identity that may be familiar to fans of Denis, the film’s setting and nods to science fiction make it a both a continuation and a complication of many of the ideas, feelings, and sensations that she’s explored before. For the occasion, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold welcomed FC contributing writer Nick Pinkerton (author of the March-April issue’s High Life cover story) and Madeline Whittle of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to discuss both High Life and one other Denis film chosen by each guest. Denis and Pattinson will sit down for a Film Comment Free Talk on Thursday, April 4, at 5:30pm. The seating will be first-come, first-served, and doors will open at 4:30pm. Don’t miss what’s sure to be an enlightening, exciting conversation. For more information, visit filmlinc.org.

For our latest Film Comment talk, Academy Award-winning director László Nemes sat down to discuss his latest film, which opened Film Comment Selects last month. The film, Sunset, tells the story of an orphaned young woman, Irisz, searching for her mysterious brother in the nightmarishly labyrinth of pre-World War I Budapest. Sunset opens in theaters on March 22. Nemes joined Film Comment editor Nicolas Rapold for a conversation following on Saturday, February 9 to discuss Sunset and the director's work more broadly.

Over the years, the True/False festival (based in the college town of Columbia, Missouri) has grown into one of the most outstanding annual showcases for documentary film. This year, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold returned to moderate “Toasted,” the True/False festival’s very late-night wrap-up event, in front of a lively audience. Rapold was joined by a crew of filmmakers and programmers, including Brett Story, director of The Hottest August; Maíra Bühler, director of Let It Burn; Miko Revereza, director of No Data Plan; and Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, filmmaker and founder and director of the Third Horizon collective and the Third Horizon Film Festival.

This week, the Film Comment Podcast digs into Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and the ways in which the reputations of the notorious film and its maker have shifted over the years. In a feature article on the legendary Nazi-propaganda project in the latest issue of Film Comment, contributing editor J. Hoberman writes that, “Triumph of the Will is an organic product of cinema history, a synthesis of Metropolis’s monumental mass ornament, Potemkin’s pow, and Hollywood extravagance.” Once denounced as the fascist propaganda it in fact is, the film came to be celebrated as a masterpiece of formal daring in the 1960s and 1970s, a rehabilitation that culminated with Riefenstahl receiving a controversial tribute at the 1974 Telluride Film Festival. Film Comment Editor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Hoberman and filmmaker and professor Zoe Beloff for a discussion of the film’s relevance to the current historical moment (Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes are purportedly big fans) and the larger question of artistry in the service of evil. Read J. Hoberman's article: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/triumph-of-the-will/

On February 13, Film Comment presented a special evening with the Spike Lee, Best Director nominee for BlacKkKlansman. The night included an extended conversation between Lee and Emmy Award–winning writer and television host Lawrence O’Donnell (The West Wing, MSNBC), followed by a screening of BlacKkKlansman, presented by Film Comment. Lee discusses the genesis of BlacKkKlansman, how he chooses collaborators, and what it would mean to him to win an Oscar for the film. Nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director, BlacKkKlansman tells the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department, who bravely sets out on a dangerous mission: infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan. In his feature on the film in the July-August 2018 issue of Film Comment, Teo Bugbee writes that, "BlacKkKlansman is no straight biopic. Instead, it follows the beats of a traditional cop movie, where a man of the law is torn between allegiances in his efforts to solve a case. In this regard, the film represents the latest chapter in the underrated career of Spike Lee, genre filmmaker."

Love is, of course, in the air, and with most new release schedules in hibernation, February can be a great time for repertory cinema for both lovers and loners. Guests Nellie Killian (FC contributing editor and independent programmer) and Jon Dieringer (founder of Screen Slate) join Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold to run down the best rep screenings on offer around New York City. First up are two series at Anthology Film Archives: the annual “Valentine’s Day Massacre”—featuring mainstays Albert Brooks’s Modern Romance and Maurice Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together—and “In-Person Reenactment,” featuring Martha Coolidge’s Not a Pretty Picture. The three also discuss new documentaries about outsider musicians, the recently wrapped-up Film Comment Selects series, the Marlon Riggs series at BAM, and Claire Simon’s The Competition, among others.

The Film Comment Podcast returns with our final episode on the wild, windswept ride that was Sundance 2019. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Film Society of Lincoln Center Deputy Director (and Film Comment Co-publisher) Eugene Hernandez to dissect and analyze their standout films from the festival, with a special focus on documentaries Leaving Neverland and Halston. The two also discuss the evolution of Sundance over the years, from Eugene's first visit in 1992 ("The Year of the Twentysomething") to the festival's more recent efforts to expand their programming beyond the world of American independent cinema. Catch up on all The Film Comment Podcast reports from Sundance 2019.

Maintaining a marathon pace, the Film Comment Podcast returns with more insightful commentary and conversation from the Sundance Film Festival. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined once again by guests and FC contributors Devika Girish and Eric Hynes (also curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image) for a discussion of some under-the-radar films that might not have received as much attention at the Festival. These gems include the Macedonian documentary Honeyland, Danish drama Queen of Hearts, experimental short film America, teen drama Selah and the Spades, and finally, a cynical comedy that stood out in all the wrong ways: Brittany Runs a Marathon.

The Film Comment Podcast returns with another update from Park City. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined this time by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and FC contributor Amy Taubin for a rundown of standout films from the festival, both fiction and documentary. These include Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, Nisha Ganatra's Late Night, Rachel Lears's documentary Knock Down the House, Chinonye Chukwu's Clemency, Julius Onah's Luce, Joe Talbot's The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang's One Child Nation.

The Film Comment Podcast returns with our fourth update from the snow-and-glamour-packed streets of Park City, Utah. For today's episode, FC Editor-in-Chief is joined by guests and FC contributors Devika Girish, Eric Hynes (also curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image), and Ashley Clark (also senior programmer of cinema at BAM). Today's conversation focuses on a range of films, including The Farewell, Luce, Midnight Family, The Last Tree, Clemency, Paradise Hills, Ms. Purple, and The Sound of Silence. Check back throughout the week for regular updates from the Sundance Film Festival.

On the third Film Comment Podcast from the Sundance Film Festival, FC Editor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is once again joined by FC contributors Devika Girish and Eric Hynes(also curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image) to chat about a few highly-touted features that left them wanting. These include Joe Talbot's The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Scott Z. Burns' The Report, Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, and Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's The Lodge. Check back throughout the week for regular updates from the Sundance Film Festival.

We're back with our second update from Park City. Today's podcast features Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold in conversation with FC contributors Devika Girish and Eric Hynes (also curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image). The focus today is on a Rashid Johnson's Richard Wright adaptation Native Son, Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert's documentary American Factory, Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra's The Infiltrators, and Ben Berman's absurdist doc Untitled Amazing Johnathan Movie. Check back for more updates from Sundance 2019 throughout the next week.

In the first of a series of updates from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold hits the slopes with Eric Hynes, FC contributor and curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image. In addition to discussing their dietary regimens (one must maintain strength in the face of this cinematic avalanche), the two trade highlights from their first day in Park City. Rapold and Hynes kick off with a chat about Bart Freundlich's soapy After the Wedding (featuring Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams) before digging deeper into a slate of documentaries: Petra Costa's The Edge of Democracy, Todd Douglas Miller's Apollo 11, and Alexandre O. Philippe's MEMORY—The Origins of Alien. Check back over the next week and a half for updates on all the highlights from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

In the calm before the storm, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sits down with critic and FC contributor Amy Taubin to chat about some of their more eagerly anticipated film from Sundance 2019, opening January 24 and running through February 3. Perhaps appropriately, the conversation begins with films that aren’t actually in competition, but will be showing as part of Slamdance, the Sundance alternative celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. In addition to Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird (screening February 7 as part of Film Comment Selects), the two also touch on Beniamino Barrese’s The Disappearance of My Mother and Nick Broomfield’s Leonard Cohen documentary, among others. Check back in throughout the next week and half for regular updates from the snow-topped cinemas of Sundance.

From Woodstock to Stop Making Sense to Madonna: Truth or Dare, the concert film provides an up-close-and-personal—and otherwise unattainable—perspective on performance and performer. In the new issue of Film Comment, out now, contributor Andrew Chan digs into the long-awaited 1972 Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, finally released in 2018 after years of legal wrangling and building anticipation. The wait was well worth it, as the Sydney Pollack-directed film documents Aretha’s transcendent gospel and R&B and provides (as Chan writes) “access to the woman behind the microphone while at the same time radiating a ghostly effect that’s impossible to shake.” For the latest Film Comment Podcast, Nicolas Rapold sat down with Chan, who is also web editor at The Criterion Collection, and Film Comment contributor and Rogerebert.com critic Sheila O’Malley to discuss Amazing Grace and three other specially selected concert films: The T.A.M.I. Show, Sign o' the Times, and Can’s 1972 Free Concert.

New year, new rep report! Our latest edition looks at the annual mainstay of the restoration calendar, To Save and Project at the Museum of Modern Art—featuring everything from Chantal Akerman to Nude on the Moon—as well as a wide-ranging survey of the city symphony film at Anthology Film Archives. And on the new release side of the episode, we play catch-up with the likes of Welcome to Marwen and more. Joining Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold this time were our regulars from Screen Slate, its founder Jon Dieringer and FC contributing editor and independent programmer Nellie Killian; and two colleagues from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Programming Assistant Maddie Whittle and Digital Marketing Manager Jordan Raup, also founder of The Film Stage.

All too often, the ritual of ranking films at the end of the year leaves a lot of worthy movies on the cutting floor. Some don’t receive enough votes to make our Best of 2018 list; others maybe don’t leap to mind when weighing the artistic strengths and weaknesses of movies. So now that you’ve read about the best of 2018, we present the rest of 2018—a few films that we enjoyed but that, for one reason or another, didn’t crack the hallowed top 20. Editor-in-chief Nicolas Rapold talked with Michael Koresky, editorial and creative director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and two colleagues in FSLC Programming, Maddie Whittle and Tyler Wilson.

For the final Film Comment Talk of the year, Matt Dillon came to the Film Society of Lincoln Center to talk about his new film, The House That Jack Built, directed by Lars von Trier. The film stars Dillon as a serial killer who recounts a series of his murders over several years. Dillon talked about playing a depraved character and working with von Trier. Maddie Whittle of the Film Society of Lincoln Center moderated the dialogue.

The Rep Report continues with another joyous discussion of the latest in repertory and new release. This time we venture into the shadows of the Jacques Tourneur retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, along with some choice selections from New York’s wealth of offerings. Then it’s time for a holiday surprise—at least, that’s how the movie has affected our critics, who saw it only after deadlines for the best-of-the-year polls had passed: The Mule, directed by Clint Eastwood, who stars as a charming drug courier of a certain age. For this episode, I was joined by K. Austin Collins of Vanity Fair; Jon Dieringer, co-founder of Screen Slate; Nellie Killian, a contributing editor at Film Comment and programmer; and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor.

Every year we send out a poll to our critics and staff and put together a list of the best movies of the year. For 2018, we did something a little different and fun: we counted down the best movies of the year at a live Film Comment Talk at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Along the way, Film Comment editor-in-chief Nicolas Rapold discussed the results with a group of all-star critics: Molly Haskell, critic and author; Michael Koresky, director of editorial and creative strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Sheila O’Malley and Nick Pinkerton, also frequent Film Comment contributors.

At the New York Film Festival, Film Comment presents a series of talks that includes our reliably energizing and insightful conversation with a group of directors. Our 2018 Filmmakers Chat—posted for the first time now—featured a unique and invigorating mix of talents in a discussion about the art and craft (and anxieties and rewards) of making movies. I was honored and delighted to be joined at the Film Society of Lincoln Center by Louis Garrel, director of A Faithful Man; Jodie Mack, director of The Grand Bizarre; Alex Ross Perry, director of Her Smell; and Albert Serra, director of Roi Soleil.

The Rep Report, our new Film Comment podcast series devoted to repertory programs and new releases, continues this week with its latest installment. Once again we talked about the latest movies (new and old) that we’ve seen, desperately want to see, or have wept bitter tears over missing, with special emphasis on the rich offerings of repertory / art-house cinemas. For the first half, I was delighted to join FC contributing editor (and Screen Slate board member) Nellie Killian, and Screen Slate founder, publisher, and editor Jon Dieringer. We talked about everything from a freshly restored Detour at Film Forum to vérité rediscovery Inquiring Nuns at the Museum of the Moving Image to a beguiling SculptureCenter video program. And for the new release portion of the episode, I discussed The Favourite, Roma, and the joys of Thanksgiving viewing with FC contributor Maddie Whittle of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

In marketing parlance, a “family film” has tended to mean an anodyne product, something that all could enjoy and that couldn't possibly offend anyone. For our latest Film Comment Podcast, we’re taking our cue instead from movies actually about families, with all of the love, mundanity, and cringing horror left intact. That includes not only Shoplifters—a new release from that auteur of the comforts and complications of home, Hirokazu Kore-eda—but also the likes of Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Yasujiro Ozu’s Equinox Flower, and a couple more that may surprise you. Film Comment’s Michael Koresky was joined for this discussion by K. Austin Collins of Vanity Fair; Aliza Ma, head programmer of Metrograph; and Farihah Zaman, filmmaker and FC contributor.

Ida Lupino was an original. A Warner Brothers star who went on to become an independent director, writer, and producer, Lupino holds a singular place in American film history, and she is currently the subject of an ongoing retrospective at New York’s Film Forum. On the latest Film Comment Podcast, I was joined by Farran Smith Nehme, critic and author of Missing Reels; and Sheila O’Malley, frequent FC contributor and critic at Rogerebert.com, to discuss the work of this legend, including films she starred in, such as Moontide (which O’Malley wrote about in the March/April issue of the magazine), and those she directed, such as the unforgettable The Hitchhiker and Outrage.

There’s an abundance of riches in movie houses across our fair city of New York—and, of course, beyond. We’ve long wanted to feature discussions among our contributors about the many options out there, and we‘re pleased to dive right in with the first of a new strand in the Film Comment Podcast family. In the first half, we go deep into the repertory side with Screen Slate’s John Dieringer and FC Contributing Editor (and Screen Slate board member) Nellie Killian, including titles by Margarethe von Trotta and the largely unknown James Robert Baker (Blonde Death); then, frequent FC contributors Sheila O’Malley and Nick Pinkerton glance across the slate of new and recent releases and give us their thoughts on such titles as Private Life, Burning, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

“With Shirkers, Sandi Tan . . . revisits the long-lost footage from her unfinished narrative feature shot in Tan’s native Singapore in 1992, also called Shirkers, and in the process reckons with both why the film was never finished and how several relationships were forever changed in its wake,” Eric Hynes wrote in our March/April 2018 issue, about Sandi Tan’s Sundance prize-winning film. For our latest Film Comment Talk at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Tan sat down to talk about her experience making Shirkers, joined by FC contributor Farihah Zaman, also a filmmaker. Shirkers opened October 26 and is available to view on Netflix.

Cinema and ghosts both offer the promise of life after death. On the latest Film Comment Podcast, just in time for Halloween, we talked about the fascinating role ghosts play in movies. We start with the 1940s, when ghosts seemed to exert a special hold on Hollywood cinema of wartime and postwar era. From there, it's off to the spooky races, all the way up to the 1970s and Personal Shopper and (the great) beyond. For this haunting discussion, I was joined by Imogen Sara Smith, critic and author of our Phantom Light column; and Michael Koresky, director of editorial and creative strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Our latest Film Comment Talk brought together Paul Dano, director and co-writer of Wildlife, and Richard Ford, author of the book from which the film was adapted. It was a rare occasion in many ways, with Ford and Dano exchanging illuminating insights on writing and filming fiction. Film Comment columnist Eric Hynes, curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, moderated the conversation.

As a chronicler of film history, director Peter Bogdanovich has assembled what amounts to an insider’s oral history of classic Hollywood, across books and films and assorted individual interviews. His documentary on the silent great Buster Keaton, aptly titled The Great Buster, is yet another important project, which opened earlier this month. But Bogdanovich himself surfaces this month in another piece of film history—Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, one of cinema’s most anticipated unfinished works, which will be released onNovember 2 after an extensive reconstruction effort. For a special interview episode of The Film Comment Podcast, Nick Pinkerton sat down with Bogdanovich for a conversation about Keaton, Welles, and more.

Toward the end of the New York Film Festival, our all-star team of Film Comment contributors came together to talk about the highlights. It was the third and final Film Comment Talk during the festival (following our Cinema of Experience event and our Filmmakers Chat, coming soon). You’ll hear all about Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Claire Denis’s High Life, Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, the new Orson Welles reconstruction The Other Side of the Wind, and more. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Molly Haskell, author of the foundational text From Reverence to Rape and a Yale University monograph of Steven Spielberg; K. Austin Collins, film critic at Vanity Fair; Eric Hynes, film curator at the Museum of the Moving Image; Michael Koresky, the creative and editorial director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Aliza Ma, head programmer of Metrograph.

For this week's podcast, we take a close look at Projections, the New York Film Festival’s program of experimental work from around the globe. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Nellie Killian, programmer and Film Comment contributing editor, and Becca Voelcker, doctoral student at Harvard and contributor, for a review of Projections highlights by Beatrice Gibson, Zachary Epcar, Jeremy Shaw, Sky Hopinka, and Laida Lertxundi, as well as the unique nature of the experimental film community.

The 56th New York Film Festival features three special Film Comment Talks, the first of which was our latest “Cinema of Experience” roundtable. On the occasion of our September/October cover featuring Burning star Steven Yeun—interviewed by Devika Girish about the notion of authenticity, and the excitement of working with director Lee Changdong—the focus of the talk was Asian and Asian American experience on and off screen. At the Film Society of Lincoln Center, I was joined by a stellar cast of commentators with an array of professional perspectives: Andrew Chan, web editor of the Criterion Collection; David Ninh, director of press and publicity; Genevieve Yue, assistant professor of culture and media at the New School; and Andrew Ahn, director of the film Spa Night. The 25th anniversary of The Joy Luck Club became the starting point for a thoughtful and movingly personal discussion. Stay tuned (or drop on by) for our next two talks: a chat with NYFF filmmakers and our critics' wrap-up of the films.

“In their films—especially Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, and Inside Llewyn Davis—there’s always the sense that the deck is stacked against us and that we’re the authors of our own misery, a doubly discomfiting, Camusian view that perfectly matches their aesthetic approach, an overwhelming omniscience that results in a kind of bravura melancholy,” Michael Koresky writes in his feature about Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in our September/October issue. This week, Koresky, FSLC Editorial and Creative Director, moderates a special Film Comment Podcast featuring three more Coeniacs in conversation about the brothers’ dazzling 30-year-plus body of work, from greatest hits to lesser-known ballads: K. Austin Collins, film critic at Vanity Fair; Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph; and Adam Nayman, Toronto-based critic and author of the new book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together (Abrams). The Ballad of Buster Scruggs screens on October 4 and 9 in the New York Film Festival and opens in November. And look out for our Film Comment Talks during NYFF: the Cinema of Experience on September 29, our Filmmakers Chat on October 7, and our critics' Festival Wrap about festival highlights on October 10.

Our latest guest for our Film Comment Talks was Ethan Hawke. His new film Blaze, which he directed, stars in, and co-wrote, was released in August by IFC Films. In a busy year that also saw the release of First Reformed, where he played a tormented priest, Hawke took time to talk with FC stalwart Nick Pinkerton about playing characters who value authenticity and integrity. The actor-writer-filmmaker was in prime raconteur mode, in front of an enthused audience. Look out for more Film Comment Talks during the New York Film Festival and beyond!

“Very rare are the movie depictions of restaurant work that evoke the mental and emotional dissonance required to get through an eight-hour shift,” April Wolfe wrote in her Film Comment review of Support the Girls. “Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls—which takes place predominantly within a topsy-turvy 24-hour period, as the manager of a T&A sports bar juggles the concerns of every needy patron and employee—portrays precisely that odd mix of knowing self-abjection and bubbling, flirtatious confidence present in real-life restaurant workers.” The portrayal of work on screen is a practically inexhaustible topic for study, but recently we dipped a toe into the discussion, with a little help. A few weeks before the fall festival glut, I joined filmmaker/critic Sierra Pettengill, author of the Chick Strand feature in our September/October issue, for an interview/discussion with Bujalski concerning Support the Girls and the challenges of depicting work on screen.

Our Toronto 2018 podcast series comes to a close as our group gabs about Olivier Assayas's garrulous Non-Fiction, Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell, Ho Wi Ding's Cities of Last Things, and more. Guests include Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph; Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image in New York and Film Comment columnist; leading Toronto critic Adam Nayman, a Cinema Scope and Reverse Shot contributor; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at Film Society of Lincoln Center. Back to New York!

The Toronto hit parade continues with another podcast from the festival formerly known as the Festival of Festivals. I brought together even more hearts and minds this time for another spirited chat: Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph; Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image in New Yorkand Film Comment columnist; Nick Davis, a Film Comment contributing editor and professor of film, literature, and gender studies at Northwestern University; and Michael Koresky, director of editorial and creative strategy at Film Society of Lincoln Center. We discussed High Life, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Crossing, American Dharma, and In Fabric.

Drawn like hopeless spaceships into a black hole, Film Comment and friends are currently attending the sprawling Toronto film festival. I brought together a couple of critics willing to take time out from the buffet of movies for a spirited chat: Nick Davis, a Film Comment contributing editor and professor of film, literature, and gender studies at Northwestern University; and leading Toronto critic Adam Nayman, a Cinema Scope and Reverse Shot contributor. We discussed a number of films you may not have heard much about, and a few you have, including Fahrenheit 11/9, Graves Without a Name, Destroyer, Peterloo, and Aniara.

Taking a breath to look back, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Jonathan Romney, FC contributing editor, in an undisclosed garden location at the Venice Film Festival to discuss a few of the much-anticipated headliners: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Laszlo Nemes’s Sunset, S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete, and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria.

This week on the podcast, the re-release of Terence Davies’s first full-length film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, in a new restoration, has our guests reminiscing about great debut features throughout cinema. After discussing Davies’s 1988 masterpiece, the group goes on to talk in detail about some great first features to careers that either took off or were frustratingly cut short, including a trio of Ter(r)ences and Lynne Littman. Joining in the discussion were frequent Film Comment contributors Ina Archer, media conservator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; Michael Koresky, the Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (and author of the University of Illinois Press book Terence Davies; and critic and FC contributing editor Nick Pinkerton.

This week on the podcast we head back to the summer of 2001. These days, the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop has become a way of life, though at the time that summer, we were blithely seeing movies without knowing what was to come. It was the year of Mulholland Drive but also of Rush Hour 2, a year of shifting gears into a new decade, and a formative time for many of us at the magazine. In our free and easy late-summer discussion, we’ve tried to capture what was special about the movies we were seeing at that moment, even though some of us can’t believe the movies we were seeing at that moment. For this trip down memory lane, I was joined by Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph in New York, and Michael Koresky, the editorial and creative director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

With a playful 13.5-hour multigenre film-of-films from Mariano Llinas, an ultra-sharp new Hong Sangsoo, and an array of other experiments, the Locarno Festival this year maintained its position as a reliable source of vitality in the cinematic landscape. The 71st edition also marked an end of an era, in one respect at least, as artistic director Carlo Chatrian will be moving on to the coveted top post at the Berlinale. But there was plenty to talk about in the stimulating lineup, which has a way of trickling into other festivals of note in the coming year: already, Ray & Liz, La Flor, and Too Old to Die Young have been announced in the main slate of the New York Film Festival. In Locarno, I discussed the films on offer with regular FC contributor Jordan Cronk, founder/director of Acropolis and Locarno in Los Angeles, and one of the Locarno Critics Academy participants, Becca Voelcker, a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University and freelance film critic and programmer.

Our cover story for the July/August issue is about Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman—a story about incredible events in America’s past that feel well-suited to our incredible present.  “In a case where the events of history improve upon the fantasies of fiction, BlacKkKlansman, the latest Spike Lee joint, is based on the 2014 memoir written by Ron Stallworth, a black undercover police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1979,” Teo Bugbee writes in her feature. “However, Lee does not get lost in the details of Stallworth’s life story, and BlacKkKlansman is no straight biopic. Instead, it follows the beats of a traditional cop movie, where a man of the law is torn between allegiances in his efforts to solve a case. In this regard, the film represents the latest chapter in the underrated career of Spike Lee, genre filmmaker.” For this episode, I joined Bugbee and Ashley Clark of BAMcinématek to discuss Lee’s wide-ranging, and chronically misunderstood, career.

As long as we are being inundated with worrisome news about Russian cyberwarfare and other attacks, the time seems ripe for taking a look at the motherland’s cinema. The summer series “Putin’s Russia: A 21st-Century Mosaic” at the Museum of the Moving Image provided a perfect opportunity for surveying key films in the country’s recent history, including award-winning auteurs like Andrei Zvyagintsev and lesser-known directors. For this discussion I was joined by the co-programmers of the series: Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of Moving Image and FC columnist, and writer/filmmaker Daniel Witkin.

On July 17, our latest Film Comment Free Talk brought together Boots Riley, director of the mind-altering new film Sorry to Bother You, and special guest Questlove at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “All art is political,” said Riley, who detailed the genesis of the movie’s surreal Marxist story of a African-American telemarketer, and traded stories with Questlove about the nitty-gritty of the creative process. The talk was moderated by filmmaker and Film Comment contributor Farihah Zaman. For more on Sorry to Bother You, don’t miss Ina Diane Archer’s essay in the July/August issue and our podcast discussion from July 4. Our next Film Comment Free Talk takes place on August 6 with Crystal Moselle, the director of Skate Kitchen (and The Wolfpack).

“In just a few years’ time, they’ve become both requisite filmmaking tools and regrettable freighters of cliché. Drone shots are easily recognizable not because drone cameras have a single, easily definable use, but because nearly everyone’s using them the same way: god’s-eye view of a landscape, smooth gliding (heaven forbid there’s a jerk or rattle), low-grade wow factor, cut,” Eric Hynes writes in his essay about drones in the July/August issue of Film Comment. “Yet perhaps we shouldn’t blame the tool for how it’s being used, especially since we’re still in the early days, and since potential applications are still being explored within both documentary and fiction.” There’s great potential in drone photography, for sure, but how are filmmakers harnessing its power for good, and not just for awesome? In this week’s Film Comment Podcast, I discussed drones in cinema with Hynes, an FC columnist and Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, and a bona fide cinematographer, Ashley Connor (Madeline’s Madeline), and hashed out the good, the bad, and the ugly of this curious airborne invention.

“Audiences will enjoy Sorry to Bother You in one go, but the film invites and can stand up to multiple viewings, in much the same way that complex rap lyrics benefit from repeated plays and familiarity gained from memorization,” Ina Diane Archer writes in our July/August issue. “Boots Riley is, by his own definition, a storyteller—a socially conscious, political artist, communist, proud Oaklander, and the beloved front man of The Coup.” Riley’s scabrous satire tracks a telemarketer (Lakeith Stanfield) on the rise in a company engaged in some nefarious labor practices that bring corporate malfeasance into a surreal realm. For our latest episode, Archer joined me in a discussion of the feature and the many layers she unpacks in her essay.

For many New York moviegoers, the past few weeks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center have virtually belonged to Luchino Visconti. The retrospective has included established landmarks such as Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, Death in Venice, and Ossessione, but it’s also fostered rediscovery of Ludwig, The Stranger, The Damned, and more. The record audiences suggest that Visconti’s richly drawn canvases, larger-than-life characers, and sweeping historical dramas still have a special pull on the big screen. And decay never looked so good. In this episode of the podcast, I talked about Visconti’s work (and its resonance with glam rock?) with regular FC contributor Nick Pinkerton, and Florence Almozini, associate director of programming at the Film Society and co-programmer of the retrospective.

“Although religious symbols and themes have often found their way into Schrader’s film work, First Reformedmarks the first time he has applied elements of transcendental style—as extolled in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film—to his own filmmaking. Early in his career, Schrader was occupied with exploring the pathological lure of sex and violence in narrative cinema,” Aliza Ma wrote in her review of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed for our May/June issue. As part of our Film Comment Free Talks series, Schrader joined Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a conversation about the twists and turns and leaps in the writer-director’s career—from starting out as a critic and UCLA film student in the ’60s, to writing screenplays for Taxi Driver and Last Temptation of Christ, to directing films from Blue Collar through First Reformed. This week’s podcast captures the discussion. (Please note: the audio is at times slightly imperfect due to an unforeseeable technical snafu.) Looking ahead, our Film Comment Free Talks continue on July 17 with filmmaker Boots Riley, director of the much-anticipated satire Sorry to Bother You, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson.

This summer we kicked off our Film Comment Free Talks, a new series of conversations with filmmakers held at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. For the release of horror sensation Hereditary, we invited the film’s director, Ari Aster, to come for a wide-ranging chat. The talk was moderated by FSLC Editorial Director Michael Koresky, who wrote of Hereditary in our May/June issue: “We are compelled by our family stories, but they are often constructed narratives, given to biases, subjectivities, fictions. If at times Hereditary feels more like an askew domestic melodrama than a horror movie, that’s not accidental.” Aster talks about his love of Ingmar Bergman, his fear of The Wiz, his next project, and the arduous road to staging a scene just so. Our next Film Comment Free Talk will take place on July 17 with director Boots Riley where he'll discuss his funny, scathing, weird, and audacious satire Sorry to Bother You.

In the May/June issue of Film Comment, Nick Pinkerton wrote: “Like few feature films before it, Spielberg’s [Ready Player One] exemplifies an aesthetic of pop-culture decoupage that has developed, in recognizably kindred forms, across a wide range of media, one that has been increasingly prevalent through the early years of the 21st century. It is that of the junk-pile jumble of accumulated mass-manufactured character properties at the end of pop history—the aesthetic of glut.” Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, is joined by FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca and Light Industry co-founder and 4Columns contributor Ed Halter to discuss our new pop culture reality, where everything—good or bad—is here to stay.

In his essay “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic”—first published in the January/February 1978 issue of Film Comment—Robin Wood wrote: “Critics are not, of course, supposed to talk personally. It is regarded as an embarrassment, as bad taste, and besides it is an affront to the famous ideal of ‘objectivity.’ . . . Yet I believe there will always be a close connection between critical theory, critical practice, and personal life; and it seems important that the critic should be aware of the personal bias that must inevitably affect his choice of theoretical position, and prepared to foreground it in his work.” Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, invoked this landmark essay during a talk at the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was joined by K. Austin Collins, critic at Vanity Fair, and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman. Addressing representation in recent films like Love, Simon and Call Me by Your Name, the process of identification, and the absence of sexuality in the Marvel universe, their conversation is an earnest and thoughtful consideration of movie-viewing while queer.

In this unbelievable season finale, promises are broken, insults fly, and lives are forever changed…well, not really. New York Times co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis joins FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold in this final Cannes 2018 episode to discuss Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, snipers, Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, why auteur love should stick around a bit longer, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, interviewing Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noe’s Climax, and what it means to attend the festival.

It’s been a full 10 days of Cannes! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Eugene Hernandez, Deputy Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and co-publisher of Film Comment, to discuss four films that show how unforgiving life can be: Nadine Labaki’s Capernaüm, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Ayka, Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. The duo consider the effectiveness and strategies each filmmaker uses to depict such harsh realities.

It’s Cannes, day nine! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times; Mara Gourd-Mercado, general director of Montreal doc-fest RIDM; and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and film programmer at the Museum of the Moving Image. The writers and programmers discuss David Robert Mitchell’s California pop-culture noir pastiche Under the Silver Lake; Lee Chang-dong’s Haruki Murakami adaptation Burning; Alice Rohrwacher’s magical realist family farm drama Lazzaro felice; Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s ironic psychosexual melodrama Diamantino; and Laetitia Carton’s documentary Le Grand Bal.

In this episode, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Amy Taubin, Jonathan Romney, and Eric Hynes to discuss Lars von Trier’s “provocative” The House That Jack Built and Spike Lee’s provocative BlackKklansman. The writers also discuss Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, and the latest Stéphane Brizé & Vincent Lindon collaboration, At War.

In today’s dispatch, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of Moving Image, and Orwa Nyrabia, artistic director of the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), to talk about all things documentary at Cannes. They discuss Wang Bing’s bold and boundary-pushing eight-hour Dead Souls, the place (or lack thereof) for nonfiction cinema at the Croisette, and the influence of fake news frenzy on documentary filmmaking today.

Following the high-profile “82 women” red carpet protest, FC and Artforum contributing editor Amy Taubin joins FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold to discuss the festival’s failure to find (good) films by female directors. Plus: Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces; Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun; Vanessa Filho’s Angel Face; Alejandro Fadel’s Die, Monster, Die; Lukas Dhont’s Girl; and more thoughts about Godard’s The Image Book.

Amidst the jubilance of a French wedding, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Eric Hynes, curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image and FC columnist, and Christina Newland, writer for Sight & Sound and Little White Lies, on the top of the Palais to discuss a few films from up-and-coming directors they’ve enjoyed at the festival: Ognjen Glavonic’s The Load, Luis Ortega’s Angel, and Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage.

It’s Cannes day four! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Film Society of Lincoln Center Director of Programming Dennis Lim and FC columnist Jonathan Romney to discuss a few of the most anticipated films of the festival: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book, Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is Purest White, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, and Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s Diamantino.

FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Otros Cines critic Manu Yáñez Murillo sit down in the Palais to discuss the day’s films: Jaime Rosales’s Petra; Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s multigenerational, Godfather-esque cartel drama Birds of Passage; Ali Abbasi’s sweet, oddball Border; and Paul Dano’s emotionally charged Wildlife.

FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Eric Hynes, Curator of Film at the Museum of Moving Image and FC Columnist, as they reflect on day two of Cannes from the roof of the Palais. As a newcomer to the festival, Hynes recounts his first impression—from the grandeur of the red carpet to the banality of waiting in line—and the two discuss both the second feature of this year’s competition, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Leto, as well as the opening night film of Un Certain Regard, Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass.

It’s Cannes, day one! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Amy Taubin, FC contributing editor and Cannes veteran, to discuss the films they’re excited to see at this year’s edition (Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice) and a few they’re anticipating with some trepidation. The two also discuss the opening night film, Ashgar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows. Plus: an incredible anecdote about Lucrecia Martel and Marvel.

Acting dynasties—like any kind of dynasty—rarely produce talents as great as Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie’s daughter, who ended up a sui generis figure in cinema history herself. Writer Andréa R. Vaucher and David Bloom joined Chaplin at the Panama Film Festival to discuss her incredible career; working with David Lean, Carlos Saura, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, and J. A. Bayona; her teenage years as a ballerina; and, of course, her father. A few of Paul Newman’s best pranks also crop up. A Words & Deeds production; produced, engineered, and directed by David Bloom.

The incomparable French director Claire Denis returns with Let the Sunshine In, a romantic comedy of sorts that stars Juliette Binoche. Denis’s fluid vision and singular sense of timing mixed with Binoche’s endearing performance make for a thoughtful glimpse into a woman’s quest for love on her own terms and, as Andrew Chan explains in his cover story about the film, “shows us not how we feel about love but how we look at it and talk about it—how it appears to us when experienced by others.” In this episode, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold to discuss Denis and Binoche’s film; then stay tuned for a live Q&A with Denis that followed a sneak preview of the film presented by Film Comment and IFC Films.

While great pipes and a cute face don’t always allow pop stars to instantly become leading men or ladies (witness 2003’s From Justin to Kelly), many musical artists do succeed in bringing a heady mix of charisma and raw talent to the screen. Be it in a bit part or carrying the whole show, these magnificent multi-hyphenates also offer a different type of star text to enrich and complicate their roles. In this episode, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca discusses the bright lights in the musician-actor galaxy with Eric Hynes, curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, and Shonni Enelow, the author of Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama and assistant professor of English at Fordham University.

In the college town of Columbia, Missouri, the True/False Film Fest has grown to become one of the world’s premiere showcases of cutting-edge nonfiction filmmaking. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold returned to moderate “Toasted,” the festival’s late-night wrap-up event in front of a live, very lively audience, abridged for clarity here as a Film Comment podcast. Rapold was joined by a superlative crew of critics, programmers, and filmmaking talent including Mara Gourd Mercado, general director of Montreal docfest RIDM; Tayler Montague, freelance critic and programmer; Chris Boeckmann and Abby Sun, programmers at True/False; Rok Bicek, director of The Family; and Ashley Clark, senior film programmer at BAMcinématek. The freewheeling discussion kicks off with Bicek discussing The Family before it moves on to Zhang Mengqi’s Self-Portrait: Birth in 47 KM, Reece Auguiste’s Twilight City and the Black Audio Film Collective retrospective, Khalik Allah’s Black Mother, Leilah Weinraub’s SHAKEDOWN, and many more documentaries.

In honor of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of Lucrecia Martel’s work and theatrical run of Zama, we re-present this episode analyzing the film. Premiered in Venice and screened in last year’s New York Film Festival, Zama marks not only the long-awaited return of Lucrecia Martel, but also her first literary adaptation. Martel expanded on the first-person fever dream of the original 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, whose fans included Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast ruminates on Zama’s novelistic origins with the help of literary translator and CUNY professor Esther Allen, who produced the first English translation of Zama in 2016, for which she won the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose. Allen is joined by Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast host, to discuss the subconscious presences Martel might imply beyond the edges of her frames.

With the ostensible arrival of spring comes the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA’s New Directors/New Films. In this year’s crop the traditions of various genres and national cinemas plays out in often spectacular fashion, as well as up-close-and-personal narratives. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Nicolas Rapold, FC Editor-in-Chief, and Devika Girish, contributor to the magazine, to reflect on those films that caught their eyes, including Our House, Closeness, Good Manners, The Great Buddha +, and more.

Just in time for Easter (and a new series celebrating Al Pacino at The Quad), this episode honors an often-misunderstood subcategory of star: hams. Ranging from the amusing to glorious to cringeworthy, these actors call attention to themselves in ways that can overtake and redefine the films they’re performing in. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Ashley Clark, senior programmer of cinema at BAM, and Michael Koresky, editorial director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to chew over these over-the-top performers who produce a certain joy that a subtler actor can’t. From cops pontificating about posteriors in Heat to Maine put-down artists in Dolores Claiborne, this gammon-fueled chat is one for the ages.

In the March/April issue of Film Comment, Lauren Kaminsky wrote about Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin: "a delirious historical mash-up that compiles sometimes independently factual details in utterly counterfactual ways. It can therefore convey nothing about causation and is largely apolitical, but it is a spot-on satire of socialist realism and the authoritarian political culture of high Stalinism.” In our digital age, the prominence of news satire and satirical news has helped make politics more immediate—Iannucci being a prime mover through work like In the Loop and Veep—but the intermingling of humor and facts brings its own complications. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca spoke with Kaminsky about the Russian humor this film exerts within the context of Anglo-American satire of today’s political events.

All too often, women’s opinions are considered valuable only in certain situations: when there’s a problem affecting women, when there’s an opportunity to market to women, when there’s a president that is a deeply reactionary sexual predator. Nellie Killian’s series “Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories” attempts to show the multitude of experiences and issues that come to light when a director takes the simple but radical step of having a woman tell her story to the camera. Spanning several decades as well as a variety of lengths, the 34 films in the series open up a free space for discussion of how issues of class, race, immigration, violence, crime, sex, or “just” being a housewife affect women. Interspersing clips from the films, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with Killian, who is also a contributing editor to FC; Farihah Zaman, filmmaker (Remote Area Medical), critic, and Field of Vision Production Manager; and Sierra Pettengill, filmmaker (The Reagan Show) and occasional contributor to Frieze magazine. Films discussed: Soft Fiction, Janie’s Janie, The Women’s Film, Mimi, Suzanne Suzanne, Audience

Featuring the talents of Bill Gunn (Ganja & Hess), Vertamae Grosvenor (Daughters of the Dust), Ishmael Reed, and many others, Personal Problems was originally intended as “an experimental soap opera” for WNET, the public broadcast station in New York. It never aired and was thought lost for many years, but the film has been newly restored by Kino Lorber and will be traveling theatrically soon, beginning with a run at Metrograph. Written by Ishmael Reed and shot in 1979, Personal Problems stars Vertamae Grosvenor as Johnnie Mae, a nurse’s aide at Harlem Hospital who’s having an affair behind the back of her uptight transit worker husband Charles (Walter Cotton). In the March/April 2018 issue, Howard Hampton writes about this incredible work, a “motion picture [that] is inventing its language as it goes along—a series of building blocks of different shapes, tones, and materials creating a homemade Cubist mosaic. Personal Problems balances hands-on and hands-off approaches.” Tobi Haslett, contributor to N+1, 4Columns, and The New Yorker, speaks with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca about this distinctive work.

From the way in which the experiences of African Americans are portrayed on screen, to the way skin color is captured on film, the history of movies and photography is inextricable from race. How do nonwhite, nonmale filmmakers create a language that equalizes a subject? What sort of language and historical practices are required to reflect these perspectives? In this live discussion at Film Comment Selects titled “Race and Representation,” Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold discusses these questions with Antonio Méndez Esparza, director of Life and Nothing More (the opening night film of the series), RaMell Ross, director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening (winner of a prize at Sundance), and Professor Racquel Gates, author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture.

Valeska Grisebach’s extremely precise yet highly naturalistic films take years to make: so far, we have been graced with only three features. In the January/February issue of Film Comment, Haden Guest discusses Grisebach’s process of “radical observation,” as well as her relationship to existing genre forms and aesthetics. Western, Grisebach’s latest film, follows a group of German workers building a hydroelectric plant in the backlands of Bulgaria. Separated by linguistic and cultural differences, one of the German workers—Meinhard—slowly begins to bridge the gap between the two camps. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Film Society of Lincoln Center programmers Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan and Brooklyn Rail film section co-editor Leo Goldsmith to discuss the film, Grisebach’s filmography, and her relationship to new forms of realism.

After being notorious as a “hotbed” of piracy for many years, the Chinese market is now more rightly regarded as the second-largest in the world. In the January/February issue of Film Comment, Nick Pinkerton and Andrew Chan respectively report on Hollywood’s deals with mainland multiplexes and aspiring mogul Jia Zhangke. As the middle class has grown, new venues and festivals seek to satiate their desire for more entertainment options—big, small, or somewhere in-between. In this episode of the podcast, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Andrew Chan, web editor at the Criterion Collection, and Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph, to discuss Chinese film culture, sprawling multiplexes, censorship, and the types of films that do and don’t get made anymore on the Mainland and off. Read Andrew’s feature online: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jia-zhangke-pingyao-film-festival/

Recent episodes of The Film Comment Podcast have contemplated formative filmmaker obsessions, but what about the movies that struck us much earlier in life? Maybe your parents took you to see it, maybe you flipped by it on cable and couldn’t change the channel, or maybe you had a traumatic brush with the body horror of The Blob too early in life…whatever it is, we revisit our childhood fascinations on this week’s episode, giving us an occasion to reflect on how our tastes and critical faculties might begin to form at a young age, as well as what happens when beloved films may not withstand the test of time. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by K. Austin Collins, staff writer for The Ringer; Nicholas Elliott, U.S. correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma; and Mark Harris, regular contributor to Vulture and the author of FC’s 2017 column “Cinema ‘67 Revisited.”

One of the most curious entries at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (which runs January 24 to February 4) isn’t a film at all, but a new one-off project by Apichatpong Weerasethakul: SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL. True to the title, this is a fully operational hotel, conceived and designed by Apichatpong in tandem with IFFR curator Edwin Carels and a team of collaborators. Over the festival’s first five nights, guests could reserve (for a 75-euro fee) one of six beds, which are tiered within a tall metal scaffold and flanked by a wall-sized circular screen projecting assorted found footage courtesy of the nearby EYE Filmmuseum and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Complete with bedside tables, lamps, and other accoutrements of a typical hotel—not to mention a fully stocked bar, breakfast options, and a balcony for public viewing—SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL fosters the sleep states so frequently conjured and portrayed in Apichatpong’s films. Film Comment was joined by Apichatpong at the exhibition on its final day to discuss how this unique project came to be, the influences behind the look and feel of the hotel, and how dreams function as a very particular and personal form of cinema.

Food is versatile on film. Consider the ways it’s used in Tampopo, Daisies, Babette’s Feast, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast contends with how its significance varies with each story—both in the film and for the viewer. Each FC contributor—Michael Koresky, Editorial Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Aliza Ma, Head Programmer at Metrograph; and Mayukh Sen, Staff Writer at Vice’s Munchies—talks about one film that reminds them of cooking while growing up, and another that simply makes them hungry. A meal could evoke the power dynamics of desire, the familial elements of grief, or even a Marxist critique of capitalism… all while looking deee-licious.

It’s Sundance, day seven! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Amy Taubin, FC contributing editor and Sundance veteran, to discuss the evolution of the festival over the years and, of course, what they’ve seen. Taubin touches on the problematic nature of Jennifer Fox’s The Tale, argues for the intelligence of Craig Michael Macneill’s Lizzie, and praises Crystal Moselle’s skater-girl-driven Skate Kitchen. Other films covered include Robert Greene’s hybrid reenactment drama Bisbee ’17, Reed Morano’s postapocalyptic I Think We’re Alone Now, Claire McCarthy’s Shakespeare-expansion Ophelia, Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s RBG (about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), Nathaniel Kahn’s art world doc The Price of Everything. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

Steve James returns to Sundance this week to present the first half of his ten-part miniseries America to Me, set to premiere in full this fall. James tells the story of Oak Park and River Forest High School, a well-funded, diverse public school in suburban Chicago, through the experiences of several of its students. By immersing viewers in the lives of his subjects, who encompass a range of personality types and grade levels, James vies for a comprehensive portrait of the school’s ecosystem, with particular attention given to its disparities across racial and academic backgrounds. In this episode of The Film Comment Podcast, James sits down with Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, to talk about the production process and his own experiences living in the community in which it’s set.

We’re still going strong as we continue into our second week! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image are joined by special guest April Wolfe for a rousing discussion of Sam Green’s A Thousand Thoughts, documentarian-turned-narrative-filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s candid The Tale, Desiree Akhavan’s adaptation of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

In this Film Comment Podcast transmission from Park City, Sundance regular Sebastián Silva discusses his latest film, Tyrel, which had its world premiere on Saturday. Shot in anamorphic handheld by the DP of Post Tenebras Lux and The Florida Project, Alexis Zabe, the film follows Tyler (Jason Mitchell) as he accompanies his friend Johnny (Charlie Abbott) to a weekend birthday retreat in upstate New York. There, Tyler finds himself the only black person among a pack of heavily drinking white bros, with Caleb Landry Jones and Michael Cera among them. Silva chats with FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold about leaving the story open enough to allow for ambiguity, liberal white guilt, and certain nuances that might jump out at American audiences. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

As the first weekend of Sundance comes to an end, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss the white privilege and bacchanalia of Sebastián Silva’s disorienting Tyrel, Ethan Hawke’s biopic of heavy-drinking country singer/songwriter Blaze Foley, Gustav Möller’s gimmicky debut thriller The Guilty, and the joyousness and charm of Sandi Tan’s first-person Singapore-set documentary Shirkers. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

It’s day four and we’re still going strong! In this episode, Nicolas Rapold, FC Editor-in-Chief and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss the social media hell of Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, Craig William Macneill’s ascetic biopic of Lizzie Borden, the vampirism of Sundance, and the economic unhappiness of Paul Dano’s Wildlife. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

It’s Sundance, day three! On this (snowier) edition of our daily Sundance 2017 podcast, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss three more films—Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and Stephen Laing’s Crime + Punishment—with a word or two for Reinaldo Marcus Green’s New York triptych Monsters and Men. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

It’s Sundance, day two! On this edition of our daily Sundance 2017 podcast, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss three new films—Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President, and Elan and Jonathan Bogarin’s 306 Hollywood—as well as the weather and the experience of moviegoing at this unique festival. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

Before the madness begins, Film Comment kicks things off with a glimpse of what to expect from the hectic experience that is the Sundance Film Festival—how it sets the tone for the coming year and what it means to cinema lovers. Join Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, every day during the festival at noon. They will discuss what they’ve seen, what they hope to see, and everything in between. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels

“Can a meretricious, inane movie with nothing else to recommend it produce a radiant, rousing film score?” asks Gary Giddins in “Rolling Thunder,” the January/February 2018 edition of Film Comment‘s “Playing Along” column. “Very rarely,” he answers. Although Giddins isolates Franz Waxman’s score for Taras Bulba as a specific example, the guests on this week’s episode of the Film Comment Podcast each provide a couple more, which led to reminiscences about genre sampler OSTs, unlikely pop music cues, and whether or not Steven Spielberg’s idea of humor is just…shouting. For this conversation, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Tom Scharpling, host of The Best Show, and frequent FC contributors Margaret Barton-Fumo and Nick Pinkerton.

“In Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, love can be—quite literally—a miracle,” writes Sheila O’Malley in her January/February 2018 Film Comment cover story, “Love, After a Fashion.” “People are scarred by life, their emotional resilience decimated by disappointments and neglect. But sometimes love is offered and, as Blanche DuBois says, famously, in A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly!’ That’s the redemptive romantic journey of Phantom Thread, where Reynolds says to Alma at one point that she may very well keep his ‘sour heart from choking.’” Of course, Phantom Thread is no familiar story of redemption through romance. O’Malley joins FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca on this week’s Film Comment Podcast to discuss its beguiling, and even radical, twist on a love story.

Stories about Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct and cover-ups have opened the floodgates of revelations about other figures in the entertainment industry and beyond. Victims have finally been able to come forward and be heard, while the #metoo movement has fueled conversation and action, amidst an Internet outrage machine that can cheapen dialogue. In this episode of The Film Comment Podcast, Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Molly Haskell, author of the landmark 1974 text From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and regular critic to Film Comment; Monica Castillo, the film writer for The New York Times’s Watching; and Aliza Ma, head programmer at the Metrograph Theater, for an in-depth conversation about the implications of this historic moment. Purchase our feminist film anthology in our app: https://reader.filmcomment.com/contents_page/table-of-contents-feminist-film/pugpig_index.html

As filmmaker and critic Jeff Reichert put it in his January/February 2017 Film Comment feature on Steve Bannon’s documentary work, “We could dismiss Bannon as the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of shoddily made straight-to-video white supremacist documentary. But his tactics have helped put Trump in the White House, so what can we learn about Bannon or America from watching them?” This episode of the Film Comment podcast tackles that very question. Reichert, along with Chapo Trap House podcast co-host Will Menaker and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca, looks back on Bannon’s nine films released under the “Citizens United” banner. It goes without saying that there’s a lot to talk about regarding their unlikely aesthetic sensibility (sales presentation meets Leni Riefenstahl meets Michael Bay meets Vic Berger ECUs) and their characterizations of history and reality. The panel also digs into the past 15 years of political documentary on the right and the left (hello, Adam Curtis!), including the ways in which filmmakers package narratives, fact-check their material, and consider their audiences.

Sleepovers offer kids a special opportunity to hang out with their friends largely unsupervised, free to chat and dream way after bedtime. The types of films that can be discovered—and obsessively re-watched—during the wee small hours of the morning can frighten, enlighten, or amuse, which is why it’s a natural subject for this podcast. Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Nellie Killian, film programmer and FC Contributing Editor; Michael Koresky, Editorial Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Andrew Chan, Web Editor for the Criterion Collection. Pull up a pillow and listen!

As another year of moviegoing comes to a close, relax by your fire or space heater with the results of the annual Film Comment critics’ poll! The top ten theatrical releases of the year, in the humble opinion of FC contributors and editors, are unveiled on this week’s podcast by Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, Film Society Editorial Director Michael Koresky, and Digital Producer Violet Lucca. In addition to discussing what stood out (or might have been flawed) about the top-voted films, each critic also shares a film they wish had made the cut—lists have their limits, so think of ours as a way of starting a conversation about the year in film. Visit filmcomment.com/best-of-2017 to see the full results.

Picking up where we left off last week, this week’s episode travels further down cinephilic memory lane…or should we say, further forward. We check back in with the panel from Formative Filmmakers Part One—Nick Davis, professor of film, literature, and gender studies at Northwestern; Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia and the September/October FC feature on immigration cinema “A Double Life”; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Violet Lucca, Film Comment Digital Producer and podcast host—to dive deep into their memories of another early favorite filmmaker. This time, the critics move away from their earliest fascinations toward the directors they found later in life, especially ones who might have redefined their preconceived notions about the medium. Héctor Babenco, Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, and Abbas Kiarostami all crop up in this half.

There’s nothing like first love, especially when it’s projected on the silver screen. This week’s episode of the podcast revisits formative cinematic fascinations—one director who kickstarted cinephilia at a young age, and another who reinvigorated and maybe even recontextualized the passion a bit later down the road. This week’s participants—Nick Davis, professor of film, literature, and gender studies at Northwestern; Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia and the September/October FC feature on immigration cinema “A Double Life”; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Violet Lucca, Film Comment Digital Producer and podcast host—took a breather between TIFF screenings to discuss their favorites, as well as how their emotions have evolved with (or been challenged by) the passage of time. Jane Campion, Manmohan Desai, Ingmar Bergman, and Quentin Tarantino make this half!

Nick Pinkerton’s feature in the new issue, “The Golden Age of Campus Film Societies,” serves as a point of departure for a discussion on the role of campus film culture in shaping cinephilia. In this podcast, Dave Kehr, author and curator of film at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and film critic J. Hoberman talk to Pinkerton about their experiences in campus film culture. Campus film societies not only made international arthouse films available around the country, they also served as battlegrounds for competing ideas about film before the advent of academic cinema studies. In this way, campus film societies were formative for generations of cinephiles and film critics. Kehr, Hoberman, and Pinkerton join FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca to discuss the significance of campus film societies and the future of their impact.

This week, The Film Comment Podcast welcomes back seminal critic David Bordwell to discuss his new book Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. Instead of approaching the decade through the lens of one genre or auteur, Bordwell thinks about the stylistic hallmarks that distinguished the decade—for example, screenwriting conventions like flashbacks—and how they paved the way for the classical Hollywood form we might take for granted today. Bordwell joins Imogen Sara Smith, frequent FC and Criterion contributor, and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast moderator, for a journey into (and even Out of) the cinematic past.

Have we passed 100 episodes already? Apparently so! This week, we invite listeners to look back at some of the most memorable moments of The Film Comment Podcast, including choice blurts from Kent Jones, Amy Taubin, Maitland McDonagh, Molly Haskell, Nick Pinkerton, and other special guests. We also look forward with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca’s interview with Ruben Östlund about The Square, what it means to be Swedish, and the power of YouTube.

This Halloween, The Film Comment Podcast salutes a filmmaker whose work, according to the British Board of Film Classification, exemplified the “pornography of terror.” The panel—Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization assistant at the Smithsonian National African-American Museum of History and Culture; Margaret Barton-Fumo, longtime FC contributor and editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center—convenes to remember the eclectic body of work of Tobe Hooper, who passed away earlier this year. Pick your poison, whether it’s television static, or carnivorous crocodiles, or Stephen King miniseries, or meat hooks… and don’t get us started on Lifeforce. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca moderates the conversation.

Premiered in Venice and recently screened in the New York Film Festival, Zama marks not only the long-awaited return of Lucrecia Martel, but also her first literary adaptation. Martel expanded on the first-person fever dream of the original 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, whose fans included Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast ruminates on Zama’s novelistic origins with the help of literary translator and CUNY professor Esther Allen, who produced the first English translation of Zama in 2016, for which she won the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose. Allen is joined by Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast host, to discuss the subconscious presences Martel might imply beyond the edges of her frames.

Armando Iannucci has long had a genius for the absurdity of global politics, from his work on the satirical news program On the Hour in the 1990s, to the British ministry antics of The Thick of It, to his HBO series Veep. But his new film, The Death of Stalin, set amidst the immediate and ridiculous aftermath of the Soviet leader’s death in 1953, comes at a time when the political situation in America and abroad has become all too absurd. Iannucci discusses the current presidential administration, as well as the way in which humor can naturally arise from terror, in this bonus episode of The Film Comment Podcast. The Death of Stalin opens today in the U.K. and will be released in the U.S. early next year by IFC Films.

At the conclusion of the 55th New York Film Festival, Film Comment gathered together a panel of contributors and critics for one final live roundtable. For this “Festival Wrap” talk, the critics discussed festival favorites and curiosities, including films by Lucrecia Martel, Claire Denis, Ruben Östlund, Valeska Grisebach, and more. The critics weighing in this time around are Nellie Killian, programmer and Film Comment contributing editor; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph; and Wesley Morris, critic-at-large for the New York Times. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca moderates and shares her thoughts.

In this special live episode of the podcast, moderated by Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, panelists Teo Bugbee (The New York Times contributor), writer-programmer Ashley Clark (BAMcinématek), and writer-filmmaker Farihah Zaman (Field of Vision) discuss how cinematic technique is used to reflect nonwhite perspectives and stories of immigration, and what is different about the latest generation of storytelling.

Looking ahead to the New York Film Festival premiere of Susan Lacy’s documentary Spielberg, this week’s Film Comment podcast considers the household-name auteur: the architect of the modern blockbuster, and a surviving (and thriving) master of the Classical Hollywood vernacular. Molly Haskell is on hand to impart wisdom from her most recent book Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films, which came out in the spring, as well as firsthand recollections of writing about Spielberg in the age of second-wave feminism. She joins Film Society of Lincoln Center Editorial Director Michael Koresky, who edited the Reverse Shot book Steven Spielberg: Nostalgia and the Light, published with Museum of the Moving Image this summer, and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca for a discussion spanning Spielberg’s big marquee titles and his less appreciated works.

This week, The Film Comment Podcast hosts a very special guest, himself a choreographer of uninvited guests on their worst behavior. A longtime practitioners of his own strain of emotional extremity, Darren Aronofsky sat for an interview to discuss his new film mother! with FC Editor Nicolas Rapold. Instead of allegorical exegesis, the conversation covers the film’s technical craft and its intense subjectivity, as well as what Aronofsky learned from his college professor…Miklós Jancsó. You can listen below, as long as you don’t overstay your welcome and dislodge an unbraced sink.

The centerpiece retrospective of this year’s New York Film Festival celebrates the centenary of Robert Mitchum, paragon of fatalist cool. In her September/October ’17 Film Comment feature “Running Deep,” Imogen Sara Smith observes that Mitchum’s acting “goes on under the surface: amusement, sadness, anger, or banked-down warmth seep through his face the way coals glow through a layer of ash when you blow on them. To think of him ‘accessing emotion’ or ‘creating a character’ feels wrong.” This week, each critic—Smith, NYFF Director and Mitchum retrospective co-programmer Kent Jones, and FC Editorial Assistant and frequent TCM Diarist Steven Mears—brings in a Mitchum performance to delve into. Even if Mitchum self-deprecatingly claimed that he favored the Smirnoff method over Stanislavski, every example deepens our sense of the creative skill set that he kept close to the vest throughout his career. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca hosts and moderates.

This week’s Film Comment podcast requires very little introduction beyond the topic—Twin Peaks: The Return, a work that is both a heartfelt refraction of David Lynch’s 50 years of creative output and a medium-reshaping beast unto itself. But rather than presume that 45 minutes is enough time to hone in on any single airtight interpretation (or that it would be any fun to do so), the goal is to strike an analytical balance, seeking useful context while allowing the dream to remain a dream. From some subconscious alcove above a convenience store, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, about Lynch and the recent 18-episode run.

With every festival comes a new round of roundtables, so if you couldn’t make it to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, you can still listen to this week’s episode of the podcast and start planning ahead for when the lineup comes to a theater or streaming service near you. And luckily, the talking points of this year’s TIFF are varied: the highly anticipated return of Lucrecia Martel; adventurous new films from familiar faces like Alexander Payne and Darren Aronofsky; and mesmerizing documentary work from Wang Bing, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca discusses and debates the selection with a panel of FC contributors, including Eric Hynes, associate curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image; Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph; Adam Nayman, Cinema Scope contributor; Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Screening in the New York Film Festival a little over a month after the white supremacist horror in Charlottesville, Dee Rees’s Mudbound has a shocking urgency. Charting the relationship between a black sharecropping family and a white landowning family in Mississippi during and immediately after World War II, the film is truly epic in scale and theme. In the new issue, Ashley Clark, senior programmer of cinema at BAM and frequent Film Comment contributor, writes “Mudbound is thrillingly ambitious and complex, and features daring experimental flourishes, including a multicharacter narration that, while initially a touch overbearing, ultimately lends the film an apposite epistolary quality—repressed characters who are physically or emotionally adrift from their families are given voice, to powerful dramatic effect.” In this episode, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Clark and Eric Hynes, associate film curator at Museum of the Moving Image in New York, to discuss the film.

In May, we premiered our very first gift-giving episode. In it, each critic chose two films for another participant to experience for the first time. The first was a film that they’d be interested in hearing that person talk about; the second was a film that they thought the other might genuinely like. It didn’t always work out that way, though. To continue the tradition, we offer a very special gift-giving episode in reverse order, and our resulting conversation runs the gamut from Andrew Dice Clay to Stephen Chow to Barbra Streisand. As you’ll hear, sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish which film was intended to amuse and which aimed to abuse, but each gift gave way to surprising appreciation and lively conversation. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Michael Koresky, Editorial Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Nick Pinkerton, regular contributor to Film Comment, and Aliza Ma, Head of Programming at Metrograph.

Reducing Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama to a straightforward psychological reading barely scratches the surface—which is exactly what makes the film a productive starting point for this week’s Film Comment Podcast. When setting out to make a film depicting terrorism, filmmakers must thoughtfully parse out aesthetic choices about narrative tone and character intentionality, while also being mindful of the potential impact of historical memory. FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca is joined by Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph, and Jeff Reichert, filmmaker and co-editor of Reverse Shot, to look at a few specific approaches spanning national and historical contexts—a varied sample set, from Olivier Assayas to Paul Greengrass to Japanese director Kazuhiko Hasegawa.

In memory of Jeanne Moreau (1928-2017), this week’s podcast offers up a selection of previously unreleased interviews with the legendary actress and director. Writer Andréa R. Vaucher takes us through her series of conversations with Moreau—her first being an interview published in Film Comment (March/April 1990)—in which she shares Moreau’s stories and philosophies of acting and directing, Truffaut and Friedkin, the French New Wave and the sexual revolution, and even Orson Welles’s The Deep. A Words & Deeds production; produced, engineered, and directed by David Bloom. Read the original interview here: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/interview-jeanne-moreau/

“What holds the movies of 1977 together beyond a coincidence of the calendar?” asks J.D. Connor, writing on the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s ’77 series, which runs through August 24. “Is there something in the zeitgeist animating both Suspiria and Smokey and the Bandit? Slap Shot and Ceddo? Killer of Sheep and The Car? Probably not. But they might be held together in more abstract ways…range widely enough and you will also gain a sense of what the aesthetic limits of cinema were, what enforced them, and where the energy to bust them apart was coming from.” In the spirit of the episode from last summer that returned to the summer of ’66, here we look back on Connor’s “coincidence of the calendar,” which produced the cinema of 1977. Maitland McDonagh, author of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and publisher of 120 Days Books, shares her memories of moviegoing in seventies Times Square and shares her insights on horror classics that premiered in ’77, including The Hills Have Eyes, Suspiria, and Exorcist II: The Heretic. She’s joined by longtime Film Comment contributor Margaret Barton-Fumo, editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews, and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca for a conversation that also touches on The American Friend, Sorcerer, and 3 Women . . . and speculates on the appeal of the year’s top-grossing film, Star Wars.

“Championed by Annette Michelson, B. Ruby Rich, and many others, [Yvonne] Rainer’s films are densely verbose, elusive, dryly comic, furious, fractured, and intimately concerned with addressing a variety of injustices beyond the concerns of feminism, from ageism to gentrification to mental illness,” writes Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca in her July/August print feature “Moving Beyond.” “Each work turns received notions of form and feminist praxis on their heads, talking out solutions to (or just expressing frustration at) extremely large problems, and using anecdotes to illustrate how desire and power influence all aspects of our lives.” On the occasion of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of her films, Rainer, 82, joined Lucca for a conversation ranging across her varied and dynamic career—her choreography and radical dance work, her cinema’s aesthetic approaches to examining privilege, and her interactions with second- and third-wave feminist circles.

As Eric Hynes wrote in the cover story of our July/August issue, “At their best, the Safdies’ films don’t just mooch off the city’s story surplus—they also feed into it, contributing truly odd, activated extensions of urban life.” Their latest, Good Time, is no exception. In conversation with their lead actor Robert Pattinson, co-writer Ronald Bronstein, and Film Comment editor Nicolas Rapold at a special sneak preview, the filmmakers delineate and riff on the alchemic creation of a criminal anti-hero. Actively engaged in their native New York’s alternate (and everyday) realities, the Safdie Brothers trace the six-year long journey from the conception of to the making of Good Time—from a first encounter with Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and binge-watched episodes of Cops to news of Richard Matt and David Sweat’s prison-break and the initial hard-core-addict look of Pattinson’s character.

Plenty of films open with an establishing shot of a city's iconic skyline, or of a few iconic barns, only to go on and use the location as an anonymous backdrop. But few and far between are films that actually use the specificity that comes from location shooting to express something about the city's history, the characters, and the story itself. The cover story of our July/August issue is the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time—a New York film through and through—and in the same issue’s Art and Craft column, we asked veteran location manager Ken Lavet to reflect on the art of scouting for Steven Soderbergh and other filmmakers. "It always starts with the story—whether it's in a beat sheet form or a script or a treatment of some kind,” Lavet writes. “Hopefully I get some description from the screenwriter—of, say, a house, or an apartment building, or an office. And I start looking with that in mind." In this episode, Film Comment contributors Nick Pinkerton, Eric Hynes, and Margaret Barton-Fumo join Digital Producer Violet Lucca to discuss a film shot in their hometown, and access how each film interfaces with their lived experience of those places.

As David Thomson succinctly puts it in the July/August issue, "Wanda is the kind of person who didn’t and still doesn’t get into American movies (unless she’s got a few dollars for a ticket)." Based on a newspaper story about a woman convicted of robbery who thanked the judge for sentencing her to jail for 20 years, Wanda is an unapologetic look at life in America's coal country starring its director and writer, Barbara Loden. Still relatively hard to see, the 1970 film has experienced a(nother) recent critical resurgence thanks in part to Nathalie Léger's book about the film, which charts the writer’s quest to discover more about Loden's life and the soul-searching that ensues. In this episode, Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontent, and regular FC contributors Nick Pinkerton and Margaret Barton-Fumo.

What do we talk about when we talk about independent film? At various points it’s referred to a freedom of style, or it’s been shorthand for a low-budget film outside of the studio system. In his Cannes coverage, Kent Jones cites Larry Gross’s prophetic declaration that independent film would go from an “actual economic position within the film industry to pure marketing speak.” Nevertheless, filmmakers across the country (yes, in between L.A. and New York!) are still making films with humor and velocity, even, maybe especially, as the cultural and economic conditions become ever more precarious. Rather than retrace the well-trod mythology of independent film history, the contributors to this episode of The Film Comment Podcast have selected a few contemporary independent filmmakers—from Anna Biller to the Safdie Brothers—and some favorite practitioners from years past. Participants: Nellie Killian, Senior Programmer at BAMcinématek; Gina Telaroli, filmmaker, critic, and archivist; Violet Lucca, digital producer at Film Comment; and Nicolas Rapold, Editor of Film Comment.

We expect that discrete scenes will play off of one another to create any given feature film, but what happens when one of these moments tugs the narrative in an unexpected direction? Sometimes the moment works, and sometimes it doesn’t—and in the context of a bad film, the misfires might even indicate the possibility of a better film lurking within. There’s also a certain how-did-this-happen fascination in finding a truly awful moment in an otherwise excellent film, suggesting that—surprise—perhaps art isn’t a matter of perfection. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast considers these moments of dissonance and what alternate narrative realities and artistic impulses they might indicate… for better or for worse. To ruminate on these nuances, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca asks this week’s participants—Ashley Clark, programmer and FC contributor; Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center—to bring in case studies of good scenes in bad films and bad scenes in good films.

Having programmed two high-profile Netflix premieres, Bong Joon Ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), in the main competition, Cannes was shadowed by a debate over distribution—theatrical versus streaming—and the role of heavyweight newcomers Amazon and Netflix. The controversy placed streaming services in direct opposition to cinemas, but the shifting landscape is more complex; for one, Amazon also distributes its titles with more conventional theatrical rollouts, and the same-day VOD release model doesn’t apply to every Amazon title in the market. This episode of The Film Comment Podcast focuses not only on streaming, but also on the interactions between global markets and studios, film critics and consumers, and cinephiles and local art house circuits—and why it’s difficult to make a monolithic statement about what the future holds. Daniel Loría, Editorial Director of Box Office Magazine, and Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle, offer up their insights in conversation with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca.

Maybe it’s the magnetic pull of a performance, a sequence, or a mood, but there are some movies that demand multiple rewatches. This episode of the podcast samples some films that keep our critics coming back, and here—staring at last into the abyss of compulsive movie love—they do some soul-searching as to why they resonate so strongly. Questions of childhood nostalgia or perfect timing enter the mix, as well as how personal responses to a film might shift over time. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca offers a couple of “movie addictions” with Ashley Clark, regular Film Comment contributor; K. Austin Collins, staff writer for The Ringer; and Michael Koresky, Director of Creative and Editorial Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Did the golden age of television already happen? This episode of the podcast makes the case that it has—in 1970s Germany, courtesy of the one and only R.W. Fassbinder. In her feature in the May/June issue, Aliza Ma tackles Fassbinder’s recently restored and rediscovered Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, the nearly eight-hour series the auteur wrote and shot at a crucial moment in his career. The ensemble story involves the friends and family of a worker in a machine parts factory as he slowly mobilizes colleagues against the management. Ma writes: “With Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Fassbinder channels his unique capacity for self-interrogation and curiosity about new social modes of existence into mass media, proving—at least for five episodes—that it is possible to create popular entertainment that manages to be multifaceted, provocative, and meaningful.” Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Ma, head of programming at Metrograph, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to bask in the complexities and pleasures of this newly essential addition to the Fassbinder oeuvre.

The agony and the ecstasy of festivalgoing continues on this week’s episode. In the second week of Cannes, two television shows by established auteurs—Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—premiered, along with grittier indie fare, like Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold was joined by contributing editors Amy Taubin and Jonathan Romney, as well as Jordan Cronk, co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival, to discuss the standouts and the failures.

The dark of the theater and the sunny seafront come together but once a year at the Cannes Film Festival, and in this week's episode of the Film Comment Podcast, the critics weigh in live from the south of France on the slate's standouts, surprises, and offenses so far. Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold chats with a roundtable—namely Jordan Cronk, co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival; Nicholas Elliott, New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma and contributing film editor for BOMB; and FC Contributing Editors Jonathan Romney and Amy Taubin—about the first week of screenings, including Claire Denis's Un beau soleil intérieur, Agnès Varda and JR's Visages Villages, Bong Joon-ho's Okja, Ruben Östlund's The Square, and Michael Haneke's Happy End.

There's one alliterative movie musical that's dominated the recent conversational limelight, but less frequently discussed is how it operates within the genre. In this spirit, Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, uses La La Land as a starting point to delve into the form of the movie musical in his May/June Film Comment feature "Working It" As a second act, this week's episode of the FC podcast expands the sample set of movie musicals—each panelist brings in a favorite classic musical, as well as a newer musical that pushes the form forward—to look at a wider variety of global cinemas, performance techniques, and ways of deploying music in the narrative. To talk it over—and sing it out—FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca joins Koresky; Andrew Chan, Web Editor for the Criterion Collection; and Eric Hynes, Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Following a free screening of Michael Radford's adaptation of 1984 in early April as part of a nationwide event, Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold moderated a panel discussion about present-day doublespeak and dystopia. This week's episode of the FC podcast presents the conversation, which took place at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Using the film's aesthetics and narrative as a starting point, the panel—featuring critic and curator Ashley Clark; filmmaker Petra Epperlein, director of the Stasi documentary Karl Marx City; and New York Magazine book critic Christian Lorentzen—considers the Trump administration's manipulations of memory, motifs in modern dystopian literature and film, the role of media in public discourse in the UK and Russia, and how Orwell's original text resonates in 2017.

To celebrate the 55th birthday of our magazine, we present a special gift-giving episode of the podcast. The gifts in this case are movies: as in a Secret Snowflake office gift exchange, each critic gave two films to another participant that the recipient hadn’t seen before. One was a film that they’d be interested in hearing that person talk about; the other, a film that was just for fun. As you’ll hear, some gifts were more appreciated than others—but each of the viewings yielded a fascinating discussion. Along with Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca, the gift-givers/recipients included Michael Koresky, the Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Nick Pinkerton, regular contributor to Film Comment, and Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph.

This week's episode of the Film Comment podcast takes a sonic journey through this year's edition of Art of the Real, which runs through May 2 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. First, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with AotR co-programmer Rachael Rakes about searching for formally daring new nonfiction work, as well as the preconceptions people bring to concepts like "film," "entertainment," and "art." Then, Lucca delves into the stylistic and structural intricacies of three festival selections—Patric Chiha's Brothers of the Night, Robinson Devor's Pow Wow, and Shengze Zhu's Another Year—to explore the range of techniques and stories on view. Reflecting on these films are Rakes; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Genevieve Yue, critic and assistant professor at the New School's Eugene Lang College.

On the occasion of Criterion Collection's home video release of Multiple Maniacs and the publication of his new book Make Trouble, Violet Lucca chats with John Waters—the director, writer, artist, sometime actor (most recently of FX's Feud: Bette and Joan), and Christmas card sender extraordinaire. Waters talks about the freedom of writing across multiple media, film critic Parker Tyler, his early days abusing zoom lenses and getting arrested for Mondo Trasho, and how his bad taste movement has been folded into the mainstream, from reality television to raunchy Hollywood comedies, to the current occupant of the White House. Waters called in from his home in Baltimore (where there's a special word tailor-made for the likes of Trump).

James Gray's The Lost City of Z, which opened last Friday, charts a course into the jungle alongside a character in search of transcendence. Shot on gorgeous 35mm and masterfully structured, it crafts a fittingly sublime cinematic texture to evoke its protagonist's quest. It's not uncommon to come across criticism identifying Gray as a "classicist," but what exactly does "classical cinema" mean? This question guides the conversation in this week's episode of the Film Comment podcast, featuring Kent Jones, critic, filmmaker, and Director of the New York Film Festival; and Michael Koresky, the Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who conducted a feature-length interview with Gray for our March/April issue. The discussion, moderated by FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca, touches on the nuances of the word "classical," the evolution of film grammar, the intersection of art and commerce, and other entries in Gray's singular body of work.

"You don't want something to look too staged in movies or they look overly presented. You don't know what comes out . . . You don't know what you have at the end of the day." That was Terrence Malick during a rare public appearance at SXSW last month, on the occasion of the premiere of the Austin, Texas–set Song to Song. Although the film nominally follows characters through the city’s music scene and features the likes of Patti Smith (for a few minutes) and John Lydon (for 10 seconds), it doesn't seek to document a milieu so much as evoke the breadth of human experience in all its tactility and transience. Needless to say, there's a lot to discuss, so this episode of The Film Comment Podcast thoughtfully considers Song to Song and Malick's artistic output. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca mulls it over with contributors Shonni Enelow, English professor at Fordham and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents, and Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle, in a conversation covering Malick's experimentation with free-associative forms, the 19th-century influence on his worldview, his depictions of gender, and how the critical discourse surrounding his work often reflects subtly different philosophies of art and criticism.

In a March/April 2017 feature titled "No Joke," Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca traces current trends in modern American comedies to the pressures of globalization and the rise of the internet. "The specificity of wordplay and sociological observation—two things that non-silent comedy thrives on—is therefore diminished or omitted to ensure its international portability," Lucca explains. "Remakes and adaptations of successful, preexisting intellectual property are nothing new—they have been part and parcel of Hollywood since its inception. However, as the media scholar Mark Fisher suggested, 'capitalist realism' resigns us to this repetition by telling audiences that we are in crisis mode and there’s no time to think about anything outside of the current system: Hollywood really is out of ideas this time, so just get used to it. It is the seventh art acknowledging its marginalized state and throwing up its hands." This episode of The Film Comment Podcast focuses on the past six to eight years of American film comedy but also puts it in dialogue with TV and the history of the genre. What actually makes us laugh, and what do comedies reflect about our culture? What's the right balance to strike between comic digressions and plot motion? And what is a Harold? To talk about these topics—as well as the magical alchemy of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly—Lucca sat down with Michael Delaney, senior instructor at New York improv institution Upright Citizens Brigade and an actor whose credits include The Other Guys, Veep, and Curb Your Enthusiasm; and Robert Sweeney, producer at Kino Lorber and contributor to FC and FilmStruck.

This week's episode of the Film Comment podcast begins with an interview with the irrepressible Albert Serra, director of our March/April cover film The Death of Louis XIV, which opens this Friday. Then we move on to the annual New Directors/New Films series, which wrapped this past weekend. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with two members of the ND/NF selection committee—La Frances Hui, Associate Curator of Film at MoMA, and Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at Film Society of Lincoln Center—about what they look for when scouting for new filmmaking voices, as well as the process of crafting a well-rounded festival slate. They are joined by Nicholas Elliott, the New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma and Contributing Film Editor for BOMB, in a detailed look at ND/NF films such as Arábia, The Challenge, and The Future Perfect that defy labels.

Horror films are unusually adept at giving mutable flesh to the terrors of adolescence, and Julia Ducournau's new film Raw is no exception. After a choice freshman-year hazing ritual involving a rabbit liver, the veterinary-school protagonist of Raw finds herself developing a taste for raw flesh, which she processes as she adjusts to life at school. Metaphorical monsters and latent taboo impulses like these are to be expected when it comes to horror-movie growing pains, and so this episode of The Film Comment Podcast revisits a few classics of coming-of-age horror. Pig's blood, werewolves, and the Eraserhead baby all appear in this conversation, featuring frequent FC contributors Margaret Barton-Fumo, editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews and author of a feature on Raw in the March/April issue; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle; and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast moderator.

The True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Missouri, reliably assembles a selection of the world’s finest nonfiction film, tracking down surprises from smaller festivals across the globe and picking highlights from Sundance. This year, Film Comment traveled to Columbia for a long weekend of documentary and essay film—and hosted a festival recap at the festival’s traditional closing-night spot, a waffle bar that doubles as a music venue. This special live edition of the Film Comment podcast features the critics Ela Bittencourt, a selection committee member for It's All True International Film Festival; Jordan Cronk, founder of the Acropolis Cinema in Los Angeles and co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival; Aliza Ma, Head of Programming at Metrograph; and Nicolas Rapold, Editor of Film Comment. And, thanks to the open audience format of the event, a couple of filmmakers from the festival join the conversation to discuss the emotionally intimate work of editing and shooting documentary: Shevaun Mizrahi, director of Distant Constellation, about an Istanbul old folks home; and Sompot Chidgasornpongse, director of the Thai train system portrait Railway Sleepers who has been AD on films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Jean-Pierre Léaud's familiar face graces the cover of the new March/April issue of Film Comment, waiting out his final days in Albert Serra's new film The Death of Louis XIV. As Yonca Talu observes in her feature on the film, "The film relies heavily on Jean-Pierre Léaud’s vulnerable acting. Famous for his vibrant, unrestrained body language as the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, the legendary actor exists in a state of complete paralysis here, dependent on others to meet his basic needs." In some ways, she continues, the film serves as a symbolic conclusion to the Antoine Doinel cycle—Jean-Pierre Léaud's mere presence adds a layer of film-historical context to the film that might not otherwise be there. This week's episode of the Film Comment podcast explores the nuances of legacy, persona, and presence when it comes to acting. As with Léaud, we watch actors with enduring careers mature onscreen, developing their crafts and playing off of already formed associations that viewers might have with their earlier work. The panel—Shonni Enelow, English professor at Fordham and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; Nick Pinkerton of the New York Film Critics Circle; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Violet Lucca, Film Comment Digital Producer—muses on the shifting modes of expression and physicality of performers like Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Gerard Depardieu, and Sissy Spacek.

As filmmaker and critic Jeff Reichert put it in his January/February 2017 Film Comment feature on Steve Bannon's documentary work, "We could dismiss Bannon as the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of shoddily made straight-to-video white supremacist documentary. But his tactics have helped put Trump in the White House, so what can we learn about Bannon or America from watching them?" This episode of the Film Comment podcast tackles that very question. Reichert, along with Chapo Trap House podcast co-host Will Menaker and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca, looks back on Bannon's nine films released under the “Citizens United” banner. It goes without saying that there's a lot to talk about regarding their unlikely aesthetic sensibility (sales presentation meets Leni Riefenstahl meets Michael Bay meets Vic Berger ECUs) and their characterizations of history and reality. The panel also digs into the past 15 years of political documentary on the right and the left (hello, Adam Curtis!), including the ways in which filmmakers package narratives, fact-check their material, and consider their audiences.

In his 1985 film God's Country, Louis Malle visits a small town in Minnesota both before and after Reagan's election, documenting the stark economic despair that the agricultural community was forced to face. Following a screening of God's Country in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's screening series Film Comment Selects, we conducted a live the Film Comment Podcast about how we differently perceive certain films before and after the election. To discuss this fraught political moment, we invited Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution and FC's Cinema '67 Revisited column; Genevieve Yue, critic and assistant professor at the New School's Eugene Lang College; and Farihah Zaman, filmmaker, critic, and Production Manager for Field of Vision to join FC Editor Nicolas Rapold and FC Digital Producer and podcast host Violet Lucca. Films discussed include those by Chris Marker, Errol Morris, Jason Osder, Alexander Payne, and more.

“I always go back to Ozu and Bresson, both of whom I admire a great deal. I like the way Bresson frames midriff: a person going across the room but you’re just seeing the half, the midriff of the body. The scene in Pickpocket at the racetrack. And Hitchcock, any of the inserts: the scene in The Wrong Man where Fonda is booked and Hitchcock shows you the detail, each step of the process. It has such a sense of isolation and helplessness, because these objects, these inserts, they speak to you. They tell you how to look at them. They direct the viewer,” Martin Scorsese said to Nick Pinkerton in the cover feature of our January/February issue. This special live episode of the Film Comment podcast deep-dives into perhaps the most appropriate Scorsese film for a live media event, The King of Comedy, shown in the Museum of the Moving Image’s Martin Scorsese retrospective. Following its screening of the film, the Museum hosted The Film Comment Podcast, featuring Pinkerton; Eric Hynes, MoMI curator and FC columnist; Nicolas Rapold, Editor; and Violet Lucca, Digital Editor. The lively conversation covers the film's unsettling mix of humor and discomfort, its open-ended slippage between fantasy and reality, its place in the careers of Scorsese and De Niro, and the myriad ways in which Rupert Pupkin's name gets hopelessly botched. Listen and enjoy, whether or not your office happens to be a Pupkin-esque setup in a Times Square phone booth. And as a special treat, the discussion is followed by a guided audio tour of the museum's exhibition of Scorsese artifacts with Lucca and MoMI Chief Curator David Schwartz.

Road-tripping crises of masculinity soundtracked by classic rock, Harvey Keitel making up for his sins in the streets—a laundry list of 1970s New Hollywood highlights can tend to lack a nuanced female presence. But the ’70s also gave us Wanda, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Girlfriends, A Woman Under the Influence, and even Five Easy Pieces, all of which explore female identity in the era of second-wave feminism. This episode of the Film Comment podcast spirals outwards from From Reverence to Rape author Molly Haskell's essay on Mike Mills's 20th Century Women and accompanying interview with Annette Bening, in the January/February issue, taking a closer look at depictions of women in New Hollywood. Some of these were "neo-women's films," dealing with disillusioned housewives fleeing the domestic sphere; others took on female friendship without turning a blind eye to its messiness, a line that runs through Thelma and Louise, Frances Ha, and Broad City. In addition to Haskell, FC Deep Cuts columnist Margaret Barton-Fumo stops by to join the conversation, and as always, Digital Editor Violet Lucca moderates.

This week's two-pronged episode of the Film Comment podcast digs into a varied slate of contemporary filmmaking. First, from the New York Film Festival, FC columnist and Museum of the Moving Image Associate Curator Eric Hynes speaks to Raoul Peck, whose vital new film I Am Not Your Negro opens this Friday, February 3 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Peck explains his approach to James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House, his use of archival footage to create arresting counterpoints, his experience rehearsing Samuel L. Jackson to deliver Baldwin's words, and his personal reflections on the author's work. Our podcast then flashes forward for a final dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival, a live discussion from the Kickstarter House featuring two directors the magazine has supported who have made films with the help of crowdfunding: Laura Dunn, who co-directed Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (shown in Sundance’s Spotlight section), and Dustin Guy Defa, who directed Person to Person (in the NEXT section). Dunn’s prior feature, The Unforeseen (2007), was deemed “best film of the festival, hands down” in these pages, and so we were eager to see where she took Look & See, a Kickstarter project. Likewise, Defa’s feature Bad Fever, another Kickstarter alum, received the magazine’s high praise (“a small-scale, painfully candid examination of the connection between loneliness and creativity”—which is a good thing), and so expectations were high for his latest, Person to Person.

The first Sundance Film Festival, then known as the US/Utah Film Festival, took place in 1978 in an effort to bring independent filmmaking talent to the state. Over the years, word spread, crowds grew, and first-time directors broke out as commercial buyers eventually clued into the potential of this latest wave of American independent film—and now, nearly four decades later, Sundance remains an industry phenomenon. But reading about its history only goes so far, especially for a festival renowned for its original mission of fostering an independent film community. In this special episode of the Film Comment podcast recorded at Sundance in front of an audience at the Kickstarter house, Editor Nicolas Rapold spoke with a panel of Sundance veterans: Ira Deutchman, film producer, distributor, marketer (of sex, lies, and videotape, among others), academic, and co-founder of Emerging Pictures; Eugene Hernandez, Deputy Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the co-founder of Indiewire; Lesli Klainberg, Executive Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and a documentary filmmaker whose work has been shown at numerous Sundances; and Dan Mirvish, co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival and author of The Cheerful Subversive's Guide to Independent Filmmaking. The discussion (featuring a couple of surprise guests) covered the evolution of Sundance up through the 1990s and beyond as a force in the industry, its importance to queer media and representation, its significance to mainstream perceptions of independent film, and more.

Alpine air, ski-friendly powder, and independent film converge every January at the Sundance Film Festival. And now, as a slight respite from the hype tweets, the Film Comment podcast is proud to transmit a little bit of Park City to your earbuds with this critics' roundtable, recorded live at Sundance this past weekend. FC Editor Nicolas Rapold, frequent FC contributors Nick Pinkerton and Ashley Clark, and freelance critic Paula Mejia share early festival impressions and highlights from the worlds of fiction, documentary, and virtual reality (housed in the grandiosely titled "VR Palace"). And be sure to check back in as the festival progresses for more dispatches from FC writers.

Ideology and aesthetics have somehow come to be positioned opposite one another—in film criticism, should one be privileged over the other? This episode of The Film Comment Podcast discusses how race, ethnicity, and other markers of identity factor into film criticism and cinema generally. FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca unpacks the topic with Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor to FC and Artforum, and Ashley Clark, FC contributor and programmer, in a conversation that spans multiple decades of film history—from Taxi Driver to OJ: Made in America to Notting Hill to I Am Not Your Negro, to the canceled Michael Jackson episode of Urban Myths starring Joseph Fiennes.

Questions of legacy can rile up the creative juices in unexpected ways, especially when filmmakers who win a bit of success are allowed to dive headlong into their obsessions. In cases like these, equipped with higher budgets and greater creative freedom, a filmmaker sets out to make A Statement. At best, it's an opportunity to show off one's talents with unbridled freedom of expression; at worst, it can lapse into gratuitous excess. This episode of the Film Comment podcast takes up passion projects, particularly those in which filmmakers are given the "keys to the kingdom" after a commercial success. It can be an anxiety-inducing move—as the tagline for Zardoz, John Boorman's 1974 sci fi statement and Deliverance follow-up, aptly prophesied, "I have seen the future, and IT...DOESN'T...WORK." As always, Digital Editor Violet Lucca moderates, and is joined by FC mainstays Ashley Clark, film critic and programmer; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

There’s no single way to celebrate the holiday season, but nearly every custom is centered on family and friends gathering together. In the first segment of this episode, Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with Julien Allen, Reverse Shot and Cinema Scope writer, to explore the British tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas and the works of M.R. James. In the second, Lucca is joined by Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Ina Archer, media artist and FC contributor, Margaret Barton-Fumo, FC columnist, to discuss horror movies set during this joyous time of year.

On the other side of the visibility hurdle, questions about queer representation in film persist. Is visibility enough? How much is an appropriate amount? Do all queer films need to support the cause? Where is the gay hotel in The Lobster? In this episode of The Film Comment Podcast, we discuss the reductive mainstream treatment of queer characters in Hollywood fare, how television affords more exploration of gay characters, the aesthetics of queer sex scenes, and the failure of such films to either address queerness directly or imagine queer characters on the sidelines. To elaborate upon ideas from Mark Harris’ piece in the November/December issue on the paucity of LGBT visibility in Hollywood films, FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Harris, K. Austin Collins of The Ringer, Farihah Zaman, filmmaker, critic and Production Manager for Field of Vision, and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

2016 may be ill-suited to fond recollections, but the annual Film Comment Top 20 list does have plenty of good cheer to go around. This year's poll was conducted a bit differently, with a sharpened focus on Film Comment's contributors in order to better capture the magazine's voice. Even though the results will inevitably be skewed by factors like regional specificity and the availability of advance screenings for late-season films under consideration, polls aren't about securing an airtight appraisal of a year; they're about starting a critical discussion, which can just as much concern what was omitted as what was included. In this episode of The Film Comment Podcast, Digital Editor Violet Lucca takes stock of the results along with Nicolas Rapold, the magazine's Editor, and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The conversation also covers films that didn't quite make the cut, what films the polls helped bring to light, and, of course, the best diner scenes in 2016 (no need to unwrap the silverware when you use your napkin).

The clickbait consensus may be that cinema is dead, but the fact of the matter is a bit more nuanced. In the November/December issue of Film Comment, New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones suggests that perhaps we are witnessing the marginalization of cinema—although cinema may no longer be the most significant popular art form, it will evolve into something new. In other words, its particular impact may change, but it is certainly not dead. Jones joins Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca and New York Film Critics Circle member Nick Pinkerton to discuss the shifting landscapes of the multiplex and the home theater, as well as what artistic salvation may come from cinema's marginalization.

There’s more to tearjerkers than the deceptively simple term might suggest, and in this episode of the Film Comment podcast, we consider the nuanced workings of cinematic sorrow. Is a tearjerker expressly and solely designed to elicit collective weeping, or is the effect of the button-pushing more personalized than we might admit? Does it count if a film moves its viewers to a profound silence rather than outright sobs? And what exactly makes us cry? The release of Kenneth Lonergan's new film Manchester by the Sea has brought these questions to the forefront of cinematic circles, and Film Society Editorial Director Michael Koresky's feature in the new Film Comment explores how Lonergan's cinema is structured by the experience of grieving. Our conversation spins off into a broader discussion of the "tearjerker" film, its ways and means, and why one might beware of watching any remotely traumatic film on a plane. Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca is joined by Koresky and FC contributors Shonni Enelow, assistant professor of English at Fordham University, and Mark Harris of Vulture.

According to the experts, this wasn’t supposed to turn out this way… but it did. While the election of Donald Trump has prompted a great deal of speculation by pundits and citizens alike, we’ve asked some of our own experts to weigh in. In the first part of this episode, J. Hoberman, critic for The New York Times and a Film Comment contributing editor, and Tobi Haslett, contributor to Artforum, n+1, and The Village Voice, to discuss films that they understand differently after the election, and how politics and aesthetics interrelate. In the second, Farihah Zaman, filmmaker, critic and Production Manager for Field of Vision, and Meenasarani Linde Murugan, assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, discuss issues of representation and what a Trump presidency potentially means for filmmakers and their creative process.

What are the uncanny forces at work behind Paul Verhoeven’s visceral and transgressive cinema? In anticipation of the Film Society’s complete retrospective of the Dutch master’s films and the U.S. release of Elle, this episode offers a comprehensive discussion of the director’s audacious and eclectic career encompassing art-house Dutch films (Turkish Delight [1971], Spetters [1980]) and big-budget Hollywood productions such as Basic Instinct (1992), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997). In the first part of the podcast, Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca sits down with a panel of Verhoeven connoisseurs, including Cinema Scope critic Adam Nayman, Film Comment Deep Cuts columnist Margaret Barton-Fumo (also the editor of a forthcoming book of interviews with Verhoeven), and Fort Buchanan director Benjamin Crotty, to tackle the controversy that lies at the core of Verhoeven’s work. In the final part of the episode, Margaret Barton-Fumo speaks to Verhoeven about the uncomfortable eroticism that pervades Elle and his Brechtian influences.

It's finally here: Election Day. After you've cast your vote, hopefully this new episode of the Film Comment podcast will help you relax as the results come in. This week, we spotlight two writers whose work has never shied away from the political: blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein, whose numerous credits include The Front, Fail-Safe, and The House on Carroll Street; and Cuban novelist Edmundo Desnoes, whose seminal work Memories of Underdevelopment investigated the bourgeois mindset during the Cuban revolution and was subsequently adapted into the 1968 film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Each talks with Digital Editor Violet Lucca about exploring different forms of subjective experience within objective political realities, as well as harnessing their art to provoke further questioning from viewers.

Although one-on-one interviews with filmmakers are often accessible (depending, of course, on the personality at hand), group roundtables with a variety of filmmaking talent can be more difficult to come by. To counter this void, Film Comment assembled such an event at the 54th New York Film Festival—and now, in this week's episode of the podcast, you can listen to the complete talk. This Film Comment panel brought together three NYFF filmmakers—Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper), Alison Maclean (The Rehearsal), and Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius)—to discuss their practical approaches to the craft of filmmaking, as well as their grander philosophies about the art form. The conversation, moderated by Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold, covers a swath of topics, from on-set collaboration to transnational cinema. Questions from the audience also make a requisite appearance near the end.

Kristen Stewart took a quick breather from promoting her triptych of new films at NYFF to reflect on collaborating with Olivier Assayas and Kelly Reichardt. She also shares her excitement about stepping behind the camera for the first time. And speaking of directorial debuts, Chloë Sevigny discusses making her first short film, Kitty, on the heels of its North American premiere at NYFF, as well as the pursuit of a unique, substantive acting career in a white male-centric independent film landscape.

Is it possible to pinpoint what is so scary about an unsettling moment of a well-made horror film? It could be the image itself, but it could also be an unexpected sonic flourish, or an abrupt cut, or a lingering long take. A truly frightening horror film often derives its power from the uncanny specificity of its techniques or mise en scène, instilling a fundamental sense of unease that can't easily be shaken. With Halloween on the horizon, Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca is joined by a panel of FC mainstays to reminisce about the haunting appeal of (often uncomfortably) memorable cursed images. Guests include Michael Koresky, Editorial Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Margaret Barton-Fumo, author of FC's Deep Cuts column; and Ina Archer, FC contributor and student at NYU's Moving Image Archive and Preservation Program.

Photography is by nature bittersweet: a warm moment with a loved one is captured forever, a reminder of an instant in time that can never be repeated. These conflicting feelings are deftly explored in Errol Morris’s latest documentary, The B-Side, which traces the career of Elsa Dorfman. Never seeking fame, Dorman forged lifelong friendships with counter-culture giants like Alan Ginsberg, and shot everyone from Bob Dylan to Jonathan Richman. A perfect expression of the challenges female artists have faced without overstating them, the film is a significant departure from Morris’s other work. However, when Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with him the day after the second presidential debate, many of the themes that have run throughout his work—namely, the nature of truth—naturally arose. The director also talks about his upcoming Netflix series, documentary technique, and a few of his dream collaborations with heads of state.

The fanfare of the 54th New York Film Festival may have officially wrapped on Saturday, but the films themselves live on—so let's talk about them. As part of an aptly named "Festival Wrap" free talk, several of Film Comment's frequent contributors and editors recently came together before a live audience to reflect on the highlights of a robust NYFF slate. Listen below to the full conversation before these films make the rounds in the coming months. The panel includes FC columnist Margaret Barton-Fumo, critic K. Austin Collins, MOMI programmer and FC columnist Eric Hynes, and Metrograph programmer Aliza Ma, as well as Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca and Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold.

The September/October issue of Film Comment re-envisioned the magazine’s style and sharpened its focus, celebrating the vibrancy of cinema as well as delving into tough critical issues. As part of the 54th New York Film Festival’s free talks series sponsored by HBO, critics whose work appears in the current issue—Farihah Zaman, Nick Pinkerton, Imogen Sara Smith, and Shonni Enelow—joined Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold and Film Society Editorial Director Michael Koresky before a live audience to discuss their ideas and find points of comparison between the big films of the season and the pressing issues facing the medium.

Aside from search engines, the most visited sites in the world are social media: the old mainstays Facebook and Twitter. Their impact on film culture and cinephilia has been profound, giving voice to people who were formerly outside of the established critical conversation, but also providing a new outlet for seasoned critics. However, not all of the changes fostered by social media have been positive: hasty and reductive festival “takes,” the performative nature of “callout culture,” and straight-up trolling, to name but a few. To discuss and elaborate upon ideas from Nick Pinkerton’s feature on social media and criticism in the September/October issue, Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Pinkerton, Kameron Collins of The Ringer, and Mark Harris of Vulture for this episode.

Great works of art transcend the passage of time, but the cinema of years past has its own special qualities of transcendence and immersion. This episode of The Film Comment Podcast explores how we relate to older films in the modern era, and examines the culture that surrounds their appreciation in an era of revival runs, film festivals, and restoration efforts. The discussion, led by Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca, touches on modern audiences' emotional distance from older works, the enduring power of the film medium, and the particular experience of younger generations of cinephiles. Rounding out the panel are Vulture critic Mark Harris; FC columnist Farran Smith Nehme; and critic Imogen Sara Smith, whose September/October feature on classical cinema and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival inspired this conversation.

How do you approach political filmmaking in a meaningful way? And, in this politically charged era, where are the dissenting voices in film? In this episode, two very different filmmakers—Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep and To Sleep with Anger, and Oliver Stone, the director of Born on the Fourth of July and Snowden—speak about their films and their thoughts on contemporary media and politics.

Hosting over 300 films, many of which are world or North American premieres, the Toronto International Film Festival is a frequently overwhelming experience even for veteran attendees. To help cut through—or at least acknowledge that there will be—hype, this episode features a roundtable of critical voices discussing (and debating) key films from the festival. Participants: Film Comment podcast regulars Nick Pinkerton and Eric Hynes; Toronto-based critic Adam Nayman; Metrograph programmer Aliza Ma; Film Society of Lincoln Center Editorial Director Michael Koresky; and the Editor of Film Comment, Nicolas Rapold.

This episode is the first of three to dive into features from our newly redesigned September-October issue, which asks "What Is Cinema Now?" Shonni Enelow, author of Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama and assistant professor of English at Fordham University, wrote a feature about an emerging trend in contemporary American acting, characterized by restraint and withholding emotion. Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Enelow and regular contributor Ashley Clark to discuss the article as well as explore changing trends in training and conceptions of what makes an actor (or performance) great.

Last month, the final VCR rolled off the line at the Funai plant in Japan, officially signaling the end of an era. Although there have been numerous sea-changes in media since the end of VHS’s supremacy, there's something special (and, in a way, lost to time) about the formative cinephilic experiences fostered by video store communities. In this episode of the podcast, FILM COMMENT Editor Nicolas Rapold, Digital Editor Violet Lucca, FSLC Editorial Director Michael Koresky (Video Room), and New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones (New Video) discuss their relationships with those once-precious tapes.

Visions of class surround us each day, both overtly and subliminally, in advertisements, literature, and film. Which visual and narrative tools are specific to each medium? To what extent does authorial background matter? And how does criticism of aesthetics or content either elucidate or complicate matters? All of these topics are broached in this episode of the FILM COMMENT podcast, wherein Digital Editor Violet Lucca joins K. Austin Collins, a regular contributor to The Ringer, as well as regular FC critics Nick Pinkerton and Eric Hynes (also the associate curator of the Museum of the Moving Image) to examine cinematic depictions of wealth and poverty.

While so many soundtracks seem to exist solely to underline the tone of a scene, unexpected musical cues can completely recontextualize and undermine its action. The idea of the soundtrack as counterpoint entered the mainstream with directors like Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick, and, at a certain point, became a bad cliché itself. This episode of The Film Comment Podcast, scripted by Sean Doyle, traces the evolution of ironic music in film from its earliest and most infamous uses to today.

This month, at Anthology Film Archives, FILM COMMENT contributor Nick Pinkerton has programmed a variety of shockumentary-style works ranging from the notorious Mondo Cane (an Academy Award nominee, for Original Song) to Thierry Zéno’s Des Morts. Many of these films aim to shock and titillate, sometimes purporting to document actual deaths, but they become politically and culturally revealing texts. None of this problematic entertainment holds a candle, however, to the real-life horror that has become a fixture of 21st-century visual culture: recordings showing police brutality—grim evidence of actual violence that is used in calls for justice. In a wide-ranging discussion that moves from the cinema of taboo to the complexities of recordings of police violence, FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with Pinkerton, critic and programmer Ashley Clark, and New Yorker video producer (and former FC intern) Cassie da Costa.

Though associated with heritage films—lush period films typically set in Britain’s imperial past—producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala collaborated since the early 1960s on a variety of literary adaptations. Masterfully constructed, Merchant-Ivory films came to symbolize a certain type of prestige film—for better and worse. Perhaps the pinnacle of their collaboration was Howards End (92), based on the E. M. Forster novel about class and inheritance set in Edwardian England. In anticipation of the theatrical run of its new 4K restoration, Michael Koresky, Editorial Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Farran Smith Nehme, FILM COMMENT columnist and regular contributor for the New York Post, and Digital Editor Violet Lucca discussed the artful, complex adaptation and other Merchant-Ivory classics.

Kristen Stewart takes the spotlight in the brand-new July/August issue of FILM COMMENT, in a nuanced and balanced appreciation of the star's performances by Nick Davis. In this edition of The Film Comment Podcast, Digital Editor Violet Lucca and Editor in Chief Nicolas Rapold explore the cover story and other articles with the help of three featured writers. Ashley Clark, film critic and author of Facing Blackness, discusses his essay on silent-era black performers and their overlooked talents. FC contributor and filmmaker Yonca Talu reflects on her interview with Clément Cogitore, whose recent film Neither Heaven Nor Earth burrows into the fractured and fracturing experience of 21st-century warfare. Finally, Museum of the Moving Image associate curator Eric Hynes investigates the links between New Journalism and contemporary documentary, tracing a shared interest in complicating notions of reportage and reality. You can read about all this and more in the July/August issue—but for the inside story (and effortlessly delightful repartee) have a listen to this week's podcast.

In his recently published book The Rhapsodes, seminal critic and film historian David Bordwell pays tribute to four groundbreaking film critics who were writing in the 1940s: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Through meticulous examinations of their rarely read, multidisciplinary writings and moving biographical accounts, Bordwell paints a vivid portrait of their cultural milieux and makes the case for the uniqueness and importance of their work. Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with Bordwell about the genesis of his book and the unparalleled legacy of his “rhapsodes,” in the company of regular FILM COMMENT contributor Nick Pinkerton.

Today, the term “summer movie” is synonymous with big budgets, explosions, superhero franchises, family-friendly animated films, and sequels. Yet this wasn't always the case. In the summers of the 1960s, years before 1975’s Jaws began to redefine the blockbuster, successful new releases were held over in certain cities for months, and risqué international films were shown alongside schlocky American B movies. For this week’s episode, we flash back to the summer of 1966 to see what was playing in Cincinnati, Washington D.C., Chicago, and New York City (all five boroughs), featuring J. Hoberman, critic for The New York Times; Nick Pinkerton, regular FILM COMMENT contributor; and Ina Archer, co-chair of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund for New York Film and Television, in conversation with FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca.

Hong Sangsoo is a filmmaker who isn’t afraid to repeat himself. Fashioning narratives around lonesome or just pathetic male artists’ attempts at finding romantic connection, Hong’s films are characterized by their long takes and minute variations—a slightly off-center frame of two people talking, a digital zoom, a subtle readjustment of focus—that make us question what’s really going on in the scene. In honor of his soju-fueled comedy of manners, Digital Editor Violet Lucca served as bartender for Genevieve Yue, assistant professor at Eugene Lang College at the New School, Leo Goldsmith, co-editor of the film section of The Brooklyn Rail, Max Nelson, editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books, and Jeff Reichert, filmmaker and co-editor of Reverse Shot.

In their intimate and insightful documentary De Palma, directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow sit down with the legendary filmmaker to discuss his audacious career. With no authorial voices included, the film takes the form of a two-hour introspective monologue, in which the maestro reflects on his directorial approach and why he loves filming beautiful women so much. Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with FILM COMMENT and Film Society Editorial Director Michael Koresky, and critic Ashley Clark, about their takes on the documentary and Brian De Palma's thrilling films, including Dressed to Kill, Carlito's Way, Carrie, and Femme Fatale.

Believe it or not, but occasionally the critics attending Cannes take umbrage with the jury’s choices for awards—so much so this year that the Grand Prix recipient, Xavier Dolan, was booed during the ceremony. But who really got it right this year, and which films will endure as highlights? Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with FILM COMMENT and Artforum contributing editor Amy Taubin; Brandon Harris, assistant professor at SUNY Purchase and Vice contributor; and FILM COMMENT editor Nicolas Rapold about films including Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Michael O’Shea’s The Transfiguration, Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV, Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical, The Romanians, and more. In this week’s special second segment, Whit Stillman talks with FC contributor Nick Pinkerton about his new film, Love & Friendship, adaptation, and the finer points of writing a novel.

Comedies and genre films may not be the usual Croisette fare, but that wasn’t the case with the 69th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Touching on Maren Ade’s unanimously praised Toni Erdmann, as well as more divisive films like Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a roundtable hosted by editor Nicolas Rapold and featuring Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times; Nicholas Elliott, New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma; and FILM COMMENT contributing editors Jonathan Romney and Amy Taubin breaks down this year’s unique selection.

Plenty of films are set in the past, either adapted from texts from the period or written by authors looking back on history (and likely bringing their own biases to it). Yet only a select few of such works manage to so convincingly convey a tactile sense of the time that they approach the immersive. And which genuine traces of the present captured by filmmakers—be it locations, attitudes, or small details like trash in the street—will serve as accurate snapshots for the future? Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with Nick Pinkerton, regular FILM COMMENT contributor, and Eric Hynes, FC columnist and associate curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss how history is made (or unmade) on film.

It’s that most special time of year: the May/June issue has arrived! What’s inside? We’re glad you asked: FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca takes an informative stroll through the new issue with Nicolas Rapold, Editor in Chief. And, in the second half of this episode, we expand upon the new issue’s major feature on French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. For decades, the pair created an insightful body of work that delved deeply into history and art. Working closely together in all aspects of film production, they created personalized cinematic visions, frequently using the works of other artists—literature, painting, and film—as a jumping-off point to explore contemporary political issues. Violet Lucca speaks with Dan Sullivan, programmer at Film Society of Lincoln Center; Ted Fendt, editor of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet; and Josh Siegel, curator at MoMA, to discuss MoMA’s complete retrospective of Straub-Huillet that begins this Friday.

On June 28, 1969, following a police raid of the Greenwich Village LGBT bar Stonewall Inn, a riot broke out around the neighborhood that continued into the following evening. The upheaval is commonly treated as the beginning of the contemporary gay rights movement. As with many accounts of history, the clear demarcation—as if the lights were suddenly flipped on—doesn’t entirely hold water under close scrutiny, but the Stonewall Riots have become a useful point of reference as well as a symbol. The Film Society's repertory series “A Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall,” curated by FSLC programmer at larger Thomas Beard, takes these events as an opportunity to explore multiple histories of queer cinema through a variety of Hollywood, experimental, nonfiction, and foreign films. Digital Editor Violet Lucca discussed the films, and the history, with Mark Harris, film historian and columnist for Vulture; Michael Koresky, director of publications at the Metrograph Theater; and Manuel Betancourt, FC contributor.

Described by Joan Dupont in the March/April issue of FILM COMMENT as “too haunted to be the suave lady-killer and too classy to be the loser,” Vincent Lindon has slowly gained prominence outside of France in his quietly simmering performances in films like Claire Denis’s Bastards and Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man. Wesley Morris of The New York Times and Amy Taubin, contributor to FILM COMMENT and Artforum, spoke with Digital Editor Violet Lucca about the actor’s working-class charms, the “polymorphous sexuality” of visual artist Ryan Trecartin's work, and the strengths and weaknesses of other actors from John Goodman to Robert Redford.

Following the bold experiment of Boyhood, Richard Linklater returns with Everybody Wants Some!!, a semi-autobiographical movie about the infinite potential that awaits at the cusp of adulthood. A few days before the start of college classes, Jake (Blake Jenner), a freshman pitcher, moves into a house with his fellow ball players; drunken hilarity and horndogging ensue, while salient points about identity get made. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca asked David Fear of Rolling Stone and Nick Pinkerton, frequent FC contributor, for their thoughts on Linklater’s latest and their leading contenders for their top sports movies.

Since film’s inception—from the Lumière’s early actualités to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North—the boundary between documentary and fiction film has been fairly fluid (or not even a term of discussion.) And as Jacques Rivette once observed: “Every film is a documentary of its own making.” Thanks in part to the relative ease and low cost of digital filmmaking tools, directors from a variety of backgrounds have more leeway to explore and expand the definition of documentary, incorporating fictional or fictionalized elements into non-fiction works. Now in its third year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series The Art of the Real offers a showcase for such films, and offers a variety of documentaries, hybrid documentaries, experimental films, and narrative films in a non-fiction context. Co-programmed by Dennis Lim, director of programming at Film Society, and Rachael Rakes, a programmer at large at Film Society, this year’s program includes films culled from festivals from around the world: Ben Rivers’s What Means Something, Mauro Herce’s Dead Slow Ahead, Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Sergio Oksman’s O Futebol, Ju Anqi’s Poet on a Business Trip, Andrés Duque’s Oleg and the Rare Arts, Roberto Minervini’s The Other Side, Im Heung-soon, Factory Complex, Thom Anderson’s The Thoughts That Once We Had, and Hassen Ferhani’s A Roundabout in My Head, to name a few. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Lim and Rakes, as well as Eric Hynes, FILM COMMENT columnist and associate director of programming at the Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss the motivations behind the series, and the films themselves.

In the spirit of fantasy football—or, you know, film criticism—FILM COMMENT contributors Michael Koresky (editor of Reverse Shot and director of publications of the Metrograph theater) and Ashley Clark (author of Facing Blackness) joined Digital Editor Violet Lucca to discuss the actors they feel deserve a renaissance.

Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days takes the characters of his third feature, My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument, and puts them into new (but also familiar) narratives, collapsing and expanding our understanding of them. Not unlike Peter Parker, Desplechin’s protagonist “Paul Dedalus” has been reimagined and rebooted for contemporary audiences… sort of. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca spoke with Desplechin and Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, Deputy Editor of FILM COMMENT, and co-writer of Desplechin’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, to talk about creating My Golden Days. Their conversation also touched upon the state of Hollywood filmmaking, and that most disreputable genre, the rom-com.

Now in its 45th year, New Directors / New Films showcases fiction and documentary work from around the world. These filmmakers offer bold visions and confidently stake out fresh territory on cinema’s frontiers. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by David Fear of Rolling Stone, Eric Hynes, FILM COMMENT columnist and Associate Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, and Amy Taubin, New York Film Festival selection committee member and contributing editor to FILM COMMENT and Artforum, discuss what films in the lineup left them raving (or loudly sighing).

Though we’re taught to compartmentalize historical movements into discrete events and dates, the truth (or what we know of it) is anything but. Four recent films— Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor, Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart, Amos Gitai’s Rabin, the Last Day, and Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul—take very different but ambitious aesthetic approaches to historical trauma. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by FILM COMMENT's Nicolas Rapold, The Nation critic Stuart Klawans, and New York Times and FILM COMMENT contributor J. Hoberman to discuss these films’ varying approaches, strengths, and blind spots. We also have a special interview with French icon Isabelle Huppert, who spoke with Yonca Talu about Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love and working with Maurice Pialat and Claude Chabrol (with a few words about her next collaborator, Michael Haneke).

Criticism gets a bad rap a lot of the time, even from its practitioners. But rather than a defense of criticism, A.O. Scott. a chief film critic for The New York Times, has written a kind of long-form thought experiment around the profession that traces the impetuses behind criticism and its myriad functions. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism explores how we determine our own taste, the value and function of criticism in our current media environment, some (low) points in its history, and rhetorical issues, pulling from a wide variety of texts from poetry to performance art to criticism in its many guises. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Scott and another veteran critic, Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com and New York magazine, to discuss ideas raised by the book and how larger changes in media have affected their careers and the profession at large

It's that most wonderful time of year: Film Comment Selects! This edition of our annual series of eclectic, international, and avant-garde films offered a host of pleasures: a revival of Chantal Akerman’s musical Golden Eighties, Terence Davies's exquisite period piece Sunset Song, new films by Benoît Jacquot, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Alexei German Jr., and a special spotlight on the work of recently deceased Polish auteur Andrzej Żuławski. On Saturday, Film Comment's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold assembled contributors Eric Hynes, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Michael Koresky to discuss the work of Davies and Żuławski in front of a live audience during Film Comment Selects. The special edition was called Film Comment, Live!

Now that “takes,” gossip, and conversations about film can be instantly broadcast to the world, it’s sometimes easy to forget that above all else, film criticism is an act of writing. In a frank and accessible dialogue, Mark Harris, film historian and Vulture columnist, Eric Hynes, critic, journalist, and Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, talk about the writers and larger cultural trends (be it the rise of VHS or social media) that have shaped their own approaches to the medium.

At first blush, the Coen Brothers and Peter Greenaway don’t appear to have much in common except that their new films, Hail, Caesar!and Eisenstein in Guanajuato, both came out the same day. Yet their films used to share art-house marquee space in the late '80s and early '90s when they attracted notoriety and criticism of all stripes. Although their paths have diverged considerably, their new films are united by the way in which the filmmakers construct a world of artifice, steeped in references yet inhabited in very different ways: for the Coens, it’s the glitzy movie-verse of Capitol Pictures; for Greenaway, it’s a wild combination of art history, politics, and Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film, ¡Que viva México!. FILM COMMENT's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold are joined by Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to discuss these films and especially the Coen Brothers' ever-evolving oeuvre.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center recently mounted a major retrospective of Douglas Sirk’s films, which included his first German productions from the Thirties (The Girl from the Marsh Croft, La Habanera) to his Technicolor melodramas of the Fifties (All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind). A masterful observer of American society—like fellow German émigrés Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch—Sirk’s films explore uncomfortable, unspoken truths and conjure complicated, conflicting feelings. FILM COMMENT’s Violet Lucca sat down with FC contributors Nick Pinkerton, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Ashley Clark to discuss race and representation in Taza, Son of Cochise (54), The Tarnished Angels (57), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (58), Imitation of Life (59), and more.

What were the noteworthy performances of 2015? And what different kinds of performance are there? Mindful of actors that weren’t nominated during awards season, FILM COMMENT's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold sat down with regular FC contributor Nick Pinkerton and Michael Koresky, editor of Reverse Shot and director of publications of the upcoming Metrograph theater in New York, to talk about their favorite (and least favorite) acting moments.

Rejoice, o ye year-end list obsessives! Digital editor Violet Lucca sat down with senior editor Nicolas Rapold, contributing editor and New York Film Festival Selection Committee Member Amy Taubin, and regular contributor Nick Pinkerton to discuss the top 20 films as determined by our annual critics’ poll. Their wide-ranging discussion weighs the list’s revelations (and peculiarities), what should’ve been on the list, and why Viggo Mortensen is so gosh darn dreamy. As always, the FILM COMMENT list of the year’s best films is the result of polling over 100 colleagues and consists of two categories: 1) the best films that received theatrical runs in 2015 and 2) the year’s best films that have no announced plans for U.S. theatrical distribution.

A New York Film Festival Live talk, recorded October 9th, where Film Comment editors and contributors discussed this year's NYFF. Participants: Wesley Morris of The New York Times; Eric Hynes, critic, reporter, and Film Comment columnist; Michael Koresky, staff writer of The Criterion Collection and co-editor-in-chief of Reverse Shot; Aliza Ma, programmer, critic, and author of the Film Comment September/October cover story on The Assassin; Film Comment Senior Editor Nicolas Rapold; and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca.

Melissa Anderson (contributor to Artforum, The Village Voice, and other publications) and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca speak about the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey.

The first episode of our podcast: a discussion of Shoah by critic J. Hoberman and Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing. Please leave your thoughts about your experience watching Shoah here: http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/podcast-first-episode-shoah