Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 b...
Jan 19, 2018•32 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 be...
Jan 18, 2018•32 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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 s...
Jan 16, 2018•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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, ...
Jan 09, 2018•36 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 l...
Jan 02, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 wit...
Dec 26, 2017•55 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Ko...
Dec 20, 2017•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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) a...
Dec 12, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Dec 05, 2017•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Cinephili...
Nov 28, 2017•50 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 cou...
Nov 21, 2017•48 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 grante...
Nov 14, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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....
Nov 07, 2017•51 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Oct 31, 2017•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 p...
Oct 24, 2017•48 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Oct 20, 2017•23 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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, Dire...
Oct 17, 2017•51 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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....
Oct 10, 2017•52 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 S...
Oct 03, 2017•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Oct 02, 2017•34 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Sep 26, 2017•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 t...
Sep 20, 2017•43 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 an...
Sep 13, 2017•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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, write...
Sep 05, 2017•51 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 conversatio...
Aug 29, 2017•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Vio...
Aug 22, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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, an...
Aug 15, 2017•39 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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 ...
Aug 08, 2017•51 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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 t...
Aug 01, 2017•35 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 a...
Jul 27, 2017•49 min•Ep. 1
