Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 S...
Aug 17, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Aug 10, 2021•52 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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—abo...
Aug 03, 2021•54 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Ba...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Jul 20, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 S...
Jul 06, 2021•55 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 t...
Jun 29, 2021•56 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Jun 22, 2021•24 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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, Hi...
Jun 15, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 programm...
Jun 09, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Jun 01, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Kalee...
May 25, 2021•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 tun...
May 18, 2021•53 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
May 11, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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’...
May 04, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 th...
Apr 27, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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...
Apr 20, 2021•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 th...
Apr 06, 2021•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Mar 30, 2021•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 S...
Mar 23, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Ca...
Mar 16, 2021•52 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 episo...
Mar 10, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 movi...
Apr 24, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 lates...
Apr 13, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 co...
Apr 08, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Cinem...
Apr 07, 2020•54 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Apr 06, 2020•56 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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, t...
Apr 02, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Mar 31, 2020•57 min•Ep. 1
