Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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; a...
May 20, 2016•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 snapshot...
May 10, 2016•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 hist...
May 03, 2016•49 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 o...
Apr 26, 2016•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Apr 19, 2016•45 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 D...
Apr 12, 2016•46 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Apr 05, 2016•54 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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.
Mar 29, 2016•35 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Yor...
Mar 22, 2016•45 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 contr...
Mar 15, 2016•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Nico...
Mar 08, 2016•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Mar 01, 2016•53 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Comme...
Feb 24, 2016•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 hav...
Feb 16, 2016•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 o...
Feb 09, 2016•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 comp...
Jan 26, 2016•50 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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....
Jan 19, 2016•41 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 drea...
Dec 18, 2015•55 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 E...
Oct 20, 2015•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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.
Feb 20, 2015•50 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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
Jul 03, 2013•37 min•Ep. 1
