Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 f...
May 15, 2018•40 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment 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....
May 14, 2018•39 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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....
May 13, 2018•36 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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.
May 12, 2018•37 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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.
May 11, 2018•35 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 U...
May 10, 2018•40 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 abo...
May 09, 2018•42 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
May 08, 2018•52 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 u...
May 01, 2018•48 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 th...
Apr 24, 2018•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 inc...
Apr 17, 2018•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Robert...
Apr 10, 2018•47 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Ou...
Apr 03, 2018•54 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 So...
Mar 27, 2018•1 hr•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 s...
Mar 20, 2018•36 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 s...
Mar 13, 2018•50 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 s...
Mar 06, 2018•53 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Nicol...
Feb 27, 2018•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Feb 20, 2018•39 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Feb 13, 2018•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Feb 06, 2018•59 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Feb 01, 2018•17 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Munch...
Jan 30, 2018•55 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 hybr...
Jan 24, 2018•54 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 port...
Jan 23, 2018•26 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Podc...
Jan 23, 2018•39 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 p...
Jan 22, 2018•24 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Sh...
Jan 22, 2018•35 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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....
Jan 21, 2018•31 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Fil...
Jan 20, 2018•39 min•Ep. 1
