Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Imo...
Oct 31, 2018•59 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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....
Oct 29, 2018•48 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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, ...
Oct 23, 2018•36 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 reconst...
Oct 17, 2018•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Oct 11, 2018•59 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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,...
Oct 03, 2018•53 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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...
Sep 26, 2018•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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. ...
Sep 21, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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-ab...
Sep 19, 2018•47 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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...
Sep 14, 2018•59 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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;...
Sep 12, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 di...
Sep 11, 2018•54 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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.
Sep 05, 2018•46 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 wer...
Aug 30, 2018•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ca...
Aug 22, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 s...
Aug 09, 2018•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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. “...
Aug 01, 2018•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 ...
Jul 26, 2018•1 hr•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 Co...
Jul 18, 2018•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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 Commen...
Jul 11, 2018•59 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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 t...
Jul 04, 2018•50 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 d...
Jun 28, 2018•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . “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 issu...
Jun 21, 2018•52 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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,...
Jun 14, 2018•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 aes...
Jun 07, 2018•47 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 th...
May 29, 2018•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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, ...
May 21, 2018•43 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 realiti...
May 18, 2018•47 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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 m...
May 17, 2018•42 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 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....
May 16, 2018•52 min•Ep. 1
