Subscribe to Film Comment today . Every year, Film at Lincoln Center honors a luminary of the film industry with the Chaplin Award. This year’s recipient, the 47th, is an actress who has essayed some of the most iconic performances of the last quarter-century, and whose nearly superhuman versatility is matched by the consistency of her craft: Cate Blanchett. In an in-depth tribute essay, the scholar Amy Herzog writes that “Blanchett’s almost otherworldly range has generated certain tropes in rev...
Apr 25, 2022•40 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . For this week’s podcast, Film Comment co-deputy editor Clinton Krute sat down with filmmakers Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, the duo behind the 1979 documentary The Wobblies. The film tells the story of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical labor union that nearly brought American industry to its knees in the early years of the 20th century. With The Wobblies, Stewart and Deborah painted a moving, and eye-opening portrait of a movement. Weaving tog...
Apr 12, 2022•50 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . We look forward to the Art of the Real festival every year, and 2022 is no exception. In fact, a spotlight on the work of French filmmaker Alice Diop makes this year’s roundup of groundbreaking nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking especially exciting. Diop’s We (2021), a perceptive and beautifully wrought exploration of national identity, was a highlight of last year’s festival circuit. Her previous films, screening as part of the spotlight, are no less revelatory. ...
Mar 29, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . With Ahed’s Knee, the rawest, most autobiographical entry in Nadav Lapid’s blistering filmography (The Kindergarten Teacher; Synonyms), the director crafts a stylized and self-lacerating portrait of an Israeli filmmaker railing at the censorship, hypocrisy, and violence of his government. Last week, we welcomed Lapid for a Film Comment Live Talk exploring Ahed’s Knee and the questions it raises about state censorship of cinema, the politics of self-critique, and...
Mar 22, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . The ongoing horrors of war in Ukraine have raised questions for art communities around the world: How can we meaningfully respond to this crisis? How can we support and defend artists and art in the face of cultural and material destruction? And how can art, and cinema in particular, help us grapple with our collective past and present? To delve into these questions, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited two scholars, Anastasiya Osipova an...
Mar 15, 2022•59 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . A common term in nonfiction filmmaking and criticism, “point of view” connotes a number of different meanings: a perspective on the world, a camera position, an assertion of subjectivity. Last week, at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, FC co-editor Devika Girish led a special Film Comment Live Talk with filmmakers Reid Davenport (I Didn't See You There) and Joe Hunting (We Met in Virtual Reality) to explore the material, aesthetic, and politica...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . The work and legacy of the late Jonas Mekas have been on our minds even more than usual, with a recent retrospective of his films at Film at Lincoln Center and an ongoing exhibit at the Jewish Museum. So, for today’s podcast, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish wanted to discuss a form of which Mekas was a true master: the Diary Film. Devika and Clint welcomed Anthology Film Archives Archivist John Klaccsman and critic and FC–contributor Gina Te...
Mar 01, 2022•49 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . Against all odds, the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival returned to cinemas this year after last year’s virtual edition. For this week’s podcast, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited two of FC’s Berlinale correspondents, Jessica Kiang and Edo Choi, to discuss (and debate) some of the highlights from the festival. Our spirited conversation touched upon some highly anticipated titles like Claire Denis’s Fire and Bertrand Bonello’s Com...
Feb 23, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . This week, Film Comment co-editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sit down with Steven Soderbergh, whose latest film, KIMI, premiered on HBO Max last week. The film follows an agoraphobic tech worker played by Zoë Kravitz as she uncovers evidence of a crime and becomes ensnared in an increasingly deadly corporate conspiracy. KIMI takes narrative and aesthetic cues from paranoid classics like Rear Window, The Conversation, and Blow Up. But Soderbergh’s typically...
Feb 17, 2022•49 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . For the last week and a half, your intrepid Film Comment crew has been watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock from this year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival. We hope you’ve been enjoying our coverage so far. More is on its way this week! For today’s episode, the final one in our Sundance 2022 series, editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited Film Comment contributors Abby Sun and Violet Lucca to join for an overview of the festival that was. Th...
Feb 01, 2022•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . The Sundance Film Festival is once again in full swing, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew are watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock to bring you coverage of the annual showcase for independent cinema. Though we had hoped to be reporting live from the snow-covered streets of Park City, this year’s edition is all online. But not to worry: for the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering the virtual...
Jan 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . The Sundance Film Festival is once again in full swing, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew are watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock to bring you coverage of the annual showcase for independent cinema. Though we had hoped to be reporting live from the snow-covered streets of Park City, this year’s edition is all online. But not to worry: for the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering the virtual...
Jan 26, 2022•41 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . The Sundance Film Festival is once again in full swing, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew are watching, writing, and podcasting round the clock to bring you coverage of the annual showcase for independent cinema. Though we had hoped to be reporting live from the snow-covered streets of Park City, this year’s edition is all online. But not to worry: for the next two weeks, we’ll be bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering the virtual...
Jan 25, 2022•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . This week's episode is inspired by the recent release of The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour docuseries about the making of the band’s 1970 album, Let It Be. The flurry of conversation provoked by the series—about its length, its restored archival footage, and the ways in which it captures the process of music-making and rehearsal—got Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute thinking about music documentaries more generally. What makes ...
Jan 18, 2022•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . With the holidays behind us and a new and exciting year of cinema on the horizon, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute caught up on some major recent releases. They were joined on their journey through the last few weeks of Hollywood movies by frequent guest A.S. Hamrah, critic for the Baffler, and Simran Hans, critic for the Observer and a first-time visitor to the Film Comment Podcast. They discussed blockbusters The Matrix Resurrections, Don’t Look Up, ...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . Drumroll, please! Film Comment’s highly anticipated Best Films of 2021 list, voted on by nearly a 100 critics and colleagues the world over, is finally out. Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish unveiled the results live at a special Film Comment Talk, featuring hearty discussion and debate with all-star panelists Bilge Ebiri (film critic, Vulture and New York magazine), Edo Choi (assistant curator of film, Museum of the Moving Image), and Beatrice Loayza (ass...
Dec 17, 2021•2 hr 12 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . The arrival of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria has been one of the film events of the year. Six years after 2015’s Cemetery of Splendour, the filmmaker has returned to the big screen with his first feature set outside Thailand and his first collaboration with a bona fide movie star: Tilda Swinton. Swinton plays a British visitor in Colombia who finds herself afflicted with exploding head syndrome—a condition that causes her to hear mysterious and sudden boom...
Dec 09, 2021•24 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . This week's conversation focuses on David Fincher—a director whose decade-spanning body of gritty Americana—from the grim moral drama of Se7en to the revisionist Hollywood tale of the recent Mank—has inspired reams of divisive analysis A new book by Adam Nayman, David Fincher: Mind Games (out November 23), offers a canny and timely appraisal of the director’s filmography. Adam writes that, “Over the past thirty years, Fincher has cultivated and maintained a repu...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . 2021 marks the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. As part of its centenary celebrations this fall, the NYFF inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. For the first edition, NYFF welcomed Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra, kn...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . This year marks the centenary of Amos Vogel, a programmer, writer, and educator very dear to Film Comment—he was one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, and an abiding influence on New York’s film culture with his legendary Cinema 16 film society. In addition to his many contributions to the pages of Film Comment over the decades, Amos is also widely known for his classic book Film as a Subversive Art, an encyclopedic analysis of underground, avant-ga...
Nov 09, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . Every year, as Halloween approaches, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are forced to confront one of their greatest fears: horror movies. For this year’s festivities, they invited two horror experts—Violet Lucca, web editor at Harper's Magazine, and Maddie Whittle, Programming Assistant at Film at Lincoln Center—to inflict some scary movies upon them. Violet and Maddie selected a couple underground favorites: Mohammed Shebl’s bonkers...
Nov 03, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . This Friday, a new restoration of the 1989 indie classic Chameleon Street opens at BAM. Wendell B. Harris’s utterly unique satire follows a real-life compulsive conman, Douglas Street, whose increasingly risky scams demonstrate both a sociopathic genius and a deep pathos. Wendell not only wrote and directed the film, but, like his hero Orson Welles, also played the lead character, with all of the dangerous charm of a man who conned his way into a surgical theate...
Oct 21, 2021•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . In an NYFF lineup with a record number of new and emerging filmmakers, Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider—both sophomore features—stood out for their sui generis approaches to cinematic narrative and form. Formally assured and intellectually audacious, the two films, in their own unique ways, electrify the quotidian with currents of desire, romance, and modern myth. During the fest...
Oct 13, 2021•58 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup take us back to the ‘60s heyday of the New York avant-garde: in the Main Slate, Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground offers a revelatory portrait of the milieu that gave rise to the eponymous band and its boundary-pushing music, while in Revivals, Ed Lachman’s Songs for Drella captures Lou Reed and John Cale in concert, paying tribute to the late Andy Warhol with riveting intimacy. On Sunday, October 3, Film Comment editor De...
Oct 05, 2021•57 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . This week we're reporting from the 59th New York Film Festival. One of the most anticipated films in this year's lineup is The Souvenir Part II—Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her remarkable 2019 coming-of-age drama, The Souvenir. Following Honor Swinton Byrne’s Julie, a film student, in the aftermath of her boyfriend’s death-by-overdose, the new film deepens the predecessor’s exploration of the boundaries between art and life with tender reflection, wry humor, and s...
Oct 01, 2021•39 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . Established in 2020—and picking up where the late, lamented Projections section left off—Currents is the New York Film Festival's home for films with more offbeat, experimental, or hybrid sensibilities. This year’s lineup does not disappoint, with a selection of groundbreaking features and shorts from new and established filmmakers like Matías Piñeiro and Lois Patiño, Claire Simon, Kevin Jerome Everson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and many more. For this conversa...
Sep 28, 2021•53 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . As we enter the thick of fall festival season, it seems that every week brings with it a full slate of amazing new films from all over the world. This week, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute rang up two of their favorite critics, Adam Nayman and José Teodoro, for a look at the 2021 edition of Toronto International Film Festival, which just wrapped this past weekend. José and Adam had much to report on from their hometown fest. They kicked thin...
Sep 21, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . This week Film Comment is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival, both virtually and in-person. One of the most anticipated films at this year’s festival is Benediction, the latest feature by British master Terence Davies. It’s a biopic of the English anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon—although, biopic is a bit of a misnomer. Like A Quiet Passion, Davies’s 2015 film about Emily Dickinson, Benediction is a beautifully impressionistic, personal, and i...
Sep 14, 2021•56 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . In a 2007 Film Comment essay, Amy Taubin wrote in praise of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, a documentary about the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the communities that bore its brunt. For Amy, “Lee makes it possible for their stories to be inscribed in history. It is left to us not to forget them.” The same could be said of Lee’s epic new mini-series NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½, a deep-dive into New York City’s recent history of trauma and resilience, from the ...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 1
Subscribe to Film Comment today . The summer and fall festival seasons bring a flurry of buzzy premieres at glamorous locales: Cannes, Venice, New York, Toronto. But as most film critics will attest, some of our best festival experiences are at the smaller venues and events that often fly under the radar. These include regional festivals that cater to local audiences, festivals that spotlight newer filmmakers, and lineups focused on specialized programs. To discuss the role of these festivals an...
Aug 31, 2021•52 min•Ep. 1
