The Film Comment Podcast

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 anti...

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 Rea...

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...

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,...

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,...

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,...

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 Kr...

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. The...

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 cura...

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 syndr...

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 wi...

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 bounda...

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 Ev...

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 Ada...

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 Dickin...

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...

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 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...

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 mo...