The Film Comment Podcast

We begin another week with The Film Comment Podcast at Home, keeping ourselves distracted and hopefully our listeners too. One big way the crisis is affecting the movie business is that it’s also another week without new theatrical releases. That might be the least of our concerns, but it’s definitely been food for thought among critics and other moviegoers. On this episode, Film Comment Editor-in...

Right now, movie theaters are temporarily closed, and we’ll have to wait a while before we can all sit together again and look up at the big screen. But before the curtain dropped on moviegoing, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold made his annual pilgrimage to the True/False Film Fest. True/False is a reliably energizing festival of nonfiction film, curating the best from around the world....

Staying at home is a global phenomenon in these difficult times, as we all find ourselves with a lot more indoors time and anxiety on our hands. For our latest daily edition of Film Comment Podcast at Home, we go to Brazil. Critic and programmer Ela Bittencourt wrote our interview feature on Bacurau in our March-April issue, and now, the film’s story of collective action, state of siege, and inequ...

For our latest daily edition of the podcast, we reached out again to a filmmaker for a report from another corner of the world. Nadav Lapid is the director of The Kindergarten Teacher, The Policeman, and most recently, Synonyms, which played in The New York Film Festival and before that won the top prize at Berlin. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold interviewed Nadav about The Kindergarte...

In an article in The New York Times, the critic Manohla Dargis wrote about what we’re missing right now: “There is nothing like watching a movie, leaving the world while being rooted in it alongside friends, family and everyone else.” It’s a feeling that means so much to all of us, and on this podcast, we’ve been doing our best to stay virtually connected with each other and with movies. We’ve had...

On the past few episodes we’ve posed the same essential question to critics, a filmmaker, and a curator: what’s the view from where you’re sitting? That’s come to mean a couple of things: what are you watching these days, but also what’s life like from your perspective of the film world? For this installment, we looked within our own organization, Film at Lincoln Center, and spoke with our colleag...

Last weekend, the box office report for new releases looked very different: it was glaringly empty. As with so much of the world, the pandemic has left its mark on film: for now, new theatrical releases are in a kind of holding pattern. Our latest guest on The Film Comment Podcast at Home series is regular contributor Nick Pinkerton, and he’s been wondering how this cinematic break is affecting fi...

Every year, the New Directors/New Films festival introduces audiences to fresh and adventurous cinema from around the world. It’s presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, and for many New York moviegoers, it’s a lovely prelude to the spring. This year, the 49th edition has been postponed, and so we thought it would be nice to sit down with MoMA’s chief curator of film, Raj...

For the past week we’ve been doing a special daily edition of the podcast where we talk about what we’ve been watching at home. It’s a new week now and the world still seems to get a bit scarier every day, so we’re going to keep doing this to distract anyone who needs distraction. For this episode, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Assistant Editor Devika Girish, Digital Ed...

In case you’re just joining us, this is another edition of the Film Comment Podcast at Home. Every day we’re talking about what we’re watching. For this episode, we check in with Sheila O’Malley, one of our regular columnists, who writes the Present Tense column. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold joined digital editor Clinton Krute to talk with Sheila about a classic Hollywood star she’s been retu...

Today we continue our special homebound version of the podcast, as we all do our best to stay connected and stay sane. As before, we’re talking about what we’ve been watching and how being stuck at home is leading us to try some new movies as well as return to comfort food. We hope you enjoy our latest selection, and we'd love if you watched along with us—you'll find links below to titles under di...

“NO NEW ‘MOVIES’ TIL INFLUENZA ENDS“ read the October 10, 1918, headline in The New York Times, during the global flu pandemic one century ago. Then as now, theaters nationwide were temporarily closing, leaving moviegoers without any movies to go to. “WE MISS OUR MOVIES” went another newspaper headline that same October, atop an article that marveled at the impact of this young popular art form: “...

You don’t need us to tell you that we’re living in extraordinary times, and consequently, many of us are spending our time indoors these days. And with all that extra time inside, we’ve been talking with folks and hearing that it might be nice to listen to some friendly talk about movies—and maybe give us something else to think about. So we will be doing special editions of The Film Comment Podca...

Bacurau is the new film from Brazilian filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, and it has a pulp thriller premise with a radical heart: a small rural community becomes the target of a mysterious, heavily armed group of foreign white tourists. But the Bacurau residents don’t give up, and the result is what Ela Bittencourt calls, in our March-April issue, “a blistering portrait of re...

First Cow is the movie on the lovely cover of our March-April issue, directed by Kelly Reichardt. The setting of the movie is an Oregon frontier town in the 1820s, when newcomers are busily trying to get a foothold in life and in business. Two such newcomers are at the center of First Cow, a cook named Cookie and a fugitive he befriends named King Lu. It’s another chapter in Reichardt’s richly ima...

In the cover story of our March-April issue, out now, Film Comment Digital Editor Clinton Krute writes “Kelly Reichardt’s deceptively modest epic First Cow opens with a wide, static shot of a barge, heavy with consumer goods, pushing down the Columbia River. Like the story that follows, this shot is deceptively straightforward, gesturing toward one of the themes—nature vs. society, with the human...

The Berlin International Film Festival is now over, but there were a few more films we wanted to share with you. We’ve talked about highlights such as new films from Christian Petzold and Hong Sangsoo. For our final Berlinale episode, we’re discussing new work from Tsai Ming-liang; the Golden Bear award-winner, There Is No Evil, from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof; and a couple of films that...

This week we have been reporting from the Berlin International Film Festival. And without a doubt, very high on the list of favorites has been Christian Petzold’s new film, Undine. You might know Petzold from his previous features such as Transit, Barbara, and Phoenix. Undine is the story of a museum guide who moves on from a breakup to a relationship with a new man. But there are undercurrents of...

This week, The Film Comment Podcast reports from the Berlin International Film Festival, straight from, you guessed it, Berlin. It’s one of the year’s major festivals, and the 2020 edition has been highly anticipated because of its new leadership and impressive slate. We’ll be talking about the highlights including new films from Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo, and Abel Ferrara, as well as Natali...

This week, The Film Comment Podcast reports from the Berlin International Film Festival, straight from, you guessed it, Berlin. It’s one of the year’s major festivals, and the 2020 edition has been highly anticipated because of its new leadership and impressive slate. We’ll be talking about the highlights including new films from Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo, and Abel Ferrara, as well as Natali...

This week, The Film Comment Podcast reports from the Berlin International Film Festival, straight from, you guessed it, Berlin. It’s one of the year’s major festivals, and the 2020 edition has been highly anticipated because of its new leadership and impressive slate. We’ll be talking about the highlights including new films from Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo, and Abel Ferrara, as well as Natali...

Last fall saw the release of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, which joins a long tradition of marital dramas while adding its own fresh sense of candor. After featuring the film in our September-October 2019 issue, we launched our hit podcast series Marriage Stories. Actually, we’ve only done one so far, but we are excited to present another installment. The premise is simple: we invite couples on...

Last fall saw the release of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, which joins a long tradition of marital dramas while adding its own fresh sense of candor. After featuring the film in our September-October 2019 issue, we immediately thought, why not invite married couples on the podcast to talk about movies about marriage? We’re calling the series Marriage Stories, and the results have been wonderfull...

The achievements of actors and actresses of color have long gone under-recognized in Hollywood. It’s a fact of the industry that has only gotten more glaring as the years go by. For the latest Film at Lincoln Center Talk hosted by Film Comment magazine, we gathered together to celebrate the craft of our favorite performers of color from current cinema. We also talked about key figures and overlook...

As you may have noticed, Film Comment went to the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah. We recorded a series of podcasts and now at last we have our thrilling conclusion. For our final episode in Park City, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Manohla Dargis of The New York Times; Amy Taubin, contributing editor at Film Comment; and Devika Girish, our assistant editor. We talked ab...