The Film Comment Podcast

This week we have been recording at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, talking about the highlights in its film lineup. One of the most anticipated movies there was the new film from Kirsten Johnson. Johnson’s first feature was the incredible Cameraperson, assembled partly from images she shot while working as a cinematographer on other films. Her new feature is called Dick Johnson Is...

Welcome back to our ongoing series podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. As we near the festival’s end, we’ve redoubled our efforts to bring our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Ashley Clark, Director of Film...

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. We’re bringing our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Ela Bittencourt (critic and FC contributor), Eric Hynes (FC columnist and curator of film at the Mu...

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. We’re bringing our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with filmmaker and critic Sierra Pettengill and Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, for a discussion...

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival! We’ll be bringing you daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Abby Sun, programmer and FC contributor, and Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, for a discussion of Shirley, Time, Yalda, małni—tow...

This week we are at the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah, sending regular dispatches about the highlights in its independent film lineup. One of the most highly anticipated movies here is called The Last Thing He Wanted, from filmmaker Dee Rees, who previously directed Mudbound and Pariah. The Last Thing He Wanted is an adaptation of the Joan Didion novel, which centers on a journalist wh...

Welcome back to our series of podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival! We’ll be bringing you daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Sam Adams, senior editor at Slate and editor of Slate’s culture blog Brow Beat, and FC Assistant Editor (and podcast regular)...

We’re back, reporting from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Where others may have balked, we brave the dangerously crowded, ice-packed streets of Park City, Utah to bring you critical conversations about all the highlights from the festival. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined for this episode by Assistant Editor Devika Girish and podcast regular Eric Hynes, Curator of Film, Muse...

It’s January, which means it’s time once again to see some movies in the snowy wilderness of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Once again, the Film Comment Podcast will be on the scene, recording regular episodes, with the latest on the festival, the movies, and the filmmakers. We’re kicking things off with a preview of the 2020 edition’s offerings, talking about the movies we’re most...

For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about the 2010s and asking some questions as part of our Decade Project. What were the key movies of the decade, which filmmakers were doing innovative work, and what were the major shifts and big issues in the artform and the industry? We brought our discussion of the decade to our latest Film Comment Talk at Film at Lincoln Center. Joining Editor-in-Chi...

Vitalina Varela, the beautiful new film from Pedro Costa, is the cover of our January-February issue. Jordan Cronk spoke with Costa about the film’s story of a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina who comes back to Lisbon for the funeral of her estranged husband. As Cronk put it in his feature: “Costa has been developing his approach into a new kind of dramatic portraiture . . . He has become a touch...

Throughout her pioneering career, Agnès Varda has inspired countless filmmakers with her work and her groundbreaking career and style. At Film Comment, we leapt at the opportunity to put her on the cover when Faces Places was released. More recently, to celebrate the final weekend of the Varda retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, Film Comment presented a conversation with another generation of...

Uncut Gems, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, and starring Adam Sandler, is a full-throttle portrait of a diamond dealer in New York’s Diamond District. It’s been a wild success since it opened in December, and in our November-December issue, Michael Koresky wrote about the movie, praising how the Safdie brothers “capture the bustle and pace of rapid-fire economic exchange, filtering it through a...

Little Women is without question one of the best movies of the recently-ended year, and it’s a wonderful triumph for director Greta Gerwig. That’s why we put it on the cover of our November-December issue, featuring Gerwig’s delightful interview by Devika Girish. But there’s even more to say about the movie and its intelligent, complex, and visually rich adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. So...

Welcome to another episode in our Decade Project series where we look back at the past 10 years and talk about our favorite filmmakers, major changes and trends, and the movies that made a difference. This week, we’re talking about acting and performance in the 2010s—actors that made their mark, and tendencies we’ve noticed. Joining Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold are Michael Koresky,...

With the 2010s on the way out, we thought that this very recent history could use a road map. Each installment of the Decade Project will look at key developments, pivotal movies, groundbreaking film artists, and so on. This week, we’re looking at filmmakers but specifically everyone but the director. We’re as guilty as anyone of referring to movies in terms of their directors. So we wanted to loo...

It’s that time of year again! Film Comment has made a list and we’ve checked it twice: the best films of 2019, chosen through a poll of our contributing writers. And according to our new annual tradition, we announced the results live at a special Film Comment Talk. This year, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined to unveil and discuss the films by Amy Taubin, longtime contributin...

By any measure, the 2010s have been a confusing and turbulent and also exciting time. That goes for both movies and the world at large, and that’s saying a lot after the 2000s. At Film Comment, part of our goal is to offer a critical chronicle of the movies as they’re happening, putting things in historical perspective, pointing out the bold and the beautiful in the art and craft of film, and hope...

Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman has been out in theaters since the beginning of November, which you probably know unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (or were buried under Giants Stadium). Scorsese’s story follows the life of mob fixer Frank Sheeran and his close relationship with mob boss Russell Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters leader. The movie’s release is the perfect time to...

It’s a busy couple of months for moviegoers as hits from festivals make their way into cinemas. That means it’s time for another New Releases episode, where talk about some highly anticipated titles. Film Comment Editor-in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor of Film at The City College of New York. Among the movies dis...

Dark Waters is the new film from Todd Haynes, and it’s a change of pace from his last feature, Wonderstruck, and much of his work generally. Dark Waters is a whistleblower drama about Rob Billott, a lawyer who began investigating the chemical company DuPont, which his own firm was doing business with. To discuss the movie, contributing editor Amy Taubin sat down with Haynes for an extended intervi...

Some of the most exciting movies being made today are tackling class tensions and the role of work in our lives. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, our cover story last issue, is one major example, with its twisty upstairs-downstairs thriller set-up. But many other films have been taking up the subjects of work and class in a variety of different ways: Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Stephen Soderbergh’s...

This week we celebrate two different strands of Indian cinema, looking at the past and the vibrant present. First, we look at the landmark Film at Lincoln Center retrospective for Ritwik Ghatak, director of The Cloud-Capped Star, A River Called Titas, and other films. For that part of the discussion, we’ll be joined by two of the series' programmers, Moinak Biswas and former Film at Lincoln Center...

Horror movies are the usual choice for Halloween viewing. But we here at Film Comment got to wondering: what are the scariest movies that are not horror films? There are many ways a movie can get under your skin, and it’s not always through gore or the supernatural. To discuss this notion, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold got together with Film Comment regular Michael Koresky and Ashley Clark, se...

The Lighthouse is the mind-bending new movie out from Robert Eggers, a director who’s making a career out of revisiting America’s primal past in vividly imagined period films. In 2015, Eggers won the Best Directing Award at Sundance for The Witch, a chilling piece of horror set in a colonial New England settlement. In The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as two lighthouse keepers...