The Film Comment Podcast

At Film Comment, we love it when we get behind a movie and then see other movie-goers share the love. Parasite, the funny and fierce thriller from Bong Joon Ho, was on the cover of our September-October issue, but wasn't released in theaters until mid-October. But what a release! Audiences are packing the theaters. To talk about the movie’s appeal and Bong’s masterful filmmaking, FC Editor-in-Chie...

Mister America is the new film starring Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington. It’s a documentary-style satire about an first-time political candidate named Tim Heidecker, that is, the character Heidecker has played for years now alongside Turkington as part of their movie show On Cinema at the Cinema. In case you don’t already know, Heidecker and Turkington have created an incredible comedic univers...

For the festival’s final week, contributing critics and editors gather together for a spirited discussion with Film Comment‘s Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold about the movies they’ve seen in the NYFF57 lineup. Panelists include programmer and FC contributing editor Nellie Killian; Michael Koresky of Film Comment and Reverse Shot; Amy Taubin of Film Comment and Artforum; and critic Phoebe Chen. The...

Every year at the New York Film Festival, Film Comment brings together a group of intrepid filmmakers whose work is screening in the festival. It’s a rare chance to share stories about the art, craft, and angst of filmmaking, and to compare notes on inspirations and what makes a good collaboration. This year, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief spoke with an all-star lineup of filmmakers from across the...

The new film Bacurau centers upon the residents of a remote Brazilian village who gradually discover that they’re being hunted by a group of Western tourists. Part class-warfare satire, part thriller, the movie gripped audiences at the New York Film Festival and it marks a major achievement by its directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. In this episode, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Ra...

Think of it as a festival within the festival: every year, the annual Projections program brings the latest and greatest of experimental film to the New York Film Festival. Projections is a crucial and consistently popular snapshot of the boundary pushing part of cinema that is embedded in the DNA of the New York Film Festival, by way of co-founder Amos Vogel. To navigate this year’s rich offering...

Every year at the New York Film Festival, Film Comment puts on a slate of special events, including public talks and a screening presentation. Our first NYFF talk this year was titled State of the Nation, a wide-ranging conversation about the complex interplay between politics and cinema. How do filmmakers grapple with the challenge of portraying current events and recent history on screen? And ho...

The New York Film Festival is here! And there’s a lot to talk about. Film Comment will have three onstage talks during the festival, as well as special screenings of the much-anticipated Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But first we wanted to dip our toe into the lineup by talking with two recent guests at Film at Lincoln Center: Ashley Clark, Senior repertory and specialty film programmer at BAM; and...

One of the highlights of the fall, and this year’s New York Film Festival, is the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, Pain and Glory. Our new September-October issue features an essay by Michael Koresky about the film and it’s fearless autobiographical story. Koresky writes, “There has been no clearer onscreen representation of the filmmaker’s essence than the main character of Pain and Glory, played wit...

For our third roundup of all the on-screen goings-n at TIFF 2019, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sits down with critic and FC contributor Michael Koresky and Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, to discuss Waves, Jojo Rabbit, Africa, Two of Us, Uncut Gems, Marriage Story, Saturday Fiction, Color Out of Space,and others.

For our second dispatch from the not-yet-frozen tundra of Toronto, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold welcomes back Devika Girish (FC Assistant Editor) and programmer and critic Abby Sun for a rundown of highlights, including Lina from Lima, Just Mercy, Synonyms, Terminal Sud, Blood Quantum, and Simple Women.

After a whirlwind tour of Venice (don't forget to check out those episodes!), we dive right into the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sits down with guests Devika Girish (Assistant Editor at Film Comment), Jessica Green (programmer and Artistic Director of the Houston Cinema Arts Society) and Eric Hynes (curator of film at the Museum of the...

In our third and final dispatch from the Venice Film Festival, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Jay Weissberg, film critic for Variety, and Christina Newland, writer for Sight & Sound and Little White Lies. They discuss a packed line-up of films: Olivier Assayas's Wasp Network, Pietro Marcello's Martin Eden, David Michôd's The King, Pablo Larraín's Ema, Roy Andersson's About Endl...

In our second dispatch from the Venice Film Festival, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, to discuss some much-anticipated titles, including Todd Phillips' Joker, Nate Parker's American Skin, and Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat. Plus: our new Which Movie quiz, in which critics try to find some order in the chaos of festival-viewing...

This week The Film Comment Podcast reports on the latest premieres at the Venice Film Festival, already in full swing with the fall’s first wave of highly anticipated titles. Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold joins FC contributing editor and veteran international correspondent Jonathan Romney at an undisclosed alfresco location for an in-depth discussion of festival highlights. These include James Gr...

The 76th Venice International Film Festival opens today, kicking off a jam-packed fall festival season. Before heading off to the Lido, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish to discuss the films in the lineup—by auteurs both established and new—that we're most excited about. They speculate about Haifa Al-Mansour's The Perfect Candidate (which h...

Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, Before Sunset and beyond—it’s hard to match Richard Linklater when it comes to movies basically about how we find our way through life. And probably a lot of us found our way with the help of Linklater’s thoughtful, restless movies. His latest film Where’d You Go Bernadette adds another chapter to his work with the story of a woman rediscovering a creative self she lef...

This week, the Film Comment podcast reports on location from the 2019 Locarno International Film Festival. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined by Jessica Green, programmer and Artistic Director of the Houston Cinema Arts Society, and programmer and FC contributor Jordan Cronk, for a discussion of festival highlights. These include Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, Elsa Kremser and Levin Pete...

Welcome to another edition of the Rep Report, our regular roundup of retrospectives, repertory cinema, and other film series in New York. This week, we focus on the series Another Country: Outsider Visions of America, currently running at Film at Lincoln Center. The program looks at America through the eyes of a wide range of artists born abroad: Chantal Akerman (News from Home) Lars Von Trier (Do...

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood is the subject of the cover story for our July-August issue. Tarantino’s latest made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival, and now it’s finding great success in theaters. All of that despite being a change of pace for the director. The film is set in the twilight period of 1969, in a small world of Hollywood actors, bit players, and movie and TV...

We tend to agree on the classic films of the past, from Breathless, to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, to Tokyo Story. A new series at Film at Lincoln Center looks to more recent history with a survey of outstanding debut films from the 21st century so far. The series includes Medicine for Melancholy from Barry Jenkins (director of Moonlight), The Forest for the Trees from Maren Ade (director of Toni Er...

Welcome back to the second installment in our monthly series covering new releases. This week, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by critic Emily Yoshida, who has written for Vulture and Vanity Fair, and frequent FC contributor Devika Girish. The three sat down to discuss Lulu Wong’s The Farewell, which has already received a fair amount of attention for its sweet story about a...

One of summer’s most anticipated films is Midsommar, from filmmaker Ari Aster. The director joined us last summer for a talk at Film at Lincoln Center to discuss his previous feature, the unforgettable Hereditary, and we were delighted to welcome him back for another Film Comment chat on Tuesday, July 10. In front of a packed house, Aster sat down with author and Film Comment mainstay Michael Kore...

A big part of Film Comment’s mission is to bring well-informed insights and original voices to the rich heritage of movies. One beautiful example of this is our regular column, Queer & Now & Then, written by Michael Koresky. With every column, Michael picks a single movie from a specific year for a discussion in terms of queerness, as part of what he calls, “a conversation with himself and...

As summer officially begins and vacations mount, more and more find themselves stranded on remote, unspoiled beaches, far from the nearest cinema. We decided to throw those unfortunate souls a lifeline with a podcast focusing on new and upcoming movies. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by FC contributors Devika Girish and Maddie Whittle for an in-depth (and occasionally spoile...