The Film Comment Podcast

Food is versatile on film. Consider the ways it’s used in Tampopo, Daisies, Babette’s Feast, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast contends with how its significance varies with each story—both in the film and for the viewer. Each FC contributor—Michael Koresky, Editorial Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Aliza Ma, Head Prog...

It’s Sundance, day seven! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Amy Taubin, FC contributing editor and Sundance veteran, to discuss the evolution of the festival over the years and, of course, what they’ve seen. Taubin touches on the problematic nature of Jennifer Fox’s The Tale, argues for the intelligence of Craig Michael Macneill’s Lizzie, and praises Crystal Moselle’s skater-girl-driv...

Steve James returns to Sundance this week to present the first half of his ten-part miniseries America to Me, set to premiere in full this fall. James tells the story of Oak Park and River Forest High School, a well-funded, diverse public school in suburban Chicago, through the experiences of several of its students. By immersing viewers in the lives of his subjects, who encompass a range of perso...

We’re still going strong as we continue into our second week! FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image are joined by special guest April Wolfe for a rousing discussion of Sam Green’s A Thousand Thoughts, documentarian-turned-narrative-filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s candid The Tale, Desiree Akhavan’s adaptation of The Miseducation...

In this Film Comment Podcast transmission from Park City, Sundance regular Sebastián Silva discusses his latest film, Tyrel, which had its world premiere on Saturday. Shot in anamorphic handheld by the DP of Post Tenebras Lux and The Florida Project, Alexis Zabe, the film follows Tyler (Jason Mitchell) as he accompanies his friend Johnny (Charlie Abbott) to a weekend birthday retreat in upstate Ne...

As the first weekend of Sundance comes to an end, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss the white privilege and bacchanalia of Sebastián Silva’s disorienting Tyrel, Ethan Hawke’s biopic of heavy-drinking country singer/songwriter Blaze Foley, Gustav Möller’s gimmicky debut thriller The Guilty, and the joyousness...

It’s day four and we’re still going strong! In this episode, Nicolas Rapold, FC Editor-in-Chief and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss the social media hell of Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, Craig William Macneill’s ascetic biopic of Lizzie Borden, the vampirism of Sundance, and the economic unhappiness of Paul Dano’s Wildlife. The Film Comment Podcas...

It’s Sundance, day three! On this (snowier) edition of our daily Sundance 2017 podcast, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss three more films—Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and Stephen Laing’s Crime + Punishment—with a word or two for R...

It’s Sundance, day two! On this edition of our daily Sundance 2017 podcast, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss three new films—Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President, and Elan and Jonathan Bogarin’s 306 Hollywood—as well as the weather and the experience of moviegoing at this uniq...

Before the madness begins, Film Comment kicks things off with a glimpse of what to expect from the hectic experience that is the Sundance Film Festival—how it sets the tone for the coming year and what it means to cinema lovers. Join Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, every day during the festival at noon. They will disc...

“Can a meretricious, inane movie with nothing else to recommend it produce a radiant, rousing film score?” asks Gary Giddins in “Rolling Thunder,” the January/February 2018 edition of Film Comment‘s “Playing Along” column. “Very rarely,” he answers. Although Giddins isolates Franz Waxman’s score for Taras Bulba as a specific example, the guests on this week’s episode of the Film Comment Podcast ea...

“In Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, love can be—quite literally—a miracle,” writes Sheila O’Malley in her January/February 2018 Film Comment cover story, “Love, After a Fashion.” “People are scarred by life, their emotional resilience decimated by disappointments and neglect. But sometimes love is offered and, as Blanche DuBois says, famously, in A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘Sometimes—there’s God—so qu...

Stories about Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct and cover-ups have opened the floodgates of revelations about other figures in the entertainment industry and beyond. Victims have finally been able to come forward and be heard, while the #metoo movement has fueled conversation and action, amidst an Internet outrage machine that can cheapen dialogue. In this episode of The Film Comment Podcast, Digital...

As filmmaker and critic Jeff Reichert put it in his January/February 2017 Film Comment feature on Steve Bannon’s documentary work, “We could dismiss Bannon as the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of shoddily made straight-to-video white supremacist documentary. But his tactics have helped put Trump in the White House, so what can we learn about Bannon or America from watching them?” This episode of the Fi...

Sleepovers offer kids a special opportunity to hang out with their friends largely unsupervised, free to chat and dream way after bedtime. The types of films that can be discovered—and obsessively re-watched—during the wee small hours of the morning can frighten, enlighten, or amuse, which is why it’s a natural subject for this podcast. Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Nell...

As another year of moviegoing comes to a close, relax by your fire or space heater with the results of the annual Film Comment critics’ poll! The top ten theatrical releases of the year, in the humble opinion of FC contributors and editors, are unveiled on this week’s podcast by Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, Film Society Editorial Director Michael Koresky, and Digital Producer Violet Lucca. In a...

Picking up where we left off last week, this week’s episode travels further down cinephilic memory lane…or should we say, further forward. We check back in with the panel from Formative Filmmakers Part One—Nick Davis, professor of film, literature, and gender studies at Northwestern; Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia and the September/October FC feature on immigration cinema “A Double Li...

There’s nothing like first love, especially when it’s projected on the silver screen. This week’s episode of the podcast revisits formative cinematic fascinations—one director who kickstarted cinephilia at a young age, and another who reinvigorated and maybe even recontextualized the passion a bit later down the road. This week’s participants—Nick Davis, professor of film, literature, and gender s...

Nick Pinkerton’s feature in the new issue, “The Golden Age of Campus Film Societies,” serves as a point of departure for a discussion on the role of campus film culture in shaping cinephilia. In this podcast, Dave Kehr, author and curator of film at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and film critic J. Hoberman talk to Pinkerton about their experiences in campus film culture. Campus film societies n...

This week, The Film Comment Podcast welcomes back seminal critic David Bordwell to discuss his new book Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. Instead of approaching the decade through the lens of one genre or auteur, Bordwell thinks about the stylistic hallmarks that distinguished the decade—for example, screenwriting conventions like flashbacks—and how they paved...

Have we passed 100 episodes already? Apparently so! This week, we invite listeners to look back at some of the most memorable moments of The Film Comment Podcast, including choice blurts from Kent Jones, Amy Taubin, Maitland McDonagh, Molly Haskell, Nick Pinkerton, and other special guests. We also look forward with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca’s interview with Ruben Östlund about The Square,...

This Halloween, The Film Comment Podcast salutes a filmmaker whose work, according to the British Board of Film Classification, exemplified the “pornography of terror.” The panel—Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization assistant at the Smithsonian National African-American Museum of History and Culture; Margaret Barton-Fumo, longtime FC contributor and editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews;...

Premiered in Venice and recently screened in the New York Film Festival, Zama marks not only the long-awaited return of Lucrecia Martel, but also her first literary adaptation. Martel expanded on the first-person fever dream of the original 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, whose fans included Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast ruminates on Zama’s...

Armando Iannucci has long had a genius for the absurdity of global politics, from his work on the satirical news program On the Hour in the 1990s, to the British ministry antics of The Thick of It, to his HBO series Veep. But his new film, The Death of Stalin, set amidst the immediate and ridiculous aftermath of the Soviet leader’s death in 1953, comes at a time when the political situation in Ame...

At the conclusion of the 55th New York Film Festival, Film Comment gathered together a panel of contributors and critics for one final live roundtable. For this “Festival Wrap” talk, the critics discussed festival favorites and curiosities, including films by Lucrecia Martel, Claire Denis, Ruben Östlund, Valeska Grisebach, and more. The critics weighing in this time around are Nellie Killian, prog...