The Film Comment Podcast

A new film from Mike Leigh is always a cause for celebration. Starting with his first feature Bleak Moments in 1971, Leigh has carved out a singular place in British and global cinema for his beautifully sensitive and detailed portraits of the lives of his largely working-class characters. His latest, Hard Truths, arrives six years after his previous release, the 2018 historical drama Peterloo. Th...

Two enigmatic icons with enduring holds on the Western imagination are currently lighting up multiplex screens: fearsome Transylvanian vampire Dracula and Nobel Prize–winning American treasure Bob Dylan. Both released on Christmas Day, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown are ambitious efforts at crafting new and absorbing tales out of these two mainstays of pop culture...

On December 12, 2024, as part our annual winter list extravaganza, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish led a panel of special guests—Molly Haskell (critic, author), and Michael Koresky (critic, founding editor of Reverse Shot)—for a live real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate) about the...

Sleepily emerging from the turkey-induced haze of Thanksgiving break and looking ahead to the barrage of Best of 2024 lists, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critics Robert Daniels and Beatrice Loayza to discuss some of the most highly-anticipated Hollywood blockbusters (and would-be blockbusters) of this year’s holiday season. The group convened to offer their thoughts...

During the 2024 New York Film Festival, Film Comment’s Devika Girish had the chance to chat with Julianne Moore, one of the great American actresses of the last three decades and more. She was at the festival for the premiere of The Room Next Door, the first English-language feature film by Pedro Almodóvar, which stars Moore as a writer in New York who reconnects with an old friend, now in the lat...

When Payal Kapadia won a historic Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her second feature, All We Imagine as Light (the first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years), she paid homage to another Cannes prizewinner whose work has deeply influenced her: Miguel Gomes, whose Grand Tour won the award for Best Director. The resonances between their latest films go beyond C...

The films of Robert Kramer blend fiction and documentary modes to engage with, and expand on, traditions of militant political cinema and subjective essay filmmaking. A founding member of the New Left activist film collective Newsreel in 1967, Kramer devoted himself to the group’s radical ethos, but he also began to make his own hermetic and probing fiction films—like The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969...

As the 62nd New York Film Festival drew to a close last weekend, it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. This year, the end-of-fest ritual took place in collaboration with the New York Film Critics Circle, which will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2025. Devika and Clint were joined by NYFCC members Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye f...

Two films in this year’s New York Film Festival lineup grapple beautifully with the challenge of narrating stories of collective movements without giving in to the allure of the heroic individual protagonist. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Revivals selection Northern Lights (1978) stages the founding of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota—formed in the mid-1910s by farmers from that state—parall...

The films of Christopher Harris are haunting and cerebral in equal measure—blending the sensorial power of analog avant-garde cinema with a thoroughly researched and deeply felt engagement with African-American history. Starting in 2001 with the 16mm feature still/here, which was also his MFA thesis at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Harris has created a rich and versatile body of work...

This week, Film Comment is on the ground at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which began on September 5 and runs through September 15. This year, as ever, the festival’s lineup is full of buzzy titles, including new films from directors like Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Brady Corbet, Dea Kulumbegashvili, and more. For our fourth and final Podcast from the...

This week, Film Comment is on the ground at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which began on September 5 and runs through September 15. This year, as ever, the festival’s lineup is full of buzzy titles, including premieres of new films from directors like Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Brady Corbet, Dea Kulumbegashvili, and more. For our third Podcast from th...

This week, Film Comment is on the ground at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which began on September 5 and runs through September 15. This year, as ever, the festival’s lineup is full of buzzy titles, including premieres of new films from directors like Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Brady Corbet, Dea Kulumbegashvili, and more. For our second Podcast from t...

This week, Film Comment is on the ground at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which began on September 5 and runs through September 15. This year, as ever, the festival’s lineup is full of buzzy titles, including premieres of new films from directors like Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Brady Corbet, Dea Kulumbegashvili, and more.  For our first Podcast from t...

Last April, Film Comment invited writer Adam Shatz on the Podcast to talk about The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, his new biography of the Martinican writer, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary. The Podcast explored Fanon’s lasting impression on the world of cinema since his untimely death in 1961—and it became the basis for a four-day series of screenings and...

Last April, Film Comment invited writer Adam Shatz on the Podcast to talk about The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, his new biography of the Martinican writer, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary. The Podcast explored Fanon’s lasting impression on the world of cinema since his untimely death in 1961—and it became the basis for a four-day series of screenings and...

Last April, Film Comment invited writer Adam Shatz on the Podcast to talk about The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, his new biography of the Martinican writer, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary. The Podcast explored Fanon’s lasting impression on the world of cinema since his untimely death in 1961—and it became the basis for a four-day series of screenings and...

Last April, Film Comment invited writer Adam Shatz on the Podcast to talk about The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, his new biography of the Martinican writer, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary. The Podcast explored Fanon’s lasting impression on the world of cinema since his untimely death in 1961—and it became the basis for a four-day series of screenings and...

As part of this year's Locarno Film Festival, scholars at the Università della Svizzera italiana organized a conference called Cinema Audiovisual Futures, with a series of panels and workshops exploring cinema's importance in constructing a new and alternative futures. As part of the conference, Film Comment editor Devika Girish moderated a panel with filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri and writer and progr...

The Locarno Film Festival takes place every August in the Swiss town of Locarno, at the base of the Alps, with a robust mix of discovery titles, repertory selections, and premieres of films by major auteurs. Film Comment was on the ground this year, combing through the lineup for highlights, and this episode—featuring critics and curators Inney Prakash and Cici Peng in conversation with FC Editor...

For the third and final installment of our Summer Rep Report series, Sam Fleischner and Courtney Muller, the founding programmers of the Rockaway Film Festival, join Film Comment editor Devika Girish to discuss this year’s edition, which runs from August 17 to 25. Launched in 2018 in the Queens, New York oceanside neighborhood, the festival draws upon the cultural history and environmental feature...

For Part 2 of our Summer Rep Report, film programmer Jessica Green joins to discuss Passing You By: Impostorism on Film, a new series she’s programmed titled at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The series opens today and runs through August 15 and focuses on movies that all explore the act of passing—be it for another race, gender, class, or nationality.  Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devik...

Early August is usually something of a lull in the film calendar, but this year, at least in New York City, it’s proved to be a goldmine—particularly for repertory programming. We had planned to record a single episode of our Rep Report series this week, but there was so much good stuff out there that we ended up recording three different conversations about three different programs, which we’ll b...

The guest on this week’s episode will need little introduction to anyone who reads film criticism or follows film culture. Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the most prolific and respected critics of the last half-century, began his career at publications like Film Comment and Sight and Sound in the ’70s, and later became known for his writing at The Chicago Reader. More recently, he’s gained notice for...

In April, Film Comment published an article by Phillip Vance Smith II, titled “Streaming Behind Bars.” Phillip is an incarcerated writer, and his piece delves into the ways in which people in prison watch movies—the technology they’re able to use, the programming they can access, and the exorbitant costs involved. That piece was facilitated by Empowerment Avenue, an organization that supports inca...