The Film Comment Podcast

In a recent essay, critic Isabel Stevens writes: “There is much discussion of childishness—popular cinema is often described as ‘infantilized’—but how often do we consider what children want and need from films, and what they are watching and where (outside the usual narrow, artificial controversies about the dangers film poses to their innocent minds)? How are their critical faculties and underst...

The Flaherty Film Seminar is one of the nonfiction film world’s most interesting events. Founded by Frances Flaherty in 1955 in honor of her late husband, Robert—the documentarian best known for Nanook of the North (1922)—the Seminar brings together scholars, artists, programmers, critics, and more to watch and intimately discuss a selection of works curated by rotating guest programmers. But here...

In April 2021, Film Comment published a Trans Cinema Roundtable Podcast, in which two trans film critics and two trans filmmakers answered questions submitted by listeners on what constitutes a cinema of transness. Now, two of those panelists—Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay—are about to publish a new book on that very subject. Corpses, Fools and Monsters is a thorough inquiry into the...

Critics have been buzzing about Richard Linklater’s Hit Man since it premiered at festivals last year. A charming mix of screwball and noir, the film takes inspiration from the real-life story of Gary Johnson, a schoolteacher who for years moonlighted as a pretend hit man in Houston, helping local police entrap folks who would reach out to him to order a killing. Hit Man stars Glen Powell, who als...

For the last two weeks, our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors has been reporting from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. Before the festival officially drew to a close last Saturday, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish moderated a panel about documentary ethics in the Cannes Docs section of the Marché du Film. Curated by t...

Cannes 2024 is in wrapping up this weekend—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors has been high-tailing it from screening to screening, cutting through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. For our (nearly) final episode from the sunny shores of Southern France, Dennis Lim, Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival, and Justi...

Cannes 2024 is in full swing—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors has been high-tailing it from screening to screening, cutting through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. On our latest episode from the sunny shores of Southern France, critics Beatrice Loayza, Giovanni Marchini Camia, and Caitlin Quinlan join Film Comment Edito...

Cannes 2024 is in full swing—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors has been high-tailing it from screening to screening, cutting through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. On our latest episode from the sunny shores of Southern France, critics Guy Lodge and Adam Piron join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to share their reacti...

Cannes 2024 is in full swing—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors has been high-tailing it from screening to screening, cutting through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. For our latest episode from the shores of the Riviera, critics Robert Daniels, Miriam Bale, and Mark Asch join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish for a discus...

Cannes 2024 has arrived—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors is high-tailing it from screening to screening, ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. On today’s episode, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish is joined by Kevin B. Lee, Abby Sun, and Vadim Rizov to debate their differing reactions to Jia Zhangke’s Cau...

Cannes 2024 has arrived—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors is high-tailing it from screening to screening, ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. On today’s episode, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish sat down with Canadian filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson to discuss their new film Rumou...

Cannes 2024 has arrived—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors is high-tailing it from screening to screening, ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. For today’s episode, critics Kelli Weston and Jessica Kiang join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to unpack three of the most highly anticipated premieres of the...

Cannes 2024 has arrived—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors is high-tailing it from screening to screening, ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. For this episode, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish is joined by Cannes veterans and all-star FC critics Bilge Ebiri and Jonathan Romney, whose dispatch on the fes...

Cannes 2024 has arrived—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors is high-tailing it from screening to screening, ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. To kick things off, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish sat down with our contributor Beatrice Loayza (stay tuned for her dispatch next week) and Sight and Sound’s I...

Avant-garde cinema emerged in direct conversation with the film criticism that contextualized, championed, and critiqued it. Writing about work that is premised on defying formulaic intelligibility, and which invites us to reach beyond language to other modes of interpretation, can be both challenging and thrilling—requiring the critic to draw on a deep historical knowledge and a finely-tuned sens...

Every year, Film at Lincoln Center honors a luminary of the film industry with the Chaplin Award. This year’s honoree is a beloved screen icon: the Dude, the Starman, the legend—Jeff Bridges. In advance of the 49th Chaplin Award Gala, taking place on April 29, Devika sat down with Bridges for a look back at the actor’s long career. Taking inspiration from a painting Bridges made many years ago, ti...

From the early ’70s onwards, Indian cinematographer Navroze Contractor—who passed away last year at age 80—blazed a trail of radical image-making. Trained in fine arts, photography, and cinematography, Contractor wielded the camera as a weapon and a paintbrush, capturing both the thrills and the throes of popular uprisings in films that defined political documentary in India, and giving stunning f...

In his new book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz writes that, “The American poet Amiri Baraka described James Baldwin, who was born a year before Fanon, as ‘God’s Black revolutionary mouth.’ What Baldwin was for America, Fanon was for the world, especially the insurgent Third World, those subjects of European empires who had been denied what Edward Said calle...

Christine Smallwood’s new book on Chantal Akerman’s Proust adaptation, La Captive, is, among many things, a meditation on the act of criticism. Published as part of The Decadent Editions series from Fireflies Press, this slim, pocket-sized volume takes Akerman’s year-2000 feature as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the great Belgian filmmaker’s monumental career and life, Marcel Proust’s...

Last fall, director Bertrand Bonello’s latest, The Beast, was a thrilling highlight of the festival circuit. The film is a loose, two-and-a-half-hour, time-and-space-jumping adaptation of Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, in which a man refuses love believing that he is destined for a catastrophe. In The Beast, a woman named Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is thwarted in her quest for rom...

Every spring the New Directors/New Films festival at Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA puts on an exciting showcase of movies by the best emerging filmmakers around the world. It’s always a reliable sign of the trends to come and the talents to look out for—past editions have featured early films by Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Kelly Reichardt, and others. Over the past few years, Film Comment has...

In our May-June 2020 issue, the scholar Aboubakar Sanogo wrote of Med Hondo, the late, great Mauritanian-French filmmaker: “For Hondo, decolonization and independence were not simply a matter of regime change from colonial to postcolonial, but rather a radical geopolitical and avant-gardist project. The cinema had its part to play in the realization of this emancipatory vision by liberating itself...

It’s once again that time of year: that’s right, the Academy Awards are just around the corner. Before the winners are revealed on Sunday, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute teamed up with some colleagues from Tinseltown—the editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books—to preview this year’s nominees. Eric Newman, editor-at-large at LARB, and Annie Berke, the publication’s Film &am...

The 2024 Berlinale wrapped up on Sunday, February 25, after a fortnight of buzzy premieres and fraught political controversies. The Film Comment crew was on the ground throughout the festival, reporting on each day’s goings-on via daily Podcasts, dispatches, interviews and more. On the final Friday of the festival, FC Editor Devika Girish gathered critics Jordan Cronk, Giovanni Marchini Camia, and...

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2024 Berlinale kicked off on February 15. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Olivier Assayas, Mati Diop, Bruno Dumont, Hong Sangsoo, and many more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter here to stay up-to-date. On...