Every January, to ring in the new year, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute take a look at some of the major new releases of the holiday season. This year, they were joined by critics Sam Adams and Nicholas Russell to run down some of the blingier titles that have recently graced the marquees of multiplexes and streaming sites alike, including Avatar: The Way of Water, Babylon, Glass Onion, and the A.I.-horror flick M3GAN. Needless to say, opinions ran as hot as the blood of a vengeful space whale ..read more

Happy new year to our listeners, and thanks for joining us for another year of writing and talking about movies. We’ll dive into the new year’s new releases very soon, but today’s podcast is about one of 2022’s late but great entries: No Bears, the latest meta-fictional masterwork from Jafar Panahi. In the film, Panahi plays a slightly fictionalized version of himself, as a controversial filmmaker holed up in an Iranian border-village, trying to evade the surveillance of the authorities while remotely directing a film set in nearby Turkey. What starts as a seemingly gentle satire becomes a tim ..read more

A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away... Well, actually, just a few weeks ago, right here on the good old internet, our esteemed colleague, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, tweeted out two simple words: TÁR WARS. He was referring, of course, to the swirl of controversy around TÁR, one of this year’s most talked-about films. The movie, directed by Todd Field and featuring a central performance from Cate Blanchett, tracks the gradual downfall of one Lydia Tár, the egomaniacal and possibly predatory conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Though a likely lock for many end-of-year lists, TÁR ha ..read more

On our final podcast from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, FC co-editor Devika Girish talks to filmmakers Deborah Stratman, Mary Helena Clark, and Mike Gibisser about their fantastic new films, which premiered in the festival’s New Frontier section. Stratman’s Last Things explores the history of our universe through the point of view of rocks. She combines stunning images of rocks with interviews with a geoscientist and excerpts from various sci-fi texts—read by the filmmaker Valerie Massadian—to craft a narrative of the past and the future that decenters humans, and invites us to think bey ..read more

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Dessane Lopez Cassell (SEEN), Poulomi Das (The Playlist), and Jessica Kiang (Variety) join FC’s Devika Girish for another round of Sundance conversation. This time around, the critics discuss festival selections Passages, Shortcomings, A Thousand and One, and Milisuthando. Catch up on all of our Sundance ..read more

This week’s podcast is about one of America’s favorite genres: cop movies. The episode takes inspiration from a series that recently screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, titled “Watch the Cops: Policing New York in the Movies,” curated by scholar Pooja Rangan and filmmaker Brett Story. The program included a small but eclectic range of films, including big-budget genre flicks Copland and Dog Day Afternoon, which show how ambivalence about policing is often resolved in pop culture; the documentary Making “Do the Right Thing”, a behind-the-scenes record of the Spike Lee classic and a glimp ..read more

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Miriam Bale (Indie Memphis Film Festival) and Abby Sun (International Documentary Association) return for another round of Sundance conversation with Film Comment’s Devika Girish. This time, they discuss festival selections Fair Play, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Rye Lane, and The Tuba Thieves. Catch up ..read more

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish talks to critics Justin Chang (The Los Angeles Times and Fresh Air) and Jessica Kiang (Variety and elsewhere) about Sundance selections Eileen, You Hurt My Feelings, Past Lives (pro-side this time), and Cat Person. Catch up on all of our Sun ..read more

The leaves are changing color, and there’s a chill in the air. That means, of course, that List Season is upon us. This year is special: Sight & Sound is publishing their Greatest Films of All Time list. Every decade since 1952, the British magazine polls critics, programmers, and filmmakers from all over the world to compile a definitive ranking of the best movies ever made.  At last month’s Getting Real conference, organized by the International Documentary Association, Film Comment co-presented a critics panel exploring the relevance of such lists especially when it comes to docume ..read more

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Film Comment’s Devika Girish talks to Vadim Rivov(Filmmaker Magazine) and Dan Sullivan (Film at Lincoln Center) about Sundance selections Fremont, Gush, Polite Society, and A Common Sequence. They also dig into the festival’s New Frontier section and whether or not there’s such a thing as a “Sundance fil ..read more