The Film Comment Podcast

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TÁR WÁRS, with Jessica Kiang and Nathan Lee Dec 01, 2022

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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 has been fairly divisive among critics. So for today’s podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute took inspiration from Mr. Brody’s tweet and invited two well-matched gladiators—the valiant Jessica Kiang on the pro-side and the courageous Nathan Lee on the con—to debate the relative merits and demerits of TÁR. Two critics enter, one critic leaves… May the best critic win!

Pasolini at 100, with Radu Jude and Giovanni Marchini Camia Nov 15, 2022

Show notes

2022 marks the birth centenary of the great filmmaker, writer, and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini. To celebrate his legacy, Fireflies Press has published a new book, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper, featuring reflections from Mike Leigh, Helena Wittman, Alexandre Koberidze, Jia Zhangke, Angela Schanelec, and many other filmmakers on the powerful influence the auteur continues to exert on contemporary cinema. To discuss the book and reflect on Pasolini’s life and work, Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Giovanni Marchini Camia, co-publisher of Fireflies Press, and filmmaker Radu Jude, one of the contributors to Writing on Burning Paper. Among other great insights, Giovanni reveals how the title of the book—and in fact, the name “Fireflies Press” itself—was inspired by Pasolini’s writings, and Radu recalls his first encounters with Pasolini’s work at the Romanian Cinematheque in Bucharest in the early ’90s.

Cop Movies, with Brett Story and Pooja Rangan Nov 08, 2022

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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 glimpse into how movie-making impacts local communities; and the activist film, The Torture of Mothers: The Case of the Harlem 6, a docu-fiction about a famous 1965 case of police brutality and wrongful conviction. Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Brett and Pooja to discuss the thinking behind their selections and to guide them through the thought-provoking ideas underpinning the program. Check out the show page on filmcomment.com for links to several must-see films featured in the series.

Halloween Hangover 2022 with Steven Mears and Kelli Weston Nov 01, 2022

Show notes

It’s the time of year when ghosts, ghouls, and goblins are on the prowl. That’s right: it’s Halloween. Or, if we’re getting technical, the day after Halloween. And as much as Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are scared to admit it, that means it’s also time for another Halloween Hangover episode of the Film Comment Podcast, where the two confront one of their greatest fears—horror movies—with the help of some masters of the macabre. This year, Clint and Devika asked Kelli Weston, who literally holds a PhD in horror cinema, and Steven Mears, a critic and Film Comment’s famously nocturnal copyeditor, to inflict two movies of their choice upon us. Kelli chose the 1976 slasher flick Alice Sweet Alice, and Steve picked Jack Clayton’s Henry James adaptation The Innocents. Both movies were ultimately more goofy than scary, but they yielded a truly rich conversation about the role of religion, class, children, and more in horror.

Lists and the Documentary Canon, with Nick Bradshaw, Emerson Goo, Girish Shambu, and Kelli Weston Oct 25, 2022

Show notes

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 documentary films. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by critics Nick Bradshaw, Emerson Goo, Girish Shambu, and Kelli Weston to ask questions like: Are lists still useful in an age of democratizing cinema? What is the relationship between list-making and canonization? How can we collectively remake a more diverse and inclusive canon? And, of course, the fun part: which documentaries are likely to make this year’s Sight & Sound list? Listen to the end to hear our panelists’ best guesses! Read a transcript of this panel discussion here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mn6K6agPkLdRmYkIZc47QhVGSEzspynCvi5Aw6YdZQI/edit

NYFF60 Festival Report, with Phoebe Chen, Molly Haskell, and Kelli Weston Oct 18, 2022

Show notes

The 60th New York Film Festival closed up shop last weekend, which means that it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute convened an all-star team of critics—Phoebe Chen, Molly Haskell, and Kelli Weston—for a spirited wrap-up discussion about the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF60 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed Todd Field’s controversial TÁR, Alice Diop’s consensus favorite Saint Omer, Paul Schrader’s less-well-regarded Master Gardener, Joanna Hogg’s hall-of-mirrors The Eternal Daughter, and many other noteworthy selections.

Jerzy Skolimowski on EO Oct 14, 2022

Show notes

In his Cannes 2022 dispatch, Jonathan Romney wrote “Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO is a flamboyant, visionary work: its execution—including drone shots set to blazing red filters—and wayward, fragmented narrative showed an energy shared by that little else at the festival. Corny but true: the wildest, youngest film in the lineup was made by an 84-year-old director up for anything.” With EO making its US premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, we sat down with Skolimowski over Zoom to discuss his radical re-imagining of Bresson, which follows a pure-hearted donkey adrift in a cruel world. Though the filmmaker—known for such classics as Walkover, Deep End, Moonlighting, and many more—wasn’t able to attend this year’s festival in person, he was happy to field our many questions about his latest, a powerfully empathetic work of striking beauty and visual imagination.

Film Comment Live: On the Critical Attitude, with Laura Poitras, Elvis Mitchell, and Tiffany Sia Oct 12, 2022

Show notes

Taking its title from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, this talk explores the role of critique and criticism in the arts and beyond. Does critique represent a negative attitude to the world, or is it in fact an optimistic practice, one that allows us to imagine and work toward alternative and better realities? (Brecht, again: “Criticizing the course of a river means improving it, correcting it.”) Is criticism always a response to art, or can it be a form of art-making in itself? Can one effectively critique an institution or system while also living within it? Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute delved into these questions with a roundtable of directors—Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), Elvis Mitchell (Is That Black Enough for You?!?), and Tiffany Sia (What Rules the Invisible)—whose films from the NYFF60 lineup are as stunning as works of art as they are incisive as critiques—whether of history, society, or art itself.

2022 Amos Vogel Lecture by Cauleen Smith Oct 07, 2022

Show notes

2021 marked the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. To mark this occasion and honor Vogel’s path-blazing legacy, last year the festival inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. For this second edition of the Lecture, NYFF welcomed the filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith, whose landmark 1998 debut feature, Drylongso, screened in a new restoration in the Revivals section of this year’s festival. Known for the political rigor and intrepid formal experimentation of her film and multimedia practice, Smith epitomizes both the ethics of care and the commitment to subversion that guided Vogel’s mission. Smith’s address is followed by a Q&A with Jacqueline Stewart, the director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a Turner Classic Movies host, and is presented here for the first time. The 2022 Amos Vogel Lecture is sponsored by Turner Classic Movies. NYFF Talks are presented by HBO.

Remembering Godard, with Richard Brody and Blair McClendon Sep 27, 2022

Show notes

“Cinema is never on time,” wrote the great critic Serge Daney. That statement never seemed to apply to Jean-Luc Godard, an auteur who was always of his time and ahead of it—a relentless interrogator of the present who also sought the horizons of a new future. This week, as we mourn the recent passing of one of our greatest artists, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited two critics and Godard experts for a talk about the filmmaker’s life and career. Richard Brody writes about movies for The New Yorker and is the author of the must-read Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, and Blair McClendon is a film editor, regular Film Comment contributor, and author of a beautiful remembrance of Godard published by n+1. The four discussed Godard’s vast and protean filmography, from foundational works like Breathless and La Chinoise to masterful essay films like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book, and the ways in which Godard’s films awakened them, in their formative cinephilic years, to the aesthetic and political potentialities of cinema.

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