The Film Comment Podcast

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NYFF 2017 Live Roundtable Oct 17, 2017

Show notes

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, programmer and Film Comment contributing editor; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph; and Wesley Morris, critic-at-large for the New York Times. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca moderates and shares her thoughts.

The Cinema of Experience Oct 10, 2017

Show notes

In this special live episode of the podcast, moderated by Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, panelists Teo Bugbee (The New York Times contributor), writer-programmer Ashley Clark (BAMcinématek), and writer-filmmaker Farihah Zaman (Field of Vision) discuss how cinematic technique is used to reflect nonwhite perspectives and stories of immigration, and what is different about the latest generation of storytelling.

Steven Spielberg Oct 03, 2017

Show notes

Looking ahead to the New York Film Festival premiere of Susan Lacy’s documentary Spielberg, this week’s Film Comment podcast considers the household-name auteur: the architect of the modern blockbuster, and a surviving (and thriving) master of the Classical Hollywood vernacular. Molly Haskell is on hand to impart wisdom from her most recent book Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films, which came out in the spring, as well as firsthand recollections of writing about Spielberg in the age of second-wave feminism. She joins Film Society of Lincoln Center Editorial Director Michael Koresky, who edited the Reverse Shot book Steven Spielberg: Nostalgia and the Light, published with Museum of the Moving Image this summer, and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca for a discussion spanning Spielberg’s big marquee titles and his less appreciated works.

Bonus: Darren Aronofsky Oct 02, 2017

Show notes

This week, The Film Comment Podcast hosts a very special guest, himself a choreographer of uninvited guests on their worst behavior. A longtime practitioners of his own strain of emotional extremity, Darren Aronofsky sat for an interview to discuss his new film mother! with FC Editor Nicolas Rapold. Instead of allegorical exegesis, the conversation covers the film’s technical craft and its intense subjectivity, as well as what Aronofsky learned from his college professor…Miklós Jancsó. You can listen below, as long as you don’t overstay your welcome and dislodge an unbraced sink.

Robert Mitchum Sep 26, 2017

Show notes

The centerpiece retrospective of this year’s New York Film Festival celebrates the centenary of Robert Mitchum, paragon of fatalist cool. In her September/October ’17 Film Comment feature “Running Deep,” Imogen Sara Smith observes that Mitchum’s acting “goes on under the surface: amusement, sadness, anger, or banked-down warmth seep through his face the way coals glow through a layer of ash when you blow on them. To think of him ‘accessing emotion’ or ‘creating a character’ feels wrong.” This week, each critic—Smith, NYFF Director and Mitchum retrospective co-programmer Kent Jones, and FC Editorial Assistant and frequent TCM Diarist Steven Mears—brings in a Mitchum performance to delve into. Even if Mitchum self-deprecatingly claimed that he favored the Smirnoff method over Stanislavski, every example deepens our sense of the creative skill set that he kept close to the vest throughout his career. As always, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca hosts and moderates.

Twin Peaks: The Return Sep 20, 2017

Show notes

This week’s Film Comment podcast requires very little introduction beyond the topic—Twin Peaks: The Return, a work that is both a heartfelt refraction of David Lynch’s 50 years of creative output and a medium-reshaping beast unto itself. But rather than presume that 45 minutes is enough time to hone in on any single airtight interpretation (or that it would be any fun to do so), the goal is to strike an analytical balance, seeking useful context while allowing the dream to remain a dream. From some subconscious alcove above a convenience store, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, about Lynch and the recent 18-episode run.

Live From TIFF ’17 Sep 13, 2017

Show notes

With every festival comes a new round of roundtables, so if you couldn’t make it to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, you can still listen to this week’s episode of the podcast and start planning ahead for when the lineup comes to a theater or streaming service near you. And luckily, the talking points of this year’s TIFF are varied: the highly anticipated return of Lucrecia Martel; adventurous new films from familiar faces like Alexander Payne and Darren Aronofsky; and mesmerizing documentary work from Wang Bing, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca discusses and debates the selection with a panel of FC contributors, including Eric Hynes, associate curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image; Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph; Adam Nayman, Cinema Scope contributor; Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle; and Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Mudbound Sep 05, 2017

Show notes

Screening in the New York Film Festival a little over a month after the white supremacist horror in Charlottesville, Dee Rees’s Mudbound has a shocking urgency. Charting the relationship between a black sharecropping family and a white landowning family in Mississippi during and immediately after World War II, the film is truly epic in scale and theme. In the new issue, Ashley Clark, senior programmer of cinema at BAM and frequent Film Comment contributor, writes “Mudbound is thrillingly ambitious and complex, and features daring experimental flourishes, including a multicharacter narration that, while initially a touch overbearing, ultimately lends the film an apposite epistolary quality—repressed characters who are physically or emotionally adrift from their families are given voice, to powerful dramatic effect.” In this episode, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Clark and Eric Hynes, associate film curator at Museum of the Moving Image in New York, to discuss the film.

Revenge Of Movie Gifts Aug 29, 2017

Show notes

In May, we premiered our very first gift-giving episode. In it, each critic chose two films for another participant to experience for the first time. The first was a film that they’d be interested in hearing that person talk about; the second was a film that they thought the other might genuinely like. It didn’t always work out that way, though. To continue the tradition, we offer a very special gift-giving episode in reverse order, and our resulting conversation runs the gamut from Andrew Dice Clay to Stephen Chow to Barbra Streisand. As you’ll hear, sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish which film was intended to amuse and which aimed to abuse, but each gift gave way to surprising appreciation and lively conversation. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Michael Koresky, Editorial Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Nick Pinkerton, regular contributor to Film Comment, and Aliza Ma, Head of Programming at Metrograph.

Nocturama + Terrorism Aug 22, 2017

Show notes

Reducing Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama to a straightforward psychological reading barely scratches the surface—which is exactly what makes the film a productive starting point for this week’s Film Comment Podcast. When setting out to make a film depicting terrorism, filmmakers must thoughtfully parse out aesthetic choices about narrative tone and character intentionality, while also being mindful of the potential impact of historical memory. FC Digital Editor Violet Lucca is joined by Aliza Ma, head programmer at Metrograph, and Jeff Reichert, filmmaker and co-editor of Reverse Shot, to look at a few specific approaches spanning national and historical contexts—a varied sample set, from Olivier Assayas to Paul Greengrass to Japanese director Kazuhiko Hasegawa.

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