The Film Comment Podcast

It’s Sundance, day two! On this edition of our daily Sundance 2017 podcast, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, discuss three new films—Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President, and Elan and Jonathan Bogarin’s 306 Hollywood—as well as the weather and the experience of moviegoing at this unique festival. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

Before the madness begins, Film Comment kicks things off with a glimpse of what to expect from the hectic experience that is the Sundance Film Festival—how it sets the tone for the coming year and what it means to cinema lovers. Join Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes, FC contributor and Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image, every day during the festival at noon. They will discuss what they’ve seen, what they hope to see, and everything in between. The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels

“Can a meretricious, inane movie with nothing else to recommend it produce a radiant, rousing film score?” asks Gary Giddins in “Rolling Thunder,” the January/February 2018 edition of Film Comment‘s “Playing Along” column. “Very rarely,” he answers. Although Giddins isolates Franz Waxman’s score for Taras Bulba as a specific example, the guests on this week’s episode of the Film Comment Podcast each provide a couple more, which led to reminiscences about genre sampler OSTs, unlikely pop music cues, and whether or not Steven Spielberg’s idea of humor is just…shouting. For this conversation, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Tom Scharpling, host of The Best Show, and frequent FC contributors Margaret Barton-Fumo and Nick Pinkerton.

“In Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, love can be—quite literally—a miracle,” writes Sheila O’Malley in her January/February 2018 Film Comment cover story, “Love, After a Fashion.” “People are scarred by life, their emotional resilience decimated by disappointments and neglect. But sometimes love is offered and, as Blanche DuBois says, famously, in A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly!’ That’s the redemptive romantic journey of Phantom Thread, where Reynolds says to Alma at one point that she may very well keep his ‘sour heart from choking.’” Of course, Phantom Thread is no familiar story of redemption through romance. O’Malley joins FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca on this week’s Film Comment Podcast to discuss its beguiling, and even radical, twist on a love story.

Stories about Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct and cover-ups have opened the floodgates of revelations about other figures in the entertainment industry and beyond. Victims have finally been able to come forward and be heard, while the #metoo movement has fueled conversation and action, amidst an Internet outrage machine that can cheapen dialogue. In this episode of The Film Comment Podcast, Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Molly Haskell, author of the landmark 1974 text From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and regular critic to Film Comment; Monica Castillo, the film writer for The New York Times’s Watching; and Aliza Ma, head programmer at the Metrograph Theater, for an in-depth conversation about the implications of this historic moment. Purchase our feminist film anthology in our app: https://reader.filmcomment.com/contents_page/table-of-contents-feminist-film/pugpig_index.html

As filmmaker and critic Jeff Reichert put it in his January/February 2017 Film Comment feature on Steve Bannon’s documentary work, “We could dismiss Bannon as the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of shoddily made straight-to-video white supremacist documentary. But his tactics have helped put Trump in the White House, so what can we learn about Bannon or America from watching them?” This episode of the Film Comment podcast tackles that very question. Reichert, along with Chapo Trap House podcast co-host Will Menaker and FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca, looks back on Bannon’s nine films released under the “Citizens United” banner. It goes without saying that there’s a lot to talk about regarding their unlikely aesthetic sensibility (sales presentation meets Leni Riefenstahl meets Michael Bay meets Vic Berger ECUs) and their characterizations of history and reality. The panel also digs into the past 15 years of political documentary on the right and the left (hello, Adam Curtis!), including the ways in which filmmakers package narratives, fact-check their material, and consider their audiences.

Sleepovers offer kids a special opportunity to hang out with their friends largely unsupervised, free to chat and dream way after bedtime. The types of films that can be discovered—and obsessively re-watched—during the wee small hours of the morning can frighten, enlighten, or amuse, which is why it’s a natural subject for this podcast. Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Nellie Killian, film programmer and FC Contributing Editor; Michael Koresky, Editorial Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Andrew Chan, Web Editor for the Criterion Collection. Pull up a pillow and listen!

As another year of moviegoing comes to a close, relax by your fire or space heater with the results of the annual Film Comment critics’ poll! The top ten theatrical releases of the year, in the humble opinion of FC contributors and editors, are unveiled on this week’s podcast by Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold, Film Society Editorial Director Michael Koresky, and Digital Producer Violet Lucca. In addition to discussing what stood out (or might have been flawed) about the top-voted films, each critic also shares a film they wish had made the cut—lists have their limits, so think of ours as a way of starting a conversation about the year in film. Visit filmcomment.com/best-of-2017 to see the full results.

Picking up where we left off last week, this week’s episode travels further down cinephilic memory lane…or should we say, further forward. We check back in with the panel from Formative Filmmakers Part One—Nick Davis, professor of film, literature, and gender studies at Northwestern; Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia and the September/October FC feature on immigration cinema “A Double Life”; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Violet Lucca, Film Comment Digital Producer and podcast host—to dive deep into their memories of another early favorite filmmaker. This time, the critics move away from their earliest fascinations toward the directors they found later in life, especially ones who might have redefined their preconceived notions about the medium. Héctor Babenco, Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, and Abbas Kiarostami all crop up in this half.

There’s nothing like first love, especially when it’s projected on the silver screen. This week’s episode of the podcast revisits formative cinematic fascinations—one director who kickstarted cinephilia at a young age, and another who reinvigorated and maybe even recontextualized the passion a bit later down the road. This week’s participants—Nick Davis, professor of film, literature, and gender studies at Northwestern; Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia and the September/October FC feature on immigration cinema “A Double Life”; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Violet Lucca, Film Comment Digital Producer and podcast host—took a breather between TIFF screenings to discuss their favorites, as well as how their emotions have evolved with (or been challenged by) the passage of time. Jane Campion, Manmohan Desai, Ingmar Bergman, and Quentin Tarantino make this half!