The Film Comment Podcast

Though we’re taught to compartmentalize historical movements into discrete events and dates, the truth (or what we know of it) is anything but. Four recent films— Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor, Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart, Amos Gitai’s Rabin, the Last Day, and Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul—take very different but ambitious aesthetic approaches to historical trauma. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by FILM COMMENT's Nicolas Rapold, The Nation critic Stuart Klawans, and New York Times and FILM COMMENT contributor J. Hoberman to discuss these films’ varying approaches, strengths, and blind spots. We also have a special interview with French icon Isabelle Huppert, who spoke with Yonca Talu about Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love and working with Maurice Pialat and Claude Chabrol (with a few words about her next collaborator, Michael Haneke).

Criticism gets a bad rap a lot of the time, even from its practitioners. But rather than a defense of criticism, A.O. Scott. a chief film critic for The New York Times, has written a kind of long-form thought experiment around the profession that traces the impetuses behind criticism and its myriad functions. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism explores how we determine our own taste, the value and function of criticism in our current media environment, some (low) points in its history, and rhetorical issues, pulling from a wide variety of texts from poetry to performance art to criticism in its many guises. FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Scott and another veteran critic, Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com and New York magazine, to discuss ideas raised by the book and how larger changes in media have affected their careers and the profession at large

It's that most wonderful time of year: Film Comment Selects! This edition of our annual series of eclectic, international, and avant-garde films offered a host of pleasures: a revival of Chantal Akerman’s musical Golden Eighties, Terence Davies's exquisite period piece Sunset Song, new films by Benoît Jacquot, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Alexei German Jr., and a special spotlight on the work of recently deceased Polish auteur Andrzej Żuławski. On Saturday, Film Comment's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold assembled contributors Eric Hynes, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Michael Koresky to discuss the work of Davies and Żuławski in front of a live audience during Film Comment Selects. The special edition was called Film Comment, Live!

Now that “takes,” gossip, and conversations about film can be instantly broadcast to the world, it’s sometimes easy to forget that above all else, film criticism is an act of writing. In a frank and accessible dialogue, Mark Harris, film historian and Vulture columnist, Eric Hynes, critic, journalist, and Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, talk about the writers and larger cultural trends (be it the rise of VHS or social media) that have shaped their own approaches to the medium.

At first blush, the Coen Brothers and Peter Greenaway don’t appear to have much in common except that their new films, Hail, Caesar!and Eisenstein in Guanajuato, both came out the same day. Yet their films used to share art-house marquee space in the late '80s and early '90s when they attracted notoriety and criticism of all stripes. Although their paths have diverged considerably, their new films are united by the way in which the filmmakers construct a world of artifice, steeped in references yet inhabited in very different ways: for the Coens, it’s the glitzy movie-verse of Capitol Pictures; for Greenaway, it’s a wild combination of art history, politics, and Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film, ¡Que viva México!. FILM COMMENT's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold are joined by Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to discuss these films and especially the Coen Brothers' ever-evolving oeuvre.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center recently mounted a major retrospective of Douglas Sirk’s films, which included his first German productions from the Thirties (The Girl from the Marsh Croft, La Habanera) to his Technicolor melodramas of the Fifties (All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind). A masterful observer of American society—like fellow German émigrés Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch—Sirk’s films explore uncomfortable, unspoken truths and conjure complicated, conflicting feelings. FILM COMMENT’s Violet Lucca sat down with FC contributors Nick Pinkerton, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Ashley Clark to discuss race and representation in Taza, Son of Cochise (54), The Tarnished Angels (57), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (58), Imitation of Life (59), and more.

What were the noteworthy performances of 2015? And what different kinds of performance are there? Mindful of actors that weren’t nominated during awards season, FILM COMMENT's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold sat down with regular FC contributor Nick Pinkerton and Michael Koresky, editor of Reverse Shot and director of publications of the upcoming Metrograph theater in New York, to talk about their favorite (and least favorite) acting moments.

Rejoice, o ye year-end list obsessives! Digital editor Violet Lucca sat down with senior editor Nicolas Rapold, contributing editor and New York Film Festival Selection Committee Member Amy Taubin, and regular contributor Nick Pinkerton to discuss the top 20 films as determined by our annual critics’ poll. Their wide-ranging discussion weighs the list’s revelations (and peculiarities), what should’ve been on the list, and why Viggo Mortensen is so gosh darn dreamy. As always, the FILM COMMENT list of the year’s best films is the result of polling over 100 colleagues and consists of two categories: 1) the best films that received theatrical runs in 2015 and 2) the year’s best films that have no announced plans for U.S. theatrical distribution.

A New York Film Festival Live talk, recorded October 9th, where Film Comment editors and contributors discussed this year's NYFF. Participants: Wesley Morris of The New York Times; Eric Hynes, critic, reporter, and Film Comment columnist; Michael Koresky, staff writer of The Criterion Collection and co-editor-in-chief of Reverse Shot; Aliza Ma, programmer, critic, and author of the Film Comment September/October cover story on The Assassin; Film Comment Senior Editor Nicolas Rapold; and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca.

Melissa Anderson (contributor to Artforum, The Village Voice, and other publications) and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca speak about the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey.