For this episode, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish is joined by Cannes veterans and all-star FC critics Bilge Ebiri and Jonathan Romney, whose dispatch on the festival’s early days will be in Friday’s Film Comment Letter. The three discuss and debate some of the most buzzy titles that have screened to date, including George Miller’s would-be blockbuster Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Magnus van Horn’s The Girl With the Needle, Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Roberto Minervini’s The Damned, and Rúnar Rúnarsson’s When the Light Breaks....

Listen/Subscribe:

Listen/Subscribe:

The movie’s release is the perfect time to talk about Scorsese and his work, and explore exactly where The Irishman takes us. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Shonni Enelow, associate professor at Fordham University and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; Molly Haskell, critic and author whose books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films; and Film Comment regular Michael Koresky, co-editor of the Reverse Shot book, Martin Scorsese: He Is Cinema....

On today’s episode, Film Comment editor Devika Girish interviews Preciado about the making of Orlando, My Political Biography, his decision to make a collective portrait rather than a biopic, and about the violence that cinema has inflicted on trans people across history—and how we can use moving images to pave the path for a different future. Orlando, My Political Biography is currently in theaters.

To kick things off, Film Comment’s Devika Girish invited FC friends and critics Abby Sun (International Documentary Association) and Alissa Wilkinson (Vox) to chat about some of the opening night films—including The Longest Goodbye, Kim’s Video, and The Pod Generation—and the titles they’re most excited to see in the coming days. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here.

Listen/Subscribe:

In the spirit of the episode from last summer that returned to the summer of ’66, here we look back on Connor’s “coincidence of the calendar,” which produced the cinema of 1977. Maitland McDonagh, author of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and publisher of 120 Days Books, shares her memories of moviegoing in seventies Times Square and shares her insights on horror classics that premiered in ’77, including The Hills Have Eyes, Suspiria, and Exorcist II: The Heretic....

Listen/Subscribe:

Of the many edifying pleasures of Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood, the first and most striking is the notion that anything like a “Red Hollywood” existed in the first place. The 1996 essay-documentary details the phenomenon: during the 1940s and ’50s, numerous Communist (and Communist-sympathizing) filmmakers were making ideologically charged contributions to Hollywood cinema. Andersen and Burch’s illustrated history deploys clips from over 50 different films written and directed by victims of the Hollywood blacklist to describe a corpus of politically and socially engaged filmmaking that is nearly inconceivable in today’s industry....

I’d like to rack focus from process to thematic concerns for a bit, or at least start thinking about how they’re conjoined. Just as the “two-fisted Bresson” is a little misleading, so is the strictly process-oriented Bresson. I think a lot of the initial “Bresson is [X]” stuff (austere, Jansenist, minimalist, and so on) was a way of coping with his utter strangeness within the context of film culture in the 60s and 70s....

The Master (#1) This is challenging work from a filmmaker who continues to push himself artistically; in 50 years The Master might be as revered as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was unprepared for the enormity of The Master, not in size but in depth. The attention to detail in this film is incredible, not just in the visual aesthetic but in the nuances of the characters. P.T. Anderson nails the tone of postwar America without ever falling into clichés and instead creates a whole new sensibility for the term “lost soul....

The Girl on the Bridge The blindingly blonde fifties no-good-girl Beverly Michaels may have started young (she was a child model at age 9), but to watch her in her greatest films—post-noir low-rent masterworks like Hugo Haas’s The Girl on the Bridge and Pickup (both 51) and Russell Rouse’s Wicked Woman (53)—is to witness a woman in no hurry to get anywhere fast. Sublimely sullen, she often seemed as if she could barely be bothered to drag her carcass across the room ....

It seems like yesterday – and yet a million light-years ago. The Eighties, the decade that gave birth to and then sanctified the phenomenon of “indie rock,” was also, not so coincidentally, the heyday of the incendiary SoCal art-punk trio, the Minutemen. Although their career trajectory terminated with the tragic 1985 death of their voluminous and voluble guitar-playing singer, D. Boon, they will forever hold a place in the pantheon of the homegrown DIY ethos....