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We hope you’ve been following along the last two weeks as we’ve shared excerpts from Devika’s hosting shift at the event, featuring conversations with filmmaker Helena Wittman, curator Giovanni Carmine, this year’s Golden Leopard–winner Julia Murat, and others. Next up is a very exciting guest: artist, filmmaker, and critic Hito Steyerl, who talks about teaching on Minecraft during the pandemic, maintaining techno-optimism in very pessimistic times, and the distinction between attention and voyeurism....

On today’s episode, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish is joined by Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival, for a special interview with filmmaker Todd Haynes about his fest hit, May December. Inspired by a real-life scandal from the 1990s, the film stars Julianne Moore as Gracie, an older woman who, a couple decades ago, was convicted of having an affair with a 13-year-old. Gracie and her younger lover now share a seemingly cozy married life that starts to fracture when an actress (Natalie Portman) arrives at their home to do research for a movie based on the affair....

On May 9, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Amy Taubin, Genevieve Yue, and Ayanna Dozier, some of the best critics of the avant-garde working today, to discuss the history of the craft, the nitty-gritty of this niche beat, what good writing on avant-garde cinema looks and sounds like, and what to even call the genre—avant-garde? Experimental? The other cinema? The talk took place at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Downtown Manhattan as part of this year’s edition of Prismatic Ground, an exemplary and boundary-pushing festival dedicated to experimental documentary....

21 Grams (Gustavo Santaolalla) Sometimes a film score’s distinctive design or instrumentation can substitute for real composition. Santaolalla’s overcranked, deep-throated guitar gives soul to these minimal blues cues. When coupled with the accordion-like sound of the harmonium and bandoneon or, in one cue, with the Kronos Quartet, those guitar musings suggest the mournfulness that the film ultimately fails to achieve. Angels in America (Thomas Newman) A massed string orchestra playing in clean ethereal unison lines is the strongest, most memorable voice in this fantasia about AIDS and Eighties America....

The 65th Cannes Film Festival may have come and gone, but its spirit, and the critical anaylsis thereof, continue. Below, a sampling of Film Comment Top 10 lists. Peruse our website and seek out a hardcopy of the magazine for more in-depth coverage. AMY TAUBIN 1. This Is Not a Film Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran 2. Melancholia Lars von Trier, Denmark 3. Chronicle of a Summer (restoration) Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, France 4....

In 1920, painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand collaborated on Manhatta, widely regarded as the first American avant-garde film and the progenitor of the so-called City Symphony film. It chronicles a day in the life of New York City, shot over several months, surveying five square blocks of lower Manhattan from a variety of vertiginous angles. You can read the complete version of this article in the September / October 2003 print edition of Film Comment....

(Brother and Sister, Arnaud Desplechin, 2022) The most beloved films by Arnaud Desplechin—in particular his mid-to-late-aughts masterworks Kings & Queen and A Christmas Tale—are full-course meals: delightfully rich, flavorful, and multilayered experiences that feel like they’re serving up three or four movies in one. Over the past decade, however, the French director’s output has largely alternated between smaller-budget, tightly focused projects such as 2013’s psychoanalysis drama Jimmy P. and last year’s Philip Roth adaptation Deception, and rangy, supplemental explorations (My Golden Days, Ismael’s Ghosts) of the mythically tinged themes and characters of his foundational works....

Bruno Dumont has made a comedy. As unlikely as that idea may seem to those who are familiar with his work, the leading French filmmaker is in Cannes with Li’l Quinquin (P’tit Quinquin), a four-episode TV series screening here as a 197-minute feature film. The story revolves around a pair of bumbling cops (and a group of observant kids) investigating a string of gruesome murders happening at a small coastal town in the north of France....

John Hargreaves in Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1978) In 1972, the world’s first Green Party was formed in Tasmania in response to two major Australian dam projects. At the same time, Coca-Cola was shifting the blame for littering and environmental degradation from waste product to Aussie consumers, shuttering their sustainable bottle-refilling plants. Land-use issues, nuclear testing, species extinction, all of it was coming to a head in the 1970s, leading Everette De Roche to write one of the more damning eco-horror films ever made, Long Weekend (1978), in which nature is both the villain and the hero, having endured human cruelties for far too long....

Mast-del (Maryam Tafakory, 2023) The shorts screening in this year’s Currents section at the New York Film Festival, collectively marking a kind of Christmas for the city’s experimental community, feature new work from a rogue’s gallery of talented alumni including Luke Fowler, Joshua Gen Solondz, Steve Reinke, Kevin Jerome Everson, and James Edmonds, plus NYFF debuts by a number of rising artists. Representing a range of formal techniques, the programs variously attest to the endurance of celluloid as the medium of choice, the power of digital technology as a more accessible alternative, the sublimation of narrative in favor of suggestion and sensation, and, most universally, the ability of artists to create in spite of a larger cultural climate overwhelmingly hostile to art....

This interview took place a few days before the New York Film Festival’s gala screening of A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s intellectual adventure film that depicts the famous feud that developed between Freud and Jung during the early days of the psychoanalytic movement by focusing on a third person, Sabina Spielrein. A brilliant, young Russian Jew, Spielrein was treated by Jung for hysteria when she was still a teenager, had an affair with him while she was his patient, graduated from medical school in her early twenties with a degree in psychiatry, and became an analyst herself and an ally of Freud while remaining in love with Jung....

In Queen of Katwe, the director Mira Nair captures the vitality and improbable beauty of the dense, crowded street culture in an East African slum without sentimentalizing its people or underplaying their deprivations and hazards. It’s an elating achievement, and it’s all the more remarkable because she pulls it off in the context of an underdog sports movie. This surprisingly juicy film is based on the true story of Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga), a girl from Katwe, a sprawling, blighted district in Uganda’s capital, Kampala....

At a rare peak of bliss in Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s gritty fantasia Sicilian Ghost Story, the 13-year-old hero, Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez), who looks dashing riding horseback in his jodhpurs, accepts a love letter in a hand-decorated envelope from Luna (Julia Jedlikowska), his most artistic classmate. He seals it with a kiss; Luna stops the smooch with giggles. Yet it carries an emotional punch greater than the melodramatic clinches of most adult crime, horror, or message movies....

Bayaya Jiri Trnka didn’t craft his puppet-cartoon shorts and features merely to imitate life. His endlessly original and inventive movies incorporate life, or transcend it. Trnka insisted that he was “local,” and drew many of his subjects from Czech folk culture. But his sophistication energized his work, even as his warmth and freshness gave it emotional appeal. Best of all, he had “vision” in the primal sense—a new way of seeing....

In this sentimental season for “democratic socialism,” Maya Vitkova’s Viktoria, a fable set in the final decade of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria (and a few years after), trenchantly evokes just how undemocratic socialism can be. The title character is born without a bellybutton right before the annual nationwide celebration marking “victory” for Bulgaria’s proletariat. Dubbed “Viktoria” to commemorate that Marxist triumph (and given an official birthday a day after her biological birth), she is declared “Baby of the Decade” and hailed as an evolutionary leap....