Posts

1. Story of My Death / Albert Serra, Spain 2. A Thousand Suns (Mille soleils) / Mati Diop, France 3. Our Sunhi / Hong Sang-soo, South Korea 4. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon / Hong Sang-soo, South Korea 5. Club Sandwich / Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico 6. Hard to Be a God / Aleksei German, Russia 7. Real / Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan 8. Return to Homs / Talal Derki, Syria/Germany 9. Suzanne / Katell Quillévéré, France 10....

Swinton plays a British visitor in Colombia who finds herself afflicted with exploding head syndrome—a condition that causes her to hear mysterious and sudden booming sounds. Apichatpong and Swinton turn this uncanny premise into an elusive and elliptical exploration of alienation, the slippery nature of communication, and the specters of history. During the New York Film Festival last fall, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with the director and the actress to chat about their collaboration, the autobiographical origins of the film, and Apichatpong’s interest in re-enchantment through cinema....

First up, we welcome FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and frequent FC contributor Jessica Kiang on the podcast to preview this year’s lineup. We talk about the history of the festival—and how it’s changed over the years—before discussing some of the films we’re most excited to see, including David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Claire Denis’s The Stars at Noon, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, and others. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2022 edition....

I sat down with critics Chloe Lizotte and Ela Bittencourt to highlight some of our favorites from this year’s selection, including Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Tsugua Diaries, Kiyoshi Sugita’s Haruhara-san’s Recorder, Kiro Russo’s El gran movimiento, and Ted Fendt’s Outside Noise, among others. Stay tuned for more coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival, both on the podcast and in the Film Comment Letter.

Looking ahead, our Film Comment Free Talks continue on July 17 with filmmaker Boots Riley, director of the much-anticipated satire Sorry to Bother You, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson.

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. Listen/Subscribe:

A new book by Adam Nayman, David Fincher: Mind Games (out November 23 from Abrams Books), offers a canny and timely appraisal of the director’s filmography. Adam writes that, “Over the past thirty years, Fincher has cultivated and maintained a reputation that precedes him of formal rigor and technocratic exactitude, of moviemaking as a game of inches.” Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Adam and critic, filmmaker, and former NYFF director, Kent Jones—who’s written about Fincher many times over the years in FC—for an illuminating deep-dive into the Fincherverse....

Village Voice critic J. Hoberman proposed that we make it a 10 Best and 10 Worst Palmes list and we solicited from him a personal list of 10 Worst: New Yorker film editor Richard Brody submitted a brief list with the following observations: “This is a fun question that is hard to answer seriously, because 1) there are a bunch I haven’t seen, and 2) a serious answer would take into account the other movies in competition each year that these winners beat out and the respondents’ sense of whether the juries’ choices were good ones....

Marlene Dietrich & Josef von Sternberg Lillian Gish & D.W. Griffith John Wayne & John Ford Robert De Niro & Martin Scorsese Anna Karina & Jean-Luc Godard James Stewart & Anthony Mann James Stewart & Alfred Hitchcock Klaus Kinski & Werner Herzog Gena Rowlands & John Cassavetes Chishu Ryu & Yasujiro Ozu Denis Lavant & Leos Carax Jean-Pierre Léaud & François Truffaut Lon Chaney & Tod Browning Toshiro Mifune & Akira Kurosawa...

Angst (Gerald Kargl, 1983) At this year’s Viennale, the largest film festival in Austria, a strong and idiosyncratic selection of recent festival premieres coexisted with multiple retrospective series, dense with rarities, that stole the spotlight. At center stage was a massive, 41-film program dedicated to the Chilean master Raúl Ruiz. Works by Valeria Sarmiento, Ruiz’s widow and frequent collaborator, could be found in the Ruiz program as well as in a separate, comparably robust series on Chilean cinema since the 1973 coup d’état....

1. Jealousy Philippe Garrel, France Stray Dogs Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France 3. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon Hong Sang-soo, South Korea 4. Abuse of Weakness Catherine Breillat, France/Belgium/Germany Our Sunhi Hong Sang-soo, South Korea 6. The Strange Little Cat Ramon Zürcher, Germany 7. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness Ben Rivers & Ben Russell, Estonia/France 8. Story of My Death Albert Serra, Spain/France 9. Club Sandwich Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico 10. Closed Curtain Jafar Panahi, Iran 11....

It is with great excitement that FILM COMMENT begins a new chapter in our history. As some of you may have already read, I have been named Editor of FILM COMMENT, and Michael Koresky has been named Editorial Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. For years I’ve had the privilege of working alongside our spectacular current editorial team—Managing Editor Laura Kern and Digital Editor Violet Lucca—and all of us could not possibly be more pleased to be working with Michael (who’s in fact an alum of the magazine)....

WandaVision (2020) My lockdown year started with lofty intentions. At the beginning of spring 2020, with an indefinite period of home viewing stretching before us all, I was ready to launch into a diet of the harder stuff: I feasted on Mariano Llinás’s 13-hour Argentine meta-serial La Flor, and on several antique rarities on the Cinémathèque Française’s pop-up platform HENRI. This was clearly going to be the year I’d get to plug my gaps in the Lav Diaz filmography....