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Entre Ponerle y no ponerle Given all the dashed-off “think pieces” and student papers whose bibliographies are limited to the first page of Google search results, you can sometimes feel that if something’s not on the Internet, it doesn’t really exist. But in the case of film archives such as the University of Chile’s Cine Experimental, existence online is a triumph. Along with the rest of the university’s Faculty of Arts, its film program and cinematheque were closed after the country’s 1973 military coup....

The Dog, a documentary funded in part by Seed&Spark In an end-of-year blog post, producer Ted Hope listed 32 challenges facing today’s independent film scene. One common issue, affecting new and veteran filmmakers alike, was the need to foster more realistic expectations for pre- and postproduction and a better understanding of how to navigate funding and distribution platforms. True to his name, Hope offered up 32 positives as well—but failed to mention Seed&Spark, a company that helps fund projects, educate filmmakers, and distribute movies to online viewers....

Manny Farber in his Warren Street studio, New York City, 1970. Photographer unknown. Images courtesy of Hat & Beard Press Not long ago at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland I saw Nashville projected on a gloriously large screen with an enthusiastic audience. I had seen it many times before but now I was watching it with Farber’s take on the film fresh in my mind. He doesn’t fall into the world and characters easily, the way I seem to....

“I can’t help it. I ain’t going to vote Mr. Bookwright free.” Those words are spoken by Stonewall Jackson Fentry, the lead character in William Faulkner’s short story “Tomorrow,” first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1940. The story starts with a Mr. Bookwright on trial for murdering Buck Thorpe. Since Buck was known by everyone in town as an all-around bad person, nearly the whole jury thinks Mr....

Jimi Hendrix in Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker, 1968) Donn Alan (D.A.) Pennebaker, documentary filmmaking legend and co-pioneer of the direct cinema movement, died in August 2019 at age 94, having blessed posterity with chronicles of crucial fleeting moments in the performing arts, politics, and beyond—unflashy, minimally editorializing, but shrewdly planned and artfully assembled. Intending his camera to be “the least important thing in the room,” Pennebaker made films that have a thrilling immediacy, aided by brisk editing, often by frequent partner Chris Hegedus....

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On today’s podcast, FC Publisher Eugene Hernandez sits down with Lizzie Francke, producer and editor at large at the BFI, to provide an inside-the-industry take on this year’s festival. They also touch on some lesser-known films that they’re excited about, including Charlotte Well’s Aftersun, before diving into Francke’s long history with the festival, recent upheavals in the festival ecosystem, and the recent and refreshing increase in the number of women directors in UK cinema....

In this week’s special second segment, Whit Stillman talks with FC contributor Nick Pinkerton about his new film, Love & Friendship, adaptation, and the finer points of writing a novel. Listen/Subscribe:

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It’s a new riff on themes familiar from Reichardt’s work, like friendship and the ways in which precarity impinges upon community, but it’s also the director’s funniest film yet, one that finds joy and comedy in its milieu of eccentric, sometimes petty, yet infectiously passionate artists. With Showing Up arriving in theaters this week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish interviewed Reichardt about the making of the film, the casting of Williams and Chau, the work of Cynthia Lahti, Michelle Segre, and the various other artists who are featured in the film, and much more....

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On today’s podcast, Film Comment’s Devika Girish talks to Vadim Rivov (Filmmaker Magazine) and Dan Sullivan (Film at Lincoln Center) about Sundance selections Fremont, Gush, Polite Society, and A Common Sequence. They also dig into the festival’s New Frontier section and whether or not there’s such a thing as a “Sundance film.” Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here.

For our third podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch to talk about Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and Bloodshed, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children, Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, and more. Watch this space for more podcasts from TIFF 2022!

The Student Nurses Movie trailers have long been an obsession of mine, a finely tuned piece of marketing that serves as a promise: “This movie is going to feel like this! This movie’s going to be great!” In the official trailer for 2007’s Grindhouse, there was an explicit promise to deliver something that audiences didn’t even know that they had been missing: “It was called the grindhouse,” a rasping male voice intones, “theaters that played back-to-back movies featuring uncensored sexuality and hard-core thrills!...

Like every unruly being that threatens the Apollonian order, a “wild child” filmed is usually a wild child tamed. That rule doesn’t apply, however, to the six paternally dominated, socially deprived—and, for 14 years, quiescent—Peruvian-American brothers who feature in Crystal Moselle’s intimate Sundance-launched documentary The Wolfpack. Both in the act of being filmed and in the act of remaking films without a camera—which aligns them with the Peruvian peasants in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie—these smart, personable Lower East Side kids both invert the wild-child stereotype and liberate themselves creatively....

Bad Education It was a year with plenty of firsts: French triple threat Agnès Jaoui co-wrote, co-starred in, and directed the first decent Woody Allen movie in 20 years. Wong Kar-wai unveiled his first Lewis Klahr film. Michael Moore gave us the first motion picture that will certainly influence a U.S. election. And for the first time in long while, opening night featured a superior film by a major auteur....