In Space is the Place (1974), pioneering jazz musician and philosopher Sun Ra embarks on a quest to resettle the African-American population of the earth on a foreign planet, envisioning a timeless existence free of the historical injustices of racism. He travels—and transports others—through space-time with the aid of music; as he flies away on his spaceship at the end of the film, the Earth implodes while jazz plays in the background....
Insidious Appropriately for the director of Saw, James Wan has been desperately trying to get out of a trap of his own devising. He is best known as the man who unleashed upon the world the film that would help usher in the genre that would ignominiously come to be known as “torture porn.” Yet the Malaysia-born, Australia-raised Wan, who directed only the first Saw (04) and claims creative distance from the sequels, hardly bears comparison with the likes of so-called Splat Packers Eli Roth or Alexandre Aja....
After a months-long hiatus prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic, we are thrilled to kick off the return of Film Comment with one of our favorite ways to connect with our audience: our weekly podcast. We’ve missed talking about movies with our whip-smart friends and fellow critics, and we’re excited to be back here, bringing you insightful commentary on the latest in film culture. For our first new episode, we delved into the lineup of the 2021 Berlinale....
On the final Friday of the festival, FC Editor Devika Girish gathered critics Jordan Cronk, Giovanni Marchini Camia, and Beatrice Loayza to discuss a last haul of films from the lineup—including Encounters prizewinner Direct Action, Generation 14plus prizewinner Who By Fire, Victor Kossakovsky’s Architecton, Kazik Radwanski’s Matt & Mara, Christine Angot’s A Family, and Travis Wilkerson’s Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing. Catch up with all our other Berlinale coverage here—there’s more coming this week!...
Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Brett and Pooja to discuss the thinking behind their selections and to guide them through the thought-provoking ideas underpinning the program. See below for links to several must-see films featured in the series. Links and things: Excerpt from Black Journal: The Black Cop (Kent Garrett, 1972) By Any Means Necessary (Paul Garrin, 1990) Copland (James Mangold, 1997) Frame Up! (Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher, & Howard Blatt, 1974) Making “Do the Right Thing” (St Clair Bourne, 1989) The Torture of Mothers: The Case of the Harlem 6 (Woodie King Jr....
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Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Bob and bibliographer Erin McGuirl, who manages the collection, to leaf through some of these treasures. They include variant copies of classics like Citizen Kane and Notorious, editor Lou Lombardo’s working scripts for Robert Altman’s films, Ben Gazzara’s personal copies of the screenplay for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and much more. We delve into the ways in which this material—with its pictures, notations, and scribbles—challenges our understanding of auteurism and sheds light on the crucial roles played by script supervisors, secretaries, and writers in Hollywood....
On March 22, Anthology Film Archives will kick off a weeklong retrospective of Hondo’s works, including some brand-new restorations. The series is organized by none other than Aboubakar Sanogo, who joined us on today’s episode to discuss Hondo’s life and legacy.
Beneath the hoopla, the glamour, and the belated in-person reunions among filmmakers, curators, and critics, there was an eeriness to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that counterweighted all attempts at projecting an air of business as usual. Each public gathering was a potential COVID-19 bath, and indeed, as the world’s largest public film festival progressed, certain faces, masked or unmasked, would suddenly disappear from the scene as colleagues fell ill and hid away in homes or hotel rooms....
Il Fuoco Where to begin? At the beginning of the medium itself, surely, with a pair of features from Giovanni Pastrone, the Italian pioneer whose 1914 epic Cabiria reportedly had D.W. Griffith himself taking notes. Offering a more intimate story without abandoning grandiose emotions, Il Fuoco (1915) chronicles the spiraling relationship between an artist and his muse, a fitting narrative for the launching of the filmmaker’s own dark-eyed Galatea, Pina Menichelli....
“I hate an apple,” insists 19-year-old Wanda Hendrix, determined to keep the encroaching Irish out of her Mexican accent in actor-director Robert Montgomery’s exemplary ultranoir Ride the Pink Horse (47). She’s remarking on the contents of her lunch. That “h,” as in Hendrix—born Dixie Wanda Hendrix in Jacksonville, Florida in 1928—is silent: “I ate an apple.” Montgomery listens to her with his loveliest bullet- headed sneer and then calls her by a pet name, “Sitting Bull....
Voiced by John C. Reilly, Wreck-It Ralph is the baddie from an 8-bit video arcade game called Fix-It Felix, Jr. Ralph’s desire to be viewed as a “good guy” starts a chain of events that threaten the virtual world inhabited by all of the film’s characters, including gaming icons both real (Q*bert, Pac-Man, Sonic the Hedgehog) and invented. The animation and visual design in Rich Moore’s film are as stunning as one would expect from a major studio....
That question has haunted the history of nonfiction as a cinematic genre for nearly a century. At least since the initial backlash against Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the documentary has been stuck in a profound identity crisis over its capacity to faithfully capture reality—not in spite of but because of the fact that it seems so well suited to the task. One imagines it being told throughout its young life, like a high-school athlete with an early peak, that it can do anything, then struggling to cope after hitting its limits and losing the faith of its peers....
