Posts

Paul Frees, Humphrey Bogart, and Mike Lane in The Harder They Fall (Mark Robson, 1956) In tribute to Peter Fonda, heir to cinema royalty and an accomplished actor in his own right, who died at his Los Angeles home on August 16, TCM is showing both Easy Rider (1969) and Victor Nuñez’s Ulee’s Gold (1997), the gentle, character-driven mini-hit that served as a comeback vehicle for the then-57-year-old Fonda. He’d go on to appear in dozens more films, most memorably as the sublimely named record producer-cum-drug trafficker Terry Valentine in The Limey (1999)....

The 58th NYFF launched a celebration of Amos’s legacy which has since continued with tribute programs across repertory cinemas in the city and a brand-new edition of Film as a Subversive Art by Film Desk Books. At Film Comment, we’re continuing this celebration with our own week of Vogelmania. To kick things off, FC-editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited a panel of Vogel experts—Richard Peña, former Director of the New York Film Festival; Tom Waibel, Custodian of the Amos Vogel Library at the Austrian Film Museum; and Edo Choi, the Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image....

Before the festival officially drew to a close last Saturday, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish moderated a panel about documentary ethics in the Cannes Docs section of the Marché du Film. Curated by the Documentary Association of Europe and presented with American Documentary, the live event featured a stellar lineup of speakers, including Kiyoko McCrae from Chicken and Egg Pictures; Adam Piron from the Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program; Alemberg Ang, a Philippines-based producer and filmmaker; and Viv Li, a Chinese filmmaker based in Berlin....

Listen/Subscribe:

For our second episode from the Riviera, critics Beatrice Loayza and James Wham and programmer and critic Inney Prakash join FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish discuss some recently screened high-, low-, and in-between–lights, including Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Wim Wenders’s Anselm, and Wang Bing’s epic Youth (Spring). Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition....

In an in-depth tribute essay for Film Comment, Soraya Nadia McDonald writes that “Davis is very much a daughter of the American South, whose experiences have been shaped by the darkness of her skin and the tightness of the curls in her hair. The childhood of poverty, abuse, and invisibility she writes of in her memoir could easily come from a play by August Wilson. But hers is also a tale of triumph, of overcoming odds and learning to love herself through her remarkable talent as an actor....

FC co-deputy editor Clinton Krute invited Pollard on the podcast to discuss his new film with scholar Samantha N. Sheppard, whose 2020 book Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen is an expansive analysis of sports documentaries and representations of Blackness on screen. They discussed the intensive research process behind the film, how the genre of the sports documentary can be used to better understand and illuminate history, and the legacy and life of Russell, who passed away in July 2022....

Last Monday, Film Comment presented a double-feature program of two films shot by the cinematographer—Mani Kaul’s rapturous Duvidha (1973), and Sanjiv Shah’s unique musical satire Love in the Time of Malaria (1992), which screened theatrically in the U.S. for the first time—along with an extended conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, Contractor’s partner in life and work, with whom he founded the feminist Yugantar Film Collective in the 1980s. The talk, available today on the podcast, delves into the challenging and low-budget conditions that Duvidha was shot under, the influence of Indian miniature painting and still photography on its look, and Contractor’s extraordinary visual felicity with both documentary and fiction....

Blind Spot (Claudia von Alemann, 1980) Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin Last year, writing about the recent restoration of Claudia von Alemann’s Blind Spot (1980) for Cinema Scope, scholar, critic, and curator Erika Balsom concluded some thinking on feminist historiography and “archive fever” with an important projection: “The work ahead—and already underway—involves not just remembering ‘forgotten’ women but dismantling the mechanisms that led to their oblivion....

Out of the mouths of babes, filth. In a curtained corner of the Marianne Boesky show “John Waters: Beverly Hills John” screened Kiddie Flamingos, a videotaped reenactment of the director’s third feature done by—children! A table reading, strictly speaking, rather than a remake, this Pink Flamingos Jr. confronted viewers with the adorable and the damned all rolled into one dimpled package: a row of kindergarten-age kids, wearing righteous wigs piled high (plus one crucial pair of harlequin glasses), clutched their screenplays and picked their way through a bowdlerized but still demented story of revolting, unspeakable behavior and freakish love....

Family Plot An asp with ample sideburns, Ed Lauter has the squint of a serpent. He not infrequently appears cool to the touch. His forehead, which begins rising at his scowl and never stops, has the polished menace of a bullet or a smooth, potentially lethal stone. You’ve seen him dozens of times, as hammerheaded toughs on TV and along the jagged crevices of the big screen, lolling silently in shadow, waiting to scurry out from beneath a rock whenever death drew near....

Right Now, Wrong Then Hong Sangsoo, South Korea Chevalier Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers Ben Rivers, U.K. The Academy of Muses José Luis Guerín, Spain Don’t Blink – Robert Frank Laura Israel, U.S. Cosmos Andrzej Zulawski, Poland Journey to the Shore Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan Happy Hour Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan Lost and Beautiful Pietro Marcello, Italy...

The phrase “The Great American Novel” remains in the popular parlance, in no small part because of its frequent use in The Great American Comic Strip, Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. Like most language denoting outsized ambition, I suspect it is generally employed in these overcautious times with real or implicit scare quotes, although many a writer young and old may aspire to it in their secret heart all the same. We can, as it happens, pinpoint the moment of the coinage of “Great American Novel” quite precisely....

—George Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest “I got a big ego (Hahaha) I’m such a big ego (Hahaha) I got a big… (Hahaha) ego, She love my big (Hahaha) ego, So stroke my big (Hahaha) ego” —Kanye West, “Ego (Remix)” Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse I am not an easily shocked man. The recent news of Boko Haram pledging allegiance to ISIS, thus forming, in the words of my Saturday morning G....

We Are the Best! I saw We Are the Best! a couple of months ago when it was making the festival rounds, but only felt any urge to write about it after reading Richard Brody’s takedown, titled “Shiny, Happy, Fake Sweden,” in his New Yorker–hosted blog The Front Row. I find more of value in the movie than Brody does, but I’m not picking up the topic because of any overwhelming desire to stick up for it—as he notes, WAtB!...

Theater: Cinemart Cinemas, 106-03 Metropolitan Ave., Forest Hills I’ve been periodically visiting the Cinemart for years—it was a 20-minute drive from my former home in fashionable Williamsburg, and I (very belatedly) saw The Social Network there in the winter of 2010, on a slightly worse-for-the-wear 35mm print. Yes, the prospect of livid-green emulsion scratches, prancing dust mites, and encroaching tendrils of detritus are the principal allure of this Forest Hills house which, bravely waiting for this digital fad to blow over, has yet to switch brands to digital....