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The Film Comment Podcast from Sundance is sponsored by Autograph Collection Hotels.

FILM COMMENT’s Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold are joined by Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to discuss these films and especially the Coen Brothers’ ever-evolving oeuvre. Listen/Subscribe:

And who better to join us in the spirit of gift-giving than our two erudite guests: K. Austin Collins, film critic for Rolling Stone; and Adam Nayman, writer for The Ringer, contributing editor to CinemaScope, and author of Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks. Kameron and Adam joined Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute to unwrap some fantastic presents, including Cinda Firestone’s Attica, Allan King’s Warrendale, Abbas Kiarostami’s First Case, Second Case, and Elaine May’s A New Leaf....

For this week’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Clinton Krute sat down with two programmers and writers, Abby Sun and Steve Macfarlane, for a wide-ranging conversation about the current repertory landscape—about what’s changed over the past year, for the better and for the worse, and where things might be headed in the near future. They discuss the rapid evolution and proliferation of virtual repertory offerings during the pandemic, as well as the latest Flaherty Seminar and several choice offerings at Film Forum and elsewhere....

Aloha Wanderwell and Captain Walter Wanderwell in Mozambique She was “the world’s most widely traveled girl” and a driving force behind groundbreaking travelogues, but you won’t find Aloha Wanderwell’s name in film histories. As orphan-film expert Dan Streible notes: “She’s not even mentioned in the Women Film Pioneers Project website of 200 silent-era filmmakers.” Yet Wanderwell’s best work is equal to that of other pioneering traveler-filmmakers such as Burton Holmes and Lyman Howe....

The Last Train through Harecastle Tunnel Roughly from 1964 to 1990, the BBC’s drama department poured out a wealth of studio-recorded dramas and, increasingly, 16mm films that challenged the sociopolitical status quo. Sydney Newman, the visionary Canadian producer who ran the department for five years from early 1963 and introduced the groundbreaking The Wednesday Play anthology series, established a mandate of “agitational contemporaneity” that constituted “art in the service of the people....

1. A Nos Amours, Maurice Pialat, 1983 2. Fox and His Friends, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 3. The Tenant, Roman Polanski, 1976 4. Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir, 1939 5. Wanda, Barbara Loden, 1970 Playtime, Jacques Tati, 1967 The Green Room, François Truffaut, 1978 Love Streams, John Cassavetes, 1984 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee, 1989 Foolish Wives, Erich von Stroheim, 1922 A New Leaf, Elaine May, 1971...

Contempt Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 The Bad and the Beautiful Vincente Minnelli, 1952 Singin’ in the Rain Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952 Irma Vep Olivier Assayas, 1996 Sullivan’s Travels Preston Sturges, 1941 Mulholland Drive David Lynch, 2001 Day for Night François Truffaut, 1973 Beware of a Holy Whore Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971 The Player Robert Altman, 1992 Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder, 1950 In a Lonely Place Nicholas Ray, 1950...

Venezia 75 Competition Rick Alverson, The Mountain Olivier Assayas, Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies) Jacques Audiard, The Sisters Brothers Damien Chazelle, First Man – Opening Night Film Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Brady Corbet, Vox Lux Alfonso Cuarón, ROMA Paul Greengrass, 22 July Luca Guadagnino, Suspiria Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor) Jennifer Kent, The Nightingale Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite Mike Leigh, Peterloo...

My mother saves movie ads in which my name appears and magnetizes them to the door of her refrigerator. She judges my success as a Time film critic by the size and frequency of the blurbs publicists choose to promote their wares. Mom always taught me that if you can’t say something nice about a picture, don’t say anything at all. So if a month or two passes and I’m not quoted, she gets to fretting....

In this epilogue (translated into English for the first time with the permission of Kazuo Miyagawa’s family) he strikes an optimistic note about the age of electronics and the infinite possibilities of cinema. It becomes clear that throughout his life, he was always interested in innovation and ever-curious about what the young people of the time were up to. These excerpts appear courtesy of the family Kazuo Miyagawa; the translation is by Neo Sora....

One of Edgardo Cozarinsky’s short stories pivots on a sentence that exemplifies the delicate tone—tender, sympathetic, gently ironic, a little tersely evaluative—of the Argentine writer-filmmaker’s many evocations of transatlantic émigré life. In the story (“Days of 1937”) a German pianist, having left his country during World War II, drifts through the Buenos Aires he’s come to call his home. He makes a living playing regular sets at a sparsely attended café where, once a night, he’s brought a small bowl of cocaine to keep his spirits up....

La Jetée Who is Chris Marker? Better to ask “How many Chris Markers have there been?” Ever since the name Chris.Marker (that dot patiently waiting for its com) first appeared in the late Forties, the man born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve has developed into what Howard Hampton describes in the following pages as “the most unclassifiable of directors.” Moving back and forth between book and film, word and image, past and present, here and there, Marker is an ever-evolving hybrid....

Skidoo When asked to reveal their favorite artist and group at a 1968 press conference, John Lennon and Paul McCartney offered up the same curt answer: Nilsson. A singer/songwriter whom everyone has heard but few have heard of, Harry Nilsson achieved great success during his short career without performing in front of a live audience to promote his music, creating the so-called Nilsson mystique of success without widespread recognition. “Everybody’s Talkin’,” “Can’t Live,” “Coconut,” “One”—all of Nilsson’s major achievements were slightly off-center....

1945 takes place one year after the Jews in a small Hungarian village were deported to concentration camps. The movie begins early on August 12. The town clerk/de facto mayor (Péter Rudolf) lathers and shaves as the Soviet-controlled radio reports on the Nagasaki A-bomb and the Sino-Soviet War. He’s set to marry off his beanpole son to a strong, comely young woman, who will help the lad run a pharmacy previously owned by a deportee....

Harry Dean Stanton complained loud and long about his status as a “character actor.” Even after his magnetic display of melancholy as the hero of Paris, Texas (1984), he never became a “character-actor star” like Gene Hackman or Robert Duvall. But no actor developed keener instincts for connecting with other players to create a solid grid of energy and feeling. Stanton makes his presence felt profoundly in the chain-gang ensemble of Cool Hand Luke even when we merely hear him pluck his guitar or see him as a blurred face in a group at the barracks....