The Film Comment Podcast

This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema. Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.

This week, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sit down with writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose new feature, Jay Kelly, is in select theaters now. The movie stars George Clooney as an aging Hollywood star reckoning with the choices he’s made on his way to the top. The action unfolds on a trip Jay takes to a tribute to his career in Tuscany, trailed by an entourage of handlers (played by Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, and others), and haunted by his missteps as a friend, lover, and parent. Jay Kelly blends Fellini-esque memory theater, a screwball-inspired train journey, and a self-reflexive contemplation on the world of filmmaking to arrive at something universal; as Noah says in our conversation, the theme at the heart of the film is one that has animated many of his works: coming to terms with an irretrievable past. We also talked about his remarkable casting choices, how he and his crew built sets to facilitate the dreamlike flashback sequences without the use of CGI, and much more.

Last week, Devika returned from the Tokyo International Film Festival, which ran from October 27 to November 5 in the Japanese capital. As one of the major festivals in Asia, the event is a great showcase for new and restored films from the region, as well as Japanese specialities like animation. While there, Devika recorded three Podcasts exploring the lineup with a stellar rotation of guests. On our third and final Podcast from the festival, programmer, translator, and producer Aiko Masubuchi shares her thoughts on three Japanese titles. The first, Yama: Attack to Attack, a documentary from 1985, was screened outside of the festival; the latter two, Lost Land and In Their Traces, were highlights of its Nippon Cinema Now section.

Last week, Devika returned from the Tokyo International Film Festival, which ran from October 27 to November 5 in the Japanese capital. As one of the major festivals in Asia, the event is a great showcase for new and restored films from the region, as well as Japanese specialities like animation. While there, Devika recorded three Podcasts exploring the lineup with a stellar rotation of guests. On the second episode from the festival, critics Kambole Campbell and Sasha Han discuss selections from their areas of expertise—respectively, animation and Southeast Asian cinema. Some highlights include Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, a piece of WWII propaganda and the first-ever animated feature made in Japan; Mamoru Oshii’s cult classic Angel’s Egg; and Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s culinary thriller Morte Cucina.

Last week, Devika returned from the Tokyo International Film Festival, which ran from October 27 to November 5 in the Japanese capital. As one of the major festivals in Asia, the event is a great showcase for new and restored films from the region, as well as Japanese specialities like animation. While there, Devika recorded three Podcasts exploring the lineup with a stellar rotation of guests. First up, critics Vadim Rizov and Kong Rithdee join to talk about some of the big competition titles, including Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, which ended up winning the Grand Prix, and Rithy Panh’s documentary We Are the Fruits of the Forest; as well as the the long-overdue official Japanese premiere of Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, 40 years after its making.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been the talk of the town since its wide release last month—from critics to filmmakers to audiences, the reception has been nothing short of euphoric. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the film opens in an unspecified present, detailing the activities of a militant group led by a Black revolutionary (played by Teyana Taylor). Years after her disappearance, her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) are hunted down by an old enemy, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The chase takes them across California, with an assortment of other characters becoming embroiled along the way.  The movie is an unabashedly fun, feel-good action flick—one that also calls back to films as disparate as The Searchers, Commando, and Running on Empty. But is it among the greatest of the decade, as some have claimed? Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics and programmers Miriam Bale and Adam Piron on the Podcast to discuss the film’s successes and failures, how it fits into PTA’s larger body of work, and its engagement with American history and the present. If there’s one thing the four agreed on, it’s that One Battle After Another is indeed a “very rich text.”

As the 63rd New York Film Festival drew to a close last weekend, it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. FC Editor Clinton Krute was joined by critics Molly Haskell, J. Hoberman, and Beatrice Loayza for a spirited wrap-up analysis of the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF63 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed and debated Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Lav Diaz’s Magellan, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, and many other selections.

One of the highlights of this year’s New York Film Festival is the latest feature by the nonfiction master Gianfranco Rosi, known for documentaries like Sacro GRA (2013), Fire at Sea (2016), and Notturno (2020), which paint both lyrical and urgent portraits of places that function as thresholds—between land and water, life and death, heaven and hell. His new cinematic essay, Below the Clouds, brings that approach to the Italian city of Naples. Shot in ethereal black and white, the film explores Naples as an environment both cosmic and prosaic—a city whose skies are suffused with volcanic ash and whose earth is shaken by tremors; and where a glorious and ancient past scaffolds a gritty, melting-pot present.  Below the Clouds premiered in August at the Venice Film Festival, where Film Comment's Devika Girish sat down with the filmmaker for a conversation. The two discussed how Pietro Marcello (director of the NYFF selection Duse) inspired Rosi to make a film in Naples, as well as Rosi’s uniquely embedded and immersive technique, and the state of nonfiction cinema today.

Three films in this year’s NYFF lineup explore the intersections of quotidian life and the arts, following artists whose efforts to make time and space for their creative passions are thwarted or frustrated by the grind of the everyday. In Kent Jones’s Late Fame, adapted from an Arthur Schnitzler novella, a once-upon-a-time New York poet (and now a postal worker) is intoxicated by the sudden attentions of a coterie of twentysomething wannabe poets. In Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, set in the 1970s, an aimless art-school dropout executes a comically sloppy heist at a local museum, as if seeking escape from his banal, bourgeois family life. And in Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, an art student spends a summer in New York, having a series of serendipitous and erotic encounters around painting, poetry, and writing. Each film dwells in how both the making and consuming of art can force life into a pace incompatible with that of the modern world. Last Sunday at NYFF, Jones, Reichardt, and Castro joined Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a conversation exploring the temporality of cinema versus the other arts, the challenge of being a working artist, and the exquisite craft behind their new films.

“That’s the majesty of rock / The mystery of roll / The darning of the sock / The scoring of the goal / The farmer takes a wife / The barber takes a pole / We’re in this together…and ever.” These lyrics ring as true today as they did back in 1992, when Spinal Tap penned them for their song “The Majesty of Rock,” from the classic album Break Like the Wind. Centering around the core trio of frontman David St. Hubbins, lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, and bassist Derek Smalls, Spinal Tap have exerted a significant amount of musical force since the early ’60s, when St. Hubbins and Tufnel first linked up as young rockers in the rough-and-tumble London neighborhood of Squatney. After trying on a few different styles and names—including The Originals, then the New Originals, then the Thamesmen—the group eventually settled into their now very-well-worn position as the elder statesmen of rock.  But now, after a long, peaceful silence, Spinal Tap is back with a new film, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, in theaters on September 12. With noted filmmaker Marty DiBergi returning to the director’s chair, the movie follows the band as they prepare for a triumphant reunion concert, offering an intimate view of the Tap working through festering interpersonal conflicts, rehearsing material and potential new drummers, and dealing with interruptions from the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John. As with all things Tap, there’s more: on September 16, the Criterion Collection will release a new special edition of the 1984 classic This Is Spinal Tap. Film Comment Editor Clinton Krute spoke with St. Hubbins, Tufnel, Smalls, and DiBergi about the new movie, which the band hasn’t seen yet, and the old one, which they hate. They also discussed their long careers in music and film, the influence of cinema on their chosen art of music (including formative encounters with “good violent Westerns” like Run of the Arrow and sci-fi fare like The Tingler), and much more.