The Film Comment Podcast

This week Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year. This year's edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Noah Baumbach, Luca Guadagnino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Laura Poitras, and more. For our fourth episode from the city of canals, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish invited critics Bilge Ebiri and Jonathan Romney to talk about some recent premieres, including Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Brother Sister, Kent Jones’s Late Fame, Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, and Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds. Stay tuned for more Venice coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2025 edition.

This week and next, Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year. This year's edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Noah Baumbach, Luca Guadagnino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Laura Poitras, and more. For our second episode from the city of canals, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish invited critics Joseph Fahim and Öykü Sofuoğlu to talk about some recent premieres, including Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, Jihan K’s My Father and Qaddafi, and Shahad Ameen’s Hijra; the group also discussed the rise of the Saudi film industry and its role in contemporary Arab cinema. Stay tuned for more Venice coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2025 edition.

This week and next, Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year. This year's edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Noah Baumbach, Luca Guadagnino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Laura Poitras, and more. For our second episode from the city of canals, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish invited critics Tim Grierson and Katie McCabe to talk about recent festival premieres, including Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, László Nemes’s Orphan, and Poitras and  Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up. Stay tuned for more Venice coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2025 edition.

This week and next, Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year, and this year's edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Noah Baumbach, Luca Guadagnino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Laura Poitras, and more. For our first episode from the city of canals, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish invited FC contributors and Venice veterans Jonathan Romney and Jordan Cronk to talk about what sets this festival apart from other major international film showcases. Next, the group turned to some of the most highly anticipated premieres of the first few days, including Paolo Sorrentino's La grazia (8:28), Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly (16:21), Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia (26:50), Claire Simon's Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through The Eyes Of High School Students (36:40), and Mike Figgis's Megadoc (47:03). Stay tuned for more Venice coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2025 edition.

The Locarno Film Festival takes place every August in the Swiss town of Locarno, at the base of the Alps, with a robust mix of new discoveries, repertory selections, and premieres of films by major auteurs. Film Comment was on the ground this year, combing through the lineup for highlights, and this episode—featuring critics and programmers Inney Prakash and Cici Peng in conversation with FC Editor Devika Girish—covers some of the notable titles: Radu Jude's Dracula (3:09), Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf (16:10), Kamal Aljafari's With Hasan in Gaza (23:45), Sophy Romvari's Blue Heron (30:38), and more

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish moderated a conversation between the filmmakers Miguel Gomes and Alexandre Koberidze. The talk took place as part of the Future of Reality conference at the festival, organized by Locarno Factory and Università della Svizzera italiana, and the subject of the conversation was “the reality of the film set.” What is the daily experience behind making transcendent cinema? What are the tactical and interpersonal challenges of orchestrating resources and labor, all in pursuit of a singular artistic vision? Devika explored these questions with the two directors, who reflected on the making of their most recent films—last year’s Grand Tour for Gomes, and Dry Leaf, which premiered at this year's festival, for Koberidze.  Please note that the audio quality isn’t up to our usual standards due to technical problems during the recording.

Today’s episode is an entry in our regular Rep Report series, where we survey the best and most interesting offerings at repertory theaters in New York City. This month and next, the rep calendar is particularly packed with gems, so Film Comment Editor Devika Girish invited filmmaker, critic, and archivist Gina Telaroli, film scholar Benjamin Crais, and Film Comment’s Assistant Editor Michael Blair to spotlight some of the unmissable series on view right now or on the horizon.  The group discussed a program at Anthology Film Archives dedicated to unusual stories about immigration, which features Kidlat Tahimik’s 1970s classic Perfumed Nightmare (5:56); a series at the Asia Society that pairs films from India’s Parallel, or arthouse, cinema movement with classics of Bollywood (16:39); and upcoming retrospectives and screenings of the works of Luc Moullet at Film at Lincoln Center and Anthology (32:00). They also reflected on the state of repertory moviegoing in New York more broadly—including the admittedly enviable problem of too many things going on at the same time as well as what it means to see works made defiantly outside of institutional structures at august institutions.

From July 4 to July 8, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish presented a series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music called Let Them Cook: Cinema of the Rice Cooker, which spotlit movies where the humble household appliance takes on a poetics and pragmatism uniquely suited to the screen. Some of the films in the series included Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), Raymond Yip's Sixty Million Dollar Man (2005), Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning (1959), and Bong Joon Ho's Incoherence (1994).  After a screening of Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967)—which follows a yakuza assassin with a fetish for the smell of cooking rice—Devika recorded a panel discussion with film scholar and critic Phoebe Chen, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Bedatri Datta Choudhury, and Bon Appétit's Joseph Hernandez about the cinematic appeal of the rice cooker.

It’s officially summertime, and with the AC blasting in multiplexes around the globe, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited two fellow respite seekers, critics Alana Pockros and Adam Nayman, to chat about some of the buzziest new releases in circulation. The group begins with a deep dive into Celine Song’s romantic comedy Materialists (2:50) before turning to Eva Victor’s Sundance sensation Sorry, Baby (25:25); the racing blockbuster F1 (41:15), starring Brad Pitt; and the latest entry in Danny Boyle’s zombie franchise, 28 Years Later (56:03).

Earlier this month, Film Comment hosted the author Malcolm Harris for a special event celebrating the launch of his latest book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis—an invigorating analysis of climate change and the collective solutions required to rescue humanity from it. In addition to being a trenchant public intellectual, Harris is also a dedicated cinephile who often uses movies to make sense of politics and history—something we explored on a 2023 Podcast focused on his previous book, Palo Alto: The History of California, Capitalism, and the World.  One film Harris discusses in detail in his latest book is Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s GriGris. It’s a sensuous, suspenseful thriller about a disabled dancer in Chad who takes up petrol smuggling in order to pay for his stepfather’s medical expenses. As Harris describes in his book, it’s also an incredibly intelligent movie about the life-and-death stakes of the petrochemical industry, especially in the Global South. To dig deeper into Harris’s unique attraction to the film, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited him to present a screening of GriGris, followed by a panel discussion with Harris and Ugandan scholar Anselm Kizza-Besigye. The group dug into movie’s alluring classical structure and its explosive conclusion, cinematic portrayals of the climate crisis, and much more.