The Film Comment Podcast

The last few years have seen several new restorations of the films of Peter Greenaway, the British director known for classics like The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. His films are formally exacting and erudite, yet full of play and perversion, and are as provocative today as they were upon release. The latest Greenaway film to receive a restoration is Drowning by Numbers, which has just been re-released by Severin Films on Blu-Ray. Made in 1988, the film is a metaphysical puzzle, equal parts fairy tale and process piece. The story follows three women—a mother, her daughter, and her niece—all named Cissie Colpitts, as they drown their husbands one by one. They cover up their crimes with the help of local coroner Madgett and his son Smut, both of whom are obsessed with games of all stripes—moral, athletic, mathematical. Shot by Greenaway’s frequent collaborator Sacha Vierny, Drowning by Numbers is one of the best of the director’s 80s features, as clinical as it is maximalist. A couple weeks ago, FC Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute called up Greenaway on Zoom for a freewheeling conversation about his memories of making the film, his long career, and his thoughts on mortality and art.

Kelly Reichardt’s latest feature, Showing Up, is a delicate, witty, yet deeply profound film about the messy ways in which living and surviving can get in the way of art-making. The film follows a ceramics artist, Lizzy (Michelle Williams), who prepares for an upcoming gallery show while wrangling family issues, the interpersonal politics of her day job at an art school, and problems with her landlord, who happens to be none other than her more successful colleague, Jo (Hong Chau). Not to mention the injured pigeon that Lizzy is suddenly forced to care for... It’s a new riff on themes familiar from Reichardt’s work, like friendship and the ways in which precarity impinges upon community, but it’s also the director's funniest film yet, one that finds joy and comedy in its milieu of eccentric, sometimes petty, yet infectiously passionate artists. With Showing Up arriving in theaters this week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish interviewed Reichardt about the making of the film, the casting of Williams and Chau, the work of Cynthia Lahti, Michelle Segre, and the various other artists who are featured in the film, and much more.

Every spring the New Directors/New Films festival at Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA puts on an exciting showcase of movies by the best emerging filmmakers around the world. It’s always a reliable sign of the trends to come and the talents to look out for—past editions have featured early films by Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Kelly Reichardt, and others. Over the past few years, Film Comment has established our own annual tradition of previewing the best movies in the New Directors/New Films lineup with local critics. This time around, editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by Vadim Rizov and Beatrice Loayza for a rundown of some of the gems in the 2023 edition, including Earth Mama, Arnold Is a Model Student, Safe Place, The Face of the Jellyfish, and more.

This year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema festival (March 2-12), Film at Lincoln Center’s annual showcase of contemporary French filmmaking, was something of a Louis Garrel convention—the French actor and director appeared in three movies in the lineup. He directed and stars in The Innocent, a comedy inspired by his own life, about a young man whose mother marries a heist robber newly released from prison. He also stars along with his sisters, Esther and Lena Garrel, in their father Philippe Garrel’s Silver Bear–winning new feature, The Plough, a melancholic, understated drama about a family of puppeteers grappling with the decline of their patriarch and their traditions. And Louis appears as the theater director Patrice Chéreau in Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Forever Young, about a group of young initiates at Les Amandiers, a famous acting school in Paris. Last week, FC Co-Deputy Editor called up Louis on Zoom—while he was in the middle of a shoot for a film about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince—for a conversation about the autobiographical inspirations of all three films, the differences between his and his father’s directing styles, their collaboration with the legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, and more.

Last weekend, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was at the True/False Film Festival: an annual documentary festival in Columbia, Missouri that has, over the years, become an exciting site to discover the latest developments in nonfiction cinema. This year, a prominent trend in the lineup was personal filmmaking—films in which directors drew upon on their memories, families, and relationships to craft something universal or even political. Two films in particular exemplified this trend, though in different ways. Forms of Forgetting, by the filmmaker Burak Çevik, turns conversations between two of the filmmaker's friends about their memories of their relationship into a broader reflection on the link between remembrance and one's sense of place, the city, and the nation. In Milisuthando, the artist Milisuthando Bongela combines archival footage, recollections, and interviews with friends and family to reflect on her childhood in the Transkei, which was an all-Black, segregationist South African state sanctioned by the apartheid regime. On today's podcast, Burak, Milisuthando, and Jonathan Ali, a programmer for True/False, joined to delve into the making of these films and the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of personal filmmaking.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently winding down. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Giovanni Marchini Camia (Fireflies Press), Victor Guimarães (freelance), and Frédéric Jaeger (critic.de). Before getting into a broader conversation about German cinema at the Berlinale, the four discuss some of the highlights from the festival’s waning days, including Music by Angela Schanelec, In Water by Hong Sangsoo, Bad Living and Living Bad by João Canijo, Ramona by Victoria Linares Villegas, and Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything by Emily Atef. Stay up to date with all of our Berlin 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/berlin/berlin-2023/

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editor Devika Girish is joined by programmers Inney Prakash (Prismatic Ground) and Edo Choi (Musuem of the Moving Image) and critic Caitlin Quinlan to discuss the buzziest premieres from the festival’s second half: Lila Avilés’s Tótem, Lois Patino's Samsara, Christian Petzold’s Afire, Philippe Garrel’s The Plough, and James Benning’s Allensworth.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-deputy editor Clinton Krute sat down with writer/director Dustin Guy Defa and actor Michael Cera to discuss The Adults, which just had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale. The film tells the story of Eric, a youngish man returning for a quick visit to the upstate New York town where he grew up. As he struggles to reconnect with his two sisters, played by Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis, his obsession with poker, and his drive to beat every player in town, keeps prolonging his stay. The nuanced performances of the three leads, along with Guy Defa’s precise dialogue, pull the film off center, destabilizing what might otherwise have been a fairly familiar drama of family reconciliation. Instead, The Adults is something far stranger and resonant.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by curator and critic Antoine Thirion and critic (and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma) Jean-Michel Frodon to discuss some recent viewings from the festival's mid-point: Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy, John Trengove’s Manodrome, Bas Devos’s Here, Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert, and Manthia Diawara’s AI: African Intelligence. Stay up to date with all of our Berlin 2023 coverage here.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by FC contributor Ela Bittencourt and Jonathan Ali, Director of Programming at the Third Horizon Film Festival. They discuss some of the recent premieres at the Berlinale, including Claire Simon's Our Body, Moyra Davey's Horse Opera, and Aaron Kaufman and Sean Penn's Superpower; Turkish retrospective selection Black Head (1979), by Korhan Yurtsever; as well as films from the Berlin Critics' Week's "Artistic Differences" program, which included Lavra dor (1968), O tigra ea gazela (1977), The White Death of the Black Wizard (2020), and The Secret Formula (1965).