The Film Comment Podcast

With the Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returning to in-person screenings this year, your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering each day's new highlights and lowlights. To kick things off, FC editor Devika Girish invited Abby Sun (International Documentary Association) and Alissa Wilkinson (Vox) to talk about some of the opening night films, including The Longest Goodbye, Kim’s Video, and The Pod Generation, and the titles they're most excited to see in the coming days.

Last week, ThousandSuns Cinema, an online screening initiative by the Media City Film Festival, launched a unique virtual series devoted to Indigenous cinema. Co-presented with the artist-run collective COUSIN, the program brings together a vibrant selection of short and feature-length works by Indigenous filmmakers—all of which are free to stream online until January 30. The series features landmark films by established directors like Alanis Obomsawin, as well as more recent, dynamic work from emerging artists like Fox Maxy. Though the films are eclectic, with a variety of forms and themes on display, they’re united by one principle: they center Indigenous audiences and decenter the white gaze. On today’s episode, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute interview two members of COUSIN Collective, filmmakers Adam Piron and Sky Hopinka, about the series, the origins of their collective, and the community of artists that they’ve cultivated.

Every January, to ring in the new year, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute take a look at some of the major new releases of the holiday season. This year, they were joined by critics Sam Adams and Nicholas Russell to run down some of the blingier titles that have recently graced the marquees of multiplexes and streaming sites alike, including Avatar: The Way of Water, Babylon, Glass Onion, and the A.I.-horror flick M3GAN. Needless to say, opinions ran as hot as the blood of a vengeful space whale.

Happy new year to our listeners, and thanks for joining us for another year of writing and talking about movies. We’ll dive into the new year’s new releases very soon, but today’s podcast is about one of 2022’s late but great entries: No Bears, the latest meta-fictional masterwork from Jafar Panahi. In the film, Panahi plays a slightly fictionalized version of himself, as a controversial filmmaker holed up in an Iranian border-village, trying to evade the surveillance of the authorities while remotely directing a film set in nearby Turkey. What starts as a seemingly gentle satire becomes a timely reckoning with the moral dilemmas faced by people—especially women—living under a patriarchal and dictatorial regime. Though Panahi tragically remains imprisoned in Tehran since his arrest last July, we were glad to be able to speak to the film’s lead actress, Mina Kavani, about her riveting performance as an Iranian exile in Turkey. We discussed Kavani’s own experiences of living in exile, what it was like to work with Panahi, and the women-led movement that continues to reverberate throughout Iran.

Last night, we sat down with a panel of special guests—Alissa Wilkinson (critic, Vox), Bilge Ebiri (critic, Vulture), and Inney Prakash (curator, Maysles Documentary Center and founder, Prismatic Ground film festival)—for a real-time countdown of the results of our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate!) about the films as they were unveiled—now it’s here in podcast form, for your holiday home-listening pleasure! Consider it a gift from us to you, our loyal listeners.

A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away... Well, actually, just a few weeks ago, right here on the good old internet, our esteemed colleague, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, tweeted out two simple words: TÁR WARS. He was referring, of course, to the swirl of controversy around TÁR, one of this year’s most talked-about films. The movie, directed by Todd Field and featuring a central performance from Cate Blanchett, tracks the gradual downfall of one Lydia Tár, the egomaniacal and possibly predatory conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Though a likely lock for many end-of-year lists, TÁR has been fairly divisive among critics. So for today’s podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute took inspiration from Mr. Brody’s tweet and invited two well-matched gladiators—the valiant Jessica Kiang on the pro-side and the courageous Nathan Lee on the con—to debate the relative merits and demerits of TÁR. Two critics enter, one critic leaves… May the best critic win!

2022 marks the birth centenary of the great filmmaker, writer, and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini. To celebrate his legacy, Fireflies Press has published a new book, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper, featuring reflections from Mike Leigh, Helena Wittman, Alexandre Koberidze, Jia Zhangke, Angela Schanelec, and many other filmmakers on the powerful influence the auteur continues to exert on contemporary cinema. To discuss the book and reflect on Pasolini’s life and work, Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Giovanni Marchini Camia, co-publisher of Fireflies Press, and filmmaker Radu Jude, one of the contributors to Writing on Burning Paper. Among other great insights, Giovanni reveals how the title of the book—and in fact, the name “Fireflies Press” itself—was inspired by Pasolini’s writings, and Radu recalls his first encounters with Pasolini’s work at the Romanian Cinematheque in Bucharest in the early ’90s.

This week’s podcast is about one of America’s favorite genres: cop movies. The episode takes inspiration from a series that recently screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, titled “Watch the Cops: Policing New York in the Movies,” curated by scholar Pooja Rangan and filmmaker Brett Story. The program included a small but eclectic range of films, including big-budget genre flicks Copland and Dog Day Afternoon, which show how ambivalence about policing is often resolved in pop culture; the documentary Making “Do the Right Thing”, a behind-the-scenes record of the Spike Lee classic and a glimpse into how movie-making impacts local communities; and the activist film, The Torture of Mothers: The Case of the Harlem 6, a docu-fiction about a famous 1965 case of police brutality and wrongful conviction. Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Brett and Pooja to discuss the thinking behind their selections and to guide them through the thought-provoking ideas underpinning the program. Check out the show page on filmcomment.com for links to several must-see films featured in the series.

It’s the time of year when ghosts, ghouls, and goblins are on the prowl. That’s right: it’s Halloween. Or, if we’re getting technical, the day after Halloween. And as much as Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are scared to admit it, that means it’s also time for another Halloween Hangover episode of the Film Comment Podcast, where the two confront one of their greatest fears—horror movies—with the help of some masters of the macabre. This year, Clint and Devika asked Kelli Weston, who literally holds a PhD in horror cinema, and Steven Mears, a critic and Film Comment’s famously nocturnal copyeditor, to inflict two movies of their choice upon us. Kelli chose the 1976 slasher flick Alice Sweet Alice, and Steve picked Jack Clayton’s Henry James adaptation The Innocents. Both movies were ultimately more goofy than scary, but they yielded a truly rich conversation about the role of religion, class, children, and more in horror.

The leaves are changing color, and there’s a chill in the air. That means, of course, that List Season is upon us. This year is special: Sight & Sound is publishing their Greatest Films of All Time list. Every decade since 1952, the British magazine polls critics, programmers, and filmmakers from all over the world to compile a definitive ranking of the best movies ever made.  At last month’s Getting Real conference, organized by the International Documentary Association, Film Comment co-presented a critics panel exploring the relevance of such lists especially when it comes to documentary films. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by critics Nick Bradshaw, Emerson Goo, Girish Shambu, and Kelli Weston to ask questions like: Are lists still useful in an age of democratizing cinema? What is the relationship between list-making and canonization? How can we collectively remake a more diverse and inclusive canon? And, of course, the fun part: which documentaries are likely to make this year’s Sight & Sound list? Listen to the end to hear our panelists’ best guesses! Read a transcript of this panel discussion here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mn6K6agPkLdRmYkIZc47QhVGSEzspynCvi5Aw6YdZQI/edit