The Film Comment Podcast

The 60th New York Film Festival closed up shop last weekend, which means that it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. FC co-deputy editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute convened an all-star team of critics—Phoebe Chen, Molly Haskell, and Kelli Weston—for a spirited wrap-up discussion about the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF60 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed Todd Field’s controversial TÁR, Alice Diop’s consensus favorite Saint Omer, Paul Schrader’s less-well-regarded Master Gardener, Joanna Hogg’s hall-of-mirrors The Eternal Daughter, and many other noteworthy selections.

In his Cannes 2022 dispatch, Jonathan Romney wrote “Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO is a flamboyant, visionary work: its execution—including drone shots set to blazing red filters—and wayward, fragmented narrative showed an energy shared by that little else at the festival. Corny but true: the wildest, youngest film in the lineup was made by an 84-year-old director up for anything.” With EO making its US premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, we sat down with Skolimowski over Zoom to discuss his radical re-imagining of Bresson, which follows a pure-hearted donkey adrift in a cruel world. Though the filmmaker—known for such classics as Walkover, Deep End, Moonlighting, and many more—wasn’t able to attend this year’s festival in person, he was happy to field our many questions about his latest, a powerfully empathetic work of striking beauty and visual imagination.

Taking its title from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, this talk explores the role of critique and criticism in the arts and beyond. Does critique represent a negative attitude to the world, or is it in fact an optimistic practice, one that allows us to imagine and work toward alternative and better realities? (Brecht, again: “Criticizing the course of a river means improving it, correcting it.”) Is criticism always a response to art, or can it be a form of art-making in itself? Can one effectively critique an institution or system while also living within it? Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute delved into these questions with a roundtable of directors—Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), Elvis Mitchell (Is That Black Enough for You?!?), and Tiffany Sia (What Rules the Invisible)—whose films from the NYFF60 lineup are as stunning as works of art as they are incisive as critiques—whether of history, society, or art itself.

2021 marked the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. To mark this occasion and honor Vogel’s path-blazing legacy, last year the festival inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. For this second edition of the Lecture, NYFF welcomed the filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith, whose landmark 1998 debut feature, Drylongso, screened in a new restoration in the Revivals section of this year’s festival. Known for the political rigor and intrepid formal experimentation of her film and multimedia practice, Smith epitomizes both the ethics of care and the commitment to subversion that guided Vogel’s mission. Smith’s address is followed by a Q&A with Jacqueline Stewart, the director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a Turner Classic Movies host, and is presented here for the first time. The 2022 Amos Vogel Lecture is sponsored by Turner Classic Movies. NYFF Talks are presented by HBO.

“Cinema is never on time,” wrote the great critic Serge Daney. That statement never seemed to apply to Jean-Luc Godard, an auteur who was always of his time and ahead of it—a relentless interrogator of the present who also sought the horizons of a new future. This week, as we mourn the recent passing of one of our greatest artists, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited two critics and Godard experts for a talk about the filmmaker’s life and career. Richard Brody writes about movies for The New Yorker and is the author of the must-read Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, and Blair McClendon is a film editor, regular Film Comment contributor, and author of a beautiful remembrance of Godard published by n+1. The four discussed Godard’s vast and protean filmography, from foundational works like Breathless and La Chinoise to masterful essay films like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book, and the ways in which Godard’s films awakened them, in their formative cinephilic years, to the aesthetic and political potentialities of cinema.

As we head into the last weekend of the 2022 Toronto Film Festival, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes Adam Nayman (critic and certified Toronto native), Vadim Rizov (director of operations at Filmmaker Magazine), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor at the Criterion Collection) to talk about some of the major titles from this year's lineup, including The Fabelmans, Dry Ground Burning, Women Talking, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, The Whale, and the Bulgari ad directed by Paolo Sorrentino that plays before every TIFF screening.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our third podcast dispatch from Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish is joined by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle and critic Mark Asch to talk about Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and Bloodshed, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People's Children, Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, and more.

We’re reporting this week from one of the major film events of the fall: the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s screening, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from the lineup with a rotating crew of critics and special guests. For our second dispatch from the Tim Horton–studded mean streets of Toronto, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes Cristina Nord (head of the Berlinale Forum), Chloe Lizotte (editorial manager at MUBI Notebook), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor at the Criterion Collection) to talk about some of their favorites from the fest, including Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Lars von Tier’s The Kingdom Exodus, Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, Moyra Davey’s Horse Opera, Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking, and more.

Hold Me Tight, the latest directorial venture from actor and filmmaker Mathieu Amalric, is a riveting, kaleidoscopic entry to the canon of movies about women on the verge. The film, which opened on September 9, features Vicky Krieps as Clarisse, a young mother on the run who may—or may not, depending on your reading of the story—be going through indescribable grief. The actor turns in a performance of mesmerizing fluidity and mystery, as Amalric’s elliptical storytelling keeps the audience guessing about the nature of Clarisse’s reality.  Last week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish welcomed the director and star for a Film Comment Live talk about their new movie, the narrative and cinematic balancing act of depicting a mind in flux, the film’s imaginative use of music, and much more.

Once again we’ve arrived at that special time of year known as festival season. Today we kick off our coverage of one of the fall’s major film events, the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 18. Throughout this year’s festival, we’ll be on the ground, covering all the highlights (and lowlights) from this year’s lineup, alongside our rotating crew of critics and special guests. First up, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish welcomes critics and programmers Jordan Cronk, Inney Prakash, and Bedatri Choudhury to discuss Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, the experimental Wavelengths shorts program, and more. Stay tuned for more from the Tim Horton–studded mean streets of Toronto!