The Film Comment Podcast

With Cannes 2022 kicking off this week, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Publisher Eugene Hernandez sits down with Arianna Bocco, President of IFC Films, to take the temperature of Cannes, mid-way through. The two talk about her history with festival, how Cannes’ role in the film industry has evolved over the years, and how seeing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days from Cristian Mungiu (director of this year’s standout drama R.M.N.) changed her career. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts, at filmcomment.com.

With Cannes 2022 in full swing, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by FC contributors Jordan Cronk and Giovanni Marchini Camia to discuss some recent highlights from the fest, including James Gray’s Armageddon Time, Ruben Östland’s Triangle of Sadness, Christian Mungiu’s R.M.N, and more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

With Cannes 2022 in full swing, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish was joined by Inney Prakash (programmer and founder of the Prismatic Ground Festival) and Vadim Rizov (director of editorial operations at Filmmaker Magazine), to discuss some recent highlights from the fest, including Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister, Jerzy Skolimowsk’s EO, and more. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

With Cannes 2022 kicking off this week, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, FC Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish found a quiet corner to chat with frequent FC contributors Jessica Kiang and Jordan Cronk about their hot takes from the first three days of the fest. They discuss Kirill Serebrennikov’s Tchaikovsky's Wife, Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet, Michel Hazanavicius’s Coupez!, and Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to a steady stream of our Cannes 2022 coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

With Cannes 2022 kicking off this week, Film Comment is on the ground, reporting on all the cinematic excitement at the film industry’s grandest annual event with the help of our on-the-Croisette crew of contributors. On today’s podcast, Film Comment Publisher Eugene Hernandez sits down with Lizzie Francke(producer and Editor at Large at the BFI) to provide an inside-the-industry take on this year’s festival. They also touch on some lesser known films that they’re excited about (including Charlotte Well’s Aftersun) before diving into Franke’s long history with the festival, recent upheavals in the festival ecosystem, and the recent and refreshing increase in the number of women directors in UK cinema. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for early access to our daily Cannes coverage, including interviews, dispatches, and podcasts.

Cannes 2022 is here—and as news of standing ovations and walkouts, throwaway raves and pans, spit takes and hot takes flood the feed, we’ll be reporting on all the cinematic goings-on, with our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. First up, we welcome FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and frequent FC contributor Jessica Kiang on the podcast to preview this year’s lineup. We talk about the history of the festival—and how it’s changed over the years—before discussing some of the films we’re most excited to see, including David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Claire Denis’s The Stars at Noon, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, and others. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today at filmcomment.com for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2022 edition.

Everything you always wanted to know about Hong Sangsoo… but were afraid to ask! To celebrate Film at Lincoln Center’s two-part retrospective of the films of Hong, we hosted a special live conversation with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim about the playful, profound, and soju-soaked filmography of one of world cinema’s most influential and ingenious artists.  Dennis, the author of a forthcoming monograph on Hong’s Tale of Cinema from Fireflies Press, had his expertise put to the test with a series of preselected questions from Film Comment contributors about the South Korean auteur’s elliptical, endlessly generative body of work. And of course, in keeping with the spirit of the films, drinks were be served before and during the conversation. Read an exclusive excerpt from Dennis’s book here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/tale-of-cinema-dennis-lim-excerpt/

This week's special two-parter episode spotlights a pair of upcoming must-see programs in New York City. In the first half, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute chat with the critic, scholar, and former Cahiers du Cinema editor Jean-Michel Frodon, who has curated a revelatory series for the Museum of Modern Art, “Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave.” In an enlightening conversation, Jean-Michel tells us about the origins and mutations of the term nouvelle vague, the influence of the Algerian War and anti-colonial movements in that period, the intermixing of documentary and fiction in New Wave practice, and more.  In the second part of the episode, Devika and Clint interview Inney Prakash, the founder of Prismatic Ground, a new festival for experimental documentary. Inney began Prismatic Ground last year amid the upheavals of the pandemic as an attempt to reimagine film festivals from a more radical, ethical, and global perspective. Inney discusses his curatorial philosophy, why it was important for him to have the festival stream online all over the world for free, and some highlights from this year’s program, including The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton, Declarations of Love by Tiff Rekem, Squish! by Tulapop Saenjaroen, and more. For links to films and more, check out the show notes at filmcomment.com

After 2019’s Portrait of a Lady of Fire, we were eagerly awaiting Céline Sciamma’s next feature. Her new film, Petite Maman, is now finally in theaters, and it’s something of a surprise: a sweet, magical-realist story about a little girl who meets and befriends a younger version of her grieving mother. It’s a more modest film than the swooning period romance of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but Petite Maman is just as profound in its play with gender roles and women’s inner worlds. As Amy Taubin writes in an essay in this week’s Film Comment Letter, “All of Sciamma’s films contain autobiographical elements, but none are as revealing as Petite Maman’s portrait of the filmmaker as a fledgling tomboy writer/director, already eager to claim all roles on-screen and off that only have been bestowed on men.” FC Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with the director over Zoom to dig into those autobiographical elements, the film’s deceptive simplicity, Sciamma’s love of classic children’s films, and much more.

Every year, Film at Lincoln Center honors a luminary of the film industry with the Chaplin Award. This year’s recipient, the 47th, is an actress who has essayed some of the most iconic performances of the last quarter-century, and whose nearly superhuman versatility is matched by the consistency of her craft: Cate Blanchett. In an in-depth tribute essay, the scholar Amy Herzog writes that “Blanchett’s almost otherworldly range has generated certain tropes in reviews of her work: she is often described as ‘chameleonic,’ or said to ‘disappear into the character. But these takes, which suggest an innate and natural ability for imitation, or even an erasure of the self, don’t capture the careful calibrations of Blanchett’s craft.” A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Blanchett to dig into those calibrations and the process behind some of the most interesting performances of her career. We discussed her iconic turns in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, and some deeper cuts, like her early roles in the Australian miniseries Bordertown and Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (which was written by Krystof Kieslowski).