The Film Comment Podcast

With the holidays behind us and a new and exciting year of cinema on the horizon, FC editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute caught up on some major recent releases. They were joined on their journey through the last few weeks of Hollywood movies by frequent guest A.S. Hamrah, critic for the Baffler, and Simran Hans, critic for the Observer and a first-time visitor to the Film Comment Podcast. They discussed blockbusters The Matrix Resurrections, Don’t Look Up, and Being the Ricardos, as well as more unusual big-ticket fare including Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter and Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. P.S.: Don’t miss Scott’s under-the-radar picks from last year, with more than a few unexpected choices.

Drumroll, please! Film Comment’s highly anticipated Best Films of 2021 list, voted on by nearly a 100 critics and colleagues the world over, is finally out. Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish unveiled the results live at a special Film Comment Talk, featuring hearty discussion and debate with all-star panelists Bilge Ebiri (film critic, Vulture and New York magazine), Edo Choi (assistant curator of film, Museum of the Moving Image), and Beatrice Loayza (associate web editor, the Criterion Collection).  Read the full Best of 2021 lists (including newly commissioned writing from a host of critics!), including best undistributed films and individual ballots from our invaluable voters, at filmcomment.com.

The arrival of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria has been one of the film events of the year. Six years after 2015’s Cemetery of Splendour, the filmmaker has returned to the big screen with his first feature set outside Thailand and his first collaboration with a bona fide movie star: Tilda Swinton. Swinton plays a British visitor in Colombia who finds herself afflicted with exploding head syndrome—a condition that causes her to hear mysterious and sudden booming sounds. Apichatpong and Swinton turn this uncanny premise into an elusive and elliptical exploration of alienation, the slippery nature of communication, and the specters of history. During the New York Film Festival last fall, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with the director and the actress to chat about their collaboration, the autobiographical origins of the film, and Apichatpong’s interest in re-enchantment through cinema.

This week's conversation focuses on David Fincher—a director whose decade-spanning body of gritty Americana—from the grim moral drama of Se7en to the revisionist Hollywood tale of the recent Mank—has inspired reams of divisive analysis A new book by Adam Nayman, David Fincher: Mind Games (out November 23), offers a canny and timely appraisal of the director’s filmography. Adam writes that, “Over the past thirty years, Fincher has cultivated and maintained a reputation that precedes him of formal rigor and technocratic exactitude, of moviemaking as a game of inches.” Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Adam and critic, filmmaker, and former NYFF director, Kent Jones—who’s written about Fincher many times over the years for FC—for an illuminating deep-dive into the Fincherverse.

2021 marks the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. As part of its centenary celebrations this fall, the NYFF 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 the first edition, NYFF welcomed Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra, known for singular and transgressive films like The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté. An avowed fan of Vogel, Serra also wrote the foreword for the French edition of Film as a Subversive Art. Serra’s original lecture was followed by a conversation with NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim, and is published here for the first time. We hope you enjoy the lecture. And don’t miss our previous podcast, a roundtable discussion on the extraordinary life and work of Amos Vogel, featuring programmers and writers Richard Peña, Tom Waibel, and Edo Choi.

This year marks the centenary of Amos Vogel, a programmer, writer, and educator very dear to Film Comment—he was one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, and an abiding influence on New York’s film culture with his legendary Cinema 16 film society. In addition to his many contributions to the pages of Film Comment over the decades, Amos is also widely known for his classic book Film as a Subversive Art, an encyclopedic analysis of underground, avant-garde, and otherwise uncategorizable cinema. The 58th NYFF launched a celebration of Amos’s legacy which has since continued with tribute programs across repertory cinemas in the city and a brand-new edition of Film as a Subversive Art by Film Desk Books. At Film Comment, we’re continuing this celebration with our own week of Vogelmania. To kick things off, editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited a panel of Vogel experts—Richard Peña, the former Director of the New York Film Festival; Tom Waibel, Custodian of the Amos Vogel Library at the Austrian Film Museum; and Edo Choi, the Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image. The conversation reckons with Amos’s ideals of cinema as a space for dialogue, communal contemplation, and political subversion. Be sure to subscribe to the Film Comment Letter to read this week’s special edition, dedicated to the extraordinary work and life of Amos Vogel: https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Every year, as Halloween approaches, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are forced to confront one of their greatest fears: horror movies. For this year’s festivities, they invited two horror experts—Violet Lucca, web editor at Harper's Magazine, and Maddie Whittle, Programming Assistant at Film at Lincoln Center—to inflict some scary movies upon them. Violet and Maddie selected a couple underground favorites: Mohammed Shebl’s bonkers 1981 Egyptian horror musical Fangs and Andy Milligan’s low-budget sleaze-fest The Body Beneath (1970). As it turned out, these vampire outings aren’t all that frightening, but they challenge and expand commonplace notions of horror cinema with their play with genre, sexuality, and political commentary. The group also talked about some other picks: Mahakaal, an ’80s Bollywood remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, Sandor Stern’s Canuxploitation classic Pin, and more.

This Friday, a new restoration of the 1989 indie classic Chameleon Street opens at BAM. Wendell B. Harris’s utterly unique satire follows a real-life compulsive conman, Douglas Street, whose increasingly risky scams demonstrate both a sociopathic genius and a deep pathos. Wendell not only wrote and directed the film, but, like his hero Orson Welles, also played the lead character, with all of the dangerous charm of a man who conned his way into a surgical theater. On today’s podcast, Wendell joins FC Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish for a fascinating oral history of the making of Chameleon Street, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He also revealed that he’s pulled some cons of his own: in 1978, he scored an interview with classic Hollywood actor Hurd Hatfield by pretending to be a Film Comment reporter. Wendell, when you find the tape, please send it our way! Better late than never.

In an NYFF lineup with a record number of new and emerging filmmakers, Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider—both sophomore features—stood out for their sui generis approaches to cinematic narrative and form. Formally assured and intellectually audacious, the two films, in their own unique ways, electrify the quotidian with currents of desire, romance, and modern myth. During the festival last week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish sat down with Silvan Zürcher and Koberidze—who are old friends from their time together at the the renowned DFFB (the German Film and Television Academy Berlin)—for an in-depth talk. The conversation covered the two directors' filmic inspirations and aspirations, their trajectories within Swiss and Georgian cinema, the whimsical play with time and place in their movies, and much more. A special thanks to HBO, the presenting partner of all NYFF Talks.

Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup take us back to the ‘60s heyday of the New York avant-garde: in the Main Slate, Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground offers a revelatory portrait of the milieu that gave rise to the eponymous band and its boundary-pushing music, while in Revivals, Ed Lachman’s Songs for Drella captures Lou Reed and John Cale in concert, paying tribute to the late Andy Warhol with riveting intimacy. On Sunday, October 3, Film Comment editor Devika Girish and Clinton Krute joined Haynes, Lachman, critic Amy Taubin, and the editors of The Velvet Underground, Affonso Gonçalvez and Adam Kurnitz, for a roundtable talk. In our wide-ranging conversation on the stage of Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center. We touched on the making of the two films, as well as the enduring legacy of the historic moment of artistic innovation they so vividly evoke. Stay tuned to filmcomment.com for more coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival, both on the podcast, and in the Film Comment Letter.