The Film Comment Podcast

This week we have been recording at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, talking about the highlights in its film lineup. One of the most anticipated movies there was the new film from Kirsten Johnson. Johnson’s first feature was the incredible Cameraperson, assembled partly from images she shot while working as a cinematographer on other films. Her new feature is called Dick Johnson Is Dead, and it’s innovative in a different way. It’s a portrait of her father and her relationship with him as he faces the challenges of growing old. But part of how Johnson expresses this coping process is through staged scenes, sometimes showing her father in heaven, sometimes having imaginary accidents. The result brings us closer to both the filmmaker and her father and to the inevitable horizon of mortality. At Sundance, after the film’s premiere, Film Comment Assistant Editor Devika Girish sat down with Johnson for a fascinating discussion of Dick Johnson Is Dead.

Welcome back to our ongoing series podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. As we near the festival’s end, we’ve redoubled our efforts to bring our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Ashley Clark, Director of Film Programming at BAM, and FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish, for a discussion of Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs, Radha Blank’s The 40-Year-Old Version, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro, and more.

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. We’re bringing our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Ela Bittencourt (critic and FC contributor), Eric Hynes (FC columnist and curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image) and FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish, for a discussion of Steve James’s City So Real, Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven, the New Frontier program, Michael Almereyda’s Tesla, and more.

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. We’re bringing our dedicated fans the content they crave: daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with filmmaker and critic Sierra Pettengill and Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, for a discussion of Kitty Green’s The Assistant, Garrett Bradley’s Time, Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, and more.

Welcome back to our podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival! We’ll be bringing you daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Abby Sun, programmer and FC contributor, and Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, for a discussion of Shirley, Time, Yalda, małni—towards the ocean, towards the shore, and more.

This week we are at the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah, sending regular dispatches about the highlights in its independent film lineup. One of the most highly anticipated movies here is called The Last Thing He Wanted, from filmmaker Dee Rees, who previously directed Mudbound and Pariah. The Last Thing He Wanted is an adaptation of the Joan Didion novel, which centers on a journalist who gets caught up in shady international business when her ageing father gets sick. The time period is the high-Reagan 1980s, and the story involves malfeasance in Central America, gun running, family challenges, and the CIA. Anne Hathaway plays the journalist, Willem Dafoe is her father, Rosie Perez is a fellow journalist. Rees takes a kaleidoscopic approach to adapting Didion’s typically complex narration, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with the director at Sundance to discuss her process as well as pick her brain about the movie’s ideas about modernity and identity. The Last Thing He Wanted premieres here on January 27 and will be available through Netflix in February.

Welcome back to our series of podcasts from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival! We’ll be bringing you daily updates from Park City, covering all the great films and festive (film-related) goings-on. For today’s podcast, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Sam Adams, senior editor at Slate and editor of Slate’s culture blog Brow Beat, and FC Assistant Editor (and podcast regular) Devika Girish. Films discussed include Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Zola, Boys State, Into the Deep, and Jumbo.

We’re back, reporting from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Where others may have balked, we brave the dangerously crowded, ice-packed streets of Park City, Utah to bring you critical conversations about all the highlights from the festival. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined for this episode by Assistant Editor Devika Girish and podcast regular Eric Hynes, Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss the films Crip Camp, Bad Hair, Miss Americana, and This Is Not a Burial, It Is a Resurrection.

It’s January, which means it’s time once again to see some movies in the snowy wilderness of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Once again, the Film Comment Podcast will be on the scene, recording regular episodes, with the latest on the festival, the movies, and the filmmakers. We’re kicking things off with a preview of the 2020 edition’s offerings, talking about the movies we’re most looking forward to, and providing some context to the festival and what’s changed over the years. FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined for this discussion by Amy Taubin, contributing editor, and Devika Girish, Assistant Editor.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about the 2010s and asking some questions as part of our Decade Project. What were the key movies of the decade, which filmmakers were doing innovative work, and what were the major shifts and big issues in the artform and the industry? We brought our discussion of the decade to our latest Film Comment Talk at Film at Lincoln Center. Joining Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for our discussion were Ashley Clark, Director of Film Programming at BAM; Devika Girish, Assistant Editor of Film Comment; Eric Hynes, Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image; and Alissa Wilkinson, Film Critic at Vox.