The Film Comment Podcast

Nosferatu, the new film by Robert Eggers, has been the talk of the movie-town since its release on Christmas Day. With his remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic of the same name, Eggers has become the latest auteur to bring Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula to the screen, joining a group that also includes Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola. Like those before him, Eggers makes the tale of the Transylvanian vampire all his own. His Nosferatu is rooted in precise historical detail—as in his earlier films like The Witch (2015) and The Northman (2022)—while also bringing a contemporary psychodramatic sensibility to the characters, particularly Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). On today’s Podcast, Eggers joins Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to discuss why he wanted to make Dracula “scary” again, the polarizing feminist readings of Nosferatu, and the visual restraint of the film. If you stick it out until the end, you’ll also hear Eggers share some of the movies and T.V. shows he counts as Guilty Pleasures—including a reality show featuring a “demonic masc villain.”

A new film from Mike Leigh is always a cause for celebration. Starting with his first feature Bleak Moments in 1971, Leigh has carved out a singular place in British and global cinema for his beautifully sensitive and detailed portraits of the lives of his largely working-class characters. His latest, Hard Truths, arrives six years after his previous release, the 2018 historical drama Peterloo. The new film reunites Leigh with the great actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste, with whom he worked on the Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies in 1996. In Hard Truths, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a middle-aged Londoner teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Perpetually unhappy, she spends her days spewing vitriol at everyone she encounters—especially her resigned husband (David Webber) and depressed adult son (Tuwaine Barrett). Only after she is confronted by her sister, played by Leigh veteran Michelle Austin, does she begin to confront the roots of her inexplicable anger. On today’s Podcast, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Leigh to dig into his process—everything from casting actors and choosing locations to working with music composers and choosing the film’s title. A true actor’s filmmaker, Leigh works closely with his cast over months to develop characters and their backstories. What we see on screen is only, as Leigh remarked, “the tip of the iceberg.”

Two enigmatic icons with enduring holds on the Western imagination are currently lighting up multiplex screens: fearsome Transylvanian vampire Dracula and Nobel Prize–winning American treasure Bob Dylan. Both released on Christmas Day, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown are ambitious efforts at crafting new and absorbing tales out of these two mainstays of pop culture. Nosferatu stars Bill Skarsgård, Lily Rose-Depp, and Nicholas Hoult in the latest adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, joining a cinematic canon established by filmmakers like F.W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola, and Werner Herzog. A Complete Unknown features Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan, tracing his arrival in New York in 1961 to his set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he famously decided to “go electric.” On this week’s Podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Lovia Gyarkye, film critic at The Hollywood Reporter, and FC’s very own Michael Blair (a Dylan aficionado) to debate the successes and failures of the two films—for both loyalists and neophytes of Dylan & Dracula. The group also discussed a few other Christmas Week releases, including Barry Jenkins’s Mufasa and Rachel Morrison’s The Fire Inside—and if you stay till the very end, you can also listen to their thoughts on Peter Watkins’s monumental La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), which the Film Comment team viewed this past weekend at Anthology Film Archives. Sections: A Complete Unknown (7:25) Nosferatu (31:20) Mufasa (48:00) The Fire Inside (52:16) La Commune (Paris, 1871) (55:56)

On December 12, 2024, as part our annual winter list extravaganza, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish led a panel of special guests—Molly Haskell (critic, author), and Michael Koresky (critic, founding editor of Reverse Shot)—for a live real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate) about the films as they were unveiled—and now it’s here in Podcast form, for your home-listening pleasure. Consider it a holiday gift from us to you, our loyal listeners. Read the full list, plus Best Undistributed Films, individual ballots, and more, at filmcomment.com/best-films-of-2024

Sleepily emerging from the turkey-induced haze of Thanksgiving break and looking ahead to the barrage of Best of 2024 lists, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critics Robert Daniels and Beatrice Loayza to discuss some of the most highly-anticipated Hollywood blockbusters (and would-be blockbusters) of this year’s holiday season. The group convened to offer their thoughts on Steve McQueen’s Blitz (3:25), Edward Berger’s Conclave (17:00), Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II (31:56), Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (43:55), and Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 (55:53).

During the 2024 New York Film Festival, Film Comment’s Devika Girish had the chance to chat with Julianne Moore, one of the great American actresses of the last three decades and more. She was at the festival for the premiere of The Room Next Door, the first English-language feature film by Pedro Almodóvar, which stars Moore as a writer in New York who reconnects with an old friend, now in the late stages of cancer, played by Tilda Swinton. The friend makes a strange request of Moore’s character: to give her company in a house in upstate New York where she plans to take her own life using a euthanasia pill. Almodóvar’s film unfolds like a chamber drama, honing in on the awkward but tender companionship of two women in an absurd and dark situation, as they try to figure out how to enjoy the day-to-day of their togetherness while anticipating death. The Room Next Door hinges on its lead performances, and Moore and Swinton rise to the task with luminous turns that imbue the beautifully designed, fantasy world of Almodovar’s film with a rough-edged, piercing emotional realism. Devika’s conversation with Moore delves into the challenge of inhabiting the unreal worlds of Almodóvar with realism, as well as Moore’s relationship with Swinton, how she acts with her voice, and whether it’s difficult to play a good person in the movies.

When Payal Kapadia won a historic Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her second feature, All We Imagine as Light (the first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years), she paid homage to another Cannes prizewinner whose work has deeply influenced her: Miguel Gomes, whose Grand Tour won the award for Best Director. The resonances between their latest films go beyond Cannes laurels and directorial inspiration. All We Imagine as Light, which opens in American theaters this Friday, traces the stories of three women in present-day Mumbai, while Grand Tour follows a British colonial officer and his fiancée as they traipse across various East Asian cities in 1918—but both films are city symphonies that center love stories within broader political contexts and are driven by the pulsings of female desire. Last month at the New York Film Festival, Film Comment editor Devika Girish moderated a conversation with Kapadia and Gomes—both practitioners of artful docufiction—which touched on their influences, aspirations, and methods.

The films of Robert Kramer blend fiction and documentary modes to engage with, and expand on, traditions of militant political cinema and subjective essay filmmaking. A founding member of the New Left activist film collective Newsreel in 1967, Kramer devoted himself to the group’s radical ethos, but he also began to make his own hermetic and probing fiction films—like The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969)—which turned the camera back onto the mostly white middle-class milieu of his comrades, posing thorny questions about the nature of political commitment. This process reached its peak with the sprawling, 3-hour plus Milestones (1975, co-directed with John Douglas), a vast mosaic featuring a cast of over 50 fellow travelers, union organizers, dropouts, Free Vermont commune dwellers, and more, all navigating the demands of their personal and political lives in the wake of the Vietnam War. At the end of ’70s, Kramer decamped to France, where his films had been championed by critics like Serge Daney, and proceeded to work in a wide variety of contexts across Europe and beyond, making films like Guns (1980), Our Nazi (1984), Doc’s Kingdom (1988), Route One/USA (1989), and Walk the Walk (1996).  Over the past several years, the French DVD company Re:Voir has been beautifully restoring and re-releasing his films, and Kramer, who passed away suddenly in 1999, is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Viennale, running through the end of November. The retrospective is accompanied by a new book, Starting Places, published by the Austrian Film Museum, which reproduces a 1997 interview with Kramer by the French critic Bernard Eisenchitz alongside several essays written by Kramer himself. To mark the occasion, Film Comment’s Clinton Krute and Michael Blair invited Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais, two noted critics who each proudly own original Milestones posters, to discuss Kramer’s life and work. A few short audio clips of Kramer talking about his films, sourced from the original 1997 interview tapes, are interspersed throughout the conversation, providing their own points of departure into this undersung filmmaker’s richly heterogenous, and endlessly fascinating, body of work.   Special thanks to Volker Pantenburg. Show Notes: “The Traveller” by Benjamin Crais (Sidecar, 2023): https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-traveller “Milestones” by Erika Balsom (4Columns, 2020): https://4columns.org/balsom-erika/milestones Serge Daney on Milestones and Route One/USA (originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, 1975 and 1989): https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-aquarium-milestones.html; https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2014/05/murmur-of-world.html  Robert Kramer: Notes de la forteresse (1967-1999) (edited by Cyril Béghin. Re:Voir, 2019):https://re-voir.com/shop/en/books/1101-robert-kramer-notes-de-la-forteresse-1967-1999.html

As the 62nd New York Film Festival drew to a close last weekend, it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. This year, the end-of-fest ritual took place in collaboration with the New York Film Critics Circle, which will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2025. Devika and Clint were joined by NYFCC members Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye for a spirited wrap-up analysis of the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF62 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed and debated RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Trương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam, and many more. The Questions: Favorite moment in an NYFF62 film? (4:25) Favorite performance? (19:30) Best film about a real person? (32:30) A film that you can’t shake, for good or bad? (50:17)

Two films in this year’s New York Film Festival lineup grapple beautifully with the challenge of narrating stories of collective movements without giving in to the allure of the heroic individual protagonist. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Revivals selection Northern Lights (1978) stages the founding of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota—formed in the mid-1910s by farmers from that state—parallel to a tale of young love, using a dramatized approach to explore the tensions between personal desires and collective commitments. Made more than four decades later, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary Union (2024)—featured in the festival’s Spotlight section—takes on another chapter in the history of the American labor struggle: the 2022 unionization drive of the Amazon plant on Staten Island, and the challenges facing an autonomous movement that requires leadership but is rooted in democracy. Last Saturday, the two directorial pairs—Hanson and Nilsson, and Story and Maing—joined Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a live panel discussion on their stylistically different but thematically connected works. In a thought-provoking conversation, they examined the practical, formal, and political considerations of making films about people power.