The Film Comment Podcast

Vitalina Varela, the beautiful new film from Pedro Costa, is the cover of our January-February issue. Jordan Cronk spoke with Costa about the film’s story of a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina who comes back to Lisbon for the funeral of her estranged husband. As Cronk put it in his feature: “Costa has been developing his approach into a new kind of dramatic portraiture . . . He has become a touchstone for an entire movement of contemporary art cinema ranging from documentary to the avant-garde.” Vitalina Varela next screens in the Sundance film festival, followed by an exclusive theatrical run at Film at Lincoln Center, where it showed in the main slate of the New York Film Festival. Last fall, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold spoke with Pedro Costa at Film at Lincoln Center about crafting his deeply moving and technically virtuosic film.

Throughout her pioneering career, Agnès Varda has inspired countless filmmakers with her work and her groundbreaking career and style. At Film Comment, we leapt at the opportunity to put her on the cover when Faces Places was released. More recently, to celebrate the final weekend of the Varda retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, Film Comment presented a conversation with another generation of filmmakers in honor of Varda. They talked about what Varda has meant to them and which movies from her oeuvre influenced them. For this discussion, Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was pleased to be joined by Ashley Connor (cinematographer, Madeline’s Madeline and Feast of the Epiphany), Anna Rose Holmer (director, The Fits, ND/NF 2015), and Akosua Adoma Owusu (Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us, NYFF; 2020 recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists.

Uncut Gems, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, and starring Adam Sandler, is a full-throttle portrait of a diamond dealer in New York’s Diamond District. It’s been a wild success since it opened in December, and in our November-December issue, Michael Koresky wrote about the movie, praising how the Safdie brothers “capture the bustle and pace of rapid-fire economic exchange, filtering it through an increasingly panicky wild ride.” The neighborhoods of New York are central to the energy of Uncut Gems (as well as their previous films like Good Time). So we decided to invite Josh and Benny Safdie to chat about New York movies. Film Comment contributor Nick Pinkerton sat down with the filmmakers at Film at Lincoln Center, to talk about New York on screen and which particular movies influenced their vision of their hometown.

Little Women is without question one of the best movies of the recently-ended year, and it’s a wonderful triumph for director Greta Gerwig. That’s why we put it on the cover of our November-December issue, featuring Gerwig’s delightful interview by Devika Girish. But there’s even more to say about the movie and its intelligent, complex, and visually rich adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. So Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold sat down with Devika and Amy Taubin, contributing editor to FC, to talk about what makes Little Women a great and important movie that shouldn’t be missed in the hustle of the new year.

Welcome to another episode in our Decade Project series where we look back at the past 10 years and talk about our favorite filmmakers, major changes and trends, and the movies that made a difference. This week, we’re talking about acting and performance in the 2010s—actors that made their mark, and tendencies we’ve noticed. Joining Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold are Michael Koresky, Film Comment regular, and Shonni Enelow, a Fordham professor and Film Comment contributor who wrote about a certain restrained acting style that’s taken shape for our September-October 2016 issue.

With the 2010s on the way out, we thought that this very recent history could use a road map. Each installment of the Decade Project will look at key developments, pivotal movies, groundbreaking film artists, and so on. This week, we’re looking at filmmakers but specifically everyone but the director. We’re as guilty as anyone of referring to movies in terms of their directors. So we wanted to look back and choose a few favorite cinematographers, and editors, and costume designers who were doing outstanding work in the 2010s. Joining Film Comment Editor-in-Chief for this conversation are two programmers, Eric Hynes, curator of the Museum of the Moving Image, and Ashley Clark, director, film programming, at BAM.

It’s that time of year again! Film Comment has made a list and we’ve checked it twice: the best films of 2019, chosen through a poll of our contributing writers. And according to our new annual tradition, we announced the results live at a special Film Comment Talk. This year, Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold was joined to unveil and discuss the films by Amy Taubin, longtime contributing editor at Film Comment; Soraya Nadia Macdonald, who writes for The Undefeated and is a contributing editor at Film Comment; Michael Koresky, all around Film Comment all-star; and Devika Girish, assistant editor at Film Comment. You can read the full Best of 2019 list online, including best unreleased films, and don’t forget to follow along with our special podcast series The Decade Project, about the 2010s. But now, our Best Films of 2019 countdown.

By any measure, the 2010s have been a confusing and turbulent and also exciting time. That goes for both movies and the world at large, and that’s saying a lot after the 2000s. At Film Comment, part of our goal is to offer a critical chronicle of the movies as they’re happening, putting things in historical perspective, pointing out the bold and the beautiful in the art and craft of film, and hopefully offering an insight or two along the way. That’s often hardest to do with contemporary history, and so to grapple with the 2010s, we’re starting a series of Film Comment podcasts we’re calling The Decade Project. We’ll look at the movies from different angles and do our best to map out a vivid but often hard to characterize time. This week, we’ll talk about some of the major shifts and changes that happened over the last ten years, and some of the decade’s pivotal movies. It’s also an opportunity to talk about the big picture in movies, which probably means having a healthy skepticism about thinking in terms of decades altogether. Joining FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold for this discussion are longtime contributing editor Amy Taubin; FC regular Michael Koresky, who is co-editor of the Reverse Shot book, Martin Scorsese: He Is Cinema; and Nick Pinkerton, who’s written a number of essays for us looking at the big picture. Stay tuned for more of The Decade Project with guests Ashley Clark, Sheila O’Malley, Andrew Chan, Molly Haskell, and more. Let’s go to the beginning of our conversation.

Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman has been out in theaters since the beginning of November, which you probably know unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (or were buried under Giants Stadium). Scorsese’s story follows the life of mob fixer Frank Sheeran and his close relationship with mob boss Russell Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters leader. The movie’s release is the perfect time to talk about Scorsese and his work, and explore exactly where The Irishman takes us. Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Shonni Enelow, associate professor at Fordham University and author of Method Acting and Its Discontents; Molly Haskell, critic and author whose books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films; and Film Comment regular Michael Koresky, co-editor of the Reverse Shot book, Martin Scorsese: He Is Cinema.

It’s a busy couple of months for moviegoers as hits from festivals make their way into cinemas. That means it’s time for another New Releases episode, where talk about some highly anticipated titles. Film Comment Editor-in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Devika Girish, assistant editor at FC, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor of Film at The City College of New York. Among the movies discussed are Atlantics, The Irishman, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is coming soon in December.