The Film Comment Podcast

Having programmed two high-profile Netflix premieres, Bong Joon Ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), in the main competition, Cannes was shadowed by a debate over distribution—theatrical versus streaming—and the role of heavyweight newcomers Amazon and Netflix. The controversy placed streaming services in direct opposition to cinemas, but the shifting landscape is more complex; for one, Amazon also distributes its titles with more conventional theatrical rollouts, and the same-day VOD release model doesn’t apply to every Amazon title in the market. This episode of The Film Comment Podcast focuses not only on streaming, but also on the interactions between global markets and studios, film critics and consumers, and cinephiles and local art house circuits—and why it’s difficult to make a monolithic statement about what the future holds. Daniel Loría, Editorial Director of Box Office Magazine, and Nick Pinkerton, member of the New York Film Critics Circle, offer up their insights in conversation with FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca.

Maybe it’s the magnetic pull of a performance, a sequence, or a mood, but there are some movies that demand multiple rewatches. This episode of the podcast samples some films that keep our critics coming back, and here—staring at last into the abyss of compulsive movie love—they do some soul-searching as to why they resonate so strongly. Questions of childhood nostalgia or perfect timing enter the mix, as well as how personal responses to a film might shift over time. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca offers a couple of “movie addictions” with Ashley Clark, regular Film Comment contributor; K. Austin Collins, staff writer for The Ringer; and Michael Koresky, Director of Creative and Editorial Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Did the golden age of television already happen? This episode of the podcast makes the case that it has—in 1970s Germany, courtesy of the one and only R.W. Fassbinder. In her feature in the May/June issue, Aliza Ma tackles Fassbinder’s recently restored and rediscovered Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, the nearly eight-hour series the auteur wrote and shot at a crucial moment in his career. The ensemble story involves the friends and family of a worker in a machine parts factory as he slowly mobilizes colleagues against the management. Ma writes: “With Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Fassbinder channels his unique capacity for self-interrogation and curiosity about new social modes of existence into mass media, proving—at least for five episodes—that it is possible to create popular entertainment that manages to be multifaceted, provocative, and meaningful.” Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca was joined by Ma, head of programming at Metrograph, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to bask in the complexities and pleasures of this newly essential addition to the Fassbinder oeuvre.

The agony and the ecstasy of festivalgoing continues on this week’s episode. In the second week of Cannes, two television shows by established auteurs—Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—premiered, along with grittier indie fare, like Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold was joined by contributing editors Amy Taubin and Jonathan Romney, as well as Jordan Cronk, co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival, to discuss the standouts and the failures.

The dark of the theater and the sunny seafront come together but once a year at the Cannes Film Festival, and in this week's episode of the Film Comment Podcast, the critics weigh in live from the south of France on the slate's standouts, surprises, and offenses so far. Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold chats with a roundtable—namely Jordan Cronk, co-founder of the Locarno in Los Angeles Film Festival; Nicholas Elliott, New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma and contributing film editor for BOMB; and FC Contributing Editors Jonathan Romney and Amy Taubin—about the first week of screenings, including Claire Denis's Un beau soleil intérieur, Agnès Varda and JR's Visages Villages, Bong Joon-ho's Okja, Ruben Östlund's The Square, and Michael Haneke's Happy End.

There's one alliterative movie musical that's dominated the recent conversational limelight, but less frequently discussed is how it operates within the genre. In this spirit, Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, uses La La Land as a starting point to delve into the form of the movie musical in his May/June Film Comment feature "Working It" As a second act, this week's episode of the FC podcast expands the sample set of movie musicals—each panelist brings in a favorite classic musical, as well as a newer musical that pushes the form forward—to look at a wider variety of global cinemas, performance techniques, and ways of deploying music in the narrative. To talk it over—and sing it out—FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca joins Koresky; Andrew Chan, Web Editor for the Criterion Collection; and Eric Hynes, Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Following a free screening of Michael Radford's adaptation of 1984 in early April as part of a nationwide event, Film Comment Editor Nicolas Rapold moderated a panel discussion about present-day doublespeak and dystopia. This week's episode of the FC podcast presents the conversation, which took place at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Using the film's aesthetics and narrative as a starting point, the panel—featuring critic and curator Ashley Clark; filmmaker Petra Epperlein, director of the Stasi documentary Karl Marx City; and New York Magazine book critic Christian Lorentzen—considers the Trump administration's manipulations of memory, motifs in modern dystopian literature and film, the role of media in public discourse in the UK and Russia, and how Orwell's original text resonates in 2017.

To celebrate the 55th birthday of our magazine, we present a special gift-giving episode of the podcast. The gifts in this case are movies: as in a Secret Snowflake office gift exchange, each critic gave two films to another participant that the recipient hadn’t seen before. One was a film that they’d be interested in hearing that person talk about; the other, a film that was just for fun. As you’ll hear, some gifts were more appreciated than others—but each of the viewings yielded a fascinating discussion. Along with Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca, the gift-givers/recipients included Michael Koresky, the Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Nick Pinkerton, regular contributor to Film Comment, and Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph.

This week's episode of the Film Comment podcast takes a sonic journey through this year's edition of Art of the Real, which runs through May 2 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. First, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca speaks with AotR co-programmer Rachael Rakes about searching for formally daring new nonfiction work, as well as the preconceptions people bring to concepts like "film," "entertainment," and "art." Then, Lucca delves into the stylistic and structural intricacies of three festival selections—Patric Chiha's Brothers of the Night, Robinson Devor's Pow Wow, and Shengze Zhu's Another Year—to explore the range of techniques and stories on view. Reflecting on these films are Rakes; Michael Koresky, Director of Editorial and Creative Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Genevieve Yue, critic and assistant professor at the New School's Eugene Lang College.

On the occasion of Criterion Collection's home video release of Multiple Maniacs and the publication of his new book Make Trouble, Violet Lucca chats with John Waters—the director, writer, artist, sometime actor (most recently of FX's Feud: Bette and Joan), and Christmas card sender extraordinaire. Waters talks about the freedom of writing across multiple media, film critic Parker Tyler, his early days abusing zoom lenses and getting arrested for Mondo Trasho, and how his bad taste movement has been folded into the mainstream, from reality television to raunchy Hollywood comedies, to the current occupant of the White House. Waters called in from his home in Baltimore (where there's a special word tailor-made for the likes of Trump).