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Review: Jupiter Ascending
It’s not always easy to be a Mila Kunis fan. Certainly, there’s a lot to draw you in—keen comic timing, a voice that routinely shows more range in a single scene than some actresses manage over their...
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Interview: Dan Gilroy
Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, out this week on Blu-ray, is the best American movie of 2014. Gilroy constructs an exciting and enraging vision of contemporary life from the spectacle of TV-news...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Chinese New Year
Kung Hei Fat Choy Kung Hei Fat Choi! Sometime between late January and early February, the Chinese New Year holiday lands like an atom bomb. Work is canceled, relatives are visited, married couples...
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Deep Focus: Kingsman: The Secret Service
The main reason Kingsman: The Secret Service leaves you feeling rooked is that it wastes a once-in-an-actor’s-lifetime opportunity. Casting Colin Firth as a lethal gentleman super-spy and stranding...
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Film of the Week: ’71
Yann Demange’s ’71 occupies an intriguing position in current British cinema—a rare hybrid between hard-nosed realism, on the cusp of a quasi-documentary style, and genre thriller-adventure. Set in...
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Interview: Sandra Adair
While Mason, Samantha, and all the other characters of Boyhood were growing up on screen, an astounding number of technological shifts occurred over the 12 years it was shot. These changes most...
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Bombast: Lizabeth Scott
Pitfall Of course the women who were involved in that loosely defined phenomenon we call film noir would outlive their leading men. Women live longer, and they were younger to begin with—that was part...
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Film Comment Selects: Sneak Preview
Belluscone: A Sicilian Story Some of the most intriguing titles in this year’s edition of Film Comment Selects—which begins this Friday and runs through March 5—resist easy categorization and prefer...
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Interview: Joe Dante (Part One)
Joe Dante is the most casual and colloquial of American genre-movie masters. Whether in a werewolf movie like The Howling (81) or a one-of-a-kind coming-of-age film like Matinee (93), set in Key West...
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Interview: Joe Dante (Part Two)
Read part one of this interview. In your movies, you see through corporate honchos as slick, exploitative gladhanders, but in the last reel you don’t always feel compelled to punish them. Well, John...
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Deep Focus: Queen & Country
John Boorman’s Queen and Country, his sequel to Hope and Glory (87), is bracingly sane about war, peace, and young adulthood. In this engrossing autobiographical saga of life in Britain’s National...
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Film of the Week: Wild Tales
I admire Pedro Almodóvar all the more after watching the Argentinian portmanteau movie Wild Tales—you have to applaud his generosity in supporting a filmmaker who can do in-flight farce so much better...
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Interview: Shinya Tsukamoto
Sometimes it’s impossible for a filmmaker to escape being identified with one of their groundbreaking early works, no matter how many different genres or types of stories they may explore in...
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Film Comment Readers’ Poll 2014
The ballots came thundering in for Boyhood over Birdman (among other 2014 films), with Godard’s Goodbye to Language—the runner-up in our Critics’ Poll—shunted to lucky #13. Readers also went their own...
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Festivals: IDFA
If I were to identify a theme at this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam—at least in the films I saw—it’d be the human element amidst vast political change. Not “human” in the...
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Bombast: Everywhere with Helicopter
Fifteen minutes into Sharky’s Machine (81), the third feature credited to Burt Reynolds as director, we’re treated to a strange, somewhat patience-testing helicopter aerial shot. We are above the...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Cannon Ninja Films
Since the dawn of time, man’s natural predator has been the ninja. The only way to study the ninja safely, without him shooting throwing stars through both your eyes, is to capture him on film, and...
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Interview: Rakhshan Bani-E’temad
Called the “First Lady of Iranian Cinema,” Rakhshan Bani-E’temad may not be as well-known outside her country, but for three decades, she has sketched some of the most striking portraits of life in...
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Interview: Riley Stearns
Maybe it’s something in the water. That’s one explanation offered by writer-director Riley Stearns for the recent deluge of films dealing with mind control and cult deprogramming. As Stearns hastens...
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Interview: Eric Baudelaire
Of the handful of contemporary filmmakers who have found their own fruitful, imaginative twists on the essay film, the Paris-based artist Eric Baudelaire stands apart. Born in Salt Lake City,...
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