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Rep Diary: Films of John Korty
Carroll Ballard, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman, and Michael Ritchie all are, or were, San Francisco–based filmmakers. Yet none of these people seem to be Bay Area filmmakers like...
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Notebook: Oscar Week
Alejandro G. Iñárritu (credit: Richard Harbaugh / ©A.M.P.A.S.) Hollywood is really good at celebrating itself. Oscar week in Los Angeles, the series of shows and soirees that cap awards season, drives...
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Rep Diary: Tulsa
Tonight, Larry Clark’s The Smell of Us screens in Film Comment Selects, and in honor of the screening, here’s a look back at Clark’s early film Tulsa—from the late Sixties. Tulsa (© Larry Clark;...
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Interview: Christian Petzold
This Saturday, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix has its U.S. premiere in Film Comment Selects. The acclaimed German filmmaker’s borrowings from melodrama and noir are key to his latest feature, in which a...
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Film of the Week: Eastern Boys
You may not know the name Robin Campillo, but it’s possible that he’s partly responsible for some of your favorite French films of the last 15 years. Campillo has worked regularly as an editor with...
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Deep Focus: Maps to the Stars
Few actors leap between feats of empathy and masterstrokes of imagination with the offhand brilliance of Julianne Moore. She’s never done it more stunningly than in her back-to-back performances in...
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Interview: David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg’s approach to directing Maps to the Stars, screenwriter Bruce Wagner’s latest baleful vision of contemporary Hollywood’s moral vacuum, was to treat it as an anthropologist might treat...
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Notebook: An Evening with Tom McCarthy
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y Midway through Don DeLillo’s Mao II, a neurotic writer poses a question with no easy answer: “There's the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel...
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Bombast: Subterranean Hot Take Blues
Petitions for my attention drip down my timeline, like drops of rain on a windowpane, and I stare ahead glassy-eyed, dreading each and every one of them. This feeling—and I can’t be the only one who...
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Film Comment Selects: Nils Malmros
Six films by Nils Malmros will screen—with Malmros appearing in person—February 27 through March 1 as part of Film Comment Selects at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. 1. Pain of Love It’s...
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ND/NF Interview: Joel Potrykus
Buzzard opens this Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. FILM COMMENT spoke with director Joel Potrykus last year during New Directors / New Films. Buzzard, the new feature from Joel Potrykus...
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Interview: Cristián Jiménez
Alongside filmmakers like Pablo Larraín, Sebastián Silva, Alicia Scherson, and Andrés Wood, Cristián Jiménez belongs to a generation who, almost two decades after Pinochet, have revitalized and...
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Interview: Miguel Llansó and Yohannes Feleke
In 2010, the Spanish-born filmmaker Miguel Llansó made a short film in Ethiopia, titled Where Is My Dog? Now available on YouTube, it first garnered wider attention in 2011 at the International Film...
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Deep Focus: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
In The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Bill Nighy plays retired civil servant Douglas Ainslie to perfection. And why wouldn’t he? In its combination of diffidence, sensitivity, and a sort of...
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Review: The Lesson
Channeling Bulgaria’s malaise in the aftermath of Communist rule, writer-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov have fashioned a morality tale that gathers force gradually. The Lesson follows...
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Films of the Week: Two from Rendez-Vous
Beauty is not something that English-language film critics tend to talk about that often, at least not with any seriousness. We might note in passing the splendor of a film’s cinematography or design,...
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The New Issue: March/April 2015
Saint Laurent Our March/April 2015 issue arrives nattily dressed in the very height of fashion: Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent is our cover story. Nathan Lee explicates the textures and ideas of the...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Story of Sorrow and Sadness
The biggest development in cinema this week? An advertisement for a movie that itself is an advertisement for Samsung, Harley-Davidson, Audi, and its own $150 million line of merchandise. We live in a...
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Festivals: Sundance
The documentaries at Sundance this year were typically varied but righteously and rightly political. This was most pointedly reflected in the awards bestowed on films in competition, and in the fact...
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Interview: Jean Paul Civeyrac
In My Friend Victoria, French writer-director Jean Paul Civeyrac shifts the action of Doris Lessing’s short story “Victoria and the Staveneys” from London to contemporary Paris, but otherwise remains...
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