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Interview: Marianne Pistone and Gilles Deroo
Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best First Feature last year at Locarno and a selection of New Directors / New Films 2014, Marianne Pistone and Gilles Deroo’s Mouton has an idiosyncratic structure...
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Film Comment News Digest: 4/22/14
The Yes Men Item of the Week: shooting in nine countries over the course of four years, media hoaxers Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, aka The Yes Men, are back! In The Yes Men Are Revolting they take...
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Film of the Week: Blue Ruin
We don’t know much about the protagonist of Blue Ruin, except that he’s let himself go, learned a few survival skills in the process, and is something of a family man—as you have to be if you...
View ArticleKaiju Shakedown: Lau Kar-leung
This past weekend, the organizers of the Old School Kung Fu Fest at Anthology Film Archives were the only people to do something that should be happening around the world this year, over and over and...
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Review: The Other Woman
It is a truth universally acknowledged that hot and wealthy New York men do not make loyal mates. The moment a heroine on screen realizes that the foxy businessman of her dreams is a cheater is never...
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Bombast: The Afghan Whigs
I got the Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen and Nirvana’s In Utero in the mail on the same day, one of those BMG or Columbia House eight-CDs-for-a-penny deals. This would’ve been in the fall of 1993, when I was...
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Timeline: Hybrid Documentaries
“All great fiction films tend toward documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction . . . He who opts wholeheartedly for one necessarily finds the other at the end of his journey.”...
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Interview: Pawel Pawlikowski
During Poland’s many years under different occupying powers, Polish mothers came to serve as the preservers of the culture, carrying on traditions, history, and the native language at home. The idea...
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The Film Comment Hot 25
Expanding upon our Hot Property series which spotlights a film deserving special attention—and immediate distribution—we humbly launch the FILM COMMENT Hot 25. These are our top picks among films that...
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Film of the Week: Ida
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is a remarkably beautiful film—which, for some, may cause alarm bells to ring. I should add that it’s a remarkably beautiful film set in the early Sixities, in black and white...
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Kaiju Shakedown: ThaiWorld
What’s up with Thailand? Politically, the country’s a mess. A coup kicked Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra out of office in 2006, and an offer of amnesty to him earlier this year sparked massive...
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Rep Diary: Othello
The face of a man emerges from darkness, followed by that of a woman. Their eyes are closed, and their bodies lie still in separate beds in what looks like eternal peace. Hooded pallbearers chant a...
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Bombast: Boyhood
Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an inescapably major movie, by virtue of the unique circumstances of its production if nothing else—and there is a lot else. Shot over the course of a dozen...
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Review: Belle
Aside from opulent, fetishistic detail, heritage films are about “the rules,” be it the way a Regency-era heroine is expected to hold a spoon while a-courting or the hand-wringing caused by Oxbridge...
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Interview: Tea Time with James Gray
James Gray’s The Immigrant, a period drama starring Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jeremy Renner, opens theatrically May 16. Last October, shortly after the film screened in the 51st New York...
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Film Comment News Digest: 5/5/14
Whit Stillman has just completed a two-week shoot in Paris on The Cosmopolitans, a 30-minute pilot to be streamed by Amazon. The autobiographical portrait of a group of young Americans living in Paris...
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Festivals: Ann Arbor
With its mix of youngish filmmakers and hoary college-town hippies, Ann Arbor is one of the more rambunctious festivals out there. The 52nd edition (which ran March 25 to 30) was aided by a...
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Review: The Double
Like a lucid nightmare on the subway at odd hours, The Double leaves one feeling intellectually stimulated, creatively charged, and close to existential panic. The second feature directed by Richard...
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Films of the Week: On Llyn Foulkes & Sol LeWitt
Llyn Foulkes One Man Band “Artists are all egomaniacs,” comments the subject of Llyn Foulkes One Man Band, a documentary by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty. It’s no slur on Foulkes to say that he’s no...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Korea Edition
Everything in Korea came to a screeching halt on April 16 when a ferry carrying 476 passengers, mostly high-school students on a field trip, sank on its way to Jeju. Two hundred and sixty bodies have...
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