Film Comment Magazine
Founded in 1962, Film Comment magazine features reviews and analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world.
Interview: Jia Zhangke on Caught by the Tides
Oct 7, 2024 · This article appeared in the October 4, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024). Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke’s first fiction feature in six years, is among the 54-year-old Chinese director’s most radical and comprehensively conceived works to ...
Best Films of 2023 - Film Comment
In the hands of a different director, Showing Up might have played like yet another Sundance-style indie: a film packed with quirky characters (including an injured pigeon) and snappy, self-lacerating one-liners about the bougie artists of Portland, Oregon. But, as expected, Kelly Reichardt finds a way to complicate and enrich this premise, crafting …
Interview: Céline Sciamma - Film Comment
Why do you use Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” in the film? And what is the relationship between the discovery of a piece of music and the discovery of being in love?. I wanted the film not to have a score, which was kind of scary because making a …
Inspired: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada - filmcomment.com
Oct 2, 2024 · This article appeared in the October 1, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader, 2024). A couple of years ago, I got whacked with a bout of long COVID. I was in the hospital three times in the same year with bronchial pneumonia.
The Top Film Criticism Sites: An Annotated Blog Roll - Film Comment
The Self-Styled Siren Classical Hollywood fetishism has found a most enchanting ambassador. Farran Smith Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren turns the articulation of cliché and convention into a sport—no surprise she’s chosen melodrama as her champion underdog and counts Max Ophüls and Douglas Sirk among her favorite directors.
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Film Comment
Jun 10, 2024 · This article appeared in the June 7, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024) There’s something in the air in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa: over five decades into a career defined in equal measure by prolificness and idiosyncrasy, the Japanese filmmaker has ...
Best Films of 2022 - Film Comment
The title of Charlotte Wells’s film invokes a balm used to soothe skin scorched by an unforgiving sun. Again and again in Aftersun, the characters partake in the restorative rituals of this salve; in recurring close-ups, Calum, a young, separated father, and Sophie, his 11-year-old daughter, rub lotions into each other’s limbs and pale-pink faces as they holiday in a bright, garish resort ...
Interview: Amanda Kramer on Please Baby Please - Film Comment
Apr 4, 2022 · This article appeared in the March 31, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Please Baby Please (Amanda Kramer, 2022). A musician-turned-filmmaker with a background in theater, Amanda Kramer has—with only four features and four shorts to her name—put together one of the most ...
The Best Restorations of 2023 - filmcomment.com
Dec 15, 2023 · Yam Daabo/The Choice (Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1986, Burkina Faso/France) – Digital Restoration . Restored in 4K from the 16mm original negative camera and magnetic sound by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and L’Image Retrouvée laboratories, in collaboration with Les Films de la Plaine and the family of Idrissa Ouédraogo.