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.
Review: The King's Speech - Film Comment
“In the past, all a king had to do was look good in uniform,” observes King George V (Michael Gambon)—the first British monarch to address his subjects via radio—early on in Tom Hooper’s splendid period drama The King’s Speech.. “Now we must invade people’s homes and ingratiate ourselves,” he continues.
Deep Focus: Hunt for the Wilderpeople - Film Comment
Jun 23, 2016 · Familiarity breeds affection between an out-of-control 13-year-old Maori boy and a crusty old white bush hand—and between the movie and the audience—in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a rambunctious, beguiling comedy adventure about fugitives on the run in the New Zealand wilderness.Julian Dennison as Ricky Baker, the roly-poly problem child from foster care, and Sam Neill as ...
Deep Focus: Come and See - Film Comment
Feb 28, 2020 · Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985). The restoration of Come and See (1985), Elem Klimov’s unblinking depiction of Nazi armies wreaking carnage on Soviet Belorussia in 1943, enables us to view this disturbing, mesmerizing epic with fresh eyes as it turns Klimov’s lens into a burning glass. Originally called Kill Hitler, this film ranks with Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on …
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.
Review: Inside Out - Film Comment
By Michael Sragow in the July-August 2015 Issue. Pixar’s Pete Docter has a genius for spinning imaginative extravaganzas out of mundane materials—kids’ room closet doors in Monsters, Inc., an old man’s gingerbread house in Up.With Inside Out, he reaches into an 11-year-old girl’s mind and creates a marvelous mental landscape out of visual elements as …
Deep Focus: Lion - Film Comment
Dec 1, 2016 · Lion tells the harrowing fact-based story of a 5-year-old boy from an impoverished hamlet in central India who gets separated from his older brother after a train ride to a nearby city and winds up at the chaotic Howrah Station in Kolkata (the former Calcutta), roughly 1600 kilometers away.Unable to read or write or to speak Bengali dialect or even to provide his mother’s or his own correct ...
Cinema ’67 Revisited: Two for the Road - Film Comment
Apr 26, 2017 · In my 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution, I approached the dramatic changes in movie culture in the 1960s through the development, production, and reception of each of the five nominees for 1967’s Best Picture Academy Award: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle. In this biweekly column, I’m revisiting 1967 from a ...
The Decade in Experimental Film - Film Comment
Jan 14, 2020 · The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack, 2019). In 2009, James Benning premiered Ruhr, his first digital feature following nearly 40 years of work produced entirely on 16mm.Coming as it did at the tail end of the Aughts, after two-plus decades of hand-wringing over the slow proliferation of analog and then digital video formats in the world of experimental filmmaking, Ruhr seemed to mark the tipping ...
Archive - Film Comment
March-April 2020. Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s radical genre mashup Bacurau, Nick Pinkerton on the maximalism of Hollywood royal King Vidor, an interview with Saturday Fiction director Lou Ye, and J. Hoberman on Thomas Heise’s epic essay film Heimat Is a Space in Time.Plus: Michael Koresky on the enduring promise of cinema, Pietro Marcello ...