Film Comment

ONE YEAR AGO, WE FEATURED Black Panther director Ryan Coogler on the cover of Film Comment and wrote about how the record-setting film broke new ground in the realm of genre. For our March/April issue, we are drawn inexorably back into that realm, lo

ARTISTIC INFLUENCE AND INSPIRATION ARE SO DIFFICULT TO pin down or measure that you can’t even really describe them as phenomena. They’re bound up with life, with experiencing the passage of time and coming to terms with ceaseless change. It’s not a

For those of us who have already been dubious about the Oscars—who have long felt that pitting films against one another in a highly publicized TV death match just might, I dunno, devalue the whole art form or something—the ever-spiraling outrage ove

IN LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, AN EMOtionally wayward man searches for his former lover across southwest China. With only memories to guide him, his waking life soon opens upon a 3-D dream world. Director Bi Gan spoke about the film in anticipatio

THE FILM THAT CATAPULTED FREDI WASHINGTON TO FAME WAS JOHN M. STAHL’S 1934 adaptation of Imitation of Life, for her role as a housekeeper’s daughter who is passing as white. Anticipating the reaction to her performance as the woeful Peola Johnson, sh

THE BOOK WASN’T HIDDEN under my mattress, but it contained secrets nonetheless. It sat in plain sight, on the little shelf built into the wall of my childhood bedroom, alongside my John Bellairs mysteries, Choose Your Own Adventures, and copious film

THROUGHOUT THE 2019 Sundance film festival, the image that stayed in my mind is of a tall, agile woman with a weather-beaten face scaling a treacherous cliffside path, with gold and green hills far below her. The woman is Hatidze Muratova, believed t

Director: Gaspar Noé Country/Distributor: France/Belgium, A24 Opening: March 1 Youth culture gets a taste of its own medicine in Gaspar Noé’s apocalyptish musical. In the latest goofy provocation from a director who never saw a space—dank dungeon or

Director: Terry Gilliam Country/Distributor: Spain/Belgium/France/Portugal/UK, Screen Media Opening: April 10 Another of his surreal retellings of the David and Goliath story, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is in several ways a time (

Director: Matteo Garrone Country/Distributor: Italy/France, Magnolia Pictures Opening: April 12 The film’s title is the name of the canine-grooming salon where protagonist Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is first seen sweet-talking a snarling pit bull into

Director: Benedikt Erlingsson Country/Distributor: Iceland/France/Ukraine, Magnolia Pictures Opening: March 1 In Woman at War, an ecoterrorist learns she’s due to become a mother in late middle age, just as she’s planning her last Semtex run and mani

Director: Qiu Sheng Country/Distributor: China/Taiwan, Cinema Guild Opening: April 5 In Qiu Sheng’s tale of urbanization in western China, governmental mechanisms behave like cosmic forces of nature. While a group of surveyors investigates complaints

▸▸ DUSTx Gunpowder & Sky’s sci-fi streaming service on Roku CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FOR FREE ON ROKU, DUSTx represents the logical next step for Gunpowder & Sky’s all-encompassing science-fiction platform, DUST, which launched in 2016. An attempt to brin