A new biography of the maverick director sheds much needed light on the radical filmmaker’s life, politics, and remarkable ...

In his work and life, Berger grappled with the ways in which we see the world can offer solutions and salves for political ...

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2026, 232 pp. How does one generate empathy for an ecosystem? This was the challenge that many science-fiction filmmakers took upon themselves in the first ...

Roman Polanski’s life experience is predicated upon violence and absurdity. As an accused and convicted sex offender on the lam for nearly half a century, Polanski is toxic, although it has taken a ...

In times like these, there are few living filmmakers I’d rather have on my side than Pedro Almodóvar. The Spanish director, who is being honored on April 28 with the Chaplin Award at a Film at Lincoln ...

One of the strangest, most improbable effects of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is that after over two and half hours of unrelenting garishness, the film’s obnoxious editing, historical inaccuracy, obvious ...

On December 11, 2025, as part our annual winter list extravaganza, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by esteemed critics Amy Taubin and Bilge Ebiri for a real-time ...

Around the late 1980s, the Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros was contemplating making a movie about Marilyn Monroe. It would have been new territory. Her best-known movies had until then centered not ...

This article appeared in the August 28, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. From August ...

This article appeared in the May 2, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. This is an excerpt ...

Early in her 2019 essay film, Letter to a Friend, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir cuts from journalistic footage of the Israeli military firing tear gas onto her street in Bethlehem to a video she ...

In 1903, director Edwin S. Porter made what’s considered to be the first action film, The Great Train Robbery, a short caper of low-key stunts, gunplay, and brawls. That Porter began his filmmaking ...