The Film Comment Podcast

Sleepily emerging from the turkey-induced haze of Thanksgiving break and looking ahead to the barrage of Best of 2024 lists, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critics Robert Daniels and Beatrice Loayza to discuss some of the most highly-anticipated Hollywood blockbusters (and would-be blockbusters) of this year’s holiday season. The group convened to offer their thoughts on Steve McQueen’s Blitz (3:25), Edward Berger’s Conclave (17:00), Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II (31:56), Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (43:55), and Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 (55:53).

During the 2024 New York Film Festival, Film Comment’s Devika Girish had the chance to chat with Julianne Moore, one of the great American actresses of the last three decades and more. She was at the festival for the premiere of The Room Next Door, the first English-language feature film by Pedro Almodóvar, which stars Moore as a writer in New York who reconnects with an old friend, now in the late stages of cancer, played by Tilda Swinton. The friend makes a strange request of Moore’s character: to give her company in a house in upstate New York where she plans to take her own life using a euthanasia pill. Almodóvar’s film unfolds like a chamber drama, honing in on the awkward but tender companionship of two women in an absurd and dark situation, as they try to figure out how to enjoy the day-to-day of their togetherness while anticipating death. The Room Next Door hinges on its lead performances, and Moore and Swinton rise to the task with luminous turns that imbue the beautifully designed, fantasy world of Almodovar’s film with a rough-edged, piercing emotional realism. Devika’s conversation with Moore delves into the challenge of inhabiting the unreal worlds of Almodóvar with realism, as well as Moore’s relationship with Swinton, how she acts with her voice, and whether it’s difficult to play a good person in the movies.

When Payal Kapadia won a historic Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her second feature, All We Imagine as Light (the first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years), she paid homage to another Cannes prizewinner whose work has deeply influenced her: Miguel Gomes, whose Grand Tour won the award for Best Director. The resonances between their latest films go beyond Cannes laurels and directorial inspiration. All We Imagine as Light, which opens in American theaters this Friday, traces the stories of three women in present-day Mumbai, while Grand Tour follows a British colonial officer and his fiancée as they traipse across various East Asian cities in 1918—but both films are city symphonies that center love stories within broader political contexts and are driven by the pulsings of female desire. Last month at the New York Film Festival, Film Comment editor Devika Girish moderated a conversation with Kapadia and Gomes—both practitioners of artful docufiction—which touched on their influences, aspirations, and methods.

The films of Robert Kramer blend fiction and documentary modes to engage with, and expand on, traditions of militant political cinema and subjective essay filmmaking. A founding member of the New Left activist film collective Newsreel in 1967, Kramer devoted himself to the group’s radical ethos, but he also began to make his own hermetic and probing fiction films—like The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969)—which turned the camera back onto the mostly white middle-class milieu of his comrades, posing thorny questions about the nature of political commitment. This process reached its peak with the sprawling, 3-hour plus Milestones (1975, co-directed with John Douglas), a vast mosaic featuring a cast of over 50 fellow travelers, union organizers, dropouts, Free Vermont commune dwellers, and more, all navigating the demands of their personal and political lives in the wake of the Vietnam War. At the end of ’70s, Kramer decamped to France, where his films had been championed by critics like Serge Daney, and proceeded to work in a wide variety of contexts across Europe and beyond, making films like Guns (1980), Our Nazi (1984), Doc’s Kingdom (1988), Route One/USA (1989), and Walk the Walk (1996).  Over the past several years, the French DVD company Re:Voir has been beautifully restoring and re-releasing his films, and Kramer, who passed away suddenly in 1999, is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Viennale, running through the end of November. The retrospective is accompanied by a new book, Starting Places, published by the Austrian Film Museum, which reproduces a 1997 interview with Kramer by the French critic Bernard Eisenchitz alongside several essays written by Kramer himself. To mark the occasion, Film Comment’s Clinton Krute and Michael Blair invited Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais, two noted critics who each proudly own original Milestones posters, to discuss Kramer’s life and work. A few short audio clips of Kramer talking about his films, sourced from the original 1997 interview tapes, are interspersed throughout the conversation, providing their own points of departure into this undersung filmmaker’s richly heterogenous, and endlessly fascinating, body of work.   Special thanks to Volker Pantenburg. Show Notes: “The Traveller” by Benjamin Crais (Sidecar, 2023): https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-traveller “Milestones” by Erika Balsom (4Columns, 2020): https://4columns.org/balsom-erika/milestones Serge Daney on Milestones and Route One/USA (originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, 1975 and 1989): https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-aquarium-milestones.html; https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2014/05/murmur-of-world.html  Robert Kramer: Notes de la forteresse (1967-1999) (edited by Cyril Béghin. Re:Voir, 2019):https://re-voir.com/shop/en/books/1101-robert-kramer-notes-de-la-forteresse-1967-1999.html