The Film Comment Podcast

It's late January, and the intrepid Film Comment crew is on the ground reporting from an extra special edition of the Sundance Film Festival—the last to take place on the snowy slopes of Park City, Utah, the festival's home since 1981, before moving to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. For the next week, we’ll be gathering the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast.

For our second Podcast from the fest, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish sat down with programmer Madeline Whittle (Film at Lincoln Center) and critic Will Tavlin (n+1) to discuss Adam and Zack Khalil's Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] (1:54), John Wilson’s The History of Concrete (14:05), and Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman's Nuisance Bear (28:11).

Catch up on all of our Sundance 2026 coverage at filmcomment.com

It's late January, and the intrepid Film Comment crew is on the ground reporting from an extra special edition of the Sundance Film Festival—the last to take place on the snowy slopes of Park City, Utah, the festival's home since 1981, before moving to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. For the next week, we’ll be gathering the best critics on the scene to talk about each day’s premieres on the Podcast.

To kick things off, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish invited programmer Madeline Whittle (Film at Lincoln Center) as well as critics Robert Daniels (RogerEbert.com) and Will Tavlin (n+1) to share their responses to the films premiering during the first few days of the fest. The group discusses the tongue-in-cheek Charli XCX mockumentary The Moment (3:30), Casper Kelly's dark comedy Buddy (20:15), and Beth de Araujo’s sophomore feature Josephine (29:50).

Stay tuned for more of our Sundance 2026 coverage.

Every January, as we ring in the new year, we take a moment to take a look at some of the major new releases of the holiday season. This year, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critics Beatrice Loayza and Mark Asch to focus on a select handful of titles that have recently graced the marquees of multiplexes, and which continue to stir up discourse. The group kicks things off with a deep dive into James Cameron’s latest 3D space opera, Avatar: Fire and Ash (4:00), before turning their attention to another epic, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme (33:34)—which both Beatrice and Mark have written great essays on in recent weeks. They also touch on James L. Brooks’s Ella McCay (51:15), which Mark reviewed for Film Comment just last week.

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 countdown of the films topping our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate) about the films as they were unveiled—and now it’s available in Podcast form, for your home-listening pleasure. Consider it a holiday gift from us to you, our loyal listeners.

Read the full list, plus best undistributed films, individual ballots, and more, here: https://www.filmcomment.com/best-films-of-2025/

This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema.

Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.