film comment

Comedies and genre films may not be the usual Croisette fare, but that wasn’t the case with the 69th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Touching on Maren Ade’s unanimously praised Toni Erdmann, as well as more divisive films like Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a roundtable hosted by editor Nicolas Rapold and featuring Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times; Nicholas Elliott, New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma; and Film Comment contributing editors Jonathan Romney and Amy Taubin breaks down this year’s unique selection.

On June 28, 1969, following a police raid of the Greenwich Village LGBT bar Stonewall Inn, a riot broke out around the neighborhood that continued into the following evening. The upheaval is commonly treated as the beginning of the contemporary gay rights movement. As with many accounts of history, the clear demarcation—as if the lights were suddenly flipped on—doesn’t entirely hold water under close scrutiny, but the Stonewall Riots have become a useful point of reference as well as a symbol. The Film Society’s repertory series “A Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall,” curated by FSLC programmer at larger Thomas Beard, takes these events as an opportunity to explore multiple histories of queer cinema through a variety of Hollywood, experimental, nonfiction, and foreign films. Digital Editor Violet Lucca discussed the films, and the history, with Mark Harris, film historian and columnist for Vulture; Michael Koresky, director of publications at the Metrograph Theater; and Manuel Betancourt, FC contributor.

Listen to the episode below, or click here to listen and subscribe on iTunes.

Listen to the episode below, or click here to listen and subscribe on iTunes.

Visit www.filmcomment.com/holiday for digital and/or print gift subscriptions.

Read the story behind Les Blank’s previously unreleased music film, A Poem Is a Naked Person

"One of the constants in Malmros’s body of work has been his view of life as a series of stages, and taken together, his movies come off as proof that, in the movement from one stage to the next, there’s a loss for every gain."—Max Nelson

Read more of this interview with Rakhshan Bani-E’temad, or see it at Film Comment Selects.

"When we were storyboarding it, we hadn’t decided what process we were going to use to make the gremlins happen. At one point we thought we could use monkeys. We put a monkey in a mask, which was a bad idea because he ran all over the room and shat on everything. The efforts we put in to try to make the gremlins do what they had to do were prodigious."—Joe Dante on the making of Gremlins. Read more here, and see the preview cut at Film Comment Selects. 

A flawless ad from the November/December 1995 issue.

"Of course, the vast majority of black filmmaking in the U.S. has necessarily been independent—there has yet to be an African American CEO of a Hollywood studio, and, save for a handful of outliers like Warner Brothers’ The Green Pastures (36), the majors didn’t produce films with entirely or predominantly black casts (or “race films”) until the Seventies. Most black filmmakers have historically been forced to serve as producer and distributor in addition to writing, directing, and editing duties. While this is increasingly true of contemporary filmmakers of varying distinction in the age of digital, combining these roles meant something very different back then: it effectively shut these films out of block-booked, studio-owned theaters as well as out of many film publications, whose editorial policies restricted their coverage only to films with distribution. (Films made for public television usually suffered a similar fate.)"—Violet Lucca Familiarize yourself with the history of black independent film in New York, and if you live in the area, be sure to check out Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Tell It Like It Is" series.

"I remember trying out The Dream of a Mustache on my granddaughter as a bedtime story when she was four and saying to her, “There’s a dead man lying on the floor.” She really loved hearing about this dead man on the floor with a mustache. And then I said, “Well, the mustache had a dream,” and she said, “This is getting too scary,” and made me stop. And I thought well, this is good—she’s buying it, and being frightened by it at the same time."—Guy Maddin explains the generation of his new film,  The Forbidden Room

The amazing Emma Myers speaks with Lily Tomlin at Sundance about her career and latest role in Grandma, an intergenerational road movie.

Read the full essay by Violet Lucca here.

"We are no longer inside a diegesis; we are watching a film with David fucking Bowie in it."