Drumroll, please: critics Bilge Ebiri and Amy Taubin join for a real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics ...

There’s something strangely sedating about being at the Venice Film Festival. The annual Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica takes place not in Venice proper, but on a tiny island called Lido ...

A lot happens in Hong Sangsoo’s latest, By the Stream. After a few features in which his plots seem to have been reduced to the barest minimum—like the beautiful sister-films In Water (2023) and In ...

Peter Tscherkassky will be receiving the Underground Spirit Award for “outstanding work in independent filmmaking” at the Paliç European Film Festival this month, and it’s easy to see why. Ever since ...

Oliver Laxe’s fourth feature, Sirât, is the French-born Galician director’s first film to premiere in Competition at Cannes, where it’s been a highlight of the 2025 festival’s first week. A singular ...

The results are now in for our 2024 poll of Film Comment’s contributors! On this page, you’ll find our list of the 20 best films that were released either theatrically or virtually in 2024 in the ...

Land of the Pharaohs (1955, Howard Hawks). When I first saw it, as a kid, Land of the Pharaohs became my favorite film. I’d always been addicted to historical epics, but this one was different: it ...

Premised on illusion and promising endless reanimation, cinema is often called the ghostliest of mediums. Ghosts are themselves cinematic in essence, automatic disruptions in space and time. Movies ...

Like many of Christian Petzold’s films, Afire features a beautiful woman and a desirous man caught up in the flurries of fate. But where works like Transit (2018) and Undine (2020) call upon history ...

The results are in for our 2022 poll of Film Comment’s contributors! Our Top 20 lists in both the Released and Undistributed categories feature original appreciations from our critics, as well as ...

For modernist poet H.D. and her contemporaries at the journal Close Up, the young medium of cinema lit up the room with soul-stirring force By Sheila O'Malley in the May-June 2020 Issue The Madonna of ...

Present Tense is a column by Sheila O’Malley that reflects on the intersections of film, literature, art, and culture. Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway in Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, 1993) The ...