Episodes

  • The Best Films of 2025, with Amy Taubin and Bilge Ebiri

    The Best Films of 2025, with Amy Taubin and Bilge Ebiri
    Dec 12 2025
    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/
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    1 hr and 44 mins
  • Kleber Mendonça Filho on The Secret Agent

    Kleber Mendonça Filho on The Secret Agent
    Nov 25 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.
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    46 mins
  • Noah Baumbach on Jay Kelly

    Noah Baumbach on Jay Kelly
    Nov 18 2025
    This week, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sit down with writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose new feature, Jay Kelly, is in select theaters now. The movie stars George Clooney as an aging Hollywood star reckoning with the choices he’s made on his way to the top. The action unfolds on a trip Jay takes to a tribute to his career in Tuscany, trailed by an entourage of handlers (played by Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, and others), and haunted by his missteps as a friend, lover, and parent. Jay Kelly blends Fellini-esque memory theater, a screwball-inspired train journey, and a self-reflexive contemplation on the world of filmmaking to arrive at something universal; as Noah says in our conversation, the theme at the heart of the film is one that has animated many of his works: coming to terms with an irretrievable past. We also talked about his remarkable casting choices, how he and his crew built sets to facilitate the dreamlike flashback sequences without the use of CGI, and much more.
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    38 mins
  • Tokyo International Film Festival #3, with Aiko Masubuchi

    Tokyo International Film Festival #3, with Aiko Masubuchi
    Nov 14 2025
    Last week, Devika returned from the Tokyo International Film Festival, which ran from October 27 to November 5 in the Japanese capital. As one of the major festivals in Asia, the event is a great showcase for new and restored films from the region, as well as Japanese specialities like animation. While there, Devika recorded three Podcasts exploring the lineup with a stellar rotation of guests. On our third and final Podcast from the festival, programmer, translator, and producer Aiko Masubuchi shares her thoughts on three Japanese titles. The first, Yama: Attack to Attack, a documentary from 1985, was screened outside of the festival; the latter two, Lost Land and In Their Traces, were highlights of its Nippon Cinema Now section.
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    53 mins
  • Tokyo International Film Festival #2, with Kambole Campbell and Sasha Han

    Tokyo International Film Festival #2, with Kambole Campbell and Sasha Han
    Nov 14 2025
    Last week, Devika returned from the Tokyo International Film Festival, which ran from October 27 to November 5 in the Japanese capital. As one of the major festivals in Asia, the event is a great showcase for new and restored films from the region, as well as Japanese specialities like animation. While there, Devika recorded three Podcasts exploring the lineup with a stellar rotation of guests. On the second episode from the festival, critics Kambole Campbell and Sasha Han discuss selections from their areas of expertise—respectively, animation and Southeast Asian cinema. Some highlights include Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, a piece of WWII propaganda and the first-ever animated feature made in Japan; Mamoru Oshii’s cult classic Angel’s Egg; and Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s culinary thriller Morte Cucina.
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    48 mins
  • Tokyo International Film Festival #1, with Vadim Rizov and Kong Rithdee

    Tokyo International Film Festival #1, with Vadim Rizov and Kong Rithdee
    Nov 14 2025
    Last week, Devika returned from the Tokyo International Film Festival, which ran from October 27 to November 5 in the Japanese capital. As one of the major festivals in Asia, the event is a great showcase for new and restored films from the region, as well as Japanese specialities like animation. While there, Devika recorded three Podcasts exploring the lineup with a stellar rotation of guests. First up, critics Vadim Rizov and Kong Rithdee join to talk about some of the big competition titles, including Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, which ended up winning the Grand Prix, and Rithy Panh’s documentary We Are the Fruits of the Forest; as well as the the long-overdue official Japanese premiere of Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, 40 years after its making.
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    36 mins
  • Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, with Miriam Bale and Adam Piron

    Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, with Miriam Bale and Adam Piron
    Oct 24 2025
    Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been the talk of the town since its wide release last month—from critics to filmmakers to audiences, the reception has been nothing short of euphoric. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the film opens in an unspecified present, detailing the activities of a militant group led by a Black revolutionary (played by Teyana Taylor). Years after her disappearance, her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) are hunted down by an old enemy, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The chase takes them across California, with an assortment of other characters becoming embroiled along the way. The movie is an unabashedly fun, feel-good action flick—one that also calls back to films as disparate as The Searchers, Commando, and Running on Empty. But is it among the greatest of the decade, as some have claimed? Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics and programmers Miriam Bale and Adam Piron on the Podcast to discuss the film’s successes and failures, how it fits into PTA’s larger body of work, and its engagement with American history and the present. If there’s one thing the four agreed on, it’s that One Battle After Another is indeed a “very rich text.”
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    1 hr and 28 mins
  • NYFF63 Festival Report, with Molly Haskell, J. Hoberman, and Beatrice Loayza

    NYFF63 Festival Report, with Molly Haskell, J. Hoberman, and Beatrice Loayza
    Oct 17 2025
    As the 63rd New York Film Festival drew to a close last weekend, it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. FC Editor Clinton Krute was joined by critics Molly Haskell, J. Hoberman, and Beatrice Loayza for a spirited wrap-up analysis of the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF63 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed and debated Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Lav Diaz’s Magellan, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, and many other selections.
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    1 hr and 6 mins