Founded in 1962, Film Comment magazine features reviews and analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world.

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 United States, with original appreciations from our critics, as well as links to features, reviews, and interviews about these films and directors from throughout the year.

Oct 7, 2024 · This article appeared in the October 4, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024). Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke’s first fiction feature in six years, is among the 54-year-old Chinese director’s most radical and comprehensively conceived works to ...

In the hands of a different director, Showing Up might have played like yet another Sundance-style indie: a film packed with quirky characters (including an injured pigeon) and snappy, self-lacerating one-liners about the bougie artists of Portland, Oregon. But, as expected, Kelly Reichardt finds a way to complicate and enrich this premise, crafting …

Dec 13, 2024 · This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2024 coverage. Read all the lists here.. On December 12, 2024, as part our annual winter list extravaganza, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish led a panel of special guests—Molly Haskell (critic, author), and Michael Koresky (critic, founding editor of Reverse Shot)—for a live countdown of the films topping our year-end ...

A character in John Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick (an enjoyable book that presents magic as a vestigial nature-religion) delivers a guest sermon at a local church. It’s a pretty weird sermon, too, all about the emotions of the roundworm nestled in your small intestine, “when a big gobbety mess of half-digested steak or moo goo gai pan comes sloshing down to him.

Dec 20, 2024 · Speaking in Tongues: Take One (Christopher Harris, U.S.). Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo serves as the jumping-off point for a rhythmic collision of dance, riot, and 20th-century American cultural detritus, marking the first iteration of an evolving project from one of the most vital voices in contemporary film. (Listen to a Film Comment Podcast conversation with Christopher Harris here.)

The Film Comment Letter is a free weekly digital newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing—including the Film Comment Podcast, features, reviews, interviews, streaming picks, news, and more. The Letter is delivered directly to subscribers’ inboxes every Friday morning before being made available on filmcomment.com the following Monday.

Jan 6, 2025 · Based on the Tony-winning musical of the same name, which premiered in 2015, Dear Evan Hansen stars Ben Platt as Evan, a depressed 17-year-old who reluctantly lies about having been friends with Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a classmate who recently took his own life.The main theme of the movie is so heavy that it could be considered uncomfortable, but the infusion of music into the plot is ...

Nov 5, 2024 · 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.