This article appeared in the November 26, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

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 ...

“I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert,” remarks Sandy (Laura Derm) to Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) at a crucial juncture in the harrowing new David Lynch picture, Blue Velvet. We never are ...

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 ...

This article appeared in the April 19, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Phillip Vance ...

This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2023 coverage. Read all the lists here. Below are 10 film restorations, preservations, reprints, and remasters that I was able to see in 2023. These ...

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 instance, what, in the United States in 2010, made a then-unknown 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence so riveting in Winter’s Bone, the film that vaulted her—now the highest paid actress in ...

The results are in for our 2021 poll of Film Comment’s contributors and colleagues! Our Top 20 lists in both the Released and Undistributed categories feature original appreciations from critics, as ...