Real-life stories of grisly crimes have always had a primal pull on our collective imagination. It’s now axiomatic that if there’s anything that sells better than sex, it’s true crime. In the last decade, the genre has blown up into a media behemoth, with more and more cliffhanger podcasts, television shows, and documentaries released each year, spinning murders and mysteries into engrossing narratives. Yet these stories also raise uncomfortable questions—about the role of the media in criminal justice, the objectivity of nonfiction filmmaking, and our voyeuristic fascination that fuels this phenomenon.

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish moderated a conversation with three nonfiction filmmakers from the festival's lineup whose works question and subvert the expectations of the true-crime mode: Charlie Shackleton (Zodiac Killer Project), David Osit (Predators), and Geeta Gandhbir (The Perfect Neighbor). The panelists explored the origins and popularity of the true-crime trend, and its implications for both audiences and media-makers.

Catch up with all of our Sundance 2025 coverage at filmcomment.com

True Crime at Sundance 2025, with Charlie Shackleton, David Osit, and Geeta Gandhbir

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam, which ran from January 30 through February 9 this year, is a festival with a uniquely wide-ranging and eclectic program of new and repertory films; narrative, documentary, and experimental work; and installations, performances, and expanded cinema. One of the highlights of this year’s festival was a special focus section called Through Cinema We Shall Rise! The event marked the 70th anniversary of the historic Bandung Conference of 1955, where 29 Asian and African countries gathered in Indonesia to announce the birth of a new anti-colonialist “Third World.” The conference inspired the creation of the Afro-Asian Film Festival, which took place in Tashkent in 1958, Cairo in 1960, and Jakarta in 1964. The program at Rotterdam features 15 titles selected from those three editions, spanning films from China, Tibet, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Ghana, and more. 

Today’s episode delves into these films and the context from which they emerged. For the first half, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish sits down with two Indonesian curators and artists, Bunga Siagian and Yuki Aditya, to sketch out the history of the Bandung Conference and the three Afro-Asian Film Festivals. In the second half, critics and programmers Cici Peng and Inney Prakash join the group to discuss the films shown at Rotterdam—their aesthetics, politics, and relevance to the present.

Films discussed:
Turang (Bachtiar Siagian, 1958), Freedom for Ghana (Sean Graham, 1957), Law of Baseness (Aleksandr Medvedkin, 1962), A Phu and His Wife (Loc Mai, 1960), The Open Door (1963), The Red Detachment of Women (Xie Jin, 1961), Serfs (Li Jun, 1965), Five Golden Flowers (Wang Jiayi, 1959)

Afro-Asian Film Festival at IFFR, with Bunga Siagian, Yuki Aditya, Cici Peng, and Inney Prakash

When it comes to love and desire, the movies have always had a powerful sway: as a mirror, as a site of fantasy, and as a perfect backdrop for date night. For Valentine’s Day this year, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited author Haley Mlotek and filmmaker Matthew Rankin, two highly trained experts in the parallel worlds of cinema and romance, onto the Podcast for a love-centric edition of You’re Projecting, our advice column for cinephiles. 

We call them experts for good reason: Haley’s new book No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce brilliantly captures the highs and lows of falling in and out of love, and she’s just programmed the upcoming series The Divorced Women’s Film Festival at Metrograph. Matthew’s surreal new movie, Universal Language, is all about yearning, connection, and the many forms that love can take. The group weighs in on queries, pleas, and confessions submitted by our readers and listeners, lovelorn and lovestruck alike.

You’re Projecting – Valentine’s Day Edition, with Matthew Rankin and Haley Mlotek

On January 31, Film at Lincoln Center opened a landmark new retrospective titled Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution. The series showcases new 4K restorations of over thirty of the filmmaker’s works, which together form a monumental survey of modern American life—with a frequent focus on the intersections of individuals and institutions. Wiseman just turned 95 on New Year’s Day, and the FLC series comes on the heels of similar retrospectives in Chicago, Portland, Maine, and Vancouver—with more planned for Paris, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Boston, and beyond.

How does one even begin to consider a body of work so sprawling, so rigorous, and so significant? For today’s episode, Film Comment hosted a “Wiseman Potluck,” where each guest was tasked with bringing one film that especially resonates with them to the discussion. Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish were joined by Andrew Katzenstein, the author of a terrific new essay on Wiseman for the New York Review of Books; Genevieve Yue, who interviewed the legendary filmmaker for the Film Comment Letter in 2022; and FC‘s very own Michael Blair. The group covered the films Central Park (1990), At Berkeley (2013), Basic Training (1971), Aspen (1991), Blind (1986), and more, and reflected on Wiseman’s politics of observation and striking eye for beauty.

The Mains:

Central Park (3:30)

At Berkeley (17:30)

Law and Order + Basic Training (23:10)

Aspen (35:20)

Blind (47:31)

Some Desserts:

The Store (1983)

Un Couple (2022)

Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023)

The Frederick Wiseman Potluck, with Andrew Katzenstein, Genevieve Yue, and Michael Blair

The Academy Awards take place on Sunday, March 2, bringing a strange and wonderful year in cinema—and an awards race filled with surprises and scandals—to an end. Will Emilia Perez win prizes despite the controversy surrounding its lead actress? Will Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan beat Adrien Brody as a brutalist architect in the Best Actor category? Will Oscar voters penalize films for using too much AI?

We don’t have all the answers to these pressing questions but, as usual, we do have a lot of opinions and (probably inaccurate) predictions. To sound those out, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute joined Los Angeles Review of Books editors Eric Newman and Paul Thompson on their Radio Hour program to hotly debate the relative merits of Anora, Nickel Boys, Conclave, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, and other films vying for a statuette or two on Sunday.

Oscars 2025 Preview with The Los Angeles Review of Books

Today’s episode marks another entry in our New Releases series, where we dig into the latest titles opening in theaters and offer recommendations on what’s worth seeking out and what’s better left skipped. With so many worthy films to choose from lately, Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critic Tim Grierson (Los Angeles Times, Screendaily, and elsewhere) to help us whittle down the selection.

Tim starts things off with a brief report from the South by Southwest festival in Austin, which he’s currently attending. The trio then digs into some of the buzziest titles out right now—including Mark Anthony Green’s Opus (7:38) and Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (19:00)—before showing some love for a couple smaller, but still unmissable movies: Alain Guiradie’s Misericordia (41:30) and Carson Lund’s Eephus (51:46).

New Releases, with Tim Grierson

Spring is finally in the air, and, for New York City cinephiles, that means it’s time for another edition of New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase for standout works by emerging filmmakers co-hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. The festival is always a reliable sign of trends to come and talents to look out for—past editions have featured early films by Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, and Kelly Reichardt, among others. This year’s iteration opens tonight and runs through April 13.

Over the past few years, Film Comment has established our own annual tradition of previewing the best movies in the ND/NF lineup with some of our favorite critics. This time around, FC Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Mark Asch and Natalia Keogan for a rundown of some of the gems in the 2025 edition, including Opening Night selection Familiar Touch (3:45); Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) (18:55); Lost Chapters (28:41); Invention (37:06); Drowning Dry (45:45); Holy Electricity (53:52); and more.

New Directors/New Films 2025, with Mark Asch and Natalia Keogan

A new film by David Cronenberg is always a major event for all of us at Film Comment, especially after his 2022 opus Crimes of the Future was voted the Best Film of the Year by our contributors. So with Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds, opening in cinemas this weekend, we invited this singular auteur to talk about his strange and thrilling new movie. 

Like much of Cronenberg’s work, The Shrouds is obsessed with sex and death, body and technology. But it’s also funnier and more personal than almost anything the Canadian filmmaker has made before. Written in the wake of his wife Carolyn Cronenberg’s death, the film follows a grieving entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassell), who has invented software that allows people to monitor the decaying bodies of their deceased loved ones. When some of Karsh’s high-tech graves are vandalized, a complicated mystery arises, embroiling a number of eccentric characters—including the lookalike sister of Karsh’s dead wife, played by Diane Kruger, and her ex-husband, a software developer played by Guy Pearce.

As questions and conspiracies proliferate in the film, answers become more and more elusive. In the process, The Shrouds emerges as an extremely intelligent and moving film about our desperation for explanations in the face of the unknowable. For today’s episode, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute chat with Cronenberg about making art to process loss, the eroticism of conspiracy theories, and why The Shrouds is very much a Toronto film.

David Cronenberg on The Shrouds

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a singularly ambitious horror film set in 1930s Mississippi, is currently setting theaters ablaze (in an array of formats and aspect ratios to boot). The film stars Coogler mainstay Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as a pair of badass twins returning to their rural hometown of Clarksdale to build a blues joint—with performers whose talents are powerful enough to summon some unwanted spirits. 

To talk about this fascinating film—which weaves together genres and tones to startling, if at times overwhelming, effect—Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited Podcast veteran Robert Daniels (Rogerebert.com) and FC’s very own Michael Blair into their humble juke-joint. After sinking their fangs into Sinners, the group touches on a few other new theatrical releases they’re excited about, including Steven Soderbergh’s stylish spy thriller Black Bag (42:26) and Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet (52:22), a refreshing update on Ang Lee’s 1993 classic.

New Releases, with Robert Daniels and Michael Blair

Legendary American scholar and critic Tom Gunning has changed the way we think about film history and the future of the medium, profoundly influencing generations of academics, artists, and cinephiles. On Sunday, April 27, Devika Girish and Clinton Krute hosted a live conversation with Gunning and curator David Schwartz at the Museum of the Moving Image, following a screening of Hal Hartley’s Flirt (1995), an experimental narrative of love and loss set in three cities—New York, Berlin, and Tokyo.

The event was part of a multiday series of screenings and discussions organized by Schwartz, taking place at venues including MoMI, Anthology Film Archives, and Light Industry. This special weekend marked the publication of a new collection of Gunning’s writing, entitled The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde. The conversation covered a wide range of topics, from Gunning’s seminal essay “The Cinema of Attractions” (1986) to his teacher-student relationship with Hartley to some contemporary films that he’s (perhaps surprisingly) enjoyed.

A Conversation with Tom Gunning

Founded in 1962, Film Comment has been the home of independent film journalism for over 50 years, publishing in-depth interviews, critical analysis, and feature coverage of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world. The Film Comment Podcast, hosted by editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, is a weekly space for critical conversation about film, with a look at topical issues, new releases, and the big picture. Film Comment is a nonprofit publication that relies on the support of readers. Support film culture. Support Film Comment.

Afro-Asian Film Festival at IFFR, with Bunga Siagian, Yuki Aditya, Cici Peng, and Inney Prakash

Film Comment

Related tracks