Film Comment Magazine

2 days ago | filmcomment.com | Vikram Murthi

This article appeared in the May 9, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024)An early title card in Pavements, the new biopic-doc hybrid from director Alex Ross Perry, describes the indie-rock group Pavement as “The World’s Most Important & Influential Band”—the first cheeky joke in a film filled with them.

2 days ago | filmcomment.com | Devika Girish

This article appeared in the May 9, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Fogo, Island of Fire (Sarah Maldoror, 1978). Courtesy of the Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror and Mário de Andrade. Sarah Maldoror refused to settle.

2 weeks ago | filmcomment.com | Adam Nayman

This article appeared in the April 25, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

1 month ago | filmcomment.com | Devika Girish

This article appeared in the March 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. I Like Okinawa Sweet (Chikako Yamashiro, 2004). Courtesy the artist and Yumiko Chiba Associates. There is something unsettlingly liminal about Chikako Yamashiro’s work. The Okinawan artist’s videos take place, for the most part, on thresholds of one kind or another: graveyards, fences, shores, national borders.

1 month ago | filmcomment.com | Vadim Rizov

This article appeared in the March 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Jesus Revolution (Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle, 2023)In the mid-aughts, enabled by my then-editor, A.A. Dowd of The A.V. Club, I proactively requested review assignments for anti-evolution tracts, the God’s Not Dead franchise, and adjacent mental garbage.