The Film Comment Podcast

This week and next, Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido di Venezia, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year. This year’s edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Werner Herzog, Lee Chang-dong, Tsai Ming-liang, and more.
For our fourth Podcast from the floating city, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish invited two native Italians and longtime festival attendees—Viennale Artistic Director Eva Sangiorgi and critic Paola Casella—to discuss how the festival has grown and changed over the last few decades as well as its broader significance within Italian cinema culture. The group also debated several notable premieres from this year's edition, including Rubaiyat Hossain's The Difficult Bride (11:00), Florian Zeller’s Bunker (17:45), Alex Gibney’s Musk (24:15), Mariano Llinás’s Life of Jorge Luis Borges (32:40), and more.
Subscribe to Film Comment to stay up-to-date with all of our Venice 2026 coverage.

This week and next, Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year. This year’s edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Werner Herzog, Lee Chang-dong, Tsai Ming-liang, and more.
For our third Podcast from the festival, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish invited critics Jonathan Romney and Tim Grierson to share their reactions to The Pervert's Guide to Utopias (2:38), director Sophie Fiennes’s latest collaboration with philosopher Slavoj Žižek, as well as Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger (14:36), Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s concert documentary following the band's recent reunion tour. Finally, the three discussed one of the major standouts in the fest’s Competition section: May el-Toukhy‘s Woman Unknown (26:25).
Subscribe to Film Comment to stay up-to-date with all of our Venice 2026 coverage.

This week and next, Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year. This year’s edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Werner Herzog, Lee Chang-dong, Tsai Ming-liang, and more.

For our second Podcast from the city of canals, critics Bilge Ebiri (New York / Vulture) and Guy Lodge (Variety) join Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish to discuss two standouts of the festival's Competition section: Danny Boyle's Ink (2:28) and Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love (12:05). Next, they discuss a highlight of the Horizons sidebar: Robert Greene's Too Much Sugar (27:30).
Subscribe to Film Comment to stay up-to-date with all of our Venice 2026 coverage.

This week and next, Film Comment is reporting from the picturesque shores of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place each year. This year’s edition features new films by many major auteurs, including Werner Herzog, Lee Chang-dong, Tsai Ming-liang, and more.
 
To kick off our coverage, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish invited critics Miriam Bale and Öykü Sofuoğlu to discuss some of the most highly anticipated premieres of the festival's first days, including Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine (2:45), Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard (10:10), Paul Schrader's The Basics of Philosophy (22:06), and Lance Oppenheim's Primetime (31:52).
Subscribe today to Film Comment to stay up-to-date with all of our Venice 2026 coverage.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s third narrative feature, opens in theaters tomorrow. Dizzyingly meta-textual and deliciously, well, campy, the film stars Hannah Einbinder as an emerging queer filmmaker tasked with directing a reboot of a fictional ’80s slasher franchise titled Camp Miasma. She decides to visit the final girl of the original movie who is now an eccentric middle-aged recluse, played by Gillian Anderson, who’s living on the campgrounds where the first movie was shot. What unfolds is, in the words of our critic Nathan Lee, a “gore-soaked, titty-bouncing, sexploitation fever dream girded by real conceptual brio.” Meditations on the perverse riddles of desire as well as the queer subtexts of many slasher films and the kind of strange identification they invite from the spectator are rendered with perfectly pitched horror theatrics and laugh-out-loud humor. 
 
Film Comment Editor Devika Girish spoke with Schoenbrun about this very rich text, trying to unpack the film’s layers—but not too hard, because if there’s one thing you can take away from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, it’s that analysis is a boner-killer and mystery is hot.
Subscribe to Film Comment today for full access to new quarterly digital issues as well as our comprehensive archive of every Film Comment issue published since 1962.