Two enigmatic icons with enduring holds on the Western imagination are currently lighting up multiplex screens: fearsome Transylvanian vampire Dracula and Nobel Prize–winning American treasure Bob Dylan. Both released on Christmas Day, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown are ambitious efforts at crafting new and absorbing tales out of these two mainstays of pop culture. Nosferatu stars Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, and Nicholas Hoult in the latest retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, joining a cinematic canon established by filmmakers like F.W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola, and Werner Herzog. A Complete Unknown features Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan, tracing his arrival in New York in 1961 to his set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he famously decided to “go electric.”

On this week’s Podcast, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Lovia Gyarkye, film critic at The Hollywood Reporter, and FC’s very own Michael Blair (a Dylan aficionado) to debate the successes and failures of the two films—for both loyalists and neophytes of Dylan & Dracula. The group also discussed a few other holiday releases, including Barry Jenkins’s Mufasa: The Lion King and Rachel Morrison’s The Fire Inside—and if you stay until the very end, you can also listen to their thoughts on Peter Watkins’s monumental La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), which the Film Comment team viewed this past weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

    

Sections:

A Complete Unknown (7:25)
Nosferatu (31:20)
Mufasa: The Lion King (48:00)
The Fire Inside (52:16)
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (55:56)