Through the looking glass: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is something smarter than girlboss fantasy or canny corporate sellout—it’s a grappling, rather, with the fundamental ways in which we represent and relate to reality
by Nathan Lee
Articles published in the weekly Film Comment Letter between 2021—2025 have been organized into quarterly issues for the archive.
Greta Gerwig on Barbie
Girl talk: the director of the ultra-pink blockbuster discusses imbuing inanimate objects with feeling, balancing cynicism and care, and, of course, irrepressible thoughts of death by Devika Girish
It belongs in a museum: the latest big-screen adventure featuring Harrison Ford’s grizzled archeologist only faintly recalls the streamlined pleasures of series highpoint, Raiders of the Lost Arkby Michael Sragow
Signs of the times: the most useful films for this moment of labor unrest in the film industry are those made in close connection with the workers on the front lines by Genevieve Yue
Lush life: the director discusses her debut feature, the particularities of portraying Black motherhood, how she eschewed social-realist tropes, and what her (many nonprofessional) actors taught her about empathy
by Devika Girish
Speechless: in her overview of silent film festivals around the world, scholar Maggie Hennefeld describes fragments of lost worlds revived, offering jolts of existential promise by Maggie Hennefeld
Strength in numbers: the duo discuss their latest drama about the local effects of global capitalism, which sees working-class Northern Englanders clashing, and finding common ground, with Syrian refugees by Inney Prakash
Think piece: A.I. scholar Andrea Rizzoli and critic Kevin B. Lee join to discuss the limitations and possibilities of A.I. as applied to art and cinema
Throughlines: the German actor, known for his extraordinary physicality, discusses his inspirations and his firecracker performance in Ira Sachs’s new film, Passages
A little perspective: the musician and filmmaker talks about his new series, a madcap coming-of-age caper about a Black giant who confronts a broken capitalist world
Between the lines: collector Robert M. Rubin and bibliographer Erin McGuirl join to discuss the ways in which unique screenplays and other "exformation" can help rewrite film history
Spit take: a collection of newly restored shorts from the Sudanese Film Group strain against the didactic dictates of a state-sanctioned national cinema by Devika Girish
Youth in revolt: in the work the late French filmmaker Jean Eustache, the inexorable pain of living is transformed, through autobiography, into luminous cinema by Lisa Katzman
Out of the blue: highlights from this year’s TIFF include Miko Revereza’s Nowhere Near, Atom Egoyan’s return to form Seven Veils, the murder mystery Reptile, and more by José Teodoro
What more do you want? Local critics Saffron Maeve and Adam Nayman join to discuss new films from Atom Egoyan, Cord Jefferson, Pedro Almodóvar, Bertrand Bonello, and more
Face to face: critics Chloe Lizotte and Adam Nayman join to discuss Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Dumb Money, The Boy and the Heron, and more
Growth mindset: the director discusses the third and final season of his hit show, blurring of the line between documentary and fiction, and the ongoing series he curated for Anthology Film Archives by Daniel Schindel
Close shave: Masc, a new program on Criterion Channel, offers a rebuttal to the transphobic charge that transition and gender nonconformity are 21st-century phenomena by So Mayer
Social media: programmer and producer Tom Luddy, who passed away last February, exerted a major influence on Bay Area and American film culture equal to that of the great critics or directors of his generation by Jonathan Mackris
Life during wartime: the great documentarian discusses the making of his epic The Battle of Chile, which bore searing witness to the military coup of September 11, 1973 by Samuel Brodsky
