Film Forum
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“The Comedy of Man Begins Like This”: On and with Terry Zwigoff
The aspiring artist seeking an inspiring avatar in the corpus of Terry Zwigoff has set themselves up, to put it mildly, for a fair bit of consternation. It’s not that, to invoke his Daniel Clowes adaptation Art School Confidential (2006), the “narcotic moment of creative bliss” is totally impossible—Crumb (1994), his documentary about the eponymous underground cartoonist, is littered with such moments rendered with the commonplace flick of a pen, even if bliss is comparatively rare—only Zwigoff’s cadre of enfants terribles, male pathetics, and fringe art-makers wryly observe how a collapsing capitalism and an ever-accelerating corporatism have come to define […]
by Frank Falisi on Apr 17, 2026 -
The Passion of Amir Naderi
Amir Naderi is on the move. I connected with the Iranian filmmaker over WhatsApp on a chilly February morning, or at least morning where I am. He’s calling me from Rome, which is the second stop on his tour through Europe teaching classes on filmmaking. In every country he visits, he tells me, he shapes the curriculum around that nation’s cinema history. It’s a pedagogical approach that aptly reflects the cosmopolitanism of a filmmaker who has shot films in the United States, Japan, and Italy, and who hopes to potentially make a film in Australia. “If I can do it,” […]
by Nick Kouhi on Feb 23, 2026 -
“He Realized It Was Useful to Stop Running From the 500 Pound Maus Chasing After Him”: Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin on Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse!
Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse! centers on a legendary cartoonist who’s long struggled with being eclipsed by his own creation. Decades ago Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Holocaust-focused, autobiographical graphic novel Maus launched the underground artist into mainstream fame, and its success prompted him to follow up with the explanatory MetaMaus so he could finally stop having to publicly dissect the most painful time in his family’s history. (Needless to say, the plan backfired spectacularly.) Fast forward to today, when calls to ban Maus — and other “uncomfortable” books — make the moral of the story […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 24, 2025 -
“I Could Do a Dynamite Directors Cut, Because I Know Where All the Best Stuff is, But That Would Defeat the Whole Purpose of the Project”: Gary Hustwit on ENO
What used to be known, literally, as “the cutting room floor,” now exists as a digital bin, an assortment of deleted scenes, unused (and in today’s mode of industrial documentary production, perhaps even unviewed) footage — material that, through its absence, haunts any finished audiovisual work. Often when this material is revealed, on a Blu-ray supplemental features disc, for example, the director’s elisions affirm the strength of their initial creative editorial decisions. Other times, particularly in biographical documentaries, the unused material becomes a kind of lacuna, suggesting not only paths unexplored but a failure to engage with all that’s messy, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 12, 2024 -
“We Think of Trump as the First Meme to Hold Office in the White House”: A Conversation with Hello Dankness Creators Soda Jerk
For over 20 years, the Australian video artists Soda Jerk have been making work that samples film, music and other various forms of pop culture. Their films are kaleidoscopic and psychedelic, irreverent and constantly surprising. Their newest film, Hello Dankness, is no different. Set in a fictional suburbia populated by Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, and Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, Dankness is a response to–and a film about–the 2016 election and its aftermath. After all, an era of American history and politics that so ferociously shred away societal norms and imbued daily life with a lasting weirdness […]
by Conor Williams on Sep 9, 2023 -
Binaural Recording, Room Tone, and Voices from the Past: Sam Green on His Documentary 32 Sounds
When it came time to title his 2018 documentary about The Kronos Quartet, director Sam Green chose A Thousand Thoughts. Referring to an older Kronos composition, the title also spoke to the film’s approach, which was to use the music and biography of the Bay Area classical group to summon up a range of allusive meditations on ephemerality, culture, legacy and death. For his latest documentary, ostensibly about the much larger and more amorphous topic of “sound,” Green has gone in the numerically opposite direction. 32 Sounds, which opens today at New York’s Film Forum, announces itself as a sort […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2023 -
“The Very First Cut Lasted About 25 Hours”: María Álvarez on Her Proust Documentary, Le temps perdu
María Álvarez’s 2020 doc Le temps perdu (premiering theatrically on these shores at NYC’s Film Forum August 12th) is the second film in an exquisite trilogy, beginning with 2017’s Las cinéphilas and ending just last year with the IDFA debut of Las cercanas. All three docs are poetic meditations on the intersection of art, aging and memory, similarly focused on vibrant geriatric characters whose connections to cinema, literature and music (in ascending part order) are as profound as life itself. In the case of Le temps perdu reading becomes, in the apt description of one enthusiastic gent, “a creative act” — and an epic one at that. For […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 11, 2022 -
A Restaurant’s Democratic Promise: Director Lisa Hurwitz and Her Doc, The Automat
When The Automat director Lisa Hurwitz left her family’s home in Southern California to go to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, she found that the place where she was most comfortable was the school’s cafeteria, the Greenery. “I made new friends there every day and there was a different food every day,” she says. Hurwitz’s academic focus wasn’t film: “I took one documentary filmmaking course, just before I graduated.” But she also had a job projecting 35mm movies at Olympia’s Capitol Theater, aka the Picture Palace, which was operated by the Olympia Film Society and was the venue for […]
by Amy Taubin on Feb 20, 2022 -
“…The Parts That Were Left out of the Ken Burns Documentary”: Tom Surgal on the “Historical Corrective” That is His Free Jazz Documentary, Fire Music
Many years in the making, Fire Music tells the many-stranded story of free jazz, a chronically misunderstood and often maligned expansion of the improvisatory African-American art form that exploded as a movement in the 1960s through the innovations of path-breaking titans like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. Although this avant-garde has been around long enough to become its own tradition – its oldest living exponents are in their 90s – the music still remains somehow outside the mainstream. Even this week, Twitter was abuzz over Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon’s mockery of the German […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 10, 2021 -
Film Forum’s ‘New Yawk New Wave’ Isn’t Over
New Yawk New Wave has been running at Film Forum since January 11 but still has a couple of precious days of life left. In a way, it’s one of the more ambitious curatorial projects to emerge from the theater’s august archivists. The series isn’t bound to a single era (it encompasses the period from 1953 to 1973), genre (everything from madcap comedy to downcast drama makes an appearance), or even style (there’s New Wave, cinema vérité, post-noir, and whatever you want to call Robert Downey Sr.’s still-photos-plus-voiceovers oddity, Chafed Elbows). Besides New York origins, the main thing this wildly […]
by Jim Allen on Jan 30, 2013
