Film Comment is an arts and culture

Arts journalism

Arts journalism is a branch of journalism concerned with the reporting and discussion of the arts. This can include, but is not limited to, film, literature, music, theater, and architecture. Traditionally, journalists and critics writing about the arts had a background in writing and the arts;...

 magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

 published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center

Film Society of Lincoln Center

The Film Society of Lincoln Center based in New York City, United States, is one of the world's most prominent film presentation organizations. Founded in 1969 by three Lincoln Center executives - William F. May, Martin E. Segal and Schuyler G...

, of which it is the official publication. Film Comment features critical reviews and in-depth analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world. Founded in 1962 and originally released as a quarterly, Film Comment began publishing on a bi-monthly basis with the Nov/Dec issue of 1972. In 2007, the magazine was awarded the Utne

Utne Reader

Utne Reader is an American bimonthly magazine. The magazine collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment from generally alternative media sources, including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music and DVDs...

 Independent Press Award for Best Arts Coverage. The magazine's editorial team also hosts the annual Film Comment Selects

Film Comment Selects

Film Comment Selects is an annual program hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and curated by the editors and writers of Film Comment magazine. It aims to provide a cutting-edge lineup of eclectic and international films, many of which have appeared on the international film festival...

 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Origins

Founded during the boom years of the international art-house circuit and the so-called New American Cinema (an umbrella term for the era's independently produced documentaries and narrative features as well experimental and Underground works). Film Comment was closely tied to New York's cinephile-friendly counter culture. By way of a mission statement, founder publisher Joseph Blanco wrote in the inaugural issue: "With the increasing interest in the motion picture as an art form, and with the rise of the New American cinema, [Film Comment] takes its place as a publication for the independent film maker and those who share a sincere interest in the unlimited scope of the motion picture."

Gordon Hitchens editorship, 1962-1970

• Primarily historical and sociological orientation. Focus on cultural politics and industrial factors/means of production.
• Recurrent topics: the American Civil Rights Movement
  Civil rights movement
  The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
  
  ; censorship
  Censorship
  thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
  
  ; the United States Information Agency
  United States Information Agency
  The United States Information Agency , which existed from 1953 to 1999, was a United States agency devoted to "public diplomacy". In 1999, USIA's broadcasting functions were moved to the newly created Broadcasting Board of Governors, and its exchange and non-broadcasting information functions were...
  
  's propaganda efforts; the Hollywood blacklist
  Hollywood blacklist
  The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or...
  
  .
• House writers included Edith Laurie, Herman Weinberg, and Clara Hoover. Hitchens often invited filmmakers to contribute, regularly publishing material by directors such as Gregory Markopoulos
  Gregory Markopoulos
  Gregory J. Markopoulos was a Greek-American experimental filmmaker. Born in Toledo, Ohio to Greek immigrant parents, Markopoulos began making 8 mm films at an early age. He attended USC Film School in the late 1940s, and went on to become a co-founder — with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan...
  
  , Emile de Antonio
  Emile de Antonio
  Emile de Antonio was a director and producer of documentary films, usually detailing political or social events circa 1960s–1980s...
  
   and James Blue.
• The magazine's earliest publishers were Clara Hoover and Austin Lamont. By the third issue, the magazine had switched ownership to Lorien Productions, a corporation that Hoover "formed to cover investments in artistic enterprises" (35, Feb 1984).
• Predisposition towards low-budget narrative features and cinéma vérité
  Cinéma vérité
  Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
  
  -style documentaries. Hitchens’ dual rejection of Hollywood and the avant-garde (despite being acquainted with Jonas Mekas and Gregory Markopoulos and involved in New York's avant-garde scene):
  • On Hollywood: "We felt that the Hollywood film was adequately covered by other periodicals and by the TV medium and the daily newspaper… We didn’t want to abundantly repeat what had been said and done."
  • On the New York Underground scene / avant-garde filmmaking: "We had a lot of doubts about the Mekas
    Jonas Mekas
    Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.-Biography:...
    
     group, the Film Culture
    Film Culture
    Film Culture was an American film magazine started by Adolfas Mekas and his brother Jonas Mekas in 1954, and is now defunct. It is best known for exploring the avant-garde cinema in depth, but also published articles on all aspects of cinema, including Hollywood films.Past contributors include...
    
     kind of reader, the aesthete. They lacked political balls and awareness. They had no social commitment and were elitist, concerned with self-expression while people were starving. We felt that was infantile, narcissistic, and self-infatuated."
• Though Andrew Sarris
  Andrew Sarris
  Andrew Sarris is an American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.-Career:Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the U.S...
  
   began contributing to the magazine beginning in 1964, Hitchens’ editorial perspective was almost pointedly not auteurist
  Auteur theory
  In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
  
  . The international art cinema titans that Film Comment most vigorously praised during the 1960s—Ingmar Bergman
  Ingmar Bergman
  Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and...
  
  , Satyajit Ray
  Satyajit Ray
  Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature...
  
  , Roberto Rossellini
  Roberto Rossellini
  Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
  
  —were all associated with a school of neorealist humanism that's historically antecedent to the post-‘59 Big Bang in art-house fare driven by auteurism-inspired New Wave
  French New Wave
  The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
  
   movements.

Richard Corliss, 1970-1982

• Amidst disputes with publisher Austin Lamont, Hitchens resigned in 1970.
• He was replaced as editor by then twenty-seven year old critic Richard Corliss
  Richard Corliss
  Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
  
  . At the time, Corliss had contributed free-lance reviews to a number of periodicals (The New York Times
  The New York Times
  The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
  
  , Film Quarterly
  Film Quarterly
  Film Quarterly is a film journal published by University of California Press, in Berkeley, California, United States. It was first published in 1945 as Hollywood Quarterly, was renamed The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television in 1951, and received its current title in 1958...
  
  , and Variety
  Variety (magazine)
  Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
  
  ) and had served as the house critic for The National Review from 1966-1970.
• In sharp contrast to comparable film journals like Cahiers du cinéma
  Cahiers du cinéma
  Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
  
   and Sight & Sound
  Sight & Sound
  Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
  
  —which were turning towards a more theoretically inflected and academic style of film criticism, corresponding to the contemporary vogue for Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis—the writing in Film Comment remained relatively prosaic and broadly accessible. Corliss called his own style the "Time style" (after Time magazine): "extremely punchy, epigrammatic, us[ing] words as jokes as well as weapons. The idea was not to put the reader to sleep."
• Though Corliss had been a student of Andrew Sarris at New York University
  New York University
  New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
  
  , Corliss’ own views were not strictly auteurist. (His later work, particularly Talking Pictures [1974], would mount a persuasive critique of auteurism through critical emphasis on the creative contribution of screenwriters.) But Corliss deeply admired Sarris’ historical erudition and penetrating formalist insights, and he more generally shared the auteurists’ strongly aesthetic sensibilities as well as their love for classical Hollywood cinema.
• Under Corliss’ guidance Film Comment began in earnest an archeological excavation of Hollywood's past, wherein classical-era directors like Frank Capra
  Frank Capra
  Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...
  
  , John Ford
  John Ford
  John Ford was an American film director. He was famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath...
  
  , Howard Hawks
  Howard Hawks
  Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
  
  , Alfred Hitchcock
  Alfred Hitchcock
  Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
  
  , Max Ophuls
  Max Ophüls
  Maximillian Oppenheimer — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany , France , the United States , and France again...
  
  , Nicholas Ray
  Nicholas Ray
  Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
  
   and Orson Welles
  Orson Welles
  George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
  
   were regularly singled out for reassessment and praise.
• Several landmark Film Studies essays were published in this period, including:
  • Andrew Sarris’ "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1970";
  • Robin Wood
    Robin Wood (critic)
    Robert Paul "Robin" Wood was a Canada-based film critic and educator. He wrote books on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, and Arthur Penn and was a member, until 2007, of the editorial collective that publishes the magazine CineACTION!, a film theory collective founded by Wood and...
    
    's "To Have (Written) and Have Not (Directed): Reflections on Authorship" (as well as Wood's early auteurism-inflected essays on Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Tourneur
    Jacques Tourneur
    Jacques Tourneur was a French-American film director.-Life:Born in Paris, France, he was the son of film director Maurice Tourneur. At age 10, Jacques moved to the United States with his father. He started a career in cinema while still attending high school as an extra and later as a script clerk...
    
    , Kenji Mizoguchi
    Kenji Mizoguchi
    Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
    
     and Nicholas Ray);
  • Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
    
    's review of Pauline Kael
    Pauline Kael
    Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
    
    's Raising Kane;
  • Richard Corliss’ 116-page panorama of the American screenwriter;
  • Raymond Durgnat
    Raymond Durgnat
    Raymond Durgnat was a distinctive and highly influential British film critic, who was born in London of Swiss parents...
    
    's two-part, book-length study of director King Vidor
    King Vidor
    King Wallis Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose career spanned nearly seven decades...
    
    
  • Two important glosses of Hollywood film noir
    Film noir
    Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
    
    : Paul Schrader
    Paul Schrader
    Paul Joseph Schrader is an American screenwriter, film director, and former film critic. Apart from his credentials as a director, Schrader is most notably known for his screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull....
    
    's "Notes on Film Noir" and Place & Peterson's "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir";
• In September–October 1972, the magazine began publishing bimonthly instead of quarterly in order to generate more revenue. Eventually, Lamont had to find someone else to publish the magazine as it sank into a deficit. As a selection committee member on the New York Film Festival
  New York Film Festival
  The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
  
  , Corliss sparked interest at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (which organizes the festival) in assuming the rights and assets of a publication that could offer it "year-round exposure for its activities" (Feb 1984, 44).
• Publishing responsibilities were assumed by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 1972. With their editorial and publishing offices consolidated in New York, the magazine's lead time for articles (i.e. the time between the deadline for submissions and the date of publication) dropped from roughly three months to one. Where the magazine had previously been heavy on its retrospective focus, this infrastructural change made it feasible for the magazine to address contemporary releases as well as appreciations of older work.
• Though the magazine changed ownership, Corliss stated that the Film Society had very little direct impact on its editorial content. He claimed that "a writer can make absolutely any opinion that he wants about anything, including Film Society of Lincoln Center policies or the New York Film Festival." The magazine, however, did begin annual coverage of the New York Film Festival as "an obvious bow to the Society's interests" (Feb 1984, 46).
• New Features from this period: "Journals" begins in Fall 1971, with Jonathan Rosenbaum writing on Paris and Jim Kitses on Los Angeles; the "Film Favorites", "Independents", and "Industry", columns; "Annual Grosses Gloss" begins in 1975 Mar/Apr; "Guilty Pleasures" column begins (irregularly) in May/June 1978.
• In 1978, the magazine began to publish feature articles on the Film Society’s Gala Tribute honorees.
• The annual "Year in Review" feature (published in the January–February issue, and later called "Movie Revue") began in 1981, with ten-best lists from editors and regular contributors.

Harlan Jacobson

Harlan Jacobson

Harlan Jacobson is an American film critic, literary editor, radio host, film Lecturer and author.-Education:Harlan Jacobson received a Bachelor's Degree in English from Haverford College in 1971.-Career:...

 editorship, 1982-1990

• The magazine continued to arrange every issue around a midsection that tackled multifaceted issues of film aesthetics, historiography, and various phenomena in film culture. It also maintained a strong commitment to exploring classical Hollywood, even as it broadened the international scope of its criticism with features on Iranian and "Far Eastern" cinema.
• The magazine began to chronicle the technological changes that were shaping film spectatorship. It grappled with "The Video Revolution" in the early ’80s in a midsection devoted to the subject (May/June 1982). J. Hoberman wrote: "If Television gave every American home its own personal rep house, the VCR has the potential to equip every viewer with the equivalent of a Movieola or Steebeck. The appreciation thus engendered for fragmented (or fetishized) bits of "Film" will likely have as profound an effect on the film culture of the Eighties as TV had on that of the Fifties and Sixties." This phenomenon was further explored in David Chute's article "Zapper Power" (April 1984).
• Music videos emerged as a point of interest. Arlene Zeichner, in her piece "Rock’n Video", predicted that "Video may replace records entirely." The August 1983 midsection, also titled "Rock’n Video", was an early collection of criticism on the art form that discussed "The MTV
  MTV
  MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
  
   Aesthetic" that would become influential in the next decades, MTV's precursors, and "Video Auteurs."
• In the February 1984 issue, Film Comments midsection chronicled its own history from its beginnings as Vision to the financial and editorial challenges that lay before it in the ’80s. "Whatever its level of profitability… Film Comment for the first time in its existence has finally been provided with a steady source of financing and a rock-solid publishing foundation. With Corliss as its editor, the society as its publisher, and a handful of quality writers as its key contributors, Film Comment now seems assured of continued survival and success."
• This decade saw the first uses of color in the magazine's layout.
• A new "Television" column began during this period.
• The midsection in April 1986 commented on the emergence of gay and lesbian representation in contemporary cinema, closeted homosexuals in Hollywood, and gay cinema in the decade of AIDS.
• In the mid-Eighties, Film Comment begins regular coverage of international film festivals, including Venice, Edinburgh, and Toronto.

Richard Jameson, 1990-2000

• A series of think-pieces on the state of film criticism (March/April, May/June, and July/August 1990) included Richard Corliss' article lamenting the shallowness of TV film reviewing, the star system, and Siskel & Ebert
  At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert
  At the Movies was a movie review television program that aired from 1982 to 1990. It was produced by Tribune Entertainment and created by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who had left Sneak Previews the previous year....
  
  's thumbs-up/thumbs-down approach ("Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half-century by James Agee
  James Agee
  James Rufus Agee was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S...
  
   and Manny Farber
  Manny Farber
  Emanuel "Manny" Farber was an American painter, film critic and writer. Often described as "iconoclastic" , Farber developed a distinctive prose style and set of theoretical stances which have had a large influence on later generations of film critics; Susan Sontag considered him to be "the...
  
  , Andrew Sarris
  Andrew Sarris
  Andrew Sarris is an American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.-Career:Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the U.S...
  
   and Pauline Kael
  Pauline Kael
  Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
  
  , J. Hoberman
  J. Hoberman
  James Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
  
   and Dave Kehr
  Dave Kehr
  Dave Kehr is an American film critic. A critic at the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune for many years, he writes a weekly column for The New York Times on DVD releases, in addition to contributing occasional pieces on individual films or filmmakers.-Early life and education:Dave Kehr did...
  
  ...is an endangered species"); a back-and-forth between Roger Ebert and Corliss; and an article by Andrew Sarris on auteurism, in which he cautions his younger colleagues on being overly despairing or flippantly humorous about the state of contemporary cinema.
• The inclusion of a midsection on a specific topic in every issue was discontinued.
• Beginning in May/June 1991, Film Comment began including commentary on video and laserdisc releases by inaugurating its "Life with Video" section.
• In January/February 1993, Film Comment expanded its format by eight pages.
• A new focus on assessing the careers of international auteurs (Chen Kaige
  Chen Kaige
  Chen Kaige is a Chinese film director and a leading figure of the fifth generation of Chinese cinema. His films are known for their visual flair and epic storytelling.-Early life:...
  
  , Ousmane Sembène
  Ousmane Sembène
  Ousmane Sembène , often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane in articles and reference works, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer...
  
  , Krzystof Kieslowski, Lars von Trier
  Lars von Trier
  Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective, although his own films have taken a variety of different approaches, and have frequently received strongly divided critical opinion....
  
  , André Téchiné
  André Téchiné
  André Téchiné , is a French screenwriter and film director. He has had a long and distinguished career that places him among the best post-New Wave French film directors....
  
  , Abbas Kiarostami
  Abbas Kiarostami
  Abbas Kiarostami is an internationally acclaimed Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer. An active filmmaker since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries...
  
  ). The magazine also publishes several lengthy assessments of major contemporary filmmakers, including a two-part essay on Steven Spielberg
  Steven Spielberg
  Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
  
   spread across two issues (May/June and July/August 1992), and a sixty-page collection of articles on Martin Scorsese
  Martin Scorsese
  Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
  
   (May/June 1998). Other special sections on individual directors include a Robert Bresson
  Robert Bresson
  -Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
  
   symposium (May/June 1999) and, under the Gavin Smith editorship, a two-issue assessment of Chris Marker
  Chris Marker
  Chris Marker is a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée , A Grin Without a Cat , Sans Soleil and AK , an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa...
  
   (May/June and July/August 2003).
• The annual "Year in Review" feature was extended to include a "Moments Out of Time" section compiled by Jameson and contributing editor Kathleen Murphy, consisting of a long list of memorable scenes and images from the previous year. This feature, which was discontinued during Gavin Smith's editorship, has been reprised at MSN Movies.
• Kathleen Murphy writes "Frames", an irregular column on notable film-related websites.

Gavin Smith, 2000-present

• "Contrary to those who say it's all over, that the Golden Age of film and film criticism was the Seventies or the Sixties, or even the Forties, we think the here and now of movies is as exciting and challenging as ever. There's no sadder spectacle than the cynical nostalgia and bad faith provocations of critics who choose to project their malaise and loss of passion for cinema onto contemporary film. This is an era of too many dumb movies, cowardly distributors and mediocre critics." Gavin Smith, Jul/Aug 2000.
• Renewed emphasis on contemporary relevance.
• Punchier visual design.
• Standardization of editorial format, and the addition of several departments:
  • Annual Reader's Poll (Jan/Feb 01);
  • Sound and Vision (Sep/Oct 01);
  • Site Specifics (May/Jun '07)
  • Encore (Originally, "Return Engagement" May/June 6);
• Regular columns assigned to Alex Cox ("Flashback" then later "10,000 Ways To Die", May/June ’06), Guy Maddin ("Guy Maddin's Jolly Corner"), Paul Arthur ("Art of the Real", May/June ‘06) and Olaf Muller ("Olaf's World");
• Recurring topics: digital cinema; film festival politics; ascendant national cinema industries (China, South Korea, Romania).
• One of the lengthiest and most controversial articles Film Comment has printed appeared in September/October 2006. "Canon Fodder", by Paul Schrader, asserted the value of and laid the parameters for a film canon, and criticized what it deemed "Nonjudgmentals", who had devised schemes by which art could be closely studied and analyzed without prejudice—the prejudice, that is, of having to determine if the art work is good or bad vis-à-vis another work of art…"
• In 2004, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott described the magazine as, "a stronghold of feisty, intelligent opinion that pushes no particular party line. Its tone of plain-spoken braininess -- sophistication without snobbery, erudition with a minimum of jargon -- reflects the vitality and variety of international film culture today."

Critics

• Paul Arthur
• David Bordwell
  David Bordwell
  David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the...
  
  
• Stuart Byron
• Chris Chang
• Richard Combs
• Manohla Dargis
  Manohla Dargis
  Manohla Dargis is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with A.O. Scott. She was formerly a chief film critic for the Los Angeles Times, the film editor at the LA Weekly, and a film critic at The Village Voice. She has written for a variety of publications, including Film Comment and...
  
  
• Raymond Durgnat
  Raymond Durgnat
  Raymond Durgnat was a distinctive and highly influential British film critic, who was born in London of Swiss parents...
  
  
• Roger Ebert
  Roger Ebert
  Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
  
  
• Manny Farber
  Manny Farber
  Emanuel "Manny" Farber was an American painter, film critic and writer. Often described as "iconoclastic" , Farber developed a distinctive prose style and set of theoretical stances which have had a large influence on later generations of film critics; Susan Sontag considered him to be "the...
  
  
• Howard Hampton
• Molly Haskell
  Molly Haskell
  Molly Haskell is an American feminist film critic and author. Her most influential book is From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies...
  
  
• J. Hoberman
  J. Hoberman
  James Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
  
  
• Harlan Jacobson
  Harlan Jacobson
  Harlan Jacobson is an American film critic, literary editor, radio host, film Lecturer and author.-Education:Harlan Jacobson received a Bachelor's Degree in English from Haverford College in 1971.-Career:...
  
  
• Richard Jameson
• Kent Jones
• Dave Kehr
  Dave Kehr
  Dave Kehr is an American film critic. A critic at the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune for many years, he writes a weekly column for The New York Times on DVD releases, in addition to contributing occasional pieces on individual films or filmmakers.-Early life and education:Dave Kehr did...
  
  
• Laura Kern
• Nathan Lee
• Todd McCarthy
• George Morris
• Nicolas Rapold
• Tony Rayns
  Tony Rayns
  Antony Rayns is a British writer, commentator, film festival programmer and screenwriter. Much inspired in his youth by the films of Kenneth Anger, he wrote for the underground publication Cinema Rising before contributing to the Monthly Film Bulletin from the December 1970 issue until its demise...
  
  
• Frank Rich
  Frank Rich
  Frank Rich is an American essayist and op-ed columnist who wrote for The New York Times from 1980, when he was appointed its chief theatre critic, until 2011...
  
  
• Jonathan Rosenbaum
  Jonathan Rosenbaum
  Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
  
  
• Andrew Sarris
  Andrew Sarris
  Andrew Sarris is an American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.-Career:Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the U.S...
  
  
• Richard Schickel
  Richard Schickel
  Richard Warren Schickel is an American author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He is a film critic for Time magazine, having also written for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review....
  
  
• Elliott Stein
  Elliott Stein
  Journalist, historian, the American born Elliott Stein was in the years 60-70, in Paris, the fim critic for the Financial Times and for Village Voice. . In the 50s he managed a literary review in Paris: "Janus"...
  
  
• Chuck Stephens
• Amy Taubin
  Amy Taubin
  Amy Taubin is an American film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment...
  
  
• David Thomson
  David Thomson
  David Thomson may refer to:* David Coupar Thomson , Scottish publisher, founder of D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd* David Thomson, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet , Canadian businessman and currently the wealthiest individual in Canada...
  
  
• Richard Thomson
• Amos Vogel
  Amos Vogel
  Amos Vogel was one of the most influential cineasts in New York. He is best known for his bestselling book Film as a Subversive Art and as the founder of the New York City avantgarde ciné-club Cinema 16 , where he was the first programmer to present films by Roman Polanski, John Cassavetes,...
  
  
• Robin Wood
  Robin Wood (critic)
  Robert Paul "Robin" Wood was a Canada-based film critic and educator. He wrote books on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, and Arthur Penn and was a member, until 2007, of the editorial collective that publishes the magazine CineACTION!, a film theory collective founded by Wood and...
  
  

Others

• Woody Allen
  Woody Allen
  Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
  
  
• Ingmar Bergman
  Ingmar Bergman
  Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and...
  
  
• Alex Cox
  Alex Cox
  Alexander Cox is a British film director, screenwriter, nonfiction author and sometime actor, notable for his idiosyncratic style and approach to scripts...
  
  
• Alan Dershowitz
  Alan Dershowitz
  Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He has spent most of his career at Harvard Law School where in 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its history...
  
  
• John Kenneth Gailbraith
• Matt Groening
  Matt Groening
  Matthew Abram "Matt" Groening is an American cartoonist, screenwriter, and producer. He is the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell as well as two successful television series, The Simpsons and Futurama....
  
  
• Stephen King
  Stephen King
  Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
  
  
• Phillip Lopate
  Phillip Lopate
  Doctor Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher. He is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.-Early life and education:...
  
  
• Guy Maddin
  Guy Maddin
  Guy Maddin, OM is a Canadian screenwriter, director, cinematographer and film editor of both features and short films from Winnipeg, Manitoba...
  
  
• David Mamet
  David Mamet
  David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...
  
  
• Geoffrey O'Brien
  Geoffrey O'Brien
  Geoffrey O'Brien is an American poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Library of America as Executive Editor, becoming Editor-in-Chief in 1998.-Biography:...
  
  
• Michael Ondaatje
  Michael Ondaatje
  Philip Michael Ondaatje , OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet of Burgher origin. He is perhaps best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, which was adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film.-Life and work:...
  
  
• Oliver Sacks
  Oliver Sacks
  Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE , is a British neurologist and psychologist residing in New York City. He is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he also holds the position of Columbia Artist...
  
  
• Paul Schrader
  Paul Schrader
  Paul Joseph Schrader is an American screenwriter, film director, and former film critic. Apart from his credentials as a director, Schrader is most notably known for his screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull....
  
  
• Martin Scorsese
  Martin Scorsese
  Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
  
  
• Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
  
  
• Steven Spielberg
  Steven Spielberg
  Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
  
  
• Quentin Tarantino
  Quentin Tarantino
  Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
  
  
• John Waters
  John Waters (filmmaker)
  John Samuel Waters, Jr. is an American filmmaker, actor, stand-up comedian, writer, journalist, visual artist, and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films...
  
  

Trivia

• Founding editor Gordon Hitchens is the son of thriller novelists Bert and Dolores Hitchens, the latter author of the 1958 Fools' Gold, the novel famously adapted for the screen by Jean-Luc Godard as Band of Outsiders (1966).
• The magazine's original title, Vision, was dropped after two issues to avoid confusion with a Spanish language periodical of the same name.
• British film critic David Thomson
  David Thomson (film critic)
  David Thomson is a film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.-Career:...
  
   is not to be confused with British film critic David Thompson
  David M. Thompson
  David Marcus Thompson is a British film and television producer.Thompson moved to London in 1978, and worked for the BBC as a film programmer and documentary maker. He was the founding head of BBC Films...
  
  , though both have written regularly for Film Comment magazine.

External links

• Official website of the Film Society of Lincoln Center