
Film Comment Selects
Film Comment’s festival of movies returns in its 19th edition with a selection of titles curated by the magazine’s editors, offering strikingly bold visions, mixing New York premieres of new films and long-unseen older titles that deserve the big-screen treatment.
László Nemes
2018|
Hungary|
144 minutes|
Hungarian and German with English subtitles
Academy Award–winner László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns with an audacious, spellbindingly shot new film about an orphaned young woman searching for her mysterious brother in Budapest at the beginning of the 20th century.
Steven Soderbergh
2019|
USA|
90 minutes
During a pro basketball lockout, a sports agent (André Holland) pitches a rookie basketball client on an intriguing and controversial business proposition. Soderbergh’s new film also features Zazie Beetz, Sonja Sohn, Zachary Quinto, Kyle MacLachlan, and Bill Duke and was written by Moonlight co-screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney.
Beata Bubenec
2017|
Russia / Latvia|
80 minutes
Shot in one harrowing take, Bubenec’s tense handheld dispatch from embattled Eastern Ukraine is a window into how the bloodshed of war pervades life and aggravates and enables male aggression.
Victor Moreno
2018|
Spain|
80 minutes
Deep below Madrid, tunnels of all sorts keep the city running, whether storm drains or subways or other subterranean systems. Moreno’s mesmerizing underground city symphony takes us into an unknown world of darkness and glimmering activity.
Caroline Poggi
2018|
France|
97 minutes|
French and English with English subtitles
Jessica is the bold leader and den mother to an adopted gang of militaristic, orphaned teenage boys in this portrait of bereft teenage masculinity that feels vivid in its science fiction.
Benjamin Chapin
1917|
USA|
215 minutes
This remarkable series of 10 short silent dramas by John M. Stahl, produced by Benjamin Chapin as a vehicle for his performance as Abraham Lincoln, are structured entirely around memory and recollections of the past.
Bettina Perut
2018|
Chile / Germany|
78 minutes
Los Reyes (“The Kings”) watches Fútbol and Chola, a furry shepherd mix and some kind of labrador, respectively, as they hang out, play, and generally coexist with the people who are also hanging out and playing on the lawns and concrete ramps of Chile’s first skate park in Santiago.
Beatriz Seigner
2018|
Brazil|
88 minutes|
Portuguese and Spanish with English subtitles
Brazilian writer/director Beatriz Seigner’s setting is the island borderlands between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, where Colombian emigrants live in a liminal state. Joining their numbers are new arrivals Amparo and her two young children, rebuilding their lives from the ground up.
Yang Zhang
2018|
China|
126 minutes|
Mandarin with English subtitles
In Yang Zhang’s visually dazzling documentary, what could have been an amusing look at a painter’s rural school and the older villagers he mentors deepens into a moving and detailed look at family and community life cycles.
Abbas Fahdel
2018|
Lebanon / Iraq / France|
101 minutes|
Arabic with English subtitles
In the latest from Iraqi-French filmmaker Abbas Fahdel, a remote valley in northern Lebanon is the setting for a drama in which teenage Yara (Michelle Wehbe) lives and works with her hardscrabble grandmother (Mary Alkady) on a cliffside farm, and falls for a young hiker, Elias (Elias Freifer).
Jerry Schatzberg
1980|
USA|
119 minutes
Jerry Schatzberg’s rarely screened Honeysuckle Rose stars Willie Nelson as a touring country music singer, and was shot by the late Robby Müller who gorgeously realized works for directors ranging from Wim Wenders to Jim Jarmusch to Lars von Trier to Barbet Schroeder.
The director of the opening-night film of Film Comment Selects, Sunset, who won an Academy Award winner for Son of Saul, discusses the boundary-pushing technique of his filmmaking and approach to history in an illustrated talk with clips.
Film Comment’s festival of movies returns in its 19th edition with a selection of titles curated by the magazine’s editors, offering strikingly bold visions, mixing New York premieres of new films and long-unseen older titles that deserve the big-screen treatment. As evidenced by such past selections as Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Life and Nothing More, Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time, Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, Olivier Assayas’s demonlover, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, and Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, these are films that play by their own rules, works of considered artistry that reflect the philosophy of a magazine that has been essential for film lovers for more than 50 years.
See Film Comment‘s coverage of the lineup here.


























