Film Comment
American film magazine
Film Comment is the official publication of Film at Lincoln Center. It features reviews and 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. The magazine's editorial team also hosts the annual Film Comment Selects at the Film at Lincoln Center. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, publication of the magazine was suspended in May 2020, and its website was updated on March 10, 2021, with news of the relaunch of the Film Comment podcast and a weekly newsletter.
History
Origins
Film Comment was 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, narrative features, and experimental and underground works. 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, 1962–1970
The magazine's earliest publishers were Clara Hoover and Austin Lamont. By the third issue, the publishers transferred ownership to Lorien Productions, a corporation that Hoover "formed to cover investments in artistic enterprises" (35, Feb 1984).
This period in the magazine's history was marked by a predisposition towards low-budget narrative features and cinéma vérité-style documentaries. Hitchens was inclined towards a dual rejection of Hollywood and of the avant-garde (despite being acquainted with Jonas Mekas and Gregory Markopoulos and being involved in New York's avant-garde scene).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Film Comment” as american film magazine. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as american film magazine. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4038736. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1972, 2020 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Film Comment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.