Jameson put it, “Cinema exists in an eternal present tense.”

You get the feeling of touching down, via time machine, in the lobby of one of New York’s rep houses on a given month and eavesdropping on the chatter of the in-the-know, and at the same time, the sense of being lifted up into an Olympian movie palace in which, as former FC editor Richard T. Also because movies leave us enraptured, enraged, befuddled, betrayed, infatuated, or inspired-and whichever it is, we need to talk about it.Ī good issue of the magazine (founded in 1962 as Vision: A Journal of Film Comment, and published since 1973 by Film at Lincoln Center, formerly the Film Society of Lincoln Center) is capacious and eclectic, ranging from ephemera-news, squibs, lists-to exquisitely wrought, darn near definitive appraisals, like Geoffrey O’Brien’s ode to Jacques Tourneur (“Artisan of the Unseen,” July-Aug 2002). We read it not just for the light that smart writers can throw on cinema, but for the way that cinema, like a projector’s beam, lights up the minds of smart writers. After spending a few weeks rambling through a knee-high stack of old issues of Film Comment, I have a better idea.

Why do we read film criticism, anyway? As someone who writes the stuff, I should probably have a ready answer for that, but it can be hard to justify an activity when it feels entirely natural and necessary to you. Compared with the loss of lives, jobs, homes, and democratic ideals, its disappearance may seem minor, but for the cinephile community, already deprived of the chance to come together in movie theaters and at film festivals, its absence hurts. The magazine may not be gone forever-according to the publisher, it is on “temporary hiatus”-but it is yet another thing we are missing in this year when so much went dark. I come to praise Film Comment, not to bury it.

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