The Current
A magazine of film culture past and present, with new articles, interviews, and videos published every day
Recent Articles
A Story from Chikamatsu: From a Distance
Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.
Ali Abbasi’s Top 10
It’s no surprise that the director of the wildly unpredictable Border, Sweden’s entry for the best foreign-language film Oscar, has a soft spot for renegades like Pasolini, Buñuel, and Lynch.
The Touch and The Serpent’s Egg: Foreign Tongues
Critically maligned upon their release, Ingmar Bergman’s only two English-language films show the master’s artistry at its most restrained and its most convoluted.
Extravagant Visconti at Berkeley
California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive celebrates one of Italian cinema’s great perfectionists with a screening of Senso.
A Short-Film Marathon with a Focus on Female Auteurs
A curated selection of five eye-opening early shorts by acclaimed women directors features on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.
Paul Dano’s First Brush with the Transcendental
The actor-director talks about the college film course that introduced him to some of the giants of world cinema, including Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu.
Fanny and Alexander: The Other Side
This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.
Jarmusch’s Jailbirds in Seattle
Seattle’s oldest continuously running movie theater showcases the career of one of American independent cinema’s great rebels.
Constructing the Life-Sucking Machine in The Princess Bride
Art director Richard Holland shares the nitty-gritty of how he constructed the infernal torture device in Rob Reiner’s classic fairy tale.
M.I.A. and Stephen Loveridge’s Closet Picks
The star and the director of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. show love to politically charged films like Missing and Dheepan, and reminisce about the emotional balm they found in our Janus Films collector’s set.
Video
Spotlight
Under the Influence
In this ongoing series of videos, we invite contemporary filmmakers to discuss movies that have had a lasting impact on their work.
