Easy A

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Apr 21, 2022 — In 1948, leftist filmmaker Leo Hurwitz directed a documentary whose title summed up the uncertainty of its moment: for America’s antifascists, the end of the Second World War was a Strange Victory indeed. Using newsreels from the war’s front lines,...

Mar 16, 2021 — In Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), play is a life force, pleasure a form of liberation. Drawing inspiration from cartoons, Hollywood musicals, and the vaudeville shenanigans of early screen comedy in the vein of Buster Keaton and the Marx...

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

Dec 1, 2020 — Near the end of the late Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee’s six-decade career in cinema, journalists liked to ask him one question quite frequently: Why did he never enter Bollywood?Depending on your vantage point, this query is either reasonable or ridiculous....

Apr 21, 2020 — What happens to the films slated to premiere at Cannes 2020? After all, the fall festival season is beginning to look pretty iffy, too.

Oct 10, 2019 — Dark Passages Where the sea and the city meet, they corrupt each other. Around docks, the ocean’s margins are scummy with oil and floating garbage; the water corrodes hulls, encrusts pilings, and slimes steps. Ports cater to men who come...

Jun 20, 2019 — When French auteur Bruno Dumont emerged on the film-festival circuit at the end of the 1990s with his debut feature, La vie de Jésus, and his Cannes-award-winning international breakthrough L’humanité, he immediately polarized audiences with his pitiless vision of human...

May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...

Jan 29, 2019 — About eight months ago, we relaunched this website with a brand-new, mobile-friendly design, smoother e-commerce functionality, and a richer publishing environment for the Current. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the new site, along with a fair number...