The Past

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

Feb 6, 2019 — On the Criterion edition of Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong describes his creative process as one of utter despair. That should come as no surprise to anyone who knows his work. Since making his feature debut, Green Fish, in 1997 at...

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...

Dec 28, 2018 — Ulysses S. Jenkins’s Two-Zone Transfer By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about...

Aug 8, 2018 — The concrete bunker looms up surreally from the rolling green countryside, a huge brutalist fortress sprouting from a hillside thick with wildflowers. This is the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, also known as the Packard...

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Jul 17, 2018 — Without doubt, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape struck a nerve when it was released in 1989. Astonishingly, it still does today. Among the most storied of American independent films, it debuted at the U.S. Film Festival (soon to be renamed the...

Jun 11, 2018 — Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind the fashion brand Rodarte, are known for handmade garments that are both beautiful and outlandish. Raised in a redwood forest in northern California, the two came to their careers not through any previous expertise...

Dec 21, 2017 — With D. A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking concert film, rock music solidified its status as a universal language.

Oct 24, 2017 — In this intimate psychological thriller, Olivier Assayas interrogates contemporary society’s near-religious reliance on technology and its mediation of reality.