The Stuff

Jun 17, 2025 — Authors address overt and covert queer cinema, the avant-garde, and AI; plus notes on new collections and entire filmographies.

Nov 21, 2024 — Dennis Hopper’s bleakly nihilistic drama struggled to find an audience after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980, but time has revealed it to be one of the most hardcore films about disaffected youth ever made.

Jul 25, 2024 — During a tumultuous period in New York’s history, movies like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and Shaft found excitement and squalor in one of the city’s most infamous tourist attractions.

Jul 18, 2023 — In her music, her films, and her often stormy romances, Birkin captivated us for more than half a century.

Nov 6, 2020 — A new restoration of Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, the return of Sophia Loren, supercops in the 1970s, and Costa-Gavras’s Z are on our minds this week.

Sep 15, 2020 — For some, this nineteenth-century love story “never catches fire,” but for others, it’s “one of the finest films of the year.”

Jan 28, 2020 — The unpredictable story of a family of petty criminals features Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Richard Jenkins, and Debra Winger.

Nov 11, 2019 — This month we’re reading about the women (and men) of Hollywood, weighing arguments from all corners, and picking up an overlooked novel.

Aug 21, 2018 — A mythic piece of early Finnish cinema gets reimagined in the short film The Moonshiners, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Dec 27, 2017 — It’s been a while since we gathered news of projects in the works, but even as announcements started thinning as the holidays approached, a few of them are well worth noting in a quick roundup here. For example, Josh and...