Into the Okavango

May 26, 2020 — Richard Ford’s 1990 novel Wildlife begins with this arresting sentence: “In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love...

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...

Oct 4, 2018 — Repertory Picks Tonight at 7, as part of its tuneful series Cinema Jukebox, the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, throws the spotlight on one of the last great American films of the 1970s, as Bob Fosse’s showstopping All That...

May 31, 2018 — Repertory Picks On Saturday evening, the Bay Area’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will play host to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, screening as part of the series Early Music on Film. (The two-week program is itself part of...

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Jul 13, 2015 — “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer,...

Feb 17, 2015 — It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-­five­-year career as a writer­-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes...

Jul 28, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.

Feb 5, 2014 — Performances We don’t often talk about documentaries as featuring performances. But consider the highly performative people at the centers of Grey Gardens, General Idi Amin Dada, and last year’s The Act of Killing, or even the seemingly more modest souls...

Jan 21, 2014 — For his leading role in Michael Mann’s Thief, James Caan had a lot more to do than just embody perfect cool. His character, Frank, is an ex-con with a particular aptitude for breaking into hard-to-crack safes. Unbeknownst to the actor...