A Beautiful Life

Apr 9, 2021 — Uncovering “The Naked City,” Bruce Goldstein’s scintillating chronicle of The Naked City’s groundbreaking New York location shoot, is more than the best “where-they-filmed-it” doc ever made. As Goldstein wittily traces director Jules Dassin’s Gotham roots and influences, this twenty-three-minute documentary—now...

Mar 5, 2021 — When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark died in 2015 at age seventy-five from myelodysplastic syndrome, she left behind a vast and varied five-decade trail of portraits and documentary pictures, collected in twenty books and dozens of exhibitions, radical in their...

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

Aug 18, 2020 — A sensuous exploration of amorous discontent and dreadful miscalculation, The Comfort of Strangers (1990) could be described as an erotic thriller, though it rarely is: its eroticism is too perverse, its pedigree too highbrow. Directed by Paul Schrader and based...

Aug 13, 2020 — Today on the Current we launched a new series called First Person, in which we’re inviting writers from around the world to reflect on their most unforgettable moviegoing experiences. While developing the series, we were looking for good stories, beautiful...

Jan 8, 2020 — When it comes to building a genuine relationship between characters on-screen, how do you capture the feeling of a shared history? How much begins with what’s written on the page, and how much relies on the chemistry between actors or...

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Dec 11, 2019 — One Scene “Who can prove the genuineness of our feelings?” a character asks at one point in the Cannes-award-winning sci-fi drama Little Joe, the first English-language film by Austrian director Jessica Hausner. The question is as good a summation as...

Jul 25, 2019 — The festival will premiere new work from James Gray, Haifaa al-Mansour, Roy Andersson, Ciro Guerra, Costa-Gavras, Roman Polanski, and Olivier Assayas.

Mar 29, 2019 — When Carlos Reygadas’s debut film, Japón, came out in 2002, my generation was just starting to drive cars, smoke weed, use contraceptives. A movie ticket at the Cineteca Nacional still cost only twenty pesos then if you showed your student...