First Position

Nov 19, 1989 — After finishing High and Low (1963), director Akira Kurosawa recalls, “I started looking around for something else to do and quite by accident picked up [the novel] Red Beard by Shugoro Yamamoto. At first I thought it would make a...

Jul 14, 2026 — In May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change. Hud would be Ritt’s ninth feature but his first personal...

Jul 14, 2026 — The legacy of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game has become inextricably entangled with a defining trope of AIDS-era mainstream queer representation: the revelation that exposes the gender identity of a transgender character. By the time of the American release of...

May 27, 2026 — Is it possible to look without trying to grasp the object of one’s gaze? Traditional ethnographic documentaries, much like the written ethnographies that preceded them, have attempted to explain a given culture to those who don’t belong to it, assuming...

May 26, 2026 — Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female...

May 20, 2026 — There’s zero consensus when it comes to the latest films by Na Hong-jin and Cristian Mungiu.

May 12, 2026 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth...

May 11, 2026 — We begin with the Marilyn Monroe centenary and move on to thrillers and collections of poetry and critical essays.

May 6, 2026 — Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky opens the New York African Film Festival and screens as part of Seattle’s African Pictures program.

Apr 29, 2026 — Deep Dives You look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), and you see the snarky, risky spirit of the New Wave movements that emerged around the world in the 1960s and ’70s in full, defiant bloom. But what...