First Position

Apr 21, 2026 — It’s all a bit confusing. Point Blank is based on a novel called The Hunter by Richard Stark, one of several pseudonyms adopted by Donald E. Westlake. The book was republished as Payback in 1999 to tie in with a...

Feb 24, 2026 — Centered on the emotional unraveling of a failed newsman, this darkly prescient satire envisions the collapse of American society as we knew it through an unsparing critique of corporate media and capital accumulation.

Feb 9, 2026 — Films from South Africa, Bangladesh, France, and Georgia are among this year’s winners.

Feb 5, 2026 — In a collection of behind-the-scenes documentaries now playing on the Criterion Channel, legendary female performers assert their agency over their screen personae and find freedom in the glamour and artifice of their profession.

Jan 23, 2026 — This week: Max Ophuls, Erich von Stroheim, David Lynch, the Biden years, and the best of 1935.

Jan 22, 2026 — A singular achievement in Arab film history, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s sweeping political epic is a memorial to the lives lost in the struggle for Algerian independence.

Nov 12, 2025 — He anchored some of the best films by Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Okamoto, Naruse, and Teshigahara.

Nov 4, 2025 — The director of La commune and The War Game shook up viewers with dramatizations historical conflicts and imminent futures.

Oct 24, 2025 — It is hard to conceive of a film more dazzlingly, dizzyingly divided against itself—or one more appropriately so—than this delirious creation of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and director Ken Russell.

Sep 24, 2025 — Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.