The Present

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

Jan 17, 2025 — Featured this week are Frank Capra, Michael Roemer, John Ford, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

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.

Nov 18, 2024 — A Traveller’s Needs opens Friday, By the Stream early next year, and there’s a retrospective on in London through December 8.

Oct 18, 2024 — Names in the news this week: Bette Gordon, Robert Frank, Don Hertzfeldt, Alfonso Cuarón, Cate Blanchett, and Quentin Tarantino.

Oct 3, 2024 — The winner of the top prize in San Sebastián, Serra’s first nonfiction feature screens at the New York Film Festival.

Sep 24, 2024 — Films by Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, and Rungano Nyoni screen in the Metrograph series.

Sep 9, 2024 — Venice award-winners also include Brady Corbet, Nicole Kidman, Maura Delpero, and Dea Kulumbegashvili.

Aug 20, 2024 — In the late 1980s, filmmakers Gregorio Rocha and Sarah Minter set out to capture the rebellious subculture of youth in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a slumlike suburb synonymous with the worst failures of urban expansion in Mexico.

Aug 8, 2024 — The monumental forty-film box set CC40 celebrates forty years of the Criterion Collection with an electrifying mix of classic and contemporary films, and presents them with all their special features and essays.