NOVEMBER PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!

NOVEMBER PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!   Includes Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, new restoration of David Byrne's True Stories, and Adventures in Moviegoing with Paul Dano.   Thursday, November 1 From the Archives: Trainspotting Danny Boyle's electrifying 1996 adaptation of the cult novel by Irvine Welsh is a heady tour through Edinburgh's scuzzy 1980s underground, where Renton, an aimless young man, bounces from heroin highs to desperate lows as he tries, fails, and tries again to get his life on track. Starring Ewan McGregor in his breakout role and set to an iconic soundtrack that jumps from Iggy Pop and Brian Eno to Pulp and Primal Scream, Trainspotting is a rush of audacious, hyperinventive filmmaking. Released by the Criterion Collection only as a laserdisc, the film is presented here along with that edition's audio commentary, recorded in London in 1996 and featuring Boyle, McGregor, producer Andrew Macdonald, and screenwriter John Hodge. Expires April 12, 2019   Friday, November 2 Friday Night Double Feature: Day of Wrath and The Devils Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ken Russell conjure radically divergent visions of seventeenth-century mass hysteria in these tales of witchcraft, paranoia, and persecution. Made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943) is a transcendent parable of totalitarian oppression exquisitely filmed with the director's signature austerity. On the other end of the stylistic spectrum, mad genius Ken Russell goes over-the-top bonkers in The Devils (1971), a delirious saga of demonic possession and sexual frenzy in a French convent that was censored around the world for its graphic, sacrilegious imagery. Despite their contrasting aesthetics, both films are searing statements on power and its abuse. The Devils expires December 28, 2018   Monday, November 5 Adventures in Moviegoing with Paul Dano In the latest episode of the Channel-exclusive guest-programmer series Adventures in Moviegoing, actor and Wildlife director Paul Dano revisits the films that have shaped him as an artist both in front of and behind the camera. Dano sheds light on his evolution from performer to acclaimed filmmaker by way of a conversation that touches upon revelatory viewings of classics by Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jean-Pierre Melville; his experiences working with contemporary auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson; and the reasons why movies about families resonate so strongly with him.   Monday, November 5 Shorts for Days: Women Auteurs The first installment of this new series-which presents monthly programs of short films, each curated around a different theme-brings together early works by path-breaking artists working out the themes and aesthetics they would further explore in their celebrated features. Teen angst fuels both Sofia Coppola's first film, Lick the Star (1998), a stylish, punk rock-inflected forerunner to The Virgin Suicides, and Chantal Akerman's debut, Saute ma ville (1968), a blistering, anti-domestic yowl that laid the groundwork for her feminist landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The complex family dynamics Jane Campion would investigate in Sweetie and The Piano are fully present in her enigmatic An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982), while Andrea Arnold displays her distinctive poetic-realist eye in her devastating, Academy Award-winning international breakthrough, Wasp (2003). Finally, Uncle Yanco (1967) is vintage Agnès Varda: a wonderfully sunny, bohemian documentary made during her California period.   Tuesday, November 6 Tuesday's Short + Feature: Kaiju Bunraku* and Mothra vs. Godzilla Japan's second-most famous movie monster, Mothra, strikes twice in this fantastical pairing. Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva's psychedelic short Kaiju Bunraku (2017) blends traditional Japanese puppet theater and monster-movie mayhem into a feverishly original, surprisingly poignant tale of marital conflict. It screens with Ishiro Honda's 1964 kaiju classic Mothra vs. Godzilla, in which the winged avenger goes up against the King of the Monsters. The first-and perhaps finest-in a long line of films pitting Toho's iconic beasts against one another, it's a prime showcase for the studio's wildly imaginative creature effects and epically entertaining battle sequences. *Premiering on the Channel this month.    Wednesday, November 7 Day for Night: Edition #769 This affectionate farce from François Truffaut about the joys and strife of moviemaking is one of his most beloved films. Truffaut himself appears as the harried director of a frivolous melodrama, the shooting of which is plagued by the whims of a neurotic actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an aging but still forceful Italian diva (Valentina Cortese), and a British ingenue haunted by personal scandal (Jacqueline Bisset). An irreverent paean to the prosaic craft of cinema as well as a delightful human comedy about the pitfalls of sex and romance, Day for Night (1973) is buoyed by robust performances and a sparkling score by the legendary Georges Delerue. Supplemental features: A visual essay by filmmaker kogonada, interviews with cast and crew members, archival footage of Truffaut on the set, and more. Expires December 28, 2018   Friday, November 9 Friday Night Double Feature: Rendez-vous and Clouds of Sils Maria Juliette Binoche's evolution from breakout star to world-cinema icon is mirrored neatly by her roles in this week's double feature. In 1985, Binoche burst onto the scene with her fearless, César-nominated performance as an aspiring actor ruthlessly chasing stardom in André Téchiné's dark backstage drama Rendez-vous, coscripted by Olivier Assayas. Three decades later, Assayas directed Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)--a kind of spiritual companion to Rendez-vous in which she plays a renowned, middle-aged actor plagued by insecurity as she prepares to star opposite an up-and-coming Hollywood ingenue in a remake of the film that originally launched her career.   Tuesday, November 13 Tuesday's Short + Feature: Mammy Water and A River Called Titas Master filmmakers chronicle the everyday dramas and rituals of ancient fishing communities in these far-flung investigations of vanishing ways of life. In his dynamic 1953 short Mammy Water, pioneering documentarian-anthropologist Jean Rouch travels to a village on the Gulf of Guinea, where inhabitants honor the water spirits with elaborate ceremonies and daring "surf boys" head out to sea on multi-day canoe excursions. Then, Bengali auteur Ritwik Ghatak portrays the interlacing lives of fishermen and villagers residing on the banks of Bangladesh's Titas River in his magisterial epic A River Called Titas (1973), which poignantly captures a society's disappearing traditions in gorgeous, painterly images. Mammy Water expires January 4, 2019   Wednesday, November 14 Dheepan*: Edition #871 With this Palme d'Or-winning drama, which deftly combines seemingly disparate genres, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard cemented his status as a titan of contemporary world cinema. In an arresting performance, the nonprofessional actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan (himself a former child soldier) stars as a Tamil fighter who, along with a woman and a child posing as his wife and daughter, flees war-torn Sri Lanka only to land in a Paris suburb blighted by drugs. As the makeshift family embarks on a new life, Dheepan (2015) settles into an intimate social-realist mode before tightening into a dynamic turf-war thriller, as well as an unsettling study of the psychological aftereffects of combat. Searing and sensitive, Audiard's film is a unique depiction of the refugee experience as a continuous crisis of identity. Supplemental features: audio commentary featuring Audiard and coscreenwriter Noé Debré, interviews with Audiard and Jesuthasan, and deleted scenes. *Premiering on the Channel this month.  Friday, November 16 Friday Night Double Feature: Coma and Dead Ringers The bill isn't the scariest thing about going to the doctor in these skin-crawling medical shockers from Michael Crichton and David Cronenberg, both featuring stand-out performances from Geneviève Bujold. In Crichton's 1978 sci-fi thriller Coma, she plays a surgeon who discovers disturbing goings-on at a Boston hospital-staffed by a cast that includes Michael Douglas, Richard Widmark, and Rip Torn-where patients keep mysteriously going brain-dead. Meanwhile, Cronenberg's 1988 body-horror classic Dead Ringers casts Bujold as an actress who unleashes a psychosexual maelstrom when she comes between a pair of identical-twin gynecologists, played by Jeremy Irons in a diabolical double role. Expires February 22, 2019   Monday, November 19 Guillermo del Toro Presents: The Night of the Hunter As a guest curator on the Channel-exclusive series Adventures in Moviegoing, Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning director of Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, introduces Charles Laughton's 1955 masterpiece The Night of the Hunter. The renowned actor's only film as a director stars Robert Mitchum in a performance of towering menace as an ex-con turned sham preacher who terrorizes a widow (Shelley Winters) and her two children. Steeped in southern-gothic atmosphere and shot in striking, expressionist style by the great Stanley Cortez, the film has the dreamlike air of a sinister fairy tale, marking it as a forerunner to del Toro's similarly dark, fable-like fantasies. Expires May 17, 2019   Tuesday November 20 Tuesday's Short + Feature: Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke* and La Jetée Chris Marker's radically influential science-fiction classic is paired with a gonzo reimagining of its premise. Composed almost entirely of still images, Marker's La Jetée (1963) voyages through history and memory to evoke a time traveler's recollections of a pre-apocalyptic world. In Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke (2012), directors Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva - of Miami's celebrated indie-film collective Borscht Corporation - offer an outré spin on Marker's masterpiece. Starring Luther Campbell- aka 2 Live Crew's Luke Skyywalker-- this festival hit combines rainbow-colored animation, cartoonish live action sequences, and archival footage as it traipses through the hip-hop legend's memories and musings. *Premiering on the Channel this month.    Tuesday, November 20 True Stories*: Edition #951 Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make his sole foray into feature-film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. The Talking Heads front man plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories (1986), Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show-all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience. Supplemental features: a documentary about the film's production, deleted scenes, an homage to the town of Virgil, Texas, and more. *Premiering on the Channel this month. Expires December 28, 2018   Friday, November 23 Friday Night Double Feature: Les dames du Bois de Boulogne and Dangerous Liaisons Sexual and psychological gamesmanship is the order of the day in these stylish, high-society-set tales of revenge based on classics of eighteenth-century French literature. The second feature made by Robert Bresson, Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) is an atypical masterwork in the director's oeuvre. Featuring dialogue by Jean Cocteau (adapting Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist) and surprisingly opulent visuals, it tells the story of a spurned aristocrat who gets even with her ex-lover by orchestrating his affair with a prostitute. Similarly, Glenn Close is a scheming marquise spinning a web of erotic manipulation in Stephen Frears's deliciously decadent 1988 adaption of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' classic novel Dangerous Liaisons, acted to the hilt by a cast that includes John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman, and Keanu Reeves. Dangerous Liaisons expires December 28, 2018   Tuesday, November 27 Tuesday's Short + Feature: Sea Devil* and Dheepan* The struggles of refugees are powerfully portrayed in these visceral looks at what happens when the dream of escaping to a better life becomes a harrowing fight to survive. Directed by Dean C. Marcial and Brett Potter of Miami's acclaimed Borscht Corporation, Sea Devil (2014) is a surreal, horror-laced allegory in which a father and daughter fleeing Cuba encounter something unsettling lurking at the bottom of the ocean. In his gripping 2015 Palme d'Or winner Dheepan, director Jacques Audiard traces the journey of a Tamil fighter who trades civil unrest in Sri Lanka for simmering violence on the streets of Paris. *Premiering on the Channel this month.    Wednesday, November 28 The Awful Truth: Edition #917 In this Oscar-winning farce, Cary Grant (in the role that first defined the Cary Grant persona) and Irene Dunne exude charm, cunning, and artless affection as an urbane couple who, fed up with each other's infidelities, resolve to file for divorce. But try as they might to move on, the mischievous Jerry can't help meddling in Lucy's ill-matched engagement to a corn-fed Oklahoma businessman (Ralph Bellamy), and a mortified Lucy begins to realize that she may be saying goodbye to the only dance partner capable of following her lead. Directed by the versatile Leo McCarey, a master of improvisation and slapstick as well as a keen and sympathetic observer of human folly, The Awful Truth (1937) is a warm but unsparing comedy about two people whose flaws only make them more irresistible. Supplemental features: an interview with critic Gary Giddins, a video essay on Grant's performance, a radio adaptation of the film starring Grant and Claudette Colbert, and more. Expires May 24, 2019   Thursday, November 29 Observations on Film Art No. 25: Nonlinear Narrative- Lydia and the Power of Flashbacks Julien Duvivier's haunting, exquisitely bittersweet 1941 romance Lydia stars Merle Oberon as an elderly woman who recalls her youthful relationships with three men-memories that unfold in intricate, subjective flashback sequences that were nearly unprecedented in early 1940s Hollywood (the film was released a mere two weeks after the similarly structured Citizen Kane). In the latest episode of Observations on Film Art, a Channel-exclusive series that offers viewers a monthly dose of film school, Professor David Bordwell illuminates how this unsung melodrama helped redefine the art of cinematic flashbacks as we know them today and how the film's creative nonlinearity enhances its sublime emotional impact.   Friday, November 30 Friday Night Double Feature: Meantime and This Is England* The desperation and rebellion of Thatcher-era England are vividly evoked in this week's double feature. One of the greatest of the pioneering films Mike Leigh made for British television, the darkly funny Meantime (1984) stars Tim Roth as an alienated East Londoner grappling with unemployment and ennui opposite Gary Oldman (in his first major role) as a nigh-psychotic skinhead. While Leigh's film reflects the turmoil of the era in which it was made, Shane Meadows' hard-hitting cult classic This Is England (2006) meticulously recreates 1980s Britain via a moving coming-of-age story to take stock of how the skinhead underground evolved from a working-class movement rooted in ska and West Indian culture to an emblem of white nationalism. *Premiering on the Channel this month.  This Is England expires May 29, 2019   Complete list of films premiering on the Criterion Channel this month:   November 6 Kaiju Bunraku, Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer, 2017   November 14 Dheepan, Jacques Audiard, 2015   November 20 Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer, 2012 True Stories, David Byrne, 1986   November 27 Sea Devil, Brett Potter and Dean C. Marcial, 2014   November 30 This is England, Shane Meadows, 2006   ABOUT THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK   The Criterion Channel offers the largest streaming collection of Criterion films available, including classic and contemporary films from around the world, interviews and conversations with filmmakers and never-before-seen programming. The channel's weekly calendar features complete Criterion editions, thematic retrospectives, live events, short films, and select contemporary features, along with exclusive original programming that aims to enhance the Criterion experience for the brand's dedicated fans as well as expanding its reach to new audiences. It is presented as part of FilmStruck, a subscription streaming service that is the exclusive home of the Warner Bros. classic film library and the Criterion Collection. FilmStruck was developed by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and is managed by TCM in partnership with Warner Bros. and the Criterion Collection. FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO JOIN FILMSTRUCK VISIT HERE

 

FEBRUARY PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!

       

 

Includes 100 years of Olympic Glory, Night of the Living Dead,

Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, and Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday!

 

Thursday, February 1st

The Great Escape*

Based on the true story of an elaborately coordinated attempt to break out of a Nazi POW camp, John Sturges's The Great Escape is one of the most rousing adventure films of all time, anchored by Steve McQueen's rebellious turn as "Cooler King" Captain Virgil Hilts. Featuring a powerful ensemble that includes Richard Attenborough, James Garner, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, the film pulses with the humor of the prisoners' camaraderie and the relentless suspense of their plan. Never released on DVD or Blu-ray, this 1993 Criterion laserdisc edition includes a long-unavailable commentary featuring Sturges, composer Elmer Bernstein, production manager and second-unit director Robert E. Relyea, stuntman Bud Ekins, and film historian Bruce Eder.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

 

Friday, February 2nd

Friday Night Double Feature: The Front Page* and His Girl Friday

These two whiplash-fast newsroom comedies are based on Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur's 1928 stage hit The Front Page. Lewis Milestone scooped the story in 1931, directing a faithful adaptation that stars Adolphe Menjou as the cutthroat editor Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as Hildy Johnson, his star reporter. The film is presented in its recently restored American version, Milestone's preferred cut. Nearly a decade later, Howard Hawks turned the play inside-out: in 1940's His Girl Friday, Hildy Johnson became a woman (Rosalind Russell), and Cary Grant's Burns is not only her editor but her ex-husband-making the film one of Hollywood's most irresistible comedies of remarriage.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

 

Friday, February 2nd

Olympic Glory*

Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912-2012 is the culmination of a monumental, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of new restorations by the International Olympic Committee. This selection gathers eleven films from the box set, offering a sampler of the history of the Games across continents and decades. Among the highlights in the program are landmark documentaries by some of the world's greatest filmmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl (Olympia); Kon Ichikawa (Tokyo Olympiad); Milos Forman, Claude Lelouch, Arthur Penn, and John Schlesinger (Visions of Eight); and Carlos Saura (Marathon).

Monday, February 5th

Eclipse Series 45: Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France

Spurned first by the French New Wave iconoclasts as belonging to the "tradition of quality" and later for the extremist political views their director embraced as a member of the right-wing National Front, Claude Autant-Lara's wartime films are rarely seen today. These four romances, produced during the dark days of the German occupation, are fueled by a slyly subversive voice and exquisite visual sense, and showcase the formidable talents of two of his closest collaborators. The charmingly impetuous Odette Joyeux sparkles at the height of her stardom in a quartet of protofeminist roles, crafted by screenwriter Jean Aurenche, who injects a strain of progressive social criticism that managed to evade the Nazi censors. Also noteworthy is the first screen appearance of Jacques Tati, in Autant-Lara's most popular and technically innovative success, Sylvie et le fantôme. These long unavailable gems deserve to be better known, if only as a record of some of the most talented film artists in France, working at the height of their powers during one of the most perilous periods in twentieth-century history.

Tuesday, February 6th

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Five Miles Out* and Life Is Sweet

Andrew Haigh and Mike Leigh, two of British cinema's sharpest observers of character, turn their attention to the close and sometimes painful bonds of sisterhood. Haigh's 2009 short reveals the volcanic emotions that lurk beneath everyday scenes, centering on a girl who is sent on vacation with her cousins but remains preoccupied with her hospital-bound sister back home. An international breakthrough for Leigh, Life Is Sweet is an intimate portrait of a working-class family with twin daughters who couldn't be more different: the bookish plumber Natalie (Claire Skinner) and the bulimic, ill-tempered Nicola (Jane Horrocks). Jim Broadbent and Alison Steadman exude warmth as the girls' parents, and Stephen Rea, David Thewlis, and Timothy Spall deliver winning performances as the eccentrics who orbit the family unit. The edition of Life Is Sweet is accompanied by an audio commentary by Leigh.

 

Wednesday, February 7th

Sweet Smell of Success: Edition #555

In this swift, cynical film by Alexander Mackendrick, Burt Lancaster stars as the vicious Broadway gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the unprincipled press agent Hunsecker ropes into smearing the up-and-coming jazz musician romancing his beloved sister. Featuring deliciously unsavory dialogue, in an acid, brilliantly structured script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, and noirish neon cityscapes from Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, Sweet Smell of Success is a cracklingly cruel dispatch from the kill-or-be-killed wilds of 1950s Manhattan. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: a 1986 documentary about Mackendrick, a 1973 documentary about Howe, a video interview with film critic and historian Neal Gabler, and more.

Friday, February 9th

Friday Night Double Feature: The Misfits and The Harder They Fall

These two swan songs herald the end of the Hollywood star system with a nearly mythical sense of finality. John Huston's The Misfits features the last performances of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, and their costar Montgomery Clift would only appear in three more movies before dying at forty-five. Scripted by Monroe's husband Arthur Miller, the Nevada-set film sets the actress's inimitable mix of sensuality and vulnerability against the world-weary alienation of three hardened men, played by Gable, Clift, and Eli Wallach. Humphrey Bogart's last film, The Harder They Fall, stars the legendary actor as a down-on-his-luck sportswriter who gets roped into a scam by a fast-talking promoter (Rod Steiger) lining up fixed fights for a talentless (and clueless) Argentine heavyweight. Bogart would die less than a year after the film's premiere, and his understated portrayal of a reluctant hustler makes for a rich contrast with Steiger's Method-informed bluster, marking a shift in the tides of American film acting.

 

Tuesday, February 13

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist and The Emperor Jones

Courageously outspoken and wildly talented, Paul Robeson was one of the most commanding performers of his time. As a singer, actor, athlete, and activist, he broke barriers in Jim Crow-era America, campaigning for social justice and striving to reshape the public's idea of who a black man could be. Saul J. Turell's Oscar-winning documentary short, narrated by Sidney Poitier, traces the evolution of Robeson's career using a series of his performances of "Ol' Man River," a song that took on layers of meaning over time. That booming voice made its first appearance in sound cinema in The Emperor Jones, a 1933 adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play about a Pullman porter who muscles his way to power on a Caribbean island. Though the fearsome Brutus Jones may not have been the type of stereotype-busting role that Robeson hoped to bring to the screen, the character made him the first African-American leading man in mainstream cinema.

Tuesday, February 13th

Night of the Living Dead*: Edition #909

Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget by a band of self-taught filmmakers, horror master George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a great story of independent cinema: a midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time. A deceptively simple tale of a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse who find themselves fending off a horde of recently dead, flesh-eating ghouls, Romero's claustrophobic vision of a late-1960s America literally tearing itself apart rewrote the rules of the horror genre, combined gruesome gore with acute social commentary, and quietly broke ground by casting a black actor (Duane Jones) in its lead role. Stark, haunting, and more relevant than ever, Night of the Living Dead is back. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Night of Anubis, a never-before-presented work-print edit of the film; a program featuring filmmakers Frank Darabont, Guillermo del Toro, and Robert Rodriguez; a never-before-seen 16 mm dailies reel; and more.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

 

Wednesday, February 14th

In the Mood for Love: Edition #147

At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Loveis a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. In 1960s Hong Kong, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite-until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong's redoubtable career. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: a documentary on the making of the film; Hua yang de nian hua (2000), a short film by Wong; Toronto International Film Festival press conference from 2000, with Cheung and Leung; and more.

Thursday, February 15th

The Red Balloon and The Black Balloon

Floating from midcentury Paris to contemporary Manhattan, these two portraits of urban life breathe a whimsical sensibility into a particular inanimate item. In Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956), a boy embarks on a series of adventures with an inflatable-yet sentient-companion. A gritty variation on that beloved classic, Josh and Benny Safdie's The Black Balloon (2012) follows the stray object of the title on an odyssey through the streets of the filmmakers' native New York City.

 

Friday, February 16th

Friday Night Double Feature: A Slave of Love and Knight Without Armor

The Russian Civil War provides the roiling backdrop for these two sweeping romantic adventures. Nikita Mikhalkov's A Slave of Love (1976) tells the tale of a silent-film star who falls for a Bolshevik on set. Jacques Feyder's Knight Without Armor (1937) revolves around a British spy posing as a revolutionary (Robert Donat) and the countess whom he loves and seeks to save (Marlene Dietrich).

 

Tuesday, February 20th

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Bluebeard* and Bluebeard

A classic fairy tale, read two ways. With his colorful claymation short Bluebeard (1938), Jean Painlevé departed from the nature filmmaking that was his specialty, giving a playful charge to the dark story of a young wife and her murderous new husband. For her 2009 adaptation of Charles Perrault's classic fable, French director Catherine Breillat keyed into the material's more provocative elements, using the fable to explore her perennial themes of sex, power, and sisterhood.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

 

Wednesday, February 21

Frances Ha*: Edition #681

A leading contender for this year's best director Oscar, Greta Gerwig delivered one of her most enchanting performances as Frances, a woman in her late twenties in contemporary New York trying to sort out her ambitions, her finances, and, above all, her intimate but shifting bond with her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Meticulously directed by Noah Baumbach with a free-and-easy vibe reminiscent of the French New Wave's most spirited films, and written by Baumbach and Gerwig with an effortless combination of sweetness and wit, Frances Ha gets at both the frustrations and the joys of being young and unsure of where to go next. This wry and sparkling city romance is a testament to the ongoing vitality of independent American cinema. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: a conversation between filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich and Baumbach; a conversation between actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley and the film's cowriter and star, Greta Gerwig; and more.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

Wednesday, February 21st

Festival*: Edition #892

Before Woodstock and Monterey Pop, there was Festival. From 1963 through 1966, Murray Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Howlin' Wolf, Johnny Cash, the Staple Singers, Pete Seeger, Son House, and Peter, Paul and Mary were just a few of the legends who shared the stage at Newport, treating audiences to a range of folk music that encompassed the genre's roots in blues, country, and gospel as well as its newer flirtations with rock and roll. Shooting in gorgeous black and white, Lerner juxtaposes performances with snapshot interviews with artists and their fans, weaving footage from four years of the festival into an intimate record of a pivotal time in music-and in American culture at large. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: a documentary about the making of the film; a selection of unreleased performances by Clarence Ashley, Johnny Cash, Elizabeth Cotten, John Lee Hooker, Odetta, and Tom Paxton; and more.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

 

Thursday, February 22nd

Four Luis Buñuel Editions

One of cinema's great subversives, Luis Buñuel spent nearly half a century taking aim at a number of humankind's most cherished orthodoxies. This month, we're presenting editions of four of his late-career French films, which plunge into the surreal and satirical. A ribald deconstruction of contemporary and traditional views on Catholicism, 1969's The Milky Way(Criterion Collection Edition #402) inaugurated what Buñuel saw as a trilogy about "the search for truth." That cycle's next two films, the absurdist masterpieces The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (#102) and The Phantom of Liberty (#290), take place at high-society gatherings disrupted by absurd occurrences, revealing the hypocrisy of conventional morality and the arbitrariness of social arrangements. Buñuel's final film, 1977's That Obscure Object of Desire (#143), is a dizzying game of sexual politics that brings full circle the director's lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Supplements in this program include a documentary about Buñuel's life and work, and a video with Jean-Claude Carrière.

Friday, February 23rd

Friday Night Double Feature: Birdman of Alcatraz and Down by Law

Get a glimpse of life behind bars in John Frankenheimer's 1962 drama Birdman of Alcatraz and Jim Jarmusch's 1986 misfit "neo-Beat noir comedy" Down by Law. Featuring a powerful performance by Burt Lancaster, Frankenheimer's film is one of the blueprints of the prison movie, telling the story of a convicted murderer who, after developing an affinity for birds while in prison, goes on to become a distinguished ornithologist. Jarmusch's sophomore feature turns that blueprint on its head, bringing together Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni for an idiosyncratic tale about a Louisiana prison break that leads to a dreamlike adventure.

Monday, February 26

Observations on Film Art No. 16: The Darkness of War in Wooden Crosses

Raymond Bernard's 1932 masterpiece Wooden Crosses, often referred to as France's All Quiet on the Western Front, is one of the most poignant films to envision the horrors of combat during World War I. Widely celebrated for its lavishly expensive and realistic reconstruction of life in the trenches, the film is also remarkable for the subtlety of Bernard's techniques. For this month's episode of Observations on Film Art, a Channel-exclusive series that takes a look at how great filmmakers use cinematic devices and conventions, film-studies scholar Kristin Thompson explores how Wooden Crosses combines the brutality of other war dramas of its era with a lyricism all its own, achieved largely through the film's exquisite use of lighting.

Tuesday, February 27

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Nadja in Paris and Breathless

Two French New Wave titans find inspiration in the experiences of young American women studying abroad in Paris. In his 1964 short Nadja in Paris, Rohmer teams up for the first time with the great cinematographer Néstor Almendros, observing the everyday comings and goings of an exchange student discovering the city while writing her thesis on Marcel Proust. In his landmark 1960 debut feature, Breathless, Godard pays tribute to American gangster movies with a jazzy tale of a criminal who becomes romantically involved with an American student (the incandescent Jean Seberg) living in Paris.

 

Tuesday, February 27

4 by Agnès Varda: Edition #418

Agnès Varda used the skills she honed early in her career as a photographer to create some of the most nuanced, thought-provoking films of the past fifty years. She is widely believed to have presaged the French New Wave with her first film, La Pointe Courte, long before creating one of the movement's benchmarks, Cléo from 5 to 7. Later, with Le bonheur and Vagabond, Varda further shook up art-house audiences, challenging bourgeois codes with her inscrutable characters and offering effortlessly beautiful compositions and editing. Now working largely as a documentarian, Varda remains one of the essential cinematic poets of our time and a true visionary. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: video interviews with Varda; excerpts from a 1964 episode of the French television series Cinéastes de notre temps, in which Varda discusses her early career; a documentary about the making of Cléo from 5 to 7; and more.

 

Wednesday, February 28

Adventures in Moviegoing with Megan Abbott

An award-winning novelist and a writer for David Simon's HBO drama The Deuce, Megan Abbott joins film critic Michael Sragow to talk about her precocious filmgoing life, beginning with her family trips to the revival house in her hometown of Grosse Point, Michigan, where she first fell in love with the speed, grit, and thump of crime films like The Public Enemy. She also remembers her epiphany seeing Blue Velvet, which revealed a hidden world and new dimensions to an American suburb like her own. For the program that accompanies the interview, Abbott has picked a slate of films that echo that revelation in different ways, including Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss, as well as movies like Blood Simple, which reflects her ongoing obsessions with film noir, and Picnic at Hanging Rock, which she regards as a breakthrough treatment of female adolescence.

 

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Complete list of films premiering on the Criterion Channel this month:

February 1

Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005

Syndromes and a Century, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010

Cemetery of Splendor, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015

The Great Escape, John Sturges, 1963

 

February 2

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations, Leni Riefenstahl, 1938

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty, Leni Riefenstahl, 1938

Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa, 1965

13 Days in France, Claude Lelouch, 1968

Visions of Eight, Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, Yuri Ozerov, Arthur Penn, Michael Pfleghar, John Schlesinger, Mai Zetterling, 1973

White Rock, Tony Maylam, 1977

16 Days of Glory, Bud Greenspan, 1986

Marathon, Carlos Saura, 1993

The Front Page, Lewis Milestone, 1931 

The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912, Adrian Wood, 2016 

White Vertigo, Giorgio Ferroni, 1956

February 5

Lettres d'amour, Claude Autant-Lara, 1942

 

February 6

Five Miles Out, Andrew Haigh, 2009

 

February 13

Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968

 

February 20

Bluebeard, Jean Painlevé, 1938

 

February 21

Festival, Murray Lerner, 1967

Francis Ha, Noah Baumbach, 2013

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THE BEST WAR FILM EVER MADE — ELEM KLIMOV'S "COME AND SEE"

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Stalingrad-born Elem Klimov's "Come and See" is an undiluted expression of cinematic poetry in the service of an unspeakably turbulent, fact-based, anti-war narrative about the 628 Belarusian villages burnt to the ground along with their inhabitants by the Nazis during World War II. The film is a disorienting vision of a genocide hell on Earth that would pale Hieronymus Bosch's most gruesome compositions.

Klimov derives the film's haunting title from the Bible's Book of Revelations, "And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, come and see.

An electricity-buzzing stench of death and social decay hangs over the picture's constant volley between neo-realistic, formal, and documentary cinematic styles that Klimov uses to convert as wide a range of specific wartime experience as possible. The narrative explodes in all directions at once. The leftist filmmaker takes the viewer on a quicksilver descent into an existential madness of war through the eyes of his 14-year-old peasant protagonist Florya. Alexei Kravchenko's extraordinary performance as the film's subjective guide encompasses a lifetime of suffering over a period of a few brutal days of the Nazi invasion. His gut-wrenching performance is the traumatized soul of the movie.

Born into a communist family on July 9, 1933, Elem Klimov's parents constructed his first name as an acronym of Engels, Lenin, and Marx. In his 70 years, Elem Klimov made only five films: "Welcome, or No Trespassing" (1964), "The Adventures of a Dentist" (1965), "Agony" (1975) and "Farewell" (1981). The death of his much beloved filmmaker wife Larisa Shepitko in a car accident in 1979, eventually robbed Klimov of his artistic desire. Made in 1985, "Come and See" was Klimov's astounding final picture that would establish him as a filmic storyteller of untold narrative depth and intuitive sensitivity. The brave performances he inspired in his actors in "Come and See" are in a class beyond any other.

For the film, Klimov fashioned a detailed visual vernacular of dialectic cinematic form. His unique, rigorous narrative format compresses the overwhelming heartbreak of Hitler's War as an earth-shattering visceral experience. We feel the war's many jolts, shocks, and horrors with a force that pries into our bones. By the film's end, we witness a young boy's spirit so terribly ravaged by the horrors of war that he resembles an old man nearing the end of his life.

When Klimov sat down to write the script with his collaborator Ales Adamovich, the ardently intellectual filmmaker crafted an acutely personal story about a peasant boy who goes to fight against Nazi troops occupying his native Belarus in 1943, after joining up with a ragtag army of partisan soldiers taking shelter in the middle of a wooded area.

Objectively, "Come and See" is Elem Klimov's brave attempt to cinematically compartmentalize and contextualize his own wartime experiences as a child escaping the battle of Stalingrad in the company of his mother and younger brother by raft across the Volga while the city burned to the ground behind them. 

Klimov said of the indelible event, in relation to "Come and See," "Had I included everything I knew, and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."

Klimov establishes the narrative's peculiar social parameters with an old man holding a horsewhip while calling for two boys guilty of incessantly "digging."

"Playing a game? Digging? Well, go on digging you little bastards," the old man shouts at the boys. Dig they do.

From the distance we witness what seems to be a short, stout military officer carrying a stick and frothing at the mouth with recriminations for the little old man that he approaches with measured steps. We realize that the apparent military officer is, in fact, one of the little boys — speaking in a raspy fake adult voice, playing his imaginary role as a menacing armed forces commander.

Exasperated, the old man who fathered at least one of the "bastards," gets on his horse and cart, telling his defiant son that if he won't listen to his father then he'll "listen to the cane." Klimov uses the vision of a young boy appearing as an old man to bookend the story as a manifestation of the war's aging effect on its survivors. No one will go unscathed. The once fresh-faced Florya will switch places with his young friend, whose fate falls to Nazi soldiers. Florya's young comrade deliberately chooses to comport himself as a veteran soldier. 

Florya's smaller companion walks along the beach to find Florya laughing manically at nothing in particular while crouched down in the bushes. We are introduced to Florya as a child not in control of his behavior. There is already some madness present in his manic laughter. Florya is subordinate to his peer, who orders Florya to get back to work "digging." We, the audience, know already that everything is not right with the boys and their surroundings.

Klimov employs a powerful metaphor of the boys attempting to gain escape from the outside world by digging deeper into the earth. The oddly naturalistic scene exerts a primal human motivation at odds with the noisy warplanes that pass overhead.

Buried in the sand up to his shoulders, Florya struggles with both arms to pull something from under the sand — it appears as if an unseen monster is swallowing up the innocent boy, attempting to drag him to the depths of hell. After much struggle, Florya excitedly extracts a prized rifle that he believes will give him entree into joining a partisan troop of soldiers so that he can help battle Hitler's rampaging armies.     

A German recon warplane flies overhead to the sound of German radio-broadcast propaganda. Klimov will reuse the same archive footage of the bomber plane many times over during the course of the film as a repeating motif of deadly menace from above. The authentic historical reference contributes to an unrelenting rhythm of sudden violence and brutal spatial dilemmas that come at asymmetrical angles throughout the film. We are submersed helplessly into Florya's dark journey with an all-consuming involuntary commitment.

The endemic breakdown of family and society is confirmed in the next scene where Florya's frantic mother pleas directly to Klimov's empathetic camera for her son to take the axe that she places in his hands. She begs her son to kill her and her twin daughters rather than abandon the family to certain death at the hands of the enemy. Better to die at the hands of a family member than to suffer torture and death from the Nazis. Florya's peasant mother is disconsolate as she beats him with a bundle of rope, refusing to allow him to leave. But Florya is immune to his mother's panic. He winks at his little sisters while he holds the axe, playing a secret game with them. He still has a fleeting sense of humor that he will soon lose forever. Klimov returns again and again to these formal fourth-wall breaking compositions that incite the viewer to question our own emotional and intellectual connection to the horrible struggle of empathetic characters we relate to more as family members than as mere victims of war.

Two protestant soldiers peer in through the family's window before entering the home to take Florya to join a nearby regiment of soldiers. It is the last time that we will feel any sense of home or normal life in the film. The soldiers' politeness turns abruptly to that of menacing authority figures taking Florya with them as a willing prisoner.

In the military camp, Florya meets a lovely but deranged teenaged girl named Glasha (disconcertingly played by Olga Mironova). It would be the only film role that Mironova would ever play. The wild-eyed stare of her steel-gray eyes makes Glasha as much of a potential monster as that of a would-be love interest for Florya to gravitate toward. Her sensuality and charisma is undeniable. That Glasha, dressed in a pretty green party dress, is carrying on an affair with the troop's boorish military chief only momentarily distracts from the extent of her mental instability. Inasmuch as we subjectively bestow sanity to the Partisan group's leader, Glasha is already a casualty of war. There is a contagious insanity in the air that infiltrates every character that Klimov introduces. Even nature seems to be in revolt.

The film's first act closes with a group photograph of the ragtag troop that provides a formal tableau of thick narrative subtext — witness a wounded soldier bandaged like a mummy and a black female cow with "Eat me before the Germans do," written in white on its side. Desperation is the coin of the day.

Upon their departure, the ragtag troop abandons the young boy that the military chief has quietly deemed unsuitable for the demands of battle. Florya's inconsolable anguish at being deserted by his surrogate family boils to a breaking point when he accidentally steps on a nest of eggs, killing the tiny birds in a glimpse of nature made horribly grotesque by his unavoidable human brutality. It's this violent and immediate style of detailed poetic storytelling that grips you and drags at your senses with an inescapable urgency of survival. Klimov's precise use of graphic symbolism will steadily increase to a fever pitch in the film's stunning postmodern climax where a backward moving collage collapses Hitler's Pandora's box of death and the war that determines Florya's survival.

The soldiers also abandon Glasha, whose sole purpose was sex. The two adolescent refugees cry into each other's eyes in a heartbreaking expression of raw emotion that Klimov captures with extended fourth-wall-breaking close-ups that intuitively editorialize on their fragile mental states. Florya recognizes Glasha's strange psychosis, but is unable to evade her spell. The pity that the soldiers take on the pair, by leaving them behind, backfires when a rash of falling German artillery shells permanently robs Florya of his hearing. The bombings are especially shocking for their violent realism that arrives suddenly with large swaths of forest ripped apart by earthquaking explosions accompanied by a high-pitched ringing that destroys Florya's hearing with tinnitus and wrecks his conscious mind.  

Klimov utilizes Florya's sensory deprivation with a twisted soundscape that indoctrinates us into Florya's pain and panic via a claustrophobic sonic space that increases our sense of being badly wounded. The next morning, Florya and Glasha frolic in the rain in a brief reverie where they momentarily forget the impending danger that awaits them. Under the muted sounds of sped up radio music, Glasha does an impromptu Charleston-styled flapper dance atop Florya's rain-soaked suitcase.

There's a dreamlike quality to the couple's short-lived musical respite before an out-of-place crane presents an unnerving omen of unexplained incidents to follow. Wild animal life will play an important part of the image system filigree that Klimov uses to regularly connect the story to its ecological foundation in the rugged landscape of war-torn Belarus. 

Klimov is commanding in his willingness to create abstract visual motifs, as when Florya returns to his mother's house with Glasha as his partner. He peers at his reflection down in a well while looking for his family. We view Florya through the back end of an organic cinematic telescope through which he sees himself. His sense of personal recognition is all but lost. Florya doesn't see the mangled bloody bodies of his family and neighbors piled high against the backside of what was once his family's home. Glasha looks back and views the carnage as they walk away from the area but refrains from alerting Florya to the horror behind them for fear of his potential reaction.

Florya runs into a thick muddy swamp that he is compelled to cross, believing that his family is hiding on a small island that he must trudge through quicksand-like mud to get to. Glasha follows Florya into the mud. She holds onto the back of his coat as the young couple painfully make their way through the thick brown sludge. Klimov layers on subdued layers of musical textures and ambient sound to weave a theme of self-flagellation as assisted by Belarusia's uncontrolled topography that threatens to swallow up our protagonist and his mentally devastated female companion.

Glasha betrays Florya the first chance she gets when a Belarusian peasant helps her escape the mud. The traumatized Glasha loudly explains that Florya's family was killed, and that now he is deaf and out of his mind. Through his muted hearing, Florya hears Glasha's cruel words. He reacts with a pained cry that fully expresses a depth of agony that imprints the film with an indelible image of victimization. Moments later, Florya will be led by peasants to the badly burned body of his friend's father, who speaks his last words about how he begged the Germans that set him on fire to kill him. A crowd of desperate peasants chant under Klimov's soundscape of blowing wind. Florya sees a trench coat-dressed effigy of Hitler with a human skull head that the peasants put clay on to make more lifelike. A group cut off Florya's hair before burying it as part of a cleansing ritual that reinvents the traumatized Florya as a walking ghost. 

In the film's unpredictable third act Florya becomes a roaming independent soldier with a knack for barely escaping Nazi attacks. Florya's participation in expediting the extermination of a cornered group of Nazis by handing a gasoline filled can to a Nazi collaborator, is as suggestive an act as it is a literal one, for the Belarusian peasants will open fire on the Nazis before the fuel is ignited. Florya gains an historic perspective of Hitler that knows only annihilation. His hatred and fury seeks to eradicate the world of Adolph Hitler and his armies with severe prejudice. With his brain and body irreversibly changed, Florya has become the only thing that he will ever be capable of being for the rest of his life, a horribly disfigured soldier. 

"Come and See" won the Moscow Film Festival's Grand Prize in 1985. Afterward, Elem Klimov was elected as first secretary of the Soviet Filmmakers' Union. During his two years on the post, Klimov oversaw the release of more than a hundred previously banned Soviet films. Elem Klimov went on to struggle with the idea of creating a film version of Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita," and with making a film adaptation of Dostoevsky's "The Devils." However, in 2000, he gave up filmmaking because he felt that he had done "everything that was possible." The visionary Russian filmmaker died on October 26, 2003 of cerebral hypoxia.

Elem Klimov left behind a war film that accomplishes everything possible in cinema, and in so doing reinvents it. It eclipses every other war film by such a wide margin that there is no reason or impetus to watch any other. Come and see.

I first saw "Come and See" at the 1998 San Francisco Film Festival on advice from a pal who informed me that it was Sean Penn's favorite film. I can certainly see why Sean Penn feels the way he does about this brilliant movie.

Criterion's stunning 2K digital restoration on Blu-ray gives "Come and See" the beauty that this remarkable 142 minute film deserves. The disc includes interviews and documentary films that shed further light on "Come and See." It is truly a must-own Blu-ray for cinephiles and movie lovers alike.