JANUARY PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!
JANUARY PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!
Includes No Country for Old Men,
a double bill of Cat People and Curse of the Cat People,
and Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin!
Wednesday, January 17
The Piano Teacher: Edition #894
In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award-winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek's controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world of classical music. Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as Erika, a piano professor at a Viennese conservatory who lives with her mother in a claustrophobically codependent relationship. Severely repressed, she satisfies her masochistic urges only voyeuristically until she meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a student whose desire for Erika leads to a destructive infatuation that upsets the careful equilibrium of her life. A critical breakthrough for Haneke, The Piano Teacher - which won the Grand Prix as well as dual acting awards for its stars at Cannes - is a formalist masterwork that remains a shocking sensation.SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: interviews with Haneke and Huppert, a selected-scene commentary, and more.
Thursday, January 18
The Lure*: Edition #896
This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up - the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska - follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly auras make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit world of Smoczyńska's imagining. The director gives fierce teeth to her viscerally sensual, darkly feminist twist on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," in which the girls' bond is tested and their survival threatened after one sister falls for a human. A coming-of-age fairy tale with a catchy synth-fueled soundtrack, outrageous song-and-dance numbers, and lavishly grimy sets, The Lure explores its themes of emerging female sexuality, exploitation, and the compromises of adulthood with savage energy and originality.SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: a program about the making of the film, deleted scenes;Aria Diva (2007) and Viva Maria! (2010), two short films by Smoczyńska; and more.
Friday, January 19
Friday Night Double Feature: Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People
During his remarkable run at RKO in the 1940s, producer Val Lewton created a new breed of creature feature, one that was all the more terrifying for what it left to the imagination. With Cat People (1942), director Jacques Tourneur used shadowy noir aesthetics to tell the tale of a woman (Simone Simon) cursed to turn into a fearsome feline every time she finds herself in the heat of passion. The film's sequel, The Curse of the Cat People (1944), which marked Robert Wise's first directing credit and also starred Simon and Kent Smith in the same roles, strays into fairy-tale territory by focusing on a lonely young girl's fantasy life.
Tuesday, January 23
Tuesday's Short + Feature: And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow's Eye* and La Ciénaga
Take a trip into the intoxicating worlds of two female filmmakers from Latin America. In the 2016 short And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow's Eye, which won the award for best international narrative short at Sundance, Francisca Alegria captures the life of an eighty-five year old woman who believes a ghost has come to take her to the afterlife. With the 2001 film La Ciénaga, Lucrecia Martel became one of contemporary cinema's most exciting new voices. A work of tactile beauty and richly sensuous detail, the film observes how political and societal frustrations arise in the life of a bourgeois extended family.
*Premiering on the Channel this month.
Wednesday, January 24
Rififi: Edition #115
After making noir classics in America (Brute Force, The Naked City) and England (Night and the City), the blacklisted director Jules Dassin went to Paris and embarked on his masterpiece: a twisting, turning tale of four ex-cons who hatch one last glorious robbery in the City of Light. Rififi is the ultimate heist movie, a mélange of suspense, brutality, and dark humor that was an international hit, earned Dassin the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and has proven wildly influential on the decades of heist thrillers that have come in its wake. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: an interview with Dassin, a trailer, and more.
*Premiering on the Channel this month.
Friday, January 26
Friday Night Double Feature: I See a Dark Stranger and Black Narcissus
In the late 1940s, Deborah Kerr was on the cusp of international stardom. This double bill features two magnificent breakthrough performances from the decade, for which she won the 1947 best actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle. In Frank Launder's seriocomic wartime thriller I See a Dark Stranger (1946), she plays a young Irish woman whose anti-British sentiment leads her down the path to becoming a Nazi spy. In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's sumptuous Technicolor masterpiece Black Narcissus(1947), she stars as the Sister Superior of a group of Anglican nuns spiraling into madness in the Himalayas.
Monday, January 29
Observations on Film Art No. 15: Genre Play in The Player
Throughout his storied career, Robert Altman experimented with genre conventions, always finding new ways to put his idiosyncratic spin on everything from the western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) to the detective film (The Long Goodbye). His 1992 Hollywood comeback,The Player, was no exception. A bitingly satirical crime drama that is also a film within a film, The Player centers on a Hollywood studio executive (Tim Robbins) who becomes the subject of a murder investigation. In 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 techniques, scholar Jeff Smith delves into the genre elements at play in Altman's film and what they reveal about the director's complex attitude toward commercial cinema.
Tuesday, January 30
Tuesday's Short + Feature: (nostalgia) and Blow-Up
For this pairing, we're zooming in on two films that investigate the unreliable nature of photography and the limits of perception. In Hollis Frampton's 1976 short (nostalgia), artist Michael Snow narrates as a series of black-and-white photographs from early in Frampton's career catch fire on a hot plate. The film's final sequence has been interpreted as a retelling of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, a countercultural classic that brings the Italian auteur's signature theme of existential anguish to swinging sixties London, where a photographer inadvertently captures a death on film.
*Premiering on the Channel this month.
Wednesday, January 31
His Girl Friday: Edition #849
One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, His Girl Friday stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema's powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant), who dangles the chance for her to scoop her fellow news writers with the story of an impending execution in order to keep her from hopping the train that's supposed to take her to Albany and a new life as a housewife. When adapting Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's smash hit play The Front Page, director Howard Hawks had the inspired idea of turning star reporter Hildy Johnson into a woman, and the result is an immortal mix of hard-boiled newsroom setting with ebullient remarriage comedy. Also presented here is a restoration of the 1931 film The Front Page, Lewis Milestone's famous pre-Code adaptation of the same material. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: an interview with film scholar David Bordwell, archival interviews with Howard Hawks, and more.
Complete list of films premiering on the Criterion Channel this month:
January 1
Anatomy of a Murder, Otto Preminger, 1959
No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007
January 9
Together, Lukas Moodysson, 2000
January 10
The Complete Mr. Arkadin, Orson Welles, 1955
January 16
Yours Faithfully Edna Welthorpe (Mrs), Chris Shepherd, 2017
January 18
The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015
January 23
And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow's Eye, Francisca Alegria, 2016
FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO JOIN FILMSTRUCK VISIT HERE
ABOUT THE CRITERION CHANNEL
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. Other recent additions to the programming include MEET THE FILMMAKER: ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI and ADVENTURES IN MOVIEGOING WITH BILL HADER.
ABOUT FILMSTRUCK
FilmStruck is a new subscription on-demand service that offers film aficionados a comprehensive library of films including an eclectic mix of contemporary and classic art house, indie, foreign and cult films. Developed and managed by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in collaboration with the Criterion Collection, FilmStruck will be the new exclusive streaming home for the critically acclaimed and award-winning Criterion Collection, including the Criterion Channel, a new premium service programmed and curated by the Criterion team. FilmStruck is Turner's first domestic direct-to-consumer offering launched in November 2016.
ABOUT THE CRITERION COLLECTION
Since 1984, the Criterion Collection has been dedicated to publishing important classic and contemporary films from around the world in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements. No matter the medium-from laserdisc to DVD and Blu-ray to FilmStruck, the streaming service developed in collaboration with Turner Classic Movies - Criterion has maintained its pioneering commitment to presenting each film as its maker would want it seen, in state-of-the-art restorations with special features designed to encourage repeated watching and deepen the viewer's appreciation of the art of film.
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