AUGUST PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!

AUGUST PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!   Includes Sydney Pollack's Tootsie,  Adventures in Moviegoing with Barry Jenkins on The World, the Flesh and the Devil, and Sofia Coppola's Lick the Star!   Wednesday, August 1 Tootsie: Edition #738* In Tootsie, Michael Dorsey lands the role of a lifetime-as did the actor playing him, Dustin Hoffman. This multilayered comedy from Sydney Pollack follows the elaborate deception of a down-on-his-luck New York actor who poses as a woman to get a soap opera gig; while "Dorothy Michaels" skyrockets to fame, Michael finds himself learning to be a better man. Given support by a stellar cast that includes Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Teri Garr, George Gaynes, Bill Murray, and, in a breakthrough performance, Jessica Lange, Tootsie is a funny, cutting, and poignant film from an American moment defined by shifting social and sexual identities. Supplemental features: an audio commentary featuring director Sydney Pollack, interviews with Hoffman and comedy writer Phil Rosenthal, interview with Dorothy Michaels by film critic Gene Shalit, two documentaries about the making of the film, and more. *Premiering on the Channel this month.  Wednesday, August 1 Barry Jenkins Presents The World, the Flesh and the Devil* As a guest curator on the Channel-exclusive series Adventures in Moviegoing, Barry Jenkins introduces this atmospheric science fiction film from 1959. Mine inspector Ralph (Harry Belafonte) digs himself out of a caved-in coal shaft only to discover that a sudden apocalypse has wiped humanity from the face of the earth. When he meets two other survivors in New York, he discovers that prejudice and taboo have outlived the demise of civilization itself. Directed by Ranald MacDougall, and produced by Belafonte's own production company, The World, the Flesh and the Devil fuses ingenious genre filmmaking with incisive social commentary. *Premiering on the Channel this month.  Thursday, August 2 Female Trouble: Edition #929 Glamour has never been more grotesque than in Female Trouble, which injects the Hollywood melodrama with anarchic decadence. Divine, director John Waters' larger-than-life muse, engulfs the screen with charisma as Dawn Davenport, the living embodiment of the film's lurid mantra, "Crime is beauty," who progresses from a teenage nightmare hell-bent on getting cha-cha heels for Christmas to a fame monster whose egomaniacal impulses land her in the electric chair. Shot in Waters' native Baltimore on 16 mm, with a cast drawn from his beloved troupe of regulars, the Dreamlanders (including Mink Stole, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Edith Massey, and Cookie Mueller), this film­-the director's favorite of his work with Divine-comes to life through the tinsel-toned vision of production designer Vincent Peranio and costume designer/makeup artist Van Smith. An endlessly quotable fan favorite, Female Trouble offers up perverse pleasures that never fail to satisfy. Supplemental features: audio commentary featuring Waters, a conversation between Waters and critic Dennis Lim, interviews with cast and crew members, deleted scenes and alternate takes, and more.   Friday, August 3 Friday Night Double Feature: The Clock and Before Sunrise Time runs out for new lovers in these exquisitely romantic films by Vincente Minelli and Richard Linklater. The Clock (1945) stars Robert Walker as a soldier on leave who meets cute with Judy Garland in Penn Station. The couple fall deeply in love on a rhapsodic tour of New York City-stunningly recreated on a studio soundstage-before the war threatens to separate them forever. In Before Sunrise (1995), an American tourist (Ethan Hawke) and French student (Julie Delpy) meet by chance on a train to Vienna and decide to spend a day together. Over the course of a rambling, charming, intimate series of conversations, they form a tender connection, made all the more poignant by the chance that they'll never see each other again. Tuesday, August 7 Tuesday's Short and Feature: Hunger* and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Gluttony and greed drive men to dangerous and grotesque extremes in this week's Short + Feature pairing. Peter Foldes's 1974 Cannes-award-winning short Hunger, one of the first computer-animated films ever made, follows a shape-shifting figure who sets out at the end of a workday on a monstrous eating binge and is consumed by the wages of sin. Then, John Huston's classic fable of adventure and avarice-shot on location south of the border-stars Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston (the filmmaker's father) as Americans in Mexico whose hunt for gold drives them to paranoia, desperation, and violence. *Premiering on the Channel this month.    Wednesday, August 8 Being There: Edition #864 In one of his most finely tuned performances, Peter Sellers plays the pure-hearted, childlike Chance, a gardener who is forced into the wilds of Washington, D.C., when his wealthy guardian dies. Shocked to discover that the real world doesn't respond to the click of a remote, Chance stumbles into celebrity after being taken under the wing of a tycoon (Melvyn Douglas, in an Oscar-winning performance), who mistakes his protégé's horticultural mumblings for sagacious pronouncements on life and politics, and whose wife (Shirley MacLaine) targets Chance as the object of her desire. Adapted from a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, this satire, both deeply melancholy and hilarious, is the culmination of Hal Ashby's remarkable string of films in the 1970s, and a carefully modulated examination of the ideals, anxieties, and media-fueled delusions that shaped American culture during that decade. Supplemental features: a documentary on the making of the film, excerpts from a 1980 American Film Institute seminar with director Hal Ashby, appearances from 1980 by actor Peter Sellers on The Don Lane Show, and more. Friday, August 10 Friday Night Double Feature: An Actor's Revenge and Tootsie The duplicitous world of acting takes center stage in these two tales of gender-bending thespians. Kon Ichikawa's kabuki-inspired melodrama An Actor's Revenge (1963) features a chameleonic performance by Kazuo Hasegawa, who plays a female impersonator intent on avenging the deaths of his parents. And in Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982), struggling actor Michael (Dustin Hoffman) lands the role of a lifetime by posing as a woman for a soap-opera gig-a part that brings him unexpected fame, as well as a crash course in the trials and tribulations faced by women in 1980s America. Tuesday, August 14 Tuesday's Short and Feature: Lick the Star* and Smithereens Trailblazing female filmmakers deliver two lo-fi portraits of young women living dangerously, both fueled by killer soundtracks. Just before breaking through with The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola made her first foray into directing with Lick the Star (1998), a black-and-white 16 mm short about the viciousness of high school cliques that establishes the filmmaker's ongoing fascination with the interior lives of women. With Smithereens (1982)-the first American independent film to compete for the Palme d'Or-Susan Seidelman captures the grit and glam of eighties downtown New York through the story of a fame-seeking punk heroine. *Premiering on the Channel this month.  Wednesday, August 15 Barry Lyndon: Edition #897 Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O'Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years' War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece-a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart. Supplemental features: a documentary featuring cast and crew interviews as well as audio excerpts from a 1976 interview with director Stanley Kubrick, a program about the film's groundbreaking visuals, an interview with critic Michel Ciment, and more. Thursday, August 16 Masterclass: Damien Chazelle on Chronicle of a Summer The last few years have been a wild ride for director Damien Chazelle. His semi-autobiographical breakthrough, Whiplash, received three Academy Awards, and his contemporary spin on the golden-age musical, La La Land, made him the youngest person to ever win an Oscar. Last winter, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cinematheque invited Chazelle to present a rare 35 mm print of La La Land, and also hosted a series that included a selection of his personal favorite films. A passionate cinephile who developed his inventive approach to style and form while studying documentary filmmaking at Harvard, Chazelle joined professor Kelley Conway for a discussion about Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's 1961 cinéma verité masterwork Chronicle of a Summer, in which he delved into the evolution of documentary cinema in the sixties and the ways in which nonfiction film has influenced his work with actors. In this program, we present the full wide-ranging talk alongside our edition of Chronicle of a Summer. Friday, August 17 Friday Night Double Feature: Lolita and The Night of the Iguana Sue Lyon delivers provocative performances in these two literary adaptations. With her heart-shaped glasses and coquettish charm, the actress, under the direction of Stanley Kubrick, made a cinematic icon out of the title character of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a fourteen-year-old girl entangled in a forbidden relationship with a middle-aged professor (James Mason). In John Huston's take on Tennessee Williams's play The Night of the Iguana, Lyon once again embodies a daring nymphet, this time attempting to seduce an unstable priest played by Richard Burton.   Tuesday, August 21 Tuesday's Short + Feature: The Moonshiners* and A Private Function* Oink, oink! This porcine pair of comedies kicks off with Juho Kuosmanen's 2018 short The Moonshiners, which sets out to remake a lost 1907 movie thought to be the first feature in Finnish film history. In Kuosmanen's take, a couple embark on a journey to find the essentials for a good life: moonshine-making equipment and a pig. Then, in Malcolm Mowbray's 1984 comedy A Private Function, Maggie Smith and Michael Palin star as a couple in postwar England who steal a hog fattened up for a royal wedding celebration. *Premiering on the Channel this month.  Wednesday, August 22 The Philadelphia Story: Edition #901 With this furiously witty comedy of manners, Katharine Hepburn revitalized her career and cemented her status as the era's most iconic leading lady-thanks in great part to her own shrewd orchestrations. While starring in the Philip Barry stage play The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn acquired the screen rights, handpicking her friend George Cukor to direct. The intoxicating screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart pits the formidable Philadelphia socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn, at her most luminous) against various romantic foils, chief among them her charismatic ex-husband (Cary Grant), who disrupts her imminent marriage by paying her family estate a visit, accompanied by a tabloid reporter on assignment to cover the wedding of the year (James Stewart, in his only Academy Award-winning performance). A fast-talking screwball comedy as well as a tale of regret and reconciliation, this convergence of golden-age talent is one of the greatest American films of all time. Supplemental features: an audio commentary from 2005 featuring film scholar Jeanine Basinger, a documentary about the origin of the character and her social milieu, a piece about actor Katharine Hepburn's role in the development of the film, two full episodes of The Dick Cavett Show from 1973, and more.   Friday, August 24 Friday Night Double Feature: Child's Pose and White Heat The bond between mother and son isn't always so wholesome, as these two films go to show. Portraying a corrupt society where everyone seems to have a price, Romanian filmmaker Călin Peter Netzer's award-winning drama Child's Pose (2013) follows a well-to-do woman as she races to steer her ne'er-do-well son clear of facing charges for a fatal hit-and-run. Raoul Walsh's classic noir White Heat (1949) revolves around a psychopathic criminal (James Cagney) who learned his gangster ways from-and remains overly devoted to-his ruthless mother.   Monday, August 27 Observations on Film Art No. 22: Dissolves in The Long Day Closes Terence Davies's achingly beautiful The Long Day Closes (1992) adopts the perspective of a young boy growing up in 1950s Liverpool, affording an intimate glimpse of the hopes and fears of a lonely child on the cusp of adolescence. Unlike many coming-of-age films, Davies's heavily autobiographical second feature eschews a linear progression in favor of a boldly nonchronological method of storytelling. In the latest episode of Observations on Film Art, a Channel-exclusive series that every month offers viewers a ten-minute dose of film school, Professor Kristin Thompson focuses on how the film's editing holds its unorthodox narrative structure together. Davies has said that "when you see a dissolve, whether you realize it or not, you always read it as time passing, either forward or backward," and here, Thompson observes the ways in which the technique allows The Long Day Closes to mimic the fluidity and emotional texture of memory.   Tuesday, August 28 Tuesday's Short + Feature: Night Mayor* and Je t'aime, je t'aime Weird science powers these films from two of cinema's most original dreamers. In Guy Maddin's Night Mayor (2009), a black-and-white short set in 1939 Winnipeg, a Bosnian-immigrant inventor learns how to use the northern lights to broadcast images across his adopted homeland of Canada. In Alain Resnais's 1968 Je t'aime, je t'aime-a major influence on a later head-trip down memory lane, Michel Gondry's 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-a group of scientists persuade a suicidal man to take part in a mysterious time-travel experiment.   Wednesday, August 29 Army of Shadows: Edition #385 This masterpiece by Jean-Pierre Melville about the French Resistance went unreleased in the United States for thirty-seven years, until its triumphant theatrical debut in 2006. Atmospheric and gripping, Army of Shadows is Melville's most personal film, featuring Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and the incomparable Simone Signoret as intrepid underground fighters who must grapple with their conception of honor in their battle against Hitler's regime. Supplemental features: a short program on Melville and the film, a rare short documentary shot on the front lines during the final days of German-occupied France, and more.   Friday, August 31 Friday Night Double Feature: Some Like It Hot and Insignificance Marilyn Monroe and her enduring legacy step into the spotlight in this week's double bill. One of the most iconic Hollywood films of all time, Billy Wilder's 1959 comedy Some Like It Hotfeatures Monroe as the jazz singer Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk, whose all-female band is joined by two musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) dressed as women in order to hide from the mob. Nicolas Roeg's characteristically idiosyncratic 1985 chamber piece Insignificance takes place in a New York City hotel room, where characters based on four larger-than-life figures of the 1950s-Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), Joseph McCarthy (Curtis), and Monroe herself (Theresa Russell)-reflect on their lives, fame, and the era they've come to signify.   Complete list of films premiering on the Criterion Channel this month:   August 1 Tootsie, Sydney Pollack, 1982 The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Ranald MacDougall, 1959   August 7 Hunger, Peter Foldes, 1974   August 14 Lick the Star, Sofia Coppola, 1998   August 21 The Moonshiners, Juho Kuosmanen, 2017 A Private Function, Malcolm Mowbray, 1984   August 28 Night Mayor, Guy Maddin, 2009   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 For more information on FilmStruck and The Criterion Channel, please visit http://www.filmstruck.com/press

STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME JUNE 2018

Here's the list of films streaming on Amazon Prime beginning June 1. The bolded titles are my personal picks. Bon appetite.

June 1

1492: Conquest Of Paradise

2 Days In The Valley

Allan Quatermain And The Lost City Of Gold

All Or Nothing: New Zealand All Blacks: Season 1

As Good As Dead

August Rush

Babylon 5: Seasons 1-5

Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Beer For My Horses

Beowulf

Black Widow (AKA: Before It Had a Name)

Blitz

Blood And Glory

Blue Like Jazz

Breakdown

Burnt Offerings

Cavedweller

Chinese Box

Clown At Midnight

Command Performance

Danger Zone

Day Of The Dead

Doctor Zhivago

Dog Watch

Double Identity

Double Jeopardy

Dreams And Memories Of Where The Red Fern Grows

Drop Zone

Escape From Alcatraz

Event Horizon

Flickers

Forces Of Nature

Flood

Hans Christian Andersen: My Life As A Fairytale

Hard Rain

Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man

House Of D

I Am David

Ladies Man

Leprechaun

Leprechaun 2

Leprechaun 3

Leprechaun 4: In Space

Leprechaun 5: In The Hood

Leprechaun 6: Back 2 Tha Hood

Leprechaun: Origins

Mousehunt

Mutant Species

Nacho Libre

Nurse 3D

Panic

Rare Birds

Religulous

Rescue Me: Seasons 1-9

Revenge Of The Pink Panther

Ring Of Fire

Saturday Night Fever

Serving Sara

Space Jam

Stanley & Iris

Survivor

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

Tamara

Tears Of The Sun

The 4th Floor

The Age Of Innocence

The Ant Bully

The Ashram

The ‘Burbs

The Care Bears Movie

The Disaster Artist

The Eye 2

The Frozen Ground

The Iceman

The Natural

The Pink Panther Strikes Again

The Running Man

The Young Karl Marx

Tilt

Universal Soldier

Vampire In Brooklyn

The Waltons: Seasons 1-9

War, Inc.

Wonder Wheel

June 3

Lady Bird

Max 2: White House Hero

Stargate

June 5

Lions For Lambs

June 8

Lost In Oz: Season 1

June 9

Braven

Precious

Simon Says

June 15

Goliath: Season 2

June 16

Nostalgia

Transformers: The Last Knight

June 18

Suits: Season 7

June 26

Shutter Island

If You Give A Mouse A Cookie: Season 1

APRIL PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!

       

 

APRIL PROGRAMMING ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL ON FILMSTRUCK!

 

Includes Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place, 

Adventures in Moviegoing with Adam Gopnik, and five color films by Ozu!

 

Sunday, April 1

Adventures in Moviegoing with Megan Abbott: In a Lonely Place*

Cinema has been an important part of Megan Abbott's life since her days growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, when her family would make trips to the local revival house. In her episode of Adventures in Moviegoing, the award-winning novelist spoke with programmer Michael Sragow about films she loves, including ones that have influenced her approach to crime fiction. This month, we're adding one of her all-time favorites to her personally curated series: Nicholas Ray's emotionally charged adaptation of the Dorothy B. Hughes thriller In a Lonely Place. A brilliant, turbulent mix of suspenseful noir and devastating melodrama, fueled by powerhouse performances from Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, the film follows a gifted but washed-up screenwriter who becomes the prime suspect in a Tinseltown murder. Watch it on the Channel with a new introduction by Abbott.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

 

Tuesday, April 3

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Monkey Love Experiments* and Koko: A Talking Gorilla

Two different takes on the complex relationship between humans and primates. Combining stop-motion animation, live-action, and CG, Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson's BAFTA-nominated 2014 short Monkey Love Experiments tells the story of a misguided monkey who believes he's destined for the moon. In Koko: A Talking Gorilla, acclaimed director Barbet Schroeder and cinematographer Nestor Almendros create an intimate documentary portrait of the world-famous title subject, exploring the ethical concerns surrounding a controversial experiment that sought to teach her human communication through American Sign Language.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

Wednesday, April 4

Metropolitan*: Edition #326

 

One of the great American independent films of the 1990s, the surprise hit Metropolitan, by writer-director Whit Stillman, is a sparkling comedic chronicle of a young man's romantic misadventures while trying to fit in to New York City's debutante society. Stillman's deft, literate dialogue and hilariously highbrow observations earned this first film an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. Beneath the wit and sophistication, though, lies a tender tale of adolescent anxiety. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: an audio commentary by Stillman, editor Christopher Tellefsen, and actors Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols; and rare outtakes and alternate casting, with commentary by Stillman.

 

Thursday, April 5

Art-House America: Gold Town Nickelodeon, Juneau, Alaska

Local Hero, Bill Forsyth, 1983

 

Last year, the Channel-exclusive series Art-House America took a trip to Juneau, Alaska, where intrepid programmer Colette Costa runs a downtown movie theater catering to year-round locals in the country's cruise-ship capital. Alongside our documentary portrait of this bustling venue, Costa has been programming an ongoing selection of films that capture "what it feels like to live in Alaska." The latest addition to the series is Bill Forsyth's 1983 Local Hero, presented in a limited engagement. Mixing wry comedy and unexpected pathos, and featuring music by Mark Knopfler, this stirring ode to Forsyth's native Scotland follows a Texas oil executive (Peter Riegert) whose life is changed when his boss (Burt Lancaster) sends him to a Scottish village to buy up land for a new refinery.

Friday, April 6

Friday Night Double Feature: Night Moves and My Night at Maud's

 

"I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kinda like watching paint dry." So says Gene Hackman, famously, in Arthur Penn's 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, a film that contains striking parallels and references to the French director's wonderfully talky 1969 My Night at Maud's. Penn's New Hollywood masterpiece centers on Harry Moseby (Hackman), a retired professional football player turned Los Angeles private investigator who finds himself embroiled in the complex case of a runaway teen. One of the most acclaimed entries in the influential series "Six Moral Tales," Rohmer's film features Jean-Louis Trintignant as a pious Catholic engineer whose rigid ethical standards are challenged when he unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of a bold, brunette divorcée.

 

Monday, April 9

Adventures in Moviegoing with Barry Jenkins: The Summer of Flying Fish*

 

Not long after winning an Oscar last year for Moonlight, Barry Jenkins joined Criterion's Peter Becker for an intimate conversation about his personal journey as a movie lover, the filmmakers who have influenced his style, and finding his relationship to cinema as a person of color. Alongside some of his favorite classics, he championed some little-seen gems, including Chilean director Marcela Said's 2013 narrative feature debut, The Summer of Flying Fish. A vivid coming-of-age story and a powerful allegory about environmental destruction, this richly atmospheric drama follows a teenage girl as she goes on vacation with her father, a wealthy landowner who becomes obsessed with eliminating the carp fish from his artificial lagoon. Featuring a new introduction from Jenkins, the film streams on the Channel in a limited engagement.

*Premiering on the Criterion Channel this month.

Tuesday, April 10

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Manhatta and The Naked City

The New York of the past comes to life in these two portraits, shot in different periods in the city's history. A pioneering work of American avant-garde cinema, the silent short Manhatta (1921)- directed by photographer Paul Strand and painter Charles Sheeler-takes in the modern metropolis from a variety of soaring perspectives, assembling a miniature symphony of the city in all its industrial splendor. Shot on location more than a quarter of a century later, Jules Dassin's masterpiece The Naked City (1948), a noir procedural inspired by Italian neorealism, offers a grittier view of Lower Manhattan from street level.

 

Wednesday, April 11

The 400 Blows: Edition #5

 

François Truffaut's first feature is also his most personal. Told from the point of view of Truffaut's cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut's own childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, and petty crime. The film marked Truffaut's passage from leading critic to trailblazing auteur of the French New Wave. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: two audio commentaries, one by cinema professor Brian Stonehill and the other by director François Truffaut's lifelong friend Robert Lachenay; rare audition footage of Jean-Pierre Léaud, Patrick Auffay, and Richard Kanayan; newsreel footage from the film's showing at Cannes; and more.

 

Friday, April 13

Friday Night Double Feature: M and Peeping Tom

 

These unsettling and widely influential thrillers give viewers a glimpse inside the psychopathic mind. Fritz Lang's expressionist touchstone M (1931) revolves around the Berlin manhunt for a murderer of children (Peter Lorre), in the process offering an analysis of the man's tortured psyche. In Peeping Tom (1960), a controversial film that nearly ended his career but is now regarded as a masterpiece, Michael Powell offers a Freudian portrait of a London serial killer (Carl Boehm), a cameraman with a predilection for recording the terror of his victims.

Monday, April 16

In Search of Ozu

 

In this original documentary, filmmaker Daniel Raim delves into Yasujiro Ozu's remarkable late work, in which the master made the leap from black and white to color. In his stirring tribute to the great filmmaker, Raim examines Ozu's life and work through archival treasures such as his diary and the red teakettle from the family drama Equinox Flower (1958); sits down with Ozu's nephew and the producer of the director's gently elegiac final film, An Autumn Afternoon (1962); and interweaves many scenes and images from the vibrant and humane films with which the director capped his career. Alongside the documentary, we present five of Ozu's color films, including Equinox Flower, Floating Weeds (1959), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962). 

 

Tuesday, April 17

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Casus belli* and Weekend

 

Two critiques of consumerism that make dazzling use of tracking shots. In Greek filmmaker Yorgos Zois's sinuous debut short, Casus belli (2010), an apparently continuous dolly shot observes different queues of people, from the supermarket checkout line to the wait at the betting-agency counter-and back again-wryly revealing the social divisions among those standing in place. Jean-Luc Godard's acid comedy Weekend (1967), in which a bourgeois couple set out to secure an inheritance from a dying relative, opens with a famous seven-minute-long shot of a massive traffic pileup, setting the tone for the entropic satire to follow.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

 

Wednesday, April 18

The Hero: Edition #911

 

In this psychologically rich character study, written and directed by Satyajit Ray, Bengali film star Uttam Kumar draws on his real-world celebrity to play Arindam Mukherjee, a matinee idol on the brink of his first flop. When Mukherjee boards an overnight train to Delhi to accept an award, a journalist (Sharmila Tagore) approaches him seeking an exclusive interview, which initiates a conversation that sends the actor reeling down a path of self-examination. Seamlessly integrating rueful flashbacks and surreal dream sequences with the quietly revelatory stories of the train's other passengers, The Hero is a graceful meditation on art, fame, and regret from one of world cinema's most keenly perceptive filmmakers. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: a program featuring an interview from 2008 with actor Sharmila Tagore, and a program featuring film scholar Meheli Sen.

 

Friday, April 20

Friday Night Double Feature: Babette's Feast and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Food represents the highest of arts and the basest of cruelties in this cinematic banquet. Gabriel Axel's Oscar-winning Babette's Feast, adapted from a short story by Isak Dinesen, tells the moving story of a French housekeeper with a mysterious past who brings quiet revolution in the form of one exquisite meal to a circle of starkly pious villagers in late-nineteenth-century Denmark. It's paired with an outrageously decadent masterpiece from Peter Greenaway, who stages a modern Jacobean revenge tragedy in a lavish restaurant, where a brutal gangster (Michael Gambon) holds court while his wife (Helen Mirren) sneaks away to her paramour. With vivid cinematography by Sacha Vierny and a hypnotic Michael Nyman score, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover culminates in a memorably gruesome feast.

 

Monday, April 23

Observations on Film Art No. 18: Staging and Performance in Ivan the Terrible, Part II

Sergei Eisenstein's final film, a two-part biopic of the notorious Tsar Ivan IV, is one of the revolutionary director's boldest experiments in film form, frequently departing from the codes of cinematic realism. 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 David Bordwell examines Eisenstein's concept of "expressive movement," and shows how the director uses it to stage elaborate set pieces that incorporate the languages of painting and dance.

 

Tuesday, April 24

Tuesday's Short + Feature: Ghost Trip and Kings of the Road

These spare, existential road movies take in vast landscapes in stunning black and white. Bill Morrison's eerie Ghost Trip, a rare "fiction" film from an artist best known for his use of archival material, follows a mysterious driver on an American odyssey from coast to coast, passing through deserts, casinos, and graveyards along the way. Then, the capstone of Wim Wenders's Road Trilogy accompanies a film projector repairman and a depressed psychologist as they roam aimlessly from one movie theater to another across a melancholy Germany still haunted by war.

 

Wednesday, April 25

An Actor's Revenge: Edition #912

A uniquely prolific and chameleonic figure of world cinema, Kon Ichikawa delivered a burst of stylistic bravado with this intricate tale of betrayal and retribution. Set in the cloistered world of nineteenth-century kabuki theater, the film charts a female impersonator's attempts to avenge the deaths of his parents, who were driven to insanity and suicide by a trio of corrupt men. Ichikawa takes the conventions of melodrama and turns them on their head, bringing the hero's fractured psyche to life in boldly experimental widescreen compositions infused with kaleidoscopic color, pop-art influences, and meticulous choreography. Anchored by a magnificently androgynous performance by Kazuo Hasegawa, reprising a role he had played on-screen three decades earlier, An Actor's Revenge is an eye-popping examination of how the illusions of art intersect with life. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A rare 1999 Directors Guild of Japan interview with director Kon Ichikawa, conducted by film critic Yuki Mori; and an interview with critic, filmmaker, and festival programmer Tony Rayns.

 

Thursday, April 26

Adventures in Moviegoing with Adam Gopnik

This month's guest curator, author and longtime New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, is a writer of omnivorous interests. For his selection of favorite films, he handpicked gems such as Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, and then sat down with Antonio Monda, artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, to discuss a lifetime of moviegoing. From watching European cinema on television with his family, to seeing Singin' in the Rain during his adolescence in Paris, to his first date with the woman he would go on to marry (they saw Jean Vigo's achingly romantic L'Atalante), Gopnik chronicles his infatuation with cinema, a medium whose storytelling methods he often seeks to emulate in his own writing.

 

Friday, April 27

Friday Night Double Feature: Tokyo Drifter and The Long Good Friday

This gangster-movie double bill finds two career criminals attempting to go straight, only to get sucked back into the underworld. In Tokyo Drifter (1966),Seijun Suzuki's delirious pop-art riff on the yakuza genre, reformed hit man Tetsu gets called back from retirement to do battle with a rival gang, resulting in an onslaught of giddily stylized action. Then, a magnetic Bob Hoskins stars in John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) as a vicious London mob boss whose best-laid plans to cross over into legitimate business get blown to smithereens over the course of one agonizing, bloody day.

 

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

 

April 1

In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray, 1950

 

April 3

Monkey Love Experiments, Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, 2014

 

April 4

Metropolitan, Whit Stillman, 1990

 

April 9

The Summer of Flying Fish, Marcela Said, 2013

 

April 17

Casus belli, Yorgos Zois, 2010

 

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