Movies

Here’s What’s Coming to the Criterion Channel in March 2020


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If you’re a film nerd (and the odds are pretty high since you’re here reading this), you’re probably already hip-deep in the Criterion Channel’s selection of classic movies and insightful commentary. The streaming service’s slate of offerings for March 2020 is predictably awesome, including an expansive retrospective on the films scored by Quincy Jones. That man scored so many classic movies it’s almost impossible to look at his list of credits without saying, “Oh, he did that too?!” at least once.

Also up this month is a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing featuring Patton Oswalt in a discussion about film addiction and 8 of his favorite movies of all time. Plus, Terry Gilliam’s unappreciated-in-its-time visual masterpiece The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and a selection of Rita Hayworth’s most iconic films including Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai. Check out the full list of Criterion Channel’s March programming below.

Sunday, March 1

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Scores by Quincy Jones

Few musicians have had such a profound effect on the evolution of twentieth-century popular music as legendary record producer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and twenty-eight-time Grammy winner Quincy Jones. After establishing his virtuoso versatility arranging for greats like Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, Jones went on to a hugely successful career as a film composer at a time when Hollywood was still largely inhospitable to black artists. Encompassing jazz, blues, pop, funk, lounge, psychedelia, bossa nova, and beyond, his ultracool, sophisticated style graces classics like In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, and The Italian Job, as well as offbeat gems like Cactus Flower, Mackenna’s Gold, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Featuring some of Jones’s most renowned scores, this collection is a groove-filled tour through the swinging sounds of the 1960s and early 1970s.

  • The Pawnbroker, Sidney Lumet, 1964*
  • The Slender Thread, Sydney Pollack, 1965
  • The Deadly Affair, Sidney Lumet, 1967
  • In Cold Blood, Richard Brooks, 1967
  • In the Heat of the Night, Norman Jewison, 1967
  • A Dandy in Aspic, Anthony Mann, 1968
  • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Paul Mazursky, 1969
  • Cactus Flower, Gene Saks, 1969
  • The Italian Job, Peter Collinson, 1969
  • Mackenna’s Gold, J. Lee Thompson, 1969
  • They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, Gordon Douglas, 1970
  • The Out-of-Towners, Arthur Hiller, 1970
  • $, Richard Brooks, 1971
  • The Anderson Tapes, Sidney Lumet, 1971
  • Brother John, James Goldstone, 1971
  • The Getaway, Sam Peckinpah, 1972

*Available April 1

Monday, March 2

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Triple Play

Batter up! With opening day just around the corner, we’ve stacked the bench with a trio of baseball-themed favorites from Hollywood’s golden age. Grab some peanuts and Cracker Jacks and enjoy a tune-filled Technicolor romp starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, a madcap screwball riot scripted by Frank Tashlin, and the beloved original version of Angels in the Outfield.

  • Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Busby Berkeley, 1949
  • Kill the Umpire, Lloyd Bacon, 1950
  • Angels in the Outfield, Clarence Brown, 1951

Monday, March 2

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The Daytrippers: Criterion Collection Edition #1001

With its droll humor and bittersweet emotional heft, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Mottola announced the arrival of an unassumingly sharp-witted new talent on the 1990s indie film scene. When she discovers a love letter written to her husband (Stanley Tucci) by an unknown paramour, the distraught Eliza (Hope Davis) turns to her tight-knit Long Island family for advice. Soon the entire clan—strong-willed mom (Anne Meara), taciturn dad (Pat McNamara), and jaded sister (Parker Posey) with pretentious boyfriend (Liev Schreiber) in tow—has squeezed into a station wagon and headed into Manhattan to find out the truth, kicking off a one-crazy-day odyssey full of unexpected detours and life-changing revelations. Performed with deadpan virtuosity by a top-flight ensemble cast, The Daytrippers is a wry and piercing look at family bonds stretched to the breaking point. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary featuring Mottola and producer Steven Soderbergh; interviews with stars Hope Davis, Parker Posey, and Liev Schreiber; and a 1985 short film by Mottola.

Tuesday, March 3

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Short + Feature: Moving Pictures
24 Frames per Second and 24 Frames

Commissioned to accompany an exhibit of Persian paintings and textiles, Shirley Clarke’s experimental short 24 Frames per Second unfolds in a kaleidoscope of quick cuts that revel in the beautiful details of the works and leave the eyeballs whirling. It makes for a kinetic companion to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s sublimely meditative swan song 24 Frames, which explores the relationship between painting, photographs, and cinematic frames through a stunning trick of movie magic: twenty-four still images that flutter to life before our eyes.

Wednesday, March 4

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Too Late to Die Young
Exclusive streaming premiere, featuring a conversation with director Dominga Sotomayor

Dominga Sotomayor’s intoxicating teenage daydream floats by in a haze of gorgeously gauzy images. Chile, 1990: in a remote artists’ commune in the shadow of the Andes, a small band of families builds a new world far removed from the tumult of the city and the emerging freedoms that have come with the country’s transition to democracy. It’s in this time of change and reckoning that sixteen-year-old Sofia (Demian Hernández) confronts love, fear, and the dangerous unpredictability of nature. As the New Year approaches, Sofia begins to realize that you can’t shut the real world out forever.

Thursday, March 5

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Patton Oswalt’s Adventures in Moviegoing

For five years in the 1990s, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt lived a double life as a movie junkie, a habit he picked up at the famed Los Angeles repertory house the New Beverley and which he documents in his memoir, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, Oswalt sits down with film reporter and writer Alicia Malone to discuss the origins of his cinemania as well as some of his all-time favorite films, including a pair of Japanese New Wave crime dramas, the landmark concert documentary Gimme Shelter (which he calls one of the greatest horror films ever made), and Kelly Reichardt’s revelatory breakout feature Old Joy.

  • The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943
  • The Warped Ones, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960
  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy, 1964
  • A Colt Is My Passport, Takashi Nomura, 1967
  • Gimme Shelter, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970
  • Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, 1975
  • Mikey and Nicky, Elaine May, 1976
  • Old Joy, Kelly Reichardt, 2006

Friday, March 6

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Double Feature: Going Nuclear
Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The doomsday clock ticks ominously in these urgent Cold War wake-up calls, one deadly serious, the other morbidly funny. The end of the world is played for brilliantly sustained suspense in Sidney Lumet’s riveting political thriller Fail Safe, which offers a chillingly plausible look at the path toward nuclear annihilation. And Stanley Kubrick’s ferociously subversive Dr. Strangelove remains one of the most audacious satires ever made, a disturbingly hilarious vision of atomic brinkmanship taken to its apocalyptic endpoint starring Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, and . . . Peter Sellers in three outrageous roles.

Saturday, March 7

Saturday Matinee: Young Sherlock Holmes

A captivating, boys’-own-adventure spin on the iconic character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this Victorian fantasy follows the teenage Sherlock Holmes (Nicholas Rowe) and his faithful sidekick John Watson (Alan Cox) as they meet for the first time at boarding school and team up to solve their first mystery: a string of seemingly unrelated deaths brought on by sinister hallucinations. Produced by Steven Spielberg—whose touch is evident in the Indiana Jones–style adventure-serial tone—and featuring charming early CGI effects by Industrial Light & Magic, Young Sherlock Holmes is a delightfully entertaining addition to the Holmesian canon that both pays homage to and expands upon Doyle’s vision.

Sunday, March 8

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Featuring Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, a 1988 documentary

In a string of visionary films that challenged the audience’s perceptions of time and space, Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky created a cinematic language all his own, one in which weighty philosophical themes found expression in images of haunting, spectral beauty. Ranging from the transcendent medieval drama Andrei Rublev to meditative sci-fi epics like Solaris and Stalker, his enormously influential masterpieces are consistent in their astonishing ambition and profound insights into spirituality and metaphysical experience.

  • The Steamroller and the Violin, 1961
  • Ivan’s Childhood, 1962
  • Andrei Rublev, 1966
  • Solaris, 1972
  • The Mirror, 1975
  • Stalker, 1979
  • Nostalghia, 1983
  • The Sacrifice, 1986

Monday, March 9

Safe: Criterion Collection Edition #739

Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes, Safe functions on multiple levels: as a prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice poll of more than fifty critics. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary featuring Haynes, Moore, and producer Christine Vachon; a conversation between Haynes and Moore; The Suicide, a 1978 short film by Haynes; and more.

Monday, March 9

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3:10 to Yuma: Criterion Collection Edition #657

In this beautifully shot, psychologically complex western, Van Heflin is a mild-mannered cattle rancher who takes on the task of shepherding a captured outlaw (played with cucumber-cool charisma by Glenn Ford) to the train that will deliver him to prison. This apparently simple mission turns into a nerve-racking cat-and-mouse game that tests each man’s particular brand of honor. Based on a story by Elmore Leonard, 3:10 to Yuma is a thrilling, humane action movie, directed by the supremely talented studio filmmaker Delmer Daves with intense feeling and precision. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Elmore Leonard and Glenn Ford’s son and biographer, Peter Ford.

Tuesday, March 10

Short + Feature: Get Thee to a Nunnery!
Aves and The Nun

Shot through with a surreal mysticism, Nietzchka Keene’s hypnotic short Aves deploys a flurry of experimental animation techniques to illuminate the spiritual state of a cloistered nun. It’s a sister to one of cinema’s most astonishing explorations of life in the habit: Jacques Rivette’s controversial, once-banned French New Wave landmark The Nun, starring Anna Karina as an eighteenth-century novice who rebels against the rigid austerity of the convent.

Tuesday, March 10

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life: Criterion Collection Edition #631

In the early 1970s, the great Italian poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini brought to the screen a trio of masterpieces of medieval literature—Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and The Thousand and One Nights (often known as The Arabian Nights)—and in doing so created his most uninhibited and extravagant work. In this brazen and bawdy triptych, the director set out to challenge modern consumer culture and celebrate the uncorrupted human body, while commenting on contemporary sexual and religious mores and hypocrisies. Filled with scatological humor and a rough-hewn sensuality that leave all modern standards of decency behind, these are carnal, provocative, and wildly entertaining films, all extraordinarily designed by Dante Ferretti and featuring evocative music by Ennio Morricone. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Two documentaries on Pasolini, interviews with art director Dante Ferretti and composer Ennio Morricone, a video essay by film scholar Tony Rayns, and more.

Wednesday, March 11

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Orlando

Based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 classic Orlando: A Biography, Sally Potter’s sumptuous fantasy stars a sublime Tilda Swinton as the eponymous seventeenth-century nobleman who, commanded by Queen Elizabeth I (played by legendary raconteur Quentin Crisp) to never age, voyages through four hundred years of English history, first as a man, then as a woman. The spectacular sets, breathtaking costumes (which serve as the inspiration for this year’s Met Gala), and Swinton’s androgynous performance style give captivating expression to Woolf’s text, a playful, ahead-of-its-time exploration of gender roles and fluidity that remains as fresh and surprising today as it was in the 1920s.

Thursday, March 12

Three by Peter Bogdanovich

One of the most preternaturally talented of the movie-brat auteurs to emerge from the New Hollywood of the 1960s, cinephile-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich began his career on a remarkable high note with a string of critical successes. Produced by Roger Corman, his startling first feature, Targets, starring Boris Karloff in his last dramatic role, transcends its B-movie origins and now plays as an eerily prescient look at the rise of gun violence in America. With his next film, The Last Picture Show, an elegiac homage to John Ford and Howard Hawks, Bogdanovich was hailed as a wunderkind, and he made good on that promise in the similarly bittersweet Depression-era comedy Paper Moon. These early triumphs are testaments to the out-of-the-gate brilliance of a filmmaker who exemplified the auteur-driven creative freedom of the New American Cinema.

  • Targets, 1968
  • The Last Picture Show, 1971
  • Paper Moon, 1973

Friday, March 13

Double Feature: Read All About It!
The Front Page and His Girl Friday

Directed with pre-Code verve by Lewis Milestone, the first screen adaptation of the oft-filmed play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur stars Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien as, respectively, a newspaper editor and his ace reporter who must pull out all the stops in order to get the scoop of a lifetime. For his whirlwind remake His Girl Friday, director Howard Hawks had the genius to have the O’Brien role rewritten for Rosalind Russell, who stars opposite Cary Grant in one of the funniest, fastest-talking screwball comedies of the 1940s.

Saturday, March 14

Saturday Matinee: Hans Christian Andersen

Danny Kaye brings his infectious warmth and humor to this spectacular musical fantasy about the legendary spinner of fairy tales. Here, Andersen is a small-town shoemaker with a knack for telling stories so vividly that the local children skip school to hear them. When he heads to the big city of Copenhagen, Hans experiences the happiness and heartbreak that will set him on his journey to becoming one of the most beloved authors of all time. Incorporating a host of the writer’s immortal tales—including “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Little Mermaid”—this beloved classic brings Andersen’s storybook world to enchanting life.

Sunday, March 15

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Starring Rita Hayworth
Featuring a new introduction by critic Farran Smith Nehme

Dubbed “The Love Goddess” for her glamorous image and knockout screen presence, Rita Hayworth was the shining jewel in the crown of Columbia Pictures, the studio over which she reigned as undisputed queen throughout the 1940s. Trained as a dancer by her show-business family, Hayworth got her big Hollywood break with a small but memorable role in Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings. Tapped for stardom by the studio, she went on to dazzle in charming musicals like You Were Never Lovelier (opposite Fred Astaire, who called her his favorite dance partner) and Cover Girl, as well as in stone-cold noir classics like Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai. This selection of some of Hayworth’s most unforgettable films showcases the vitality, exuberance, and captivating allure that made her the very definition of a movie star.

  • Only Angels Have Wings, Howard Hawks, 1939
  • You’ll Never Get Rich, Sidney Lanfield, 1941
  • You Were Never Lovelier, William A. Seiter, 1942
  • Cover Girl, Charles Vidor, 1944
  • Gilda, Charles Vidor, 1946
  • The Lady from Shanghai, Orson Welles, 1947
  • Pal Joey, George Sidney, 1957
  • Separate Tables, Delbert Mann, 1958

More titles coming in April!

Monday, March 16

Observations on Film Art No. 35: In the Service of Horror—The Lyrical Cinematography of Picnic at Hanging Rock

Though its premise is not far removed from that of a straightforward horror movie, Peter Weir’s Australian New Wave classic Picnic at Hanging Rock forgoes conventional shocks in favor of an eerie, otherworldly languor that’s closer to the moody atmospherics of an art film. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson illustrates how Weir uses soft-focus cinematography, slow motion, and superimpositions to cast an ethereal, enigmatic spell that has tantalized viewers for decades.

Tuesday, March 17

Short + Feature: Express Yourself
Would You Look at Her and Tomboy

A new generation challenges restrictive gender norms in these sensitive coming-of-age journeys. Goran Stolevski’s award-winning short Would You Look at Her is a visceral immersion into the world of a teenage tomboy who defies conservative Macedonian gender expectations when she dares to take part in a religious ritual traditionally reserved for men. Céline Sciamma explores similar themes in her acclaimed feature Tomboy, a tenderly observed portrait of a gender nonconforming child testing the waters of a new identity.

Wednesday, March 18

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Directed by Kathleen Collins
Featuring an archival interview with the filmmaker

Trailblazing independent filmmaker Kathleen Collins was just forty-six at the time of her sudden death, but she left behind a rich legacy as a writer, academic, and filmmaker. This program presents her masterpiece Losing Ground, a perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads, alongside the short feature The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy. Taken together, these landmark works reveal a talent of unique vision and intelligence whose films offer sophisticated takes on racial and gender politics as well as philosophical insights on love and creativity.

  • The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, 1980
  • Losing Ground, 1982

Thursday, March 19

Three Documentaries from the Sensory Ethnography Lab

Experience documentary as you never have before with these viscerally immersive works from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Since 2006, the SEL, under the direction of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, has pioneered a radically innovative form of filmmaking that merges audiovisual experimentation and ethnographic observation to create mesmerizing meditations on nature, landscapes, and human cultures. Encompassing a hypnotic journey of three thousand sheep, an exhilarating oceanic odyssey, and a daring inquiry into the ultimate taboo, these stunningly kinetic films are bracing explorations of the world we live in.

  • Sweetgrass, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, 2009
  • Leviathan, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2012
  • Caniba, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2017

Friday, March 20

Double Feature: Thoroughly Modern Malaise
The Passenger and Identification of a Woman

Italian cinema’s most profound poet of twentieth-century alienation, Michelangelo Antonioni turned his gaze toward the architecture of modern life and found it pervaded by creeping existential angst. Like much of the director’s work, these late-career riddles—one a quasi-thriller starring Jack Nicholson, the other a tantalizing antiromance—both revolve around mysteries, unresolved secrets, and the search for someone who may hold the answers. Just don’t expect any tidy resolutions . . .

Saturday, March 21

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Saturday Matinee: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Terry Gilliam’s lavish fantasy bursts with wit, invention, and eye-popping imagery as it brings to life the fantastical exploits of the eponymous eighteenth-century German adventurer (John Neville) whose journeys take him from the belly of a sea monster to the moon and beyond. A notorious box-office failure in its day, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen can now be appreciated as one of the most audacious examples of auteurist vision run riot ever to be bankrolled by a Hollywood studio as well as for its astounding special effects, achieved without the assistance of CGI. Look out for Robin Williams in an uncredited cameo as the King of the Moon.

Sunday, March 22

German Expressionism

Physical reality warps and bends to fit the twisted psychological states on display in the cinema of the German expressionist movement of the 1920s. With their emphasis on exaggerated shadows, off-kilter camera angles, dreamlike sets, and macabre storylines, these movies paved the way for the aesthetics of both horror cinema and film noir, genres in which mood and atmosphere take precedence over realism. This selection of some of the movement’s key works includes the quintessential example of the style, the delirious nightmare The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; F. W. Murnau’s shivery vampire classic Nosferatu; and several masterpieces by Fritz Lang, who, following the success of works like Metropolis and M, would go on to become instrumental in importing expressionist aesthetics to the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s.

  • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920
  • The Golem, Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, 1920
  • Destiny, Fritz Lang, 1921

Monday, March 23

Directed by Terry Zwigoff

The great counterculture curmudgeon of American independent cinema, Terry Zwigoff makes refreshingly cynical films populated by misfits, losers, and alienated geniuses. Establishing his credentials as an ethnographer of weird Americana with his outsider-artist documentaries Louie Bluie and Crumb, Zwigoff seamlessly translated his deadpan vision to narrative cinema with the instant cult classic Ghost World. Jaded odes to eccentricity in an overly slick pop-culture wasteland, Zwigoff’s films are hilariously acerbic yet graced with an undeniable affection for their oddball antiheroes.

  • Louie Bluie, 1985
  • Crumb, 1994
  • Ghost World, 2001
  • Art School Confidential, 2006

Tuesday, March 24

Short + Feature: Send in the Clowns
24 Hours in the Life of a Clown and La strada

Two legendary directors explore the human condition through the laughter and tears of a clown. Before he became famous for his minimalist-cool crime dramas, Jean-Pierre Melville made his directorial debut with the short 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown, a charming look at the behind-the-scenes world of a circus clown and his partner, who find inspiration for their act in their everyday lives. Then, Federico Fellini runs away with the circus in his poetic masterpiece La strada, featuring a heartbreaking performance from the great Giulietta Masina as a naive young woman whose simple goodness is exploited by Anthony Quinn’s brutish traveling strongman.

Wednesday, March 25

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Three by Liliana Cavani

Transgressive, unflinching, and explosively controversial, the films of Liliana Cavani explore history, war, and trauma with taboo-shattering fearlessness and psychological intensity. In her international breakthrough and best-known work, The Night Porter, Cavani enthralled and repelled audiences alike with a startling investigation of the sadomasochistic relationship between a Holocaust survivor and her former Nazi captor. Its provocative themes resonate throughout The Skin, another portrait of survival in post–World War II Italy, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Burt Lancaster, and Women of the Resistance, an early documentary that Cavani cites as the inspiration for The Night Porter.

  • Women of the Resistance, 1965
  • The Night Porter, 1974
  • The Skin, 1981

Thursday, March 26

The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Criterion Collection Edition #768

An astounding array of talent came together for the big-screen adaptation of John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a postmodern masterpiece that had been considered unfilmable. With an ingenious script by the Nobel Prize–winning playwright Harold Pinter, British New Wave trailblazer Karel Reisz transforms Fowles’s tale of scandalous romance into an arresting, hugely entertaining movie about cinema. In Pinter’s reimagining, Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep star in parallel narratives, as a Victorian-era gentleman and the social outcast he risks everything to love, and as the contemporary actors playing those roles in a film production, and immersed in their own forbidden affair. Shot by the consummate cinematographer Freddie Francis and scored by the venerated composer and conductor Carl Davis, this is a beguiling, intellectually nimble feat of filmmaking, starring a pair of legendary actors in early leading roles. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep; a 1981 episode of The South Bank Show featuring Karel Reisz, John Fowles, and Harold Pinter; and more.

Friday, March 27

Double Feature: Remembrances of Cities Past
Of Time and the City and My Winnipeg

Two idiosyncratic auteurs revisit the worlds of their childhood in these elegiac explorations of memory and place. In his mesmerizing found-footage memoir Of Time and the City, British rhapsodist Terence Davies reflects on growing up in the working-class Liverpool of the 1950s and ’60s, his reminiscences entwined with a deeply personal portrait of the city itself. Then, we’re whisked away to the snowy reaches of Canada in Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, a “docu-fantasia” on his hometown that blends personal history, mythology, and surrealist interludes into a one-of-a-kind work of fugue-state autobiography.

Saturday, March 28

Saturday Matinee: Fly Away Home

The Black Stallion director Carroll Ballard crafts another richly expressive look at the bond between children and animals. Following the death of her mother, thirteen-year-old Amy (Anna Paquin) leaves New Zealand to go live with her estranged father (Jeff Daniels) in Canada. When a flock of orphaned baby geese comes into her care, Amy must help the chicks to leave the nest by teaching them to fly. Featuring luminous cinematography and touching performances from Paquin and Daniels, this beloved coming-of-age tale soars with tender, heartfelt feeling.

Sunday, March 29

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Starring Catherine Deneuve

For nearly six decades, Catherine Deneuve has been the face of French cinema, the embodiment of its sophistication, allure, and cool glamour. Following her star-making turn in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Deneuve’s porcelain beauty and aloof elegance caught the attention of some of the most renowned European directors of the 1960s and ’70s, including Luis Buñuel (Belle de Jour, Tristana), François Truffaut (Mississippi Mermaid, The Last Metro), and Roman Polanski (Repulsion), all of whom could only begin to scratch the surface of her enigmatic magnetism. Since then, Deneuve has continued to entrance a new generation of post–New Wave French filmmakers like André Téchiné (The Girl on the Train) and Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale), confirming her status as the reigning grande dame of Gallic cinema.

  • Vice and Virtue, Roger Vadim, 1963
  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy, 1964
  • Repulsion, Roman Polanski, 1965
  • Belle de jour, Luis Buñuel, 1967
  • The Young Girls of Rochefort, Jacques Demy, 1967
  • Mississippi Mermaid, François Truffaut, 1969
  • Donkey Skin, Jacques Demy, 1970
  • Tristana, Luis Buñuel, 1970
  • Un flic, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972
  • A Slightly Pregnant Man, Jacques Demy, 1973
  • The Last Metro, François Truffaut, 1980
  • The Hunger, Tony Scott, 1983
  • The Young Girls Turn 25, Agnès Varda, 1993
  • A Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin, 2008
  • The Girl on the Train, André Téchiné, 2009
  • On My Way, Emmanuelle Bercot, 2013

Monday, March 30

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On the Waterfront: Criterion Collection Edition #647

Marlon Brando gives the performance of his career as the tough prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy in this masterpiece of urban poetry. A raggedly emotional tale of individual failure and social corruption, On the Waterfront follows Terry’s deepening moral crisis as he must decide whether to remain loyal to the mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and Johnny’s right-hand man, Terry’s brother, Charley (Rod Steiger), as the authorities close in on them. Driven by the vivid, naturalistic direction of Elia Kazan and savory, streetwise dialogue by Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront was an instant sensation, winning eight Oscars, including for best picture, director, actor, supporting actress (Eva Marie Saint), and screenplay. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Elia Kazan and Eva Marie Saint, a conversation between Martin Scorsese and critic Kent Jones, the documentary Elia Kazan: Outsider, and more.

Tuesday, March 31

Short + Feature: A Woman’s Place
Counterfeit Kunkoo and Charulata

These subtly radical tales of feminist awakening explore what it means to be an independent woman in Indian society. Reema Sengupta’s sharply observed short Counterfeit Kunkoo follows a woman who has escaped an abusive marriage only to find herself facing deep-seated social prejudice as she struggles to find an apartment for one in Mumbai. Then, the great Satyajit Ray conjures a ravishing evocation of nineteenth-century Kolkata in his masterpiece Charulata, in which a woman caught in an unsatisfying marriage sets out to take control of her desires while finding her artistic voice.





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