Here’s what’s coming to The Criterion Channel this month.
Tuesday, May 12
Cannes ’68: Cinema in Revolt
When the 1968 edition of the Cannes Film Festival opened amid widespread civil unrest, filmmakers began pulling their movies from the schedule in solidarity with the workers and students protesting across France. This series gathers select titles from the year’s official lineup, alongside a scene-setting introduction by film historian Dudley Andrew. Decide for yourself which film should have won the never-presented Palme d’Or: Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé, Jan Němec’s A Report on the Party and Guests, Jiří Menzel’s Capricious Summer, Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko, or Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball. Also included in our series is Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit, which was set to screen that year out of competition.
- The Firemen’s Ball, Miloš Forman, 1967
- Peppermint Frappé, Carlos Saura, 1967
- Capricious Summer, Jiří Menzel, 1968
- Kuroneko, Kaneto Shindo, 1968
- A Report on the Party and Guests, Jan Němec, 1968
- Toby Dammit, Federico Fellini, 1968
Tuesday, May 12
Palme d’Or Winners
The Cannes Film Festival’s top jury prize has long been one of the most coveted awards in international cinema. Over decades of competition, the Palme has crowned instant classics like Rome Open City and Taste of Cherry, recognized the mastery of auteurs like Ermanno Olmi and Mike Leigh, and occasionally singled out controversial choices like Maurice Pialat’s Under the Sun of Satan. Take a stroll down the red carpet and revisit some of the festival’s most memorable past winners.
- Brief Encounter, David Lean, 1945
- Rome Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945
- Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg, 1951
- Gate of Hell, Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953
- The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953
- The Cranes Are Flying, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957
- Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus, 1959
- Viridiana, Luis Buñuel, 1961
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy, 1964
- The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Ermanno Olmi, 1978
- The Tin Drum, Volker Schlöndorff, 1979
- Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders, 1984
- Under the Sun of Satan, Maurice Pialat, 1987
- Secrets & Lies, Mike Leigh, 1996
- Taste of Cherry, Abbas Kiarostami, 1997
- 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu, 2007
- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010
- Dheepan, Jacques Audiard, 2015
Tuesday, May 12
Langlois
Henri Langlois, the legendary cofounder of the Cinémathèque Française, changed the course of cinema history with his passionate advocacy for film culture, helping incubate the artistic explosion of the French New Wave. When the French government attempted to close down the Cinémathèque in 1968, Langlois’s movie mecca became a rallying point for the student protest movement that would soon bring France to the brink of revolution—and shut down that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Made two years later, this documentary portrait follows Langlois around the streets of Paris and features interviews with Lilian Gish, Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve, Kenneth Anger, Viva, and more.
Tuesday, May 12
Short + Feature: Youthquakes
Tremors and The Fits
Adolescent anxiety is unleashed in strange and disturbing ways in two hallucinatory visions that give physical form to the psychic experience of teenage angst. In his award-winning short Tremors, director Dawid Bodzak explores the mysteries of male adolescence via an enigmatic portrait of a skateboarder whose inner turmoil seems to explode outward in sudden attacks that literally shake him to his core. A similarly unsettling phenomenon overtakes a girls’ dance team in Anna Rose Holmer’s stunning debut feature, The Fits, which fuses mesmerizing sound and movement to create a visceral coming-of-age dreamscape.
Wednesday, May 13
It Felt Like Love
Featuring an introduction by director Eliza Hittman and two of her early short films
As her latest film, the 2020 Sundance and Berlin award winner Never Rarely Sometimes Always, garners critical acclaim, the Criterion Channel revisits the revelatory debut feature from director Eliza Hittman. Set over the course of a languid South Brooklyn summer, this unflinchingly honest, refreshingly unsentimental tale of sexual exploration and awakening centers on Lila (Gina Piersanti, in a remarkable debut), a lonely fourteen-year-old girl who pushes herself into frightening and dangerous new territory in a quest to experience love. With an eye for evocative, richly sensorial images, Hittman offers a bracing, startlingly intimate new take on the coming-of-age drama.
Feature
It Felt Like Love, 2013
Shorts
Second Cousins Once Removed, 2010
Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, 2011
Thursday, May 14
Short Films by the Quay Brothers
Two of the world’s most brilliantly original filmmakers, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have, over the course of more than four decades, amassed an enormous cult following for their visionary blend of puppetry and stop-motion animation. Perhaps best known for their gothic classic Street of Crocodiles, The Quays display a passion for detail, a breathtaking command of color and texture, and an uncanny use of focus and camera movement that unite their darkly surreal, marvelously macabre works. Masters of miniaturization, they’ve created an unforgettable world on their tiny sets, suggestive of a landscape of long-repressed childhood dreams.
- The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, 1984
- This Unnameable Little Broom, 1985
- Street of Crocodiles, 1986
- Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, 1987
- Stille Nacht I: Dramolet, 1988
- Stille Nacht III: Tales from Vienna Woods, 1992
- Stille Nacht IV: Can’t Go Wrong Without You, 1993
- The Comb, 1990
- Anamorphosis, 1991
- In Absentia, 2000
- The Phantom Museum, 2003
Friday, May 15
Double Feature: Knockout!
The Harder They Fall and Raging Bull
Humphrey Bogart and Robert De Niro pull no punches in two of the finest, most hard-hitting boxing dramas ever made. First, Bogie delivers his powerful final screen performance as a sportswriter drawn into the corrupt underbelly of the fight racket in the gritty noir The Harder They Fall. Then, De Niro is raw physicality incarnate as self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a blistering vision of tortured masculinity that stands as perhaps the peak of one of cinema’s greatest actor-director collaborations.
Saturday, May 16
Saturday Matinee: The Boy with Green Hair
One of the most unique, charmingly eccentric films to come out of studio-era Hollywood, this heartfelt fable tells the supernatural-tinged story of Peter (a young Dean Stockwell), a war orphan who finds a safe haven in small town America . . . until one day he wakes up to find that his hair has inexplicably turned green. Although ridiculed by his classmates and the local townspeople, Peter soon realizes that there is power in being different. An impassioned call for tolerance and an inspiring celebration of individuality, THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR features a superlative cast (including Robert Ryan and Pat O’Brien), a hit theme song (“Nature Boy”) by Nat King Cole, and the typically inspired direction of Joseph Losey, making his feature debut.
Sunday, May 17
Written by Frances Marion
Featuring Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood, a feature-length documentary directed by Bridget Terry
For almost three decades, Frances Marion was Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter (male or female), a pioneer who shaped the nascent art of script writing and whose seemingly boundless imagination yielded some of the most unforgettable words and stories ever put on screen. Like fellow trailblazers Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, and Anita Loos, Marion was drawn to Hollywood at a time when women could still carve out a place for themselves in the burgeoning film industry, establishing herself as a hugely successful writer (and occasional director) for her best friend Mary Pickford. The top screenwriter at MGM during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Marion penned classics like The Wind, Anna Christie, The Big House, The Champ, Min and Bill, and Dinner at Eight for stars such as Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, and Jean Harlow, along the way becoming the first writer to win two Academy Awards. While her remarkable versatility meant that she could move easily between acclaimed literary adaptations, sparkling comedies, and gritty crime dramas, Marion’s piercing insight into human nature transcends genre and makes her work uniquely timeless.
- Stella Dallas, Henry King, 1925
- The Scarlet Letter, Victor Sjöström, 1926
- The Winning of Barbara Worth, Henry King, 1926
- The Wind, Victor Sjöström, 1928
- Their Own Desire, E. Mason Hopper, 1929
- Anna Christie, Clarence Brown, 1930
- The Big House, George Hill, 1930
- Min and Bill, George Hill, 1930
- The Champ, King Vidor, 1931
- Blondie of the Follies, Edmund Goulding, 1932
- Cynara, King Vidor, 1932
- Dinner at Eight, George Cukor, 1933
- Secrets, Frank Borzage, 1933
- Riffraff, J. Walter Ruben, 1936
- Knight Without Armour, Jacques Feyder, 1937
- Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood, Bridget Terry, 2000
Monday, May 18
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: Criterion Collection Edition #682
The provocative Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s most internationally acclaimed work is this remarkable, visceral, Oscar-winning thriller. Petri maintains a tricky balance between absurdity and realism in telling the Kafkaesque tale of a Roman police inspector (a commanding Gian Maria Volonté) investigating a heinous crime—which he himself committed. Both a compelling character study and a disturbing commentary on the draconian government crackdowns in Italy in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Petri’s kinetic portrait of surreal bureaucracy is a perversely pleasurable rendering of controlled chaos.
SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An archival interview with Petri; Elio Petri: Notes About a Filmmaker, a documentary on the director’s career; a documentary about Volonté; and more.
Tuesday, May 19
Short + Feature: Fassbinder and His Friends
Angst isst Seele auf and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Thirty years after its release, the powerful, antiracist themes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Sirkian masterpiece Ali: Fear Eats the Soul continue to resonate in an at once hard-hitting and poetic short. Shot with striking immediacy by a subjective camera, Shahbaz Noshir’s Angst isst Seele auf assumes the point of view of a black actor in Germany dealing with racist abuse as he prepares to appear in a play based on Fassbinder’s film, about the taboo relationship between an older German woman and an Arab man. Sharing the same lead actress (Brigitte Mira), cinematographer (Jürgen Jürges), and editor (Thea Eymèsz), these twin works offer a searing indictment of prejudice within German society.
Wednesday, May 20
Three by Diane Kurys
Featuring an archival interview with Kurys
n a career spanning five decades, French filmmaker Diane Kurys has mined the raw material of her own life and family history to create richly realized portraits of female relationships that overflow with wit and warmth. This selection features her effervescent feature debut, Peppermint Soda, a gently comic, autobiographical tale of two sisters coming of age in 1960s Paris; her Oscar-nominated drama Entre nous, the bittersweet story of an intimate friendship between two women in postwar France based on her own mother’s life and starring Isabelle Huppert; and Children of the Century, a sumptuous period romance starring Juliette Binoche as the iconoclastic writer George Sand. Though she is often overlooked in the pantheon of great contemporary French auteurs, Kurys makes films that manage to be at once deeply personal and universally resonant.
- Peppermint Soda, 1977
- Entre nous, 1983
- Children of the Century, 1999
Thursday, May 21
The Age of Innocence: Criterion Collection Edition #913
No filmmaker captures the grandeur and energy of New York like Martin Scorsese. With this sumptuous romance, he meticulously adapted the work of another great New York artist, Edith Wharton, bringing to life her tragic novel set in the cloistered world of Gilded Age Manhattan. The Age of Innocence tells the story of Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose engagement to an innocent socialite (Winona Ryder) binds him to the codes and rituals of his upbringing. But when her cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives in town on a wave of scandal after separating from her husband, she ignites passions in Newland he never knew existed. Swelling with exquisite period detail, this film is an alternately heartbreaking and satirical look at the brutality of old-world America. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: interviews with Scorsese, coscreenwriter Jay Cocks, production designer Dante Ferretti, and costume designer Gabriella Pescucci; Innocence and Experience, a documentary on the making of the film; and more.
Friday, May 22
Double Feature: A Legacy and a Landmark
Losing Ground and The Scar of Shame
Kathleen Collins’s independent landmark Losing Ground is a luminous, brilliantly perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads and a woman’s emotional awakening. One of the first films to explore black female desire with nuance and philosophical complexity, it contains a key allusion to actress Pearl McCormack and her role in the 1927 race film The Scar of Shame, a fascinating silent melodrama that, like Losing Ground, touches on issues of class and African American social mobility. Made more than fifty years apart, these touchstone works—once neglected, now cherished—speak to a rich counter-history of black filmmaking that extends across generations.
Saturday, May 23
Saturday Matinee: Black Beauty
Anna Sewell’s classic novel about the bond between a boy and his horse receives a stirring, handsomely mounted screen adaptation, complete with spectacular scenery and a lively sense of adventure. When Black Beauty, the beloved horse he has nurtured since birth, is taken away from him by a cruel squire, young Joe (Mark Lester of Oliver! fame) is determined that they will one day be reunited. Meanwhile, Black Beauty is passed through the hands of various masters in a series of far-flung exploits that take him from a Spanish circus to the battlefields of India and beyond. Beautifully shot amid the natural splendor of Ireland and Spain, Black Beauty is a breathlessly entertaining journey that offers a moving perspective on the relationship between humans and animals.
Sunday, May 24
Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories
Featuring a conversation between guest programmer Nellie Killian and actor Jenny Slate, plus a conversation about the filmmaking collective New Day Films
n 1979, poet Adrienne Rich observed that “one of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and sharing of words.” Curated by guest programmer Nellie Killian, Tell Me celebrates female filmmakers who took the simple, radical step of allowing women space and time to talk about their lives. Made in a range of idioms encompassing cinema verité, essay film, and agitprop, what the assembled films all share is a startling intimacy between camera and subject. Whether through the bonds of shared experience or merely genuine interest, these portraits capture women talking about trauma and sexual identity, summoning new language to describe the long-simmering injustices and frustrations we still face today, making jokes, admitting insecurities, and organizing for the future. Featuring films by Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer, Camille Billops, Chick Strand, Yvonne Rainer, Joyce Chopra, Vivienne Dick, Su Friedrich, and more, this cross-section of feminist filmmaking speaks to Rich’s insight that “in order to change what is, we need to give speech to what has been, to imagine together what might be.”
- Growing Up Female, Julia Reichert and Jim Klein, 1971
- Janie’s Janie, Geri Ashur, Peter Barton, Marilyn Mulford, and Stephanie Pawleski, 1971
- Betty Tells Her Story, Liane Brandon, 1972
- It Happens to Us, Amalie R. Rothschild, 1972
- Joyce at 34, Joyce Chopra, 1972
- Yudie, Mirra Bank, 1974
- Chris and Bernie, Bonnie Friedman and Deborah Shaffer, 1976
- Guerillère Talks, Vivienne Dick, 1978
- Inside Women Inside, Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio, 1978
- Soft Fiction, Chick Strand, 1979
- Dis-moi, Chantal Akerman, 1980
- I Am Wanda, Katja Raganelli, 1980
- Clotheslines, Roberta Cantow, 1981
- Land Makar, Margaret Tait, 1981
- Audience, Barbara Hammer, 1982
- Suzanne, Suzanne, Camille Billops and James Hatch, 1982
- The Ties That Bind, Su Friedrich, 1985
- Conversations with Intellectuals About Selena, Lourdes Portillo, 1999
- Privilege, Yvonne Rainer, 1990
- The Salt Mines, Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio, 1990
- The Transformation, Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio, 1995
- Mimi, Claire Simon, 2003
- No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman, 2015
- Shakedown, Leilah Weinraub, 2018
Monday, May 25
Le Havre: Criterion Collection Edition #619
In this warmhearted comic yarn from Aki Kaurismäki, fate throws the young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a kindly old bohemian who shines shoes for a living in the French harbor city Le Havre. With inborn optimism and the support of his tight-knit community, Marcel stands up to the officials doggedly pursuing the boy for deportation. A political fairy tale that exists somewhere between the reality of contemporary France and the classic French cinema of the past, Le Havre is a charming, deadpan delight and one of the Finnish director’s finest films. SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with members of the cast and crew and concert footage of Little Bob, the musician featured in the film.
Tuesday, May 26
Short + Feature: What a Woman Wants
The Field and The Cloud-Capped Star
Two women yearn for fulfillment amid the patriarchal inequities of Indian society in these subversive, visually sublime explorations of traditional gender expectations. Gorgeously attuned to the stirrings of the natural world, Sandhya Suri’s sensuous short The Field immerses the viewer in the world of a poor agricultural laborer leading a double life apart from her husband. Its feminist themes resonate throughout Ritwik Ghatak’s ravishing melodrama masterpiece The Cloud-Capped Star, in which a young woman sacrifices her own dreams and desires for the needs of her family.
Wednesday, May 27
Three by Nicole Holofcener
Featuring a new introduction by Holofcener
In her smart, bitingly hilarious, and deeply empathetic comedies, Nicole Holofcener offers refreshingly nuanced portrayals of flawed, complex women whose outward sophistication belies their dysfunctional, often disastrous personal lives. All featuring her regular collaborator Catherine Keener, this trio of Holofcener favorites—the cutting family portrait Lovely & Amazing, the wicked class comedy Friends with Money, and the darkly funny satire of white liberal guilt Please Give—displays the richly realized characterizations, all-too-real relationships, and trenchant insights into privilege and bourgeois anxieties that have made the writer-director one of contemporary cinema’s most astutely acerbic observers of human folly.
- Lovely & Amazing, 2001
- Friends with Money, 2006
- Please Give, 2010
Thursday, May 28
Three by Jacques Rivette
Featuring an excerpt from a 1994 profile of Rivette directed by Claire Denis for the series Cinéastes de notre temps
Sprawling, labyrinthine, and obsessed with cryptic symbols, conspiracies, and clues, the films of French New Wave titan Jacques Rivette unfold like epic, choose-your-own-adventure puzzles that draw you ever deeper down their loopy, mysterious rabbit holes. Featuring his tantalizing study of postwar disillusionment Paris Belongs to Us, the freewheeling buddy-comedy fantasia Céline and Julie Go Boating, and the mesmerizing portrait of artistic obsession La belle noiseuse, this Rivettian sampler spans three decades (and nearly ten combined hours) in the career of a master for whom moviemaking was a game of surprise and discovery.
- Paris Belongs to Us, 1961
- Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974
- La belle noiseuse, 1991
Friday, May 29
Double Feature: Tramps and Scamps
The Kid and Sidewalk Stories
In 1921, Charlie Chaplin’s immortal Little Tramp teamed up with Jackie Coogan’s streetwise ragamuffin in The Kid, and one of the all-time great screen matchups was born. Nearly seventy years later, writer-director-actor Charles Lane paid homage to Chaplin’s classic in the nearly silent Sidewalk Stories, which updates the premise for a black artist living on the streets of 1980s New York who becomes the guardian of a young orphan. Preserving the elegant slapstick invention and heart-tugging poignancy of Chaplin’s vision, Lane infuses the story with a newfound sense of realism and social consciousness to create one of the unsung miracles of 1980s independent cinema.
Saturday, May 30
Saturday Matinee: Little Fugitive
One of the most influential and enchanting films of the American independent cinema, this charming, stylistically innovative fable poetically captures the joys and wonders of childhood. When seven-year-old Joey (Richie Andrusco) is tricked into believing he has killed his older brother, he gathers his meager possessions and flees to New York’s nether wonderland: Coney Island. Upon and beneath the crowded boardwalk, Joey experiences a day and night filled with adventures and mysteries, captured in a groundbreaking semidocumentary style that is refreshingly spontaneous and thoroughly delightful. Winner of the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Little Fugitive bursts with a freewheeling inventiveness that would go on to influence both the French New Wave (particularly François Truffaut, who cited it as a key reference for The 400 Blows) and a generation of DIY American filmmakers.
Sunday, May 31
Starring Jackie Chan
Featuring a new interview with Grady Hendrix, author and cofounder of the New York Asian Film Festival
Marrying the daredevil physical comedy of Buster Keaton with the martial-arts mastery of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan is an international icon whose awe-inspiring stunt work and acrobatic grace set a new standard for action spectacle. Working his way up through the Hong Kong film industry of the 1970s as a stuntman, Chan achieved stardom when he combined his thrilling fight choreography with slapstick mayhem in early vehicles like Half a Loaf of Kung Fu and Spiritual Kung Fu. Making the leap to director with The Fearless Hyena and The Young Master, Chan embarked on a dazzling run of 1980s successes that culminated with Police Story and its sequel, blockbuster megahits in which his death-defying, adrenaline-rush set pieces reached new heights of giddy virtuosity.
- Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Chen Chi-hwa, 1978
- Spiritual Kung Fu, Lo Wei, 1978
- The Fearless Hyena, Jackie Chan, 1979
- The Young Master, Jackie Chan, 1980
- Fearless Hyena 2, Chan Chuen, 1983
- My Lucky Stars, Sammo Hung, 1985
- Police Story, Jackie Chan, 1985
- Police Story 2, Jackie Chan, 1988
Did you know we have a YouTube Channel? Every week we have a live Cord Cutting Q&A, and weekly Cord Cutting recap shows exclusively on our YouTube Channel!
Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more news, tips, and reviews. Need cord cutting tech support? Join our Cord Cutting Tech Support Facebook Group for help.