News

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson)

Wes Anderson’s feature debut, the slyly comedic Bottle Rocket, positions its heroes, three young wannabe criminals with an eye for small-scale robberies, as blind innocents, lost in the unfamiliar world of adulthood. As part of his 75-year plan, Dignan (Owen Wilson) forms a gang, consisting of himself, Anthony (Luke Wilson) who’s fresh out of a voluntary psychiatric hospital, and Bob (Robert Musgrave) who...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This August will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Tuesday, August 1

Tuesday’s Short + Feature: These Boots and Mystery Train

Music is at the heart of this program, which pairs a zany music video by Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki with a tune-filled career highlight from American independent-film pioneer Jim Jarmusch. In the 1993 These Boots, Kaurismäki’s band of pompadoured “Finnish Elvis” rockers, the Leningrad Cowboys, cover a Nancy Sinatra classic in their signature deadpan style. It’s the perfect prelude to Jarmusch’s 1989 Mystery Train, a homage to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the musical legacy of Memphis, featuring appearances by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Joe Strummer.

Mark, Aaron and Scott Nye kick off the first of a seven episode series about French cinema in the 1930s. We give an overview of the decade and some historical context, and discuss the French silent tradition and how that it transitioned to sound. We also get into detail about two important filmmakers, Jacques Feyder and Jean Vigo. Feyder was an important filmmaker in his time, but his works are not as prominent today, whereas Vigo was nearly forgotten in the 1930s and discovered after the war.

Episode Links & Notes

Special Guest: Scott Nye from CriterionCast and Battleship Pretension. You can follow him on Twitter.

3:15 – Dedication and Thanks

9:35 – Intro to French Film Series

28:15 – From Silent to Sound

46:30 – Jacques Feyder

1:13:30 – Jean Vigo

Criterion Collection: Poetic Realism Flicker Alley: The House of Mystery French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1929 Flicker Alley: L’Inhumaine Flicker Alley...

Dziga Vertov’s experimental silent documentary upends reality in ways that are still dizzying, thrilling and strangely sexy

The spirit of punk throbs in this extraordinary silent classic from 1929, now on cinema rerelease. Dziga Vertov’s experimental documentary essay remains fascinating after all these years, as potent as an exposed fragment of sodium. It shows scenes of city life in Moscow, Odessa and Kiev, and the credits describe it as an “experiment in cinematic communication of visible events”, which doesn’t do justice to its dedication to transforming and upending reality. This film is visibly excited about the new medium’s possibility, dense with ideas, packed with energy: it echoes Un Chien Andalou, anticipates Vigo’s À Propos De Nice and the New Wave generally, and even Riefenstahl’s Olympia. There are trick-shots, split-screens, stop-motion animation, slo-mo and speeded up action. Welles never had as much fun with his train-set...

Sabzian has posted "Toward a Social Cinema," a lecture Jean Vigo delivered in Paris almost exactly 85 years ago on the occasion of the second screening of his first film, À propos de Nice. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Ilpo Hirvonen on John Cassavetes's Love Streams, Phelim O'Neill's interview with Peter Strickland, new writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books on True Detective and on Star Trek and Mad Max, Trey Edward Shults (Krisha) on Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe, David Thomson on Elizabeth Banks in Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy, a discussion about Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense—and more. » - David Hudson...

Sabzian has posted "Toward a Social Cinema," a lecture Jean Vigo delivered in Paris almost exactly 85 years ago on the occasion of the second screening of his first film, À propos de Nice. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Ilpo Hirvonen on John Cassavetes's Love Streams, Phelim O'Neill's interview with Peter Strickland, new writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books on True Detective and on Star Trek and Mad Max, Trey Edward Shults (Krisha) on Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe, David Thomson on Elizabeth Banks in Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy, a discussion about Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense—and more. » - David Hudson...

(Jean Vigo, 1930-34, PG, Artificial Eye)

One of France's most revered film-makers, his father an anarchist murdered in jail during the first world war, Vigo died of leukaemia in 1934 at the age of 29. He left behind an oddly attractive short featuring the French swimming champion Jean Taris and three masterpieces: the silent, satirical portrait of life on the Côte d'Azur À propos de Nice (1930); Zéro de conduite (1933), a surreal comedy about a revolt in a horrendous boarding school; and above all L'Atalante (1934), which he didn't live to see in its complete version.

L'Atalante is a beguiling, truthful love story about the ups and downs of the marriage between a young man and the country girl (the beautiful Dita Parlo) he brings to live with him on the barge he plies on the Seine with a cranky old seafarer (the great Michel Simon). Inventive, poetic, funny and deeply moving, it's magnificently...

Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon Melancholia, A Separation Screenplay, Runner-Up Jeannie Berlin: National Society of Film Critics' Surprises Two interesting omissions from the Nsfc roster: critics' fave Michelle Williams (for portraying Marilyn Monroe in Simon Curtis' My Week with Marilyn) and George Clooney (for his stressed out father in Alexander Payne's The Descendants) weren't among the critics' top three actresses/actors. Dunst and Yun were followed by New York Film Critics winner Meryl Streep for her Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady; Brad Pitt was followed by Gary Oldman in Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Jean Dujardin in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist. Dujardin, in fact, was The Artist's sole representative in the Nsfc 2011 roster. For the record the other runners-up were Christopher Plummer (Mike Mills' Beginners) and Patton Oswalt (Jason Reitman's Young Adult...

Best Contemporary Titles

Winner: "The Tree of Life"

Runner-up: "Black Swan"

Love it or hate it, Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" is visually the most luscious film of the year and Blu-ray transfer recreates this in perfect detail. No digital artifacts or enhancements are done here, there is a bit of grain but that's expected with the photography on offer, while the IMAX 65mm sequences are true visual wonders.

Coming in second is my favourite film of last year, Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller "Black Swan". Here is a challenge of a different sort, a film shot on both 16mm film and off the shelf Dslr video cameras. The result is a deliberately soft and grainy handheld-style image which lends a realistic documentary feel to proceedings and could look terrible if the Blu-ray transfer was handled poorly. Full kudos to Fox for a high quality presentation lacking in...

Above: Le film à venir (1997).

Notebook is unfurling a series of tributes to Raúl Ruiz entitled Blind Man's Bluff: along with some previously published articles, here in English for the first time, the bulk a compilation of new, shorter pieces from a few generous critics and Ruizians on favorite moments from a vast, subterranean filmography. For more from Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man's Bluff see the Table of Contents.

The Golden Boat (1990)

A man follows a trail of beat-up shoes left discarded along a New York sidewalk. They lead him to an older man, who sits crouched on the street, crying. “This, my son, is not my place,” the older man proclaims—and then stabs himself. So begins The Golden Boat—“a game between soap opera and reality,” as Ruiz called it—his first film in America, made in exile over a few long weekends during a teaching stint at Harvard.

When, in 1934, Jean Vigo died of tuberculosis, he was only 29, "a neglected figure at the margins of the industry who had seen one of his films (Zéro de Conduite) banned by the French authorities and another (L'Atalante) recut and retitled by its producer." Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times: "Vigo lends himself to romanticization, and not just because of his tragic early death and the aura of unfulfilled promise. He led a brief but colorful life as a fellow traveler of the French surrealists and the son of a well-known anarchist who was apparently murdered in prison. Vigo's first film, the silent, 23-minute À Propos de Nice (On the Subject of Nice), part of the 'city symphony' genre that flourished in the 1920s, confirmed that the young Jean was very much his father's son…. All of Vigo's films were shot by Boris Kaufman, brother of the Soviet film pioneer...

The Criterion Collection will release The Complete Jean Vigo on Blu-ray and DVD on Aug. 30 for the list prices of $39.95 and $29.95, respectively.

A collection of all four films made by the French cinema legend before he died of tuberculosis in 1934, at the way-too-young age of 29, The Complete Jean Vigo marks the first time the filmmaker’s entire canon has been compiled in one collection.

L'Atalante (1934)

Film scholars will tell you that Vigo helped to establish French cinema’s poetic realism movement of the 1930s and 1940s, a swell that yielded such masterpieces as Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Carne’s Children of Paradise. And later on, Vigo’s work was the spark that ignited the artistic explosion that became known as the French New Wave. What I can tell you is that you don’t need a film class to enjoy Vigo’s final movie, 1934’s L’Atalante, a sensual...

It’s so strange, writing this so long after the announcement yesterday. In today’s internet world of instant information, and twenty four second news cycles, yesterday’s August 2011 Criterion Collection new releases may as well have happened last week, or last month. I’m sure that the page views for this post will be markedly smaller than the usual, as I have tried consistently to have the new release post up within minutes of the pages going live on Criterion’s website. I know this all sounds like inside baseball stuff, but it’s on my mind, and darn it, this is my website.

I had a whole, several paragraph long, write up of the August titles, but since I’m finding myself writing this at 10pm on Tuesday evening, I think it’s better if I just scrap that whole thing and start over. I was going on...

On Sunday 6 February, fans of silent cinema were treated to the first event of the Barbican Centre's 'City Symphonies' series. Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927) and Manhatta (1921) both played to a packed out audience, who were no doubt drawn by the opportunity to see these gems on 35mm film and with live musical accompaniment by REFLEKTOR2 (Jan Kopinski on saxophone, Steve Iliffe on piano).

The afternoon's programme began with the short avant-garde film Manhatta, an experimental collaboration by painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand that produced this visually stunning representation of New York. Images of the vast metropolis are cut with intertitles taken from Walt Whitman's Sparkles on the Wheel, which gives the film a slow, poetic rhythm.

The montage editing used creates an association of meaning between shots. Aerial views of people swarming en masse around the city like ants are interweaved with a shot of hundreds...