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.
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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.
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.
- 7/24/2017
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor discuss Eclipse Series 27: Rafaello Matarazzo’s Runaway Melodramas.
About the films:
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festivalgoers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of director Raffaello Matarazzo. Though turning to neorealism for character types and settings, these haywire hits about splintered love affairs and broken homes, all starring mustachioed matinee idol Amedeo Nazzari and icon of feminine purity Yvonne Sanson, luxuriate in delirious plot twists and overheated religious symbolism. Four of them are collected here, chronicles of men and women on...
About the films:
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festivalgoers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of director Raffaello Matarazzo. Though turning to neorealism for character types and settings, these haywire hits about splintered love affairs and broken homes, all starring mustachioed matinee idol Amedeo Nazzari and icon of feminine purity Yvonne Sanson, luxuriate in delirious plot twists and overheated religious symbolism. Four of them are collected here, chronicles of men and women on...
- 2/1/2016
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money
The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...
"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director
Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France
Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)
A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)
Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)
Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...
The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...
"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director
Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France
Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)
A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)
Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)
Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...
- 7/25/2014
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Legendary Spanish-born international film and music icon has died Sara Montiel, also known as either Sarita Montiel or, at times, Saritisima, was one of the Spanish-speaking world's biggest stars. She died on Monday, April 8, apparently of "natural causes" at her house in Madrid's district of Salamanca. She was 85 years old. Earlier today, a cortege driving through the streets of Madrid was attended (and applauded) by thousands of mourning fans. Montiel was born on March 10, 1928; according to online sources, her birth name was María Antonia Alejandra Vicenta Elpidia Isadora Abad Fernández; her father was a small farmer and her mother was beauty products salesperson. She left behind her poverty-stricken childhood, spending her days in the streets of her small village while dreaming of Spanish film star Imperio Argentina, after moving to Madrid in her mid-teens. Diction and singing lessons followed. Eventually, she started appearing in films, landing two roles in 1944 releases:...
- 4/10/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Too bad the critical symposium in the new, Winter 2012 issue of Cineaste isn't online. Participants evidently include Gianni Amelio, Olivier Assayas, Costa-Gavras, Robert Greenwald, and Sally Potter, "among others," but until we get our hands on the print edition, we'll have to make do with what is online, which, after all, is plenty: Patrick Z McGavin on Dave Kehr's When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Richard James Havis on Kyung Hyun Kim's Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, Andrew Horton on New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History and Henry K Miller on Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema and The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. And that's just the book reviews.
Besides the interviews with Mona Achache and Charlotte Rampling and festival reports (Locarno, Toronto and Montreal), the 15 reviews include David Sterritt on Kubrick's The Killing (1956), Joseph Luzzi on Raffaello Matarazzo,...
Besides the interviews with Mona Achache and Charlotte Rampling and festival reports (Locarno, Toronto and Montreal), the 15 reviews include David Sterritt on Kubrick's The Killing (1956), Joseph Luzzi on Raffaello Matarazzo,...
- 12/13/2011
- MUBI
Above: a publicity still from Avoveteen (1938), the absent inspiration behind this retrospective.
When Simon Popek of the Ljubljana International Film Festival invited us to present a carte blanche at these year's edition (November 9th - 20th), our first thoughts went into totally different directions from the one we finally followed. Problem was: Once we got going, the going... To cut a long story short: We either ended up with programs that were too complex and huge to do inside Simon's parameters (six slots; majority of films should be from Europe) or long lists of titles that didn't add up to anything varied, inspiring and fun.
Then, it hit us: Let's do a carte blanche like probably nobody ever did before. Normally, it works like this: The honoree shows a bunch of generally well-known and -respected films, plus maybe—maybe—one slightly less-known item. Now, what would be the opposite of that?...
When Simon Popek of the Ljubljana International Film Festival invited us to present a carte blanche at these year's edition (November 9th - 20th), our first thoughts went into totally different directions from the one we finally followed. Problem was: Once we got going, the going... To cut a long story short: We either ended up with programs that were too complex and huge to do inside Simon's parameters (six slots; majority of films should be from Europe) or long lists of titles that didn't add up to anything varied, inspiring and fun.
Then, it hit us: Let's do a carte blanche like probably nobody ever did before. Normally, it works like this: The honoree shows a bunch of generally well-known and -respected films, plus maybe—maybe—one slightly less-known item. Now, what would be the opposite of that?...
- 11/4/2011
- MUBI
Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of 5): Chains **** ; Tormento **** ½ ; Nobody's Children **** ; The White Angel *** ½ ; Series ****
Chains (1949), the first film in Eclipse’s Raffaello Matarazzo set, begins simply enough: a stolen car breaks down and the thief, desperate to avoid apprehension, hides out at a mechanic’s garage. 388 minutes and four films later, 1955’s The White Angel closes the set with a standoff between a fearless nun and a group of ruthless female inmates who are holding an infant hostage.
These two scenes best illustrate the milieu of Director Raffaello Matarazzo, one of Italy’s most commercially successful filmmakers. Matarazzo’s films vacillate violently between the mundane and the histrionic, more than earning the set’s label: "Runaway Melodramas". Those who prefer subtlety in their storytelling have received fair warning.
Ratings (out of 5): Chains **** ; Tormento **** ½ ; Nobody's Children **** ; The White Angel *** ½ ; Series ****
Chains (1949), the first film in Eclipse’s Raffaello Matarazzo set, begins simply enough: a stolen car breaks down and the thief, desperate to avoid apprehension, hides out at a mechanic’s garage. 388 minutes and four films later, 1955’s The White Angel closes the set with a standoff between a fearless nun and a group of ruthless female inmates who are holding an infant hostage.
These two scenes best illustrate the milieu of Director Raffaello Matarazzo, one of Italy’s most commercially successful filmmakers. Matarazzo’s films vacillate violently between the mundane and the histrionic, more than earning the set’s label: "Runaway Melodramas". Those who prefer subtlety in their storytelling have received fair warning.
- 6/30/2011
- by weezy
- GreenCine
"It's easy to enjoy Raffaello Matarazzo's melodramas for the campy excess of their acting and story lines," blogs Dave Kehr, "but it's more productive to take them seriously, I think — to see how cleanly and elegantly Matarazzo presents this bezerko material, with a visual style that reminded Jacques Lourcelles of Lang, Dreyer and Mizoguchi, and how perfectly engineered his narratives are, with every outlandish episode incorporated into a serene, symmetrical structure. The new Matarazzo box set (my New York Times review is here) from Criterion's budget Eclipse line contains four of Matarazzo's seven films with the towering star couple Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson (literally — Matarazzo's mise-en-scene somehow makes them seem larger, both physically and emotionally, than any of the other characters on the screen), all subtitled in English for the first time: Chains (1949) [image above], Tormento (1950), Nobody's Children (1952) and The White Angel (1955)."
"Though immensely popular, the films were dismissed by...
"Though immensely popular, the films were dismissed by...
- 6/30/2011
- MUBI
Raffaello Matarazzo has been called Italy’s answer to Douglas Sirk: a director who made wildly popular mainstream melodramas laced with details so lurid and absurd that they could be read as satire. Criterion’s “Eclipse Series” box set Raffaello Matarazzo’s Runaway Melodramas collects four of those, from 1949 to 1955: Chains, about a mechanic’s wife who has a life-changing encounter with a hood she used to date; Tormento, about a defiant woman whose working-class lover is falsely accused of murder; and the paired Nobody’s Children and The White Angel, which together tell the story of a ...
- 6/29/2011
- avclub.com
Since we have a great roster of erratic contributors here at Tfe, we should use them more often, right? What has Team Experience been watching?
What's the best and/or worst thing you saw this week?
Kurt (Cinema de Gym): The best thing I saw this week was Page One: Inside the New York Times, a doc that filled a little empty spot in my soul. Of course it's slanted so as to exalt the Gray Lady, but so what. It's thus far the most comprehensive film we have to address where we stand in the world of media, and thank God for the invaluable David Carr, a shut-up-and-listen voice of reason who defends the fundamentals amidst legions of people blindly barrelling toward an all-digital climate of media without merit. The worst thing I saw was Bad Teacher (my review) which couldn't even appeal to my sinful love of...
What's the best and/or worst thing you saw this week?
Kurt (Cinema de Gym): The best thing I saw this week was Page One: Inside the New York Times, a doc that filled a little empty spot in my soul. Of course it's slanted so as to exalt the Gray Lady, but so what. It's thus far the most comprehensive film we have to address where we stand in the world of media, and thank God for the invaluable David Carr, a shut-up-and-listen voice of reason who defends the fundamentals amidst legions of people blindly barrelling toward an all-digital climate of media without merit. The worst thing I saw was Bad Teacher (my review) which couldn't even appeal to my sinful love of...
- 6/28/2011
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
This one is coming up late, due to Criterion jam packing a ton of releases on Friday, right while I was finishing up the original post. I think they wanted to mess with me, which is very funny. But being the premier (and only) site that gives you the best coverage of Hulu Plus movies, I don’t mind taking the time at all. I’m hoping it has nothing to do with the recent shake-up going on that Josh just reported on the other day (here), and with Hulu wanting to be bought because of financial problems stemming from multiple sources, this makes one wonder what’s going to happen to the Criterion Collection and their deal with Hulu. I’m crossing my fingers that whoever buys the service, be it Amazon, Google or Yahoo (who is the frontrunner), it doesn’t ruin the deal in place for Criterion and its films.
- 6/26/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
With this week’s New Release Tuesday now past, those of us obsessed with Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs (as well as those who remain merely curious, just beginning their exploration) are able to latch on to what might be one of the oddest and most pleasurable old movie discoveries of 2011. I’m willing to bet that prior to the announcement earlier this year that something called Raffaello Matarazzo’s Runaway Melodramas would be among Criterion’s June offerings, few if any of us had one of Italy’s most commercially successful directors of the 1950s anywhere close to our wish list of hotly anticipated “must buy” DVDs.
I’ll admit that I was stumped when I first saw the news a few months back, and when I went to IMDb and Wikipedia to try and learn more about this newest addition to the Eclipse lineup, I didn’t...
I’ll admit that I was stumped when I first saw the news a few months back, and when I went to IMDb and Wikipedia to try and learn more about this newest addition to the Eclipse lineup, I didn’t...
- 6/22/2011
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
It’s another week which means another round up of all the titles Criterion has put up on their Hulu Plus page. And it’s a great smorgasbord of releases that will keep your eyes full until the next installment. Also, thanks again to everyone who has signed up for Hulu Plus via our referral page. Please sign up and let us know what you think of the service. Enough of this small talk, let’s get into the nitty gritty.
Last week’s article spoke about Louis Malle’s films being put up and sure enough, only a few days later they finally released Black Moon to their page, showing a film that will be coming out on June 28th. I love that they’re doing that with releases that are coming out, just to give their audience the film itself and if you like it, you’ll want to grab the whole package.
Last week’s article spoke about Louis Malle’s films being put up and sure enough, only a few days later they finally released Black Moon to their page, showing a film that will be coming out on June 28th. I love that they’re doing that with releases that are coming out, just to give their audience the film itself and if you like it, you’ll want to grab the whole package.
- 6/19/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
There are Tons of new releases this past week, and as my co-host and friend Travis George said, it was going to be a hell of a time to write these up for all of you people out there who want to know about Criterion’s blossoming Hulu Plus page. And as usual, I’m elated to tell you all about these films, especially if you want to join up to the service, which helps us keep this weekly article series going. I mean, come on, there’s an Ingmar Bergman film that’s not in the collection yet! More on that at the end of the article. So let’s get right to it then.
The epic film The Human Condition (1959) has been put up, separated into three videos. Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3 & 4 and Parts 5 & 6 are there for your ease of watching, so if you have 574 minutes to kill watching the...
The epic film The Human Condition (1959) has been put up, separated into three videos. Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3 & 4 and Parts 5 & 6 are there for your ease of watching, so if you have 574 minutes to kill watching the...
- 6/12/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
Criterion have just announced their upcoming June disc titles with ten new films added to the collection.
On the list this month are Louis Malle's surreal adolescent sexuality tale "Black Moon" and his anarchic comedy "Zazie in the Metro"; the 1930 silent doco/narrative feature "People on Sunday" which was co-written by Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann; and Kon Ichikawa's adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki's beloved Japanese novel "The Makioka Sisters".
Also on hand are Rolbert Aldrich's noir masterpiece "Kiss Me Deadly", Nicolas Roeg's celebrity-skewing satire "Insignificance", and a four disc 'Eclipse Series' collection of Raffaello Matarazzo’s extravagant early 50's Italian melodramas - "Chains," "Tormento," "Nobody's Children" and "The White Angel". While the Eclipse Series titles will be DVD only, all the others will be available on both DVD and Blu-ray.
On the list this month are Louis Malle's surreal adolescent sexuality tale "Black Moon" and his anarchic comedy "Zazie in the Metro"; the 1930 silent doco/narrative feature "People on Sunday" which was co-written by Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann; and Kon Ichikawa's adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki's beloved Japanese novel "The Makioka Sisters".
Also on hand are Rolbert Aldrich's noir masterpiece "Kiss Me Deadly", Nicolas Roeg's celebrity-skewing satire "Insignificance", and a four disc 'Eclipse Series' collection of Raffaello Matarazzo’s extravagant early 50's Italian melodramas - "Chains," "Tormento," "Nobody's Children" and "The White Angel". While the Eclipse Series titles will be DVD only, all the others will be available on both DVD and Blu-ray.
- 3/16/2011
- by Garth Franklin
- Dark Horizons
It always manages to amaze me how fast the months fly by, it seems like only yesterday we were announcing the May 2011 Criterion Collection titles, and here we are with June’s. This month continues Criterion’s recent trend of increasing the new titles selection, and bringing an amazing director to the Eclipse Series.
Let’s go through all of the new titles first this time. Earlier this year, Criterion released their “wacky new years” drawing, hinting at a couple of titles that we are finally getting to see made official this June. In that drawing we had an image of Marilyn Monroe with Albert Einstein’s head, hinting at Nicolas Roeg’s film, Insignificance. This will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on June 14. In that drawing, we also had the infamous glowing briefcase, hinting at Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (which also screened last year at the...
Let’s go through all of the new titles first this time. Earlier this year, Criterion released their “wacky new years” drawing, hinting at a couple of titles that we are finally getting to see made official this June. In that drawing we had an image of Marilyn Monroe with Albert Einstein’s head, hinting at Nicolas Roeg’s film, Insignificance. This will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on June 14. In that drawing, we also had the infamous glowing briefcase, hinting at Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (which also screened last year at the...
- 3/15/2011
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
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