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If Criterion24/7 hasn’t completely colonized your attention every time you open the Channel––this is to say: if you’re stronger than me––their May lineup may be of interest. First and foremost I’m happy to see a Michael Roemer triple-feature: his superlative Nothing But a Man, arriving in a Criterion Edition, and the recently rediscovered The Plot Against Harry and Vengeance is Mine, three distinct features that suggest a long-lost voice of American movies. Meanwhile, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Antiwar Trilogy four by Sara Driver, and a wide collection from Ayoka Chenzira fill out the auteurist sets.

Series-wise, a highlight of 1999 goes beyond the well-established canon with films like Trick and Bye Bye Africa, while of course including Sofia Coppola, Michael Mann, Scorsese, and Claire Denis. Films starring Shirley Maclaine, a study of 1960s paranoia, and Columbia’s “golden era” (read: 1950-1961) are curated; meanwhile, The Breaking Ice,...

Filmmakers from Ukraine, Syria, and Tanzania to receive FilmAid Award

The Ukranian group DocuDays, known for its human rights documentaries, will be honored by international film organization FilmAid at its annual benefit on Oct. 12 in New York City. DocuDays is currently building the War Archive, a database of testimonies and evidence of crimes from the war against Russia.

Syrian American actor and filmmaker Jay Abdo (pictured) and young Tanzanian filmmaker Martha Ngwada will also be honored at the event.

Abdo stars in “Neighbors,” a film coming to theaters in December. Ngwada, a former stand-up comedian, is mentoring new filmmakers through FilmAid and making short films about sexual and gender-based violence and other issues affecting young Tanzanians.

“We haven’t done anything like the War Archive before, but we just felt that it was really important. These materials could be used during war crime investigations and for future documentary films,” says DocuDays’ Julia Kartashova,...

May on the Criterion Channel will be good to the auteurs. In fact they’re giving Richard Linklater better treatment than the distributor of his last film, with a 13-title retrospective mixing usual suspects—the Before trilogy, Boyhood, Slacker—with some truly off the beaten track. There’s a few shorts I haven’t seen but most intriguing is Heads I Win/Tails You Lose, the only available description of which calls it a four-hour (!) piece “edited together by Richard Linklater in 1991 from film countdowns and tail leaders from films submitted to the Austin Film Society in Austin, Texas from 1987 to 1990. It is Linklater’s tribute to the film countdown, used by many projectionists over the years to cue one reel of film after another when switching to another reel on another projector during projection.” Pair that with 2008’s Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach and your completionism will be on-track.

No two ways about it: April’s a great month for the Criterion Channel, which (among other things; more in a second) adds two recent favorites. We’re thrilled at the SVOD premiere of Hamaguchi’s entrancing Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, our #3 of 2021, and Bruno Dumont’s lacerating France, featuring Léa Seydoux’s finest performance yet.

Ethan Hawke’s Adventures in Moviegoing runs the gamut from Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, while a 14-film John Ford retro (mostly) skips westerns altogether. And no notes on the Delphine Seyrig retro—multiple by Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, Duras, a smattering of Buñuel, and Seyrig’s own film Be Pretty and Shut Up! That of all things might be the crown jewl.

See the full list of April titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.

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3 Bad Men, John Ford, 1926

Aar paar, Guru Dutt,...

A production of the Center for Asian American Media in association with the Independent Television Service, “Kelly Loves Tony” is a take on documentary co-creation, since the two “subjects”, seventeen-year-old Kelly Saeteurn and her fiancee Tony took as much part in the shooting of the film as director Spencer Nakasako.

Kelly Loves Tony is streaming on Ovid.tv

Seventeen-year-old Kelly Saeteurn is a lu Mien refugee from Laos, and the first member of her family to have graduated from high school, on her way to college. At the same time, Kelly is in a loving relationship with Tony Saelio, also a Laotian, and a junior high school drop-out and ex-con, and eventually, she becomes pregnant. Somewhere between necessity and lu Mien tradition, she has to move in his family’s house, where she hopes his parents can help her with raising the baby while she studies. The reality, however, proves rather different,...

Following its initial run last May and June, Sentient.Art Film. has revived the series "My Sight is Lined With Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video" as a year-long program, helmed by Sentient.Art.Film Artistic Director Keisha Knight and co-curator Abby Sun. The history of Asian American film and video is shaped by what B. Ruby Rich and Brian Hu describe (in Film Quarterly's recent dossier on fifty years of Asian American cinema) as its "public-ness." Through the initiatives of community-based media arts organizations like the Center for Asian American Media and Visual Communications, burgeoning Asian American filmmakers strove to generate cultural consciousness, just as the term "Asian American" entered the national vocabulary. In the "public" tradition of Asian American cinema, and against the limitations imposed by the pandemic, this series challenges barriers of access by making these hard-to-find titles available online. You can rent the entire selection until...

The 35th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, running May 2 to May 10, will screen 200 films, including eight world premieres and a number of works by women filmmakers. For the first time in its history, the fest will open and close with feature films written and directed by Asian Pacific American women.

The festival, presented by Visual Communications, will be held at a number of venues in Los Angeles.

Opening night will be the world premiere of “Yellow Rose,” written and directed by Diane Paragas, and starring Lea Salonga and Eva Noblezada. The fest will close with “Empty by Design,” written and directed by Andrea A. Walter, and starring Rhian Ramos and Osric Chau.

Special programs include Spotlight on Taiwan, featuring Golden Horse Award winners “Long Time No Sea” and “Cities of Last Things,” and a 25th-anniversary salute to the 1994 TV series “All-American Girl,” with Margaret Cho and other cast members in discussion.