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NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research

Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Autumn screens on Sunday courtesy of Amnesiascope and Rohmer Fits.

Roxy Cinema

A 35mm print of Silent Hill shows Friday and Saturday, as does a Radiohead-scored Nosferatu; the latter day brings Apocalypse Now: Final Cut and a print of Love Streams; Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro screens on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives

A Brad Dourif retrospective includes the actor in-person for Wise Blood on Saturday and Horseplayer on Sunday; films by Dreyer play in “Essential Cinema.”

IFC Center

The Guy Maddin series “Forbidden Rooms” begins; black-and-white restoration of Johnny Mnemonic and Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat play, as does a 40th-anniversary restoration of Paris, Texas; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch play late.

Museum of Modern Art...

Above: Official poster by Yves Tinguely for the 12th New York Film Festival in 1974.The twelfth edition of the New York Film Festival, which took place 50 years ago this week, in September 1974, could have been convincingly called the New York European Film Festival. Out of the seventeen new feature films playing, all but two were European: seven French, three German, two Italian, two Swiss, and one British. Though festival director Richard Roud wrote in the program that “one of the most exciting developments in world cinema these past two years has been the re-emergence of the American film,” there was in fact only one American film in the main lineup (the world premiere of John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence) though there was also a program of four American shorts by Mirra Bank, Martha Coolidge, William Greaves, and an exciting upstart named Martin Scorsese. There was just one...

The red carpet will soon roll out for the 77th Festival de Cannes. The international film festival, playing out May 14-25, has a distinct American voice this year. “Barbie” filmmaker Greta Gerwig is the first U.S. female director name jury president. Many veteran American helmers are heading to the French Rivera resort town. George Lucas, who turns 80 on May 14, will receive an honorary Palme d’Or. Francis Ford Coppola’s much-anticipated “Megalopolis” is screening in competition, as is Paul Schrader’s “Oh Canada.” Kevin Costner’s new Western “Horizon, An American Saga” will premiere out of competition and Oliver Stone’s “Lula” is part of the special screening showcase.

Fifty years ago, Coppola was the toast of the 27th Cannes Film Festival. His brilliant psychological thriller “The Conversation” starring Gene Hackman won the Palme D’Or and well as a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury. The film would earn three Oscar nominations: picture,...

1974: a great year for many filmmakers. This was the year Francis Ford Coppola released both “The Godfather: Part II” and “The Conversation”. Mel Brooks hit a prolific streak too with “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles”. Over in West Germany, Rainer Werner Fassbinder continued his hot streak by directing Four feature films, including his most beloved work, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”. However, it was perhaps Shinichi ‘Sonny' Chiba who had the most iconic and significant year out of that roster, with a career-defining bumper year that contained an impressive amount of diversity for an actor nominally known as a martial arts star. Surrounding himself with the posse from his expert team ‘Japan Action Club' and with the backing of the Toei Company, Ltd., Chiba completed a full trilogy, a two-part crime caper saga, a spin-off to the aforementioned trilogy And a powerful anti-war drama all in one year.

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

Five Inspirations is a series in which we ask directors to share five things that shaped and informed their film. Stephen Karam's The Humans is exclusively showing on Mubi in many countries starting August 12, 2022, in the series Debuts.Inspiration #1Brigitte Mira in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) by Rainer Werner FassbinderThis very interior film (in a pre-war space) and the soulful performance by Brigitte Mira always had me thinking about how to shoot Jayne Houdyshell.Inspiration #2Nyc Chinatown tenements skyshapesI took these shots of my building’s air shafts on Eldridge Street a year before we started filming—and versions of the shots made it into the film and formed the entire opening.Inspiration #3Photographs of empty spaces by Todd HidoAnd Lucy Sante’s Paris Review essay, “The Empty Room”:The more empty the photograph, the more it implies horror. The void that dominates an empty photograph is the site of past human activity.

François Ozon is one of France’s most prolific filmmakers, directing 21 features and a handful of shorts since 1997. But his latest, “Peter von Kant,” is one of the most unique films of the director’s career. The playful spin on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” is more than just a gender-swapped remake of Fassbinder’s classic German film about an abusive fashion designer.

Ozon made waves by reimagining Fassbinder’s film as an experimental biography of the director himself, casting Denis Menochet as a thinly veiled allegory for the legendary director, and replacing other characters in the film with members of his inner circle. The resulting movie was a hit at the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival and is set to make its North American theatrical debut this weekend. Watch the exclusive trailer below.

“The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” starred Margit Carstensen as the eponymous fashion designer,...

Some of the films have never been seen by Scandinavian audiences.

Nordic distributor NonStop Entertainment’s classics label NonStop Timeless has acquired Scandinavian rights to a huge batch of 111 classic films from a variety of international sellers.

The films span Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (pictured) through to James Ivory’s Maurice. Some of the notable filmmakers included in the deals are David Lynch, Catherine Breillat and Nina Menkes.

The acquisitions also include George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park from Yellow Veil; Taika Waititi’s Boy and Eagle vs. Shark from HanWay; Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable...

Pablo Larrain’s ‘Spencer’ has been nominated for best film.

Andreas Kleinert’s Dear Thomas has emerged as the front runner at this year’s German Film Awards, known as the Lolas, with 12 nominations.

The black-and-white biopic of East German poet, dramatist and filmmaker Thomas Brasch is nominated in the best feature film category, as well as for direction, screenplay, lead actor, cinematography and production design.

Andreas Dresen’s Berlinale competition title Rabiye Kurnaz Vs. George W. Bush is not far behind Dear Thomas with 10 nominations, the same number his Gundermann attracted in 2019.

Austrian director Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom,...

From the sure evidence of his filmography—and, yes, his legendarily turbulent private life—Rainer Werner Fassbinder should be quite tickled by the thought of another, younger filmmaker deifying him in their own work. Fassbinder’s is the cinema of the submissive power dynamic, and François Ozon, no slouch either, has come to play servant to the master. What’s more elusive in Peter von Kant, his slavish reimagining of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, is what’s gained from this entangling designed to be mutually fulfilling for both parties.

Ozon has always been a fleet, engaging storyteller, but he is overly fond of pastiche, though it’s unlikely his career would’ve been so prolific without letting outside material lead his creative impulses. Still Peter von Kant is a mismatch for his sensibilities, a piece of upmarket heritage cinema with none of the subversion, danger, or nervy politics of the forebear.

Maybe she was kidding, but director Clio Barnard recently described “Ali & Ava” as her shot at making a “social-realist musical.” The phrase, which slipped out during an interview from the BFI London Film Festival, struck me as some kind of oxymoron at first: How could a rugged, true-to-life depiction of a struggling working-class English couple possibly coexist with that most surreal of cinematic genres? But in light of the end result, Barnard’s ambition makes perfect sense. The film’s two title characters don’t burst into song out of the blue but rather, listen to music as an escape from their everyday stresses. It’s the force that brings them together.

Embodied with equal parts weariness and good cheer by British Bengali actor Kamal Kaan (“Four Lions”), Ali is a Yorkshire-based ex-radio DJ who gravitates to dance and electronic music. An Irish transplant to the region, Ava (Claire Rushbrook...

Though New York moviegoing is (sort of) getting back to normal, we’ve only now filled one of the biggest spots: Metrograph have announced a return of their theater and commissary on October 1, while Metrograph At Home programming will continue through their site and Metrograph TV app.

The lineup, currently handled by new programmer-at-large Nellie Killian, doesn’t seem to have missed a step: there’s the cool factor of Żuławski’s Possession restored in 4K, the auteurist cred of a four-film Eastwood series, new releases like Bulletproof and Labyrinth of Cinema, the high art of an Amos Vogel tribute—precisely what we’ve missed for, God help us, 18 months.

Health and safety guidelines can be found here, and a highlight of October programming below.

Opens October 1

Possession (1981)

New 4K Restoration of Andrzej Żuławski’s Hallucinatory Masterpiece

Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of...

Les Films Pelleas, the Paris-based production banner behind Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anais in Love” at Cannes’ Critics Week, is powering a female-driven slate with new projects by Justine Trier (“Sibyl”), Katell Quillévéré (“Heal the Living”) and Danielle Arbid (“Suzanne et Osmane”).

“Anatomie d’une chute” marks Triet’s follow up to “Sibyl,” which competed at Cannes in 2019. Les Films Pelleas is producing the movie with Marie-Ange Luciani’s Les Films de Pierre (“Bpm (Beats Per Minute)”). A departure from Trier’s previous films, “Anatomie d’une chute” is a procedural drama revolving around a woman who being investigated for the murder of her husband who was found dead. During the investigation, the detective first suspect an accident or a suicide and eventually believe it’s a murder. The key witness in the case turns out to be the couple’s blind son, who faces a moral dilemma.

“It’s a...

One of our most-anticipated premieres amongst the Directors’ Fortnight lineup at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava. Following The Arbor, The Selfish Giant, and Dark River, the British director’s latest work is once again set in Bradford and this time draws inspiration from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul. The love story follows Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook who play a lonely pair that find unexpected affectation for one another.

“It started with the characters of Ali and Ava, and a question,” Barnard told Variety. “What would happen if you took melodrama as a genre and applied it to a social-realist version of Bradford that’s based on real people? It’s an opportunity to think about what it means to be part of a community. There’s a lot of kindness, generosity and support in Bradford and I wanted...

"Have you still not understood what that means, you amateurs? Damn." Dark Star Pictures has unveiled a new official US trailer for the strange German drama Enfant Terrible, a film about the infamous German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This was originally set to premiere at last year's Cannes (watch last year's trailer), then played at a few other fall festivals anyway, and is now opening in the US this spring. The film examines the life and the impact of iconic German New Wave director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder had a strong connection with Cannes after his drama Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, starring Mira and Salem, premiered in Competition in 1974 to critical acclaim, catapulting him onto the world stage. Oliver Masucci stars as Fassbinder, with a cast featuring Katja Riemann, Erdal Yildiz as the director's lover El Hedi ben Salem, Eva Mattes as actress Brigitte Mira, Antoine Monot Jr., Götz Otto...

One minute your kid is born, and the next — almost literally, for some of us — you start to panic about that inevitable moment somewhere down the line when this helpless little blob creature isn’t going to need you anymore. As soon as they start to crawl you’re confronted with the cold reality that you’re teaching them how to get away from you. Independence is both the goal and the curse.

But while a certain amount of post-adolescent drift might be inevitable for anyone who doesn’t go full “Gilmore Girls,” the good news is that it’s never too late to close that gap. Not after the kid grows up. Not after the kid moves out. And, as it happens in the hyper-speed new animated family comedy from the producers behind “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” not even after the robot apocalypse.

Webster University Film Series has become the location for many national tours of international cinema, often acting as the only such venue in Missouri. The Series is host to speakers and visiting artists who address the pertinent issues in films presented. In an effort to further integrate film with education, the Film Series provides workshops with artists and experts.

As part of the Film Series virtual Speaker Series, Fassbinder February focuses on the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the prolific LGBTQ+ film director of 1970s West Germany. Once a week, all throughout February, a guest speaker will give a talk on a different film of the trailblazing director. Each film is available on popular streaming services like The Criterion Channel, HBO Max, and/or Amazon Prime. Watch each ahead of time and then join The Webster University University Film Series all month long for interesting and thought-provoking discussions on the...

After highlighting 40 films we can guarantee are worth seeing this year and films we hope will get U.S. distribution, it’s time we venture into the unknown. Due to all the pandemic-related delays, our most-anticipated list this year may ring familiar to those who follow our coverage, but there’s still plenty of currently under-the-radar movies that will hopefully make a mark in 2021.

While the majority might not have a set release–let alone any confirmed festival premiere–most have wrapped production and will likely debut at some point in 2021, so make sure to check back for updates over the next twelve months and beyond.

100. No Time to Die (Cary Fukunaga; April 2)

Delays to the 25th James Bond film No Time To Die have been heartbreaking for lifelong fans of the spy franchise. While it’s unclear whether or not the Covid vaccines will roll out fast enough for...

Ali & Ava

British director Clio Barnard re-teams with her long-time producer Tracy O’Riordan for her fourth feature Ali & Ava, a contemporary love story melodrama shot on location in Bradford. Cast in the lead roles are Claire Rushbrook and Adeel Akhtar, with Ole Bratt Birkeland serving as cinematographer. Barnard’s 2010 breakout The Arbor premiered at Tribeca and 2013’s The Selfish Giant received a Cannes berth in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar in 2013 where it took home the Sacd prize. In 2017, Dark River competed in TIFF’s Platform program.

Gist: Inspired by Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Barnard’s latest focuses on intersections of class race and gender concerning its titular characters.…...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

Filmmaker, libertine, and decadent visionary Rainer Werner Fassbinder went through more doomed romances in the 1970s, the peak of his epic career, than even the most tragic poet could fit into a lifetime. For one, there was his affair with Moroccan actor El Hedi ben Salem, the star of “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” a time marked by alcohol and drug abuse, psychological torment by all parties involved, and which ended with Salem going on a stabbing spree and later killing himself. But then there was Armin Meier, an orphaned butcher whom Fassbinder cast in “Chinese Roulette,” “Satan’s Brew,” and “I Only Want You to Love Me.” After their eventual split, Meier downed four bottles of sleeping pills during the week of Fassbinder’s birthday,...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

Filmmaker, libertine, and decadent visionary Rainer Werner Fassbinder went through more doomed romances in the 1970s, the peak of his epic career, than even the most tragic poet could fit into a lifetime. For one, there was his affair with Moroccan actor El Hedi ben Salem, the star of “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” a time marked by alcohol and drug abuse, psychological torment by all parties involved, and which ended with Salem going on a stabbing spree and later killing himself. But then there was Armin Meier, an orphaned butcher whom Fassbinder cast in “Chinese Roulette,” “Satan’s Brew,” and “I Only Want You to Love Me.” After their eventual split, Meier downed four bottles of sleeping pills during the week of Fassbinder’s birthday,...

Film about late, legendary German director had Cannes 2020 hopes.

Picture Tree International has acquired international sales rights to Oskar Roehler’s biopic Enfant Terrible capturing the tumultuous life and career of late iconic German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The legendary filmmaker, who died of a drugs overdose at the age of 37 in June 1982, would have turned 75 on Sunday (May 31). Berlin-based Picture Tree has released an English-language subtitled trailer to coincide with its sales acquisition and to mark the event.

“The film isn’t due out in German cinemas until October but with the producers and German distributor Weltkino, we wanted to commemorate this special date,...

Film about late, legendary German director had Cannes 2020 hopes.

Picture Tree International has acquired international sales rights to Oskar Roehler’s biopic Enfant Terrible capturing the tumultuous life and career of late iconic German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The legendary filmmaker, who died of a drugs overdose at the age of 37 in June 1982, would have turned 75 on Sunday (May 31). Berlin-based Picture Tree has released an English-language subtitled trailer to coincide with its sales acquisition and to mark the event.

“The film isn’t due out in German cinemas until October but with the producers and German distributor Weltkino, we wanted to commemorate this special date,...

The actor, who collaborated with the director on films including Fear Eats the Soul and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, also featured in Herzog’s Woyzeck

Irm Hermann, one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s closest collaborators, has died in Berlin aged 77 following what her agent called a “short, serious illness”.

The actor, who was a staple of German theatre, TV and radio, made her name for her work with the uncompromising and virtuosic director, who she first encountered while working at the German automobile association.

Ena Sendijarević's Take Me Somewhere Nice, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from May 21 – June 20, 2019 in Mubi's Debuts series.“He’s the kind of person who thinks that nobody understands him, but I do,” the actor Ernad Prnjavorac responds when I ask him what to make of Emir, the character he’s playing. People have kept asking questions about him; they didn’t understand him when reading the script. I used Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as an inspiration. Just like Raskolnikov, Emir is on a path of extremism and radicalization. I held on to the thought that probably the people commenting on Emir’s character wouldn’t understand Raskolnikov either. Luckily, my actor does. We are in the middle of shooting my debut feature film, Take Me Somewhere Nice. It’s end of summer and we are shooting in scorching hot Bosnia,...

Here are many more movies to watch when you’re staying in for a while, featuring recommendations from Steven Canals, Larry Karaszewski, Gareth Reynolds, and Alan Arkush with special guest star Blaire Bercy from the Hollywood Food Coalition.

Please support the Hollywood Food Coalition. Text “Give” to 323.402.5704 or visit https://hofoco.org/donate!

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)

Groundhog Day (1993)

Kung Fu Mama a.k.a. Queen of Fist (1973)

Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974)

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019)

In The Mood For Love (2000)

Hunger (2008)

The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Fargo (1996)

Night of the Lepus (1971)

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

Soylent Green (1973)

Silent Running (1972)

Canyon Passage (1946)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

The Professionals (1966)

Ride Lonesome (1959)

Carrie (1952)

The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

Hello Down There (1969)

The Brass Bottle (1964)

The Trouble With Angels (1966)

Pollyanna (1960)

Tiger Bay (1959)

The Parent Trap (1961)

Endless Night (1972)

The Family Way (1966)

Take A Girl Like You (1970)

Freddy Got Fingered...

by Cláudio Alves

In these days of "social distancing" and delayed releases, the cinephiles among us must satiate our hunger for cinema in the privacy of their own homes. Streaming services are saviors during such trying times, offering a respite from the chaos. Among them, The Criterion Channel continues to shine brightest as a paragon for the promotion of the seventh art's best triumphs. Just this month, two of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most beloved and accessible masterpieces were made available for streaming. We're talking about 1974's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and 1979's The Marriage of Maria Braun.

Join us as we peruse the glamor and doom, fear and fury of these singular films…...

We started a little biweekly 'streaming reader's choice film club' last month with Voyage of the Damned, and this time you've selected the Olivia de Havilland thriller Lady in a Cage (1964) for group discussion. So watch it over the weekend on Hulu, and we'll write it up and discuss on Monday night.

Which is not to say that we'll never discuss the other films (we will have pieces on Ali Fears Eats the Soul and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne as other members of Team Experience sometimes volunteer to write things up)  For the record the votes yesterday and this morning went like so:

Lady in the Cage (24%) Cactus Flower (23%) Ali Fear Eats the Soul / Fight Club (15% each) Splash / Natural Born Killers (9% each) The Slender Thread (3%) Take Me Out to the Ball Game (2%)...

The fourth feature by the writer-director is a contemporary love story starring Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook. Principal photography has wrapped on Ali & Ava, the fourth feature by writer-director Clio Barnard. Shooting recently took place on location in Bradford for the film produced by Barnard's long-term producer Tracy O'Riordan, of Moonspun Films. The movie is financed by BBC Films, the BFI (awarding National Lottery funding) and Screen Yorkshire, with Altitude handling world sales and UK and Irish distribution. Producer O'Riordan says of the film, “It was wonderful to be back in Bradford shooting Clio's fourth feature; it’s a love story based on people we met whilst making our previous films there. Inspired by Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul, Ali & Ava is a film about fear and courage, loneliness and belonging, time and love.” Ali...

Principal photography has wrapped on “Ali & Ava,” the fourth feature from writer-director Clio Barnard, starring Adeel Akhtar (“Four Lions”) and Claire Rushbrook (“Secrets & Lies”).

The contemporary British love story follows Ava (Rushbrook), a respected matriarch on a predominantly white Bradford estate masking the scars left by an abusive ex-husband, and Ali (Akhtar), a charismatic son, brother, boss and landlord, still living with his estranged wife but hiding their separation from his family. Both lonely for different reasons, Ava and Ali forge an intimate bond with each other, despite their own fears about intimacy and the expectations of their families and communities.

Pic is produced by Barnard’s long-term producer Tracy O’Riordan of Moonspun Films, with financing from BBC Films, BFI, and Screen Yorkshire. Altitude is handling world sales and U.K. and Irish distribution.

Shooting recently took place on location in Bradford, the setting for Barnard’s previous films.

Claire Rushbrook and Adeel Akhtar star in British director’s fourth feature.

The cast and first details of Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava have finally been revealed, following a wrap on principal photography in the UK.

The fourth feature from the award-winning writer-director will star Adeel Akhtar (Four Lions) and Claire Rushbrook (Secrets & Lies) in a contemporary British love story that explores the intricacies of age, class and race.

It shot for six weeks in various locations around Bradford, in the north of England. A first-look image from the film has also been released, shown above.

Ali & Ava is...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Five films by the underseen Nico Papatakis screen as part of “Film Comment Selects.”

Roxy Cinema

The Little Mermaid and on 35mm and All That Heaven Allows plays this Saturday, while Sunday also offers a print of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

Nitehawk Cinema

A 35mm print of Possession plays...

Daniel Talbot, a distributor and exhibitor of enormous influence over specialized exhibition and distribution as well as the international film world, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 91. A memorial was held Sunday, December 31 at the Riverside Memorial Chapel with a capacity audience including many leading New York specialized players. Talbot’s wife and business partner, Toby Talbot, as well as daughters Nina, Emily and Sara attended the memorial, where the family spoke fondly about Talbot’s love for the comedian W.C. Fields.

Another more public post-holiday event marking the closing of the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas is scheduled on January 28 in New York. The last few weeks have seen Talbot’s legacy celebrated with reaction to the unexpected announcement that the six-screen Upper West Side theater would close at the end of January, at the expiration of its lease. Milstein Properties, who have been the Talbots’ co-partners in the theater since...

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.

One family is forced to shelter another in this deeply unsettling post-plague chiller that speaks to our paranoid age

Fear eats the soul in It Comes at Night, a dread-laden tale of apocalyptic American paranoia from Trey Edward Shults, writer/director of the startlingly revealing family drama Krisha (2015). Set in the wake of an unspecified plague-like outbreak, Shults’s second feature finds a family struggling to survive in a remote woodland home, isolated from the world and increasingly from one another. As with Stephen Fingleton’s similarly bleak The Survivalist, the story unfolds at the edges of a collapsed civilisation, with characters driven by distrust, desperation and a steely determination to protect what is theirs. Yet whatever fairytale terrors may lurk out there in the woods, it’s what comes from within that threatens to tear these people apart.

The film opens with the sound of breathing, of voices muffled...

Aki Kaurismäki’s tale of a Syrian refugee who stows away to Finland mines the deadpan humour he’s famous for while refusing to flinch from heartbreak and hardship

The movies of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, with their deadpan drollery and aquarium light, have long been a habit-forming pleasure. But increasingly they are something else, or something more. The issue of migrants and refugees from the Middle East may still be something from which cinema mostly averts its gaze. Not Kaurismäki’s cinema. With his previous film Le Havre, and this very sympathetic and charming new work, The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki has made refugees his focus – and done so without appearing to change style or tonal tack. His humane comedy, with its air of unworldly absurdity, has absorbed this idea, but not undermined its seriousness in any way, in fact embraced it with almost miraculous ease and simplicity.

Editor’s Note: This article is presented in partnership with FilmStruck. The exclusive streaming home for The Criterion Collection, FilmStruck features the largest streaming library of contemporary and classic arthouse, indie, foreign and cult films as well as extensive bonus content, filmmaker interviews and rare footage. Learn more here.

Todd Haynes is one of the most distinct voices working in film today. He’s also a cinematic chameleon. For every period film Haynes makes, he and his team of craftsman adapt not only the look of the movies or photography of that era, but the visual language as well.

For example, both “Carol” and “Far from Heaven” are Haynes films set in ’50s-era America, but they are worlds apart. While “Carol” got its color palette and sense of composition from the photographers like Saul Leiter who documented the period, “Far From Heaven” recreated the manufactured studio look of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas of that era.

Cleaner Emmi loves immigrant Ali, 20 years her junior – to the chagrin of 1970s Munich – in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s heart-rending and extremely prescient drama

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 movie Fear Eats the Soul is as quietly amazing as ever, nationally re-released as part of a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. It’s the gripping tale of courageous romance between Emmi, a white Polish-German woman, and Ali, a young Moroccan man: a simple, clear story and yet with its own sophisticated moral intelligence. The film takes place among the resentfully racist anständig middle classes of postwar Munich, all of them with fear-eaten souls. This is partly a homage to the 50s domestic dramas of Douglas Sirk, but given that Sirk was still alive and working when this was made, the perspective now is different. Quite unlike Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002), a masterpiece for different reasons, it is not a pastiche,...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder made more than 40 features in his 37 years on this planet, 23 of which starred Hanna Schygulla. The two first met in their early 20s when they were attending acting school in Munich, hitting it off instantly: “It suddenly became crystal clear to me that Hanna Schygulla would one day be the star of my films,” the New German Cinema stalwart wrote. “Maybe even something like their driving force.”

Schygulla was recently interviewed by the Guardian on the eve of an extensive BFI retrospective dedicated to Fassbinder, referring to herself as “one of the survivors” of the “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” and “The Marriage of Maria Braun” director.

Read More: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Top 10 Favorite Films

“He had a strong smell about him,” she recalls. “He smelled how he looked. Like a spotty rebel filled with angst.” Fassbinder, who died of an overdose in 1982, cast the actress in his debut film.

He tormented his actors, threw drinks at his cameraman, and died of an overdose at 37, leaving behind two dead lovers – and an extraordinary body of work. As a Fassbinder season begins at the BFI, Hanna Schygulla reveals how she survived

It is 35 years since the magnificent and monstrous director Rainer Werner Fassbinder died from a drugs overdose. His addiction to alcohol and cocaine was as widely known as his bisexuality, and his propensity for cruelly manipulating anyone who entered his orbit. Though he was just 37 years old at the time of his death, he had already made more than 40 features: most famously Fear Eats the Soul, a melodrama about a German widow who falls for an Arab immigrant more than 20 years her junior; Fox and His Friends, starring Fassbinder himself as a gauche carnival worker exploited by his boyfriend; and The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which a single-minded newlywed...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is showing March 28 - April 27, 2017 in the United Kingdom in the series Fassbinder: The Exploitability of Feelings.By now many will have encountered Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (German: Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) even if they are not hardcore devotees of the director’s oeuvre. Along with his Brd trilogy, Ali stands as one of Fassbinder’s most acclaimed and viewed works. The film follows 60-year-old cleaning woman Emmi (Brigitte Mira) who becomes involved with much younger Moroccan mechanic Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) after one of his friends dares him to dance with her when she walks alone into the bar one rainy evening. Ali has been frequently praised for the moving performances of its leads and for how it so effectively portrays...

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.

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro)

Crimson Peak works as many things: a melodramatic romance; both the recreation of a period and a revival of the way movies have made us perceive it; a genre-jumping comedy; and a critique of capitalistic excess. It does these things earnestly and without compromise, and it’s far braver — far more admirable — for having done so. What Guillermo del Toro’s new film doesn...

A total of 26 film projects will participate in this year’s co-production market in Rotterdam.Scroll down for full line-up

The line-up for the 2017 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) co-production market CineMart has been revealed.

The 34th edition of the co-pro event features 26 projects and will run Jan 29 – Feb 1 as part of the Iffr Pro Days industry strand of the wider festival (Jan 25 – Feb 5).

Film-makers presenting projects at this year’s edition include Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro, whose 2015 feature Neon Bull [pictured] won prizes in Venice and Toronto. His next project is titled Centre Of The Earth.

Also participating in the event will be UK director Ben Rivers, whose credits include The Sky Trembles And The Earth Is Afraid And The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers. His latest project, After London, is being produced by Ben Wheatley’s Rook Films. Rivers previously won Rotterdam’s Tiger Award for his 2014 short film Things.

Nepalese director...

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Courtesy of Janus Film.On the occasion of a comprehensive retrospective the Tiff Bell Lightbox (October 28 - December 23), the need to summarize the thirty plus films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder seems not just daunting, but reductive. How to simplify someone who both evolved and contradicted himself? While typically turning out three films per year between 1966 and his death in 1982, the year 1974 seems like one of the German director’s most unified, at least in terms of one preoccupation: marriage. This particular year seems as possibly a mid-way between Fassbinder’s working out-the-kinks genre exercises (The American Soldier, Love Is Colder Than Death) and the later, lavish international co-productions based on esteemed literary works (Despair, Querelle). The diversity upon which the holy union is depicted can be detected if just judging by each of the three’s own source material; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a...

The prize offers editorial coverage during the winning film’s life-cycle.

The 15th edition of Tallinn’s Baltic Event Co-Production Market saw Screen International’s Best Pitch award being presented to Luxembourg-based producer Marion Guth of a_BAHN for UK artist filmmaker Vicki Thornton’s hybrid docu-fiction (N)Ostalgia.

a_BAHN currently has the UK’s Roastbeef Production and Norway’s Oya Films supporting the project about a remote Soviet ghost town on the edge of the Arctic Circle and its transformation into a tourist spectacle.

The Best Pitch Award - which is decided on by the co-production market’s participants and offers editorial coverage during the film’s life-cycle - was presented in the past to such projects as Finnish filmmaker Petri Kotwica’s suspense drama Rat King; Russian director Alexei German Jr.’s Under Electric Clouds; and the first pan-Baltic fiction co-production Seneca’s Day by Kristijonas Vildziunas.

Guth had also...

The Criterion Collection has announced its slate for January, 2017, with offerings from Howard Hawks (“His Girl Friday”), Rainer Werner Fassbender (“Fox and His Friends”), Jack Garfein (“Something Wild”), and Ousmane Sembène (“Black Girl”). Check out the covers for the films below as well as synopses provided by the Criterion Collection. For more information on the special features and technical specs of each of these films, visit the Criterion Collection website.

Read More: The Criterion Collection Announces December Titles: ‘Heart of a Dog,’ ‘The Exterminating Angel’ and More

“His Girl Friday” (Available January 10)

One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, “His Girl Friday” stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant), who dangles the chance for her to scoop...

It’s no real secret that we’re reaching a tipping point with home video. Streaming is proving a better and better option for the casual consumer every day, and even the cinephile dollar, which has rather successfully driven home video decisions for the past couple of years, has such services as Hulu, Fandor, Mubi, and – soon – FilmStruck vying for their attention. Physical distributors have subsequently doubled down on their most successful and acclaimed models. Criterion is going big on new-to-disc, big international titles with new restorations (Brighter Summer Day, Paris Belongs to Us, A Touch of Zen) and lavish new editions of American classics (The New World, Dr. Strangelove). Kino is investing in silent classics (Fantomas, The Phantom of the Opera, Diary of a Lost Girl) while diversifying to include more American studio titles. Masters of Cinema is going into deep specialty stuff with an Early Murnau box and Edvard Munch.

★★★★★ It's surely the sheer, unvarnished humanity on display in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's celebrated Ali: Fear Eats the Soul that's the film's greatest success. When the eponymous Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan immigrant in his late thirties, meets nervous 60-year-old Emmi (Brigitte Mira) one evening when she steps into a bar to get out of the rain, his friends challenge Ali to ask her to dance. Apparently taking them at face value, Ali does indeed dance with her, before walking her home and going to bed with her.

Of the Big Three new wavers of German cinema—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders-- who “came of age” as it were in the ‘70s, when I was in college and my own stake in the movies was budding into something more learned and substantial than what it was when I first discovered my love for them, Herzog has emerged as the director who most speaks to me now as an adult. I think that’s true at least in part because when his movies do speak to me it never feels like a one-sided conversation. I feel like I’m in there engaging in a push-pull with Herzog’s ability to seduce me (disarm me?) with his simplicity of approach, an ability which rarely seems satisfied to consider subjects from the less-perverse of two perspectives, and his tendency to rhapsodize and harangue and sidestep visual motifs...

The Barnes & Noble sale may have ended a couple of weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still buy some Criterion Collection releases for 50% off. Best Buy is currently having a 50% off sale on a number of Criterion releases, and Amazon has begun to match their prices.

Thanks to everyone for supporting our site by buying through our affiliate links.

A note on Amazon deals, for those curious: sometimes third party sellers will suddenly appear as the main purchasing option on a product page, even though Amazon will sell it directly from themselves for the sale price that we have listed. If the sale price doesn’t show up, click on the “new” options, and look for Amazon’s listing.

I’ll keep this list updated throughout the week, as new deals are found, and others expire. If you find something that’s wrong, a broken link or price difference,...