To view Harold and Maude click here.

Anyone who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s probably remembers their first viewing of Harold and Maude (1971). For me it came in the early days of cable TV when HBO and Cinemax started running it in the afternoons on Saturday and Sunday; after all, it was rated PG so that meant it could comfortably rub shoulders with other family-friendly fare like Barbarella (1968) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). So imagine my surprise as an impressionable nine-year-old kid seeing this hilarious black comedy with a welcome morbid streak, delivering one of the screen’s great love stories when Bud Cort isn’t spurting fake blood or setting himself on fire. [...MORE]

To view Revenge click here.

Revenge (1989) concerns a vengeance that cannot be contained by time. It floats through the centuries, traveling from 17th century Korea to 20th century Sakhalin Island, a much fought over spit of land squabbled over by Russia and Japan. A free-form mass of condensed hate emerges during this period, one which causes the death of a little girl and the mission of her doomed half-brother, who is conceived and raised only to avenge her murder. A major work of what became known as the Kazakh New Wave, Revenge is elusive and incantatory due in part to the script by the Korean-Russian poet Anatoli Kim that does not provide as much of a narrative as it does a striking collage of decay. Add to this the fact that director Ermek Shinarbaev was born in Soviet controlled Kazakhstan, but after Revenge was filmed the Soviet system collapsed and Kazakhstan became a sovereign state. The film reflects the rootlessness, uncertainty and bitterness of no longer having a place to call home. Restored in 2010 thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, it is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion (in Volume 2 of their World Cinema Project series), and is now streaming on FilmStruck.

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To view Harlan County, U.S.A. click here.

I tend to romanticize cinema verité filmmakers as rugged individualists who fearlessly shoot their footage under the most difficult of circumstances. Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman, Richard Leacock—I see them as verité cowboys. Also included in that club is Barbara Kopple, who directed Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) currently streaming on FilmStruck. Harlan County, U.S.A. won an Oscar as Best Documentary and was placed on the National Film Registry in 1990. And, if you want to talk fearless, Kopple’s experiences while making the film reveals she could hold her own as a verité cowboy.

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To view These Three click here.

In 1934, Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour debuted on Broadway. Starring Anne Revere, Katherine Emery and Robert Keith, the production was a huge critical and commercial success, running for almost two years. But Hellman’s story almost didn’t make it to the stage because of its then-controversial subject matter. Based on a true story in Scotland in the early 1800s (which had been suggested to Hellman by her partner Dashiell Hammett), The Children’s Hour recounts the struggles of two young teachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, as they try to open a small boarding school for girls. With a successful opening and their young students very eager to learn, the two teachers are proud of their accomplishments and what lies ahead for them and their students. But one of the students, the granddaughter of a wealthy, influential figure in the community, spreads a lie: Ms. Dobie and Ms. Wright are romantically involved with one another and flaunting their relationship in front of the students. While the rumors of the lesbian affair are false, Ms. Dobie reveals in confidence to Ms. Wright that she has developed feelings for her. Ms. Wright, who is in a relationship with local doctor Joseph Cardin, doesn’t take Ms. Dobie seriously. Wracked by guilt over her unrequited feelings for Ms. Wright and devastated by their school’s untimely closing and subsequent ouster from the community, Ms. Dobie commits suicide.

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To view Onibaba click here.

In feudal Japan, war is being waged between Imperial forces loyal to the reigning emperor and those who support the shogun. Samurai warriors wearing expensive armor and carrying powerful weapons fight side by side with peasant farmers conscripted into military service. Amid this bloody chaos women, children and the elderly suffer unimaginable horrors including rape, disease and widespread famine.

This is the grim backdrop of Kaneto Shindô’s Onibaba (1964), a bleak, sensual and bone-chilling horror film currently available on the Criterion Channel at FilmStruck. Some critics disagree over the classification of Onibaba but there is no escaping the film’s callous brutality amid its otherworldly beauty. Shindô’s nightmare-inducing vision, depicting the ravages of war on an isolated rural community, is rooted in Buddhist tales and Japanese folklore where terrifying demons haunt the living and possess the dead.

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To view Donkey Skin click here.

I always love seeing what happens when international directors make it big on the foreign-language film circuit and start getting pressured to shoot films in English. The results tend to fall into certain categories: divisive but with fan followings, as in the case of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) or Fellini’s Casanova (1976); interesting but almost immediately forgotten, as in Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch (1971) or Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights (2007); or, on rare occasions, a language-transcending masterpiece like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), something he didn’t quite manage to replicate again with commercial audiences. (Exactly where John Woo falls on that spectrum is still being sorted out.) [...MORE]

To view Losing Ground click here.

Losing Ground (1982) is a shape-shifting drama of an imploding marriage, insinuating itself into the diverging head-spaces of a pair of quarreling intellectuals. Shot on a shoestring budget in 1982 by City College of New York professor Kathleen Collins, it was one of the first features directed by a black woman since the 1920s. Distributors didn’t know what to do with a black art film, so after a few festival screenings and an airing on public television, it disappeared from view. Thanks to the efforts of Kathleen Collins’ daughter Nina and Milestone Films, this remarkable feature was finally released into theaters in 2015, and now it’s available on a lovely DVD and Blu-ray, and is streaming on FilmStruck.

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To view Eddie and the Cruisers click here.

In the past week or so, my illustrious peers at StreamLine have written with knowledge and insight about international classics like Mon Oncle (1958), rare foreign films such as Black Jesus (1968), and key films by notable auteurs Douglas Sirk and Richard Lester. But, not me. Today, I am writing about Eddie and the Cruisers (1983)—make that happily writing about Eddie and the Cruisers.

I didn’t realize how much I adored Hollywood movies from the 1980s until I taught a section on them in one of my classes last spring. I discovered that it is an era as distinct as the ones before and after, with specific characteristics and genres associated with it. And, it serves as a transition from the serious content and experimentation of the Film School Generation to the wholesale corporatization of Hollywood by the early 1990s. One of the characteristics that I like most about some of the films of this era is the interest in mythic protagonists who are larger than life, including action heroes, genre archetypes or self-aware characters. The title character from Eddie and the Cruisers, which is currently streaming on FilmStruck, falls into that category.

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To view the films available with the “Directed by William Wyler” theme, click here.

In reflecting on the history of Hollywood filmmaking, William Wyler undoubtedly remains one of the greatest and most influential directors of his time. Twelve Academy Award nominations for Best Director (the record for most nominations of a director), winning three times for Mrs. Miniver (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Ben-Hur (1959). He directed some of Hollywood’s finest talent, including a three-film collaboration with Bette Davis, in arguably her best work, earning her Academy Award nominations each time and a win for her performance in 1938’s Jezebel. Out of her working relationship with Wyler, Davis believed that she learned to become a better actress with him behind the camera. Her thoughts on working under Wyler’s direction were not unique; most of the actors who were fortunate enough to collaborate with him, especially those who did so multiple times, recalled the director as tough and professional, drawing the absolute best performances out of his cast. To achieve his idea of perfection, Wyler demanded multiple takes, which many of the actors, at least in the moment, felt excessive and borderline obsessive. But when the final cut was on the screen, they knew exactly why their director wanted more.

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To view The Captive Heart click here.

In the past, several of us here have been tipping our hats to the rich variety of films here at FilmStruck representing the underrated British filmmaker Basil Dearden, from his earliest days at Ealing Studios to his very last feature film (The Man Who Haunted Himself [1970]). Now it’s time to take a look at one of his most enduringly popular Ealing titles, a heart-tugging World War II film that’s held in tremendous esteem in its native country: The Captive Heart (1946).

One of the most high-profile films this summer was Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, so it’s been interesting to go back and see films that tie in to those real-life events from different angles than what we saw in that IMAX spectacle. In this case we have a fictional story set after the Dunkirk evacuation, with (future Sir) Michael Redgrave cast in one of his strongest roles of the decade as Karel Hasek, a Czech captain who’s been sent to a concentration camp. A chance opportunity allows him to pose as one of the thousands of British officers sent to POW camps in the aftermath of Dunkirk, but to pull off the ruse, he has to keep writing to the wife of the dead British captain he’s now impersonating. (Think of it as a much harsher version of what Don Draper had to go through to assume his identity in Mad Men  [2007-2015].) [...MORE]