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The Postman: Jour de Fête (1949)
To view Jour de fête click here. After a decade-long career as a music-hall performer, Jacques Tati transitioned to feature filmmaking witha comedy about a remarkably gullible postman. Before Tati...
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Let’s Go Slumming with Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976)
To view Ugly, Dirty and Bad click here. Of the major names in the film world who passed away in 2016, one that got overlooked a bit, at least among Americans, was Ettore Scola. A tricky guy to pin...
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A Modern Screwball Comedy: The In-Laws (’79)
To view The In-Lawsclick here. Weddings can be stressful. The planning of the actual event, along with facing the responsibilities surrounding a life-long commitment to another person, creates both an...
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“We’re Going to Win this Thing, Right?” The Art of Propaganda
To view The Lion Has Wings click here. Propaganda can be as benign as simply biasing information to promote one particular point of view, usually at the expense of another. In its more naked form, it...
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The Gentleman Jewel Thief: David Niven in Raffles (’39)
To view Raffles click here. Currently on Filmstruck, several of director Sam Wood’s films are spotlighted as part of the streaming service’s “Directed by Sam Wood” theme. Of those featured films, the...
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Jubilee (1979)
To view Jubilee click here. Jubilee (1979) by Derek Jarman, the experimental filmmaker and activist who also made music videos for bands such as The Sex Pistols, Throbbing Gristle, The Smiths, Bob...
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“I’m Not an Actor, I’m a Movie Star”
To view My Favorite Year click here. Peter O’Toole utters the infamous line above at a strategic moment in the comedy My Favorite Year (1982), which is currently streaming on FilmStruck. As part of...
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Summer Daze: Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)
To view Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday click here. The first screen appearance of Jacques Tati’s Hulot character is inside of a car: a clattering, jittering wreck making its way to a seaside hotel in...
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Black Jesus (1968) Isn’t What You Think It Is
To view Black Jesus click here. I’d honestly be shocked if more than a handful of people around here have heard of Black Jesus (1968) before today. Barely released in American theaters by one-shot...
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One for all, and all for one!
To view The Three Musketeers click here. To view The Four Musketeers click here. Director Richard Lester was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but he directed some of the best British films of the...
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The Art of the Transition: TV to Movies
To view Norma Rae click here. Not too long ago, television actors were of an entirely different class among professional actors. There were stage actors at the top, movie actors next tier down, then...
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The Greatest Early Douglas Sirk: Lured (1947)
To view Lured click here. Writer and director Douglas Sirk is mainly known today for his exquisite technicolor melodramas, such as Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written...
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Making the Leap: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Talkies
To view The Private Life of Don Juan click here. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. made his last movie in 1934. The Private Life of Don Juan was, quite accidentally, a fitting farewell to one of the first...
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On Dave Kehr and “Movies That Mattered”
When I was in the film program at Northwestern University in Chicago, my peers and I were required to read the works of Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Michel Foucault and even Freud, Jung and Marx. The...
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Black Sheep: Mon Oncle (1958)
To view Mon Oncle click here. “That would be the ideal film. I would like people to see Hulot less and less and to see other people or characters more and more.” – Jacques Tati With Mon Oncle (1958),...
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Free at Last: The Captive Heart (1946)
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...
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Crime & Passion: Pool of London (1951)
To view Pool of London click here. I, along with some of my fellow StreamLine colleagues, have been modestly building a case for the reassessment of Basil Dearden’s career during the past year by...
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Lost (and Found) in Translation: Anna Karina and A Woman is a Woman (1961)
To view A Woman is a Woman click here. Anna Karina was discovered in the classic sense, as in someone saw her at a café and offered her a modeling job. The kind of discovery people with dreams of...
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William Wyler: Constant Chameleon and The People’s Auteur
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...
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Dogtooth (2009)
To view Dogtooth click here. “Dogtooth has the surrealism of Buñuel, the scalpel of Haneke, the underground horror of a thriller without the splatter.” It’s hard to improve on that summation, made...
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