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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 July will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

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Saturday, July 1 Changing Faces

What does a face tell us even when it’s disguised or disfigured? And what does it conceal? Guest curator Imogen Sara Smith, a critic and author of the book In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, assembles a series of films that revolve around enigmatic faces transformed by masks, scars, and surgery, including Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966).

Tuesday, July 4 Tuesday’s Short + Feature: Premature* and Ten*

Come hitch a ride with Norwegian director Gunhild Enger and the late Iranian master...

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:   Fan Build of the Day: It's not enough to just build a soapbox race car in the form of a Batmobile. One team went extra creative by doing a Lego Batmobile (via Fashionably Geek):   Supercut of the Day: Do too many movie characters utter the words "now that's what I'm talking about"? Here's supercut evidence indicating yes:   Filmmaker in Focus: The latest supercut of Wes Anderson movies highlights just the swears:   Vintage Image of the Day: Charlie Chaplin dressed as a woman in A Woman (but not playing a woman, as he did in 1914's A Busy Day). You can also see the whole film, which was released 100 years ago this week, on...

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Episode 25 of 52: In which Kate confronts Angela Lansbury onscreen and the Blacklist offscreen and manages to beat both.

Early on, I stated that sometimes Kate’s career seems charmed. I’d venture 1948 is one of those charmed years. As we saw last week, Song of Love failed--Kate’s first failure at MGM. Yet some strange circumstances and good luck landed Kate in State of the Union, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. I say “good luck” because in the fall of 1947, the storm that would become the Hollywood Blacklist was brewing, and Kate nearly got caught in the center of it.

Though not as cloyingly obvious as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - no light from the Lincoln Memorial in this film - State of the Union nevertheless delivers the classic Capra Corn package: nostalgia, patriotism, and a happy ending snatched from the jaws of tragedy at the last second.

After much media hoopla about "Vertigo" toppling "Citizen Kane" in its poll, Sight and Sound magazine have now released the full version of its once a decade 'Top 250 greatest films of all time' poll results via its website. The site also includes full on links showcasing Top Tens of the hundreds of film industry professionals who participated in the project.

For those who don't want to bother with the individual lists and to save you a bunch of clicking, below is a copy of the full 250 films that made the lists and how many votes they got to be considered for their positions:

1 - Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) [191 votes]

2 - Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) [157 votes]

3 - Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) [107 votes]

4 - La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939) [100 votes]

5 - Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927) [93 votes]

6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) [90 votes]

7 - The Searchers (Ford, 1956) [78 votes]

8 - Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) [68 votes]

9 - The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer,...

News broke today that spies for Britain’s MI5 have been puzzling over the exact date of Charlie Chaplin’s birth. Despite Chaplin’s own claim that he was born in London on April 16, 1889, no proof exists to back up that claim. When all is said and done, it may go down as a mystery for the ages, but there’s no doubt about what the legendary comic did with the (presumed) 88 years that followed until his death on Dec. 25, 1977. Below, we run down some of the highlights of Chaplin’s 86-film career, which spanned five decades.

Decked out as his now-famous character,...

Above: Street without End. Photo courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

In March the Criterion Collection released a quiet salvo of intervention into the sad state of home video distribution in the U.S. of films by Japanese studio master Mikio Naruse. After just a solitary release of the filmmaker (1960's masterpiece, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, also put out by Criterion) comes an Eclipse-label boxset of early 30s silent films by the director: Flunky, Work Hard! (1931), No Blood Relation (1932), Apart from You (1933), Every-Night Dreams (1933), and Street without End (1934). The set, Silent Naruse, instantly dramatically multiplies the number of titles available to American audiences—though sadly, as Dave Kehr recently implied in his review of the set for the New York Times, it isn't exactly a set of canonical masterpieces bound to invigorate and excite shocked discovery of a foreign master.

But then again, Naruse may be one of the...

This past May, the Criterion Collection e-mail newsletter announced that Janus Films had acquired the rights to distribute the works of Charlie Chaplin theatrically. We all celebrated in the notion that we would be able to hopefully see new clean prints of his incredible body of work, as well as the idea that these titles would inevitably make their way into the Criterion Collection.

Whether these titles would be available individually, in box sets (either in Criterion proper, or in the Eclipse Series), or some combination of the two, we still have not heard a definitive statement from Criterion. It is highly likely that we’ll get an announcement for either November or December, as many would love a complete Charlie Chaplin box set to find it’s way onto their holiday wish list.

Last month, Janus unveiled a poster image, as a placeholder on their website for an upcoming Charlie Chaplin sub-site,...

In the May e-mail newsletter from Criterion, they announced that Janus had acquired the rights to the entire Charlie Chaplin catalog, causing cinephiles everywhere to collectively hold their breath at the prospect of adding the film legend into the Collection.

On June 19th, the American Cinematheque will be screening The Gold Rush along with several other Chaplin short films, courtesy of Janus Films. This past week, we saw another piece of Chaplin news, in that the film A Thief Catcher was discovered in an Antique Sale. The film features an extended cameo from Chaplin. It is unknown at this point where the rights to this film lie, and it is doubtful that it is part of the licensing deal that Janus has with the Chaplin catalog. A Thief Catcher represents the 82 film in his official filmography, which spanned from 1914 through 1967.

To celebrate Janus’ upcoming screening run, and eventual release in the Criterion Collection,...

Director Peter Bogdanovich.

Interviewing Peter Bogdanovich for the April 2002 issue of Venice Magazine was a thrill for me. Like Francis Coppola, John Frankenheimer, and William Friedkin before him, Bogdanovich was one of those filmmakers whose one-sheets hung on my bedroom walls growing up. Plus the fact that he himself had a renowned career as a film historian and interviewer of his own childhood heroes, such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, and dozens of others, made our talk a real feast.

Not long after the article was printed, I received a letter with a New York City postmark. The note enclosed said simply: “Dear Alex, thanks for doing your homework so well, and thanks for the good vibes. All the best to you of love and luck, Peter Bogdanovich.”

Our chat remains one of my favorites during my 15 year tenure as a film writer. --A.S.

Peter Bogdanovich’S...

First the history, then the list:

In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.

Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.

The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.

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Bronson Bronson made my Top 25 of 2009 coming in at #7 and it's a film I find immensely watchable and rewatchable. While a few people disagreed with my "A" review, they all loved Tom Hardy in the lead role. Be sure to check this one out. A Serious Man The Coen brothers' latest film also made my Top 25 of 2009 coming in at #25 and I also just recently reviewed the Blu-ray edition. My opinion says buy it, but you may want to give my review a read if you are on the fence. The Time Traveler's Wife I actually don't mind this movie all that much. When it comes to schmaltzy melodramas some can be overbearing and some can actually work... for the most part this one falls into the latter category. This one drew some negativity for the rather creepy idea...

...this moment in Modern Times is near perfection. For those that don't know what's going on in the scene, he had the lyrics to the song he was supposed to sing on his cuffs, which you will notice fly off almost immediately. One thing interesting about the song Chaplin sings is that it is the first time you hear the Tramp's voice as he sings "Je cherche apres Titine" in French/Italian gibberish but his actions lead the audience to understand what he is supposed to be singing about entirely. If you are yet to familiarize yourself with Chaplin or are looking for a refresher course on April 16 TCM is set to run 10 Chaplin films in a row including Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), A Dog's Life (1918), A Day's Pleasure (1919), The Kid (1921), Pay Day (1922), A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), A King in New York (1957) and...