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No streaming service does a director retrospective like the Criterion Channel, and March offers two masters at opposite ends of exposure. On one side is Michael Mann, whose work from Thief through Collateral (minus The Keep) is given a spotlight; on the other is Alain Guiraudie, who (in advance of Misericordia opening on March 21) has five films arriving. (2001’s duet of That Old Dream That Moves and Sunshine for the Scoundrels have perhaps never streamed in the U.S. before.) Meanwhile, three noirs from Douglas Sirk are programmed alongside a Lee Chang-dong retrospective that features three new restorations.

Showcases will be staged for Dogme 95, Best Supporting Actor winners, and French Poetic Relaism. Welles’ The Trial gets a Criterion Edition alongside Demon Pond; Horace Ové’s newly restored Pressure makes a streaming premiere alongside spruced-up copies of Amadeus, Love Is the Devil, Port of Shadows, and Burning an Illusion, as...

Lucille Ball was not just known for "I Love Lucy" but also had a successful movie career with roles in several genres. "The Facts of Life" in 1960 earned Ball her first Golden Globe nomination, showcasing her ability to excel in roles beyond comedy. Films like "The Big Street," "Lured," and "The Dark Corner" allowed Ball to showcase her versatility as a comedic and dramatic actress.

Legendary actress Lucille Ball was responsible for the hit sitcom I Love Lucy but also had a great career as a movie actress. Throughout her career, Lucille Ball started her career in the late 1920s as a model but eventually got her first acting gig as an uncredited extra in the 1933 movie Roman Scandals. Up until her death in 1989, Ball was a celebrated comedian, actress, singer, dancer, and producer and is still remembered to this day. In fact, Desilu Productions, Lucille Ball's company, launched Star Trek and Mission: Impossible,...

February––particularly its third week––is all about romance. Accordingly the Criterion Channel got creative with their monthly programming and, in a few weeks, will debut Interdimensional Romance, a series of films wherein “passion conquers time and space, age and memory, and even death and the afterlife.” For every title you might’ve guessed there’s a wilder companion: Alan Rudolph’s Made In Heaven, Soderbergh’s remake, and Resnais’ Love Unto Death. Mostly I’m excited to revisit Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, a likely essential viewing before Megalopolis.

February also marks Black History Month, and Criterion’s series will include work by Shirley Clarke (also subject of a standalone series), Garrett Bradley, Cheryl Dunye, and Julie Dash, while movies by Sirk, Minnelli, King Vidor, and Lang play in “Gothic Noir.” Greta Gerwig gets an “Adventures in Moviegoing” and can be seen in Mary Bronstein’s Yeast,...

When one ponders the filmography of Douglas Sirk, one languishes in his successful meditation on stifled American lives in his 1950s soapy melodramas, the period with which he would eventually be most celebrated. It’s now unavoidable to speak of Sirk without mentioning the influence of his films from this decade on Todd Haynes or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But it’s a select number of titles, some of them remakes of earlier Hollywood melodramas themselves, which take up the bulk of the conversation. But for all the hyperbolic anguish of a Magnificent Obsession or the detrimental social issues of All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, Sirk also completed a handful of highly insightful, more psychologically attuned portraits, one of the best being 1955’s There’s Always Tomorrow (released the same year as Heaven and the little seen Rock Hudson period piece Captain Lightfoot).…...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Beastie Boys Story (Spike Jonze)

Even with its two-hour running time, the experience of watching Spike Jonze’s “live documentary” Beastie Boys Story has the feeling of a breezy, intimate, and perhaps too-short trip through the band’s history. Documenting a live event hosted in Brooklyn by surviving members Mike “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, the collaboration is a performed extension of their memoir, Beastie Boys Book. Reteaming with the group, Jonze directs this minimal two-man stage show about three guys who were lucky enough to cultivate and sustain a relationship as best friends for years. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: Apple...

There remains a dearth of unappreciated titles from German émigré Douglas Sirk’s lengthy filmography, which basically includes anything outside of his seminal Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s—films would influence the output of more contemporary international auteurs, from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Todd Haynes. Sirk is now best renowned for a quartet of iconic titles, including Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) and his final masterpiece, Imitation of Life (1959), itself a remake of an earlier 1934 Claudette Colbert film directed by John M. Stahl. While some of his English language noirs of the 1940s have been recuperated, such as the Lucille Ball headlined Lured (1947), his German period remains neglected, and perhaps more surprisingly, several other 1950s works which starred his plethora of regular players.…...

The European filmmaker directed a series of deceptively complex melodramas in the 1950s.“This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art” — Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk was born in Germany in 1900, and began his career in the early 1920s working in theater. In 1922, he directed his first production — an adaptation of Hermann Bossdorf’s Stationmaster Death, and from then on he became one of the most respected theater directors in Weimar Germany. Then, in 1934, he took a job as a film director at Ufa, the biggest studio in Germany at the time.

In 1941, Sirk left Germany and began working as a director in Hollywood. His early films, such as the WWII drama Hitler’s Madman (1942) have largely been forgotten. These early films varied in genre — he directed war films (Mystery Submarine), historical dramas (A Scandal in Paris), film...

Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk (December 23 – January 6) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York gathers a substantial number of the German auteur's classic films together with more obscure titles, some of which may deserve elevation into the higher ranks of his oeuvre. Already, in the past few years, There's Always Tomorrow (1956) has crept up the league table of Sirkian melodrama, mainly because it became easier to see and people recognized that it could stand comparison with All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), or nearly so.Some Sirk movies will, however, never be quite respectable, but in a way I love them for that. His period movies often dive headlong into Hollywood kitsch in a way that his once-despised weepies mainly avoid. There's a trio of movies playing with George Sanders which exemplify this in their different ways. Summer Storm (1944) was Hollywood's...

Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk (December 23 – January 6) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York gathers a substantial number of the German auteur's classic films together with more obscure titles, some of which may deserve elevation into the higher ranks of his oeuvre. Already, in the past few years, There's Always Tomorrow (1956) has crept up the league table of Sirkian melodrama, mainly because it became easier to see and people recognized that it could stand comparison with All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), or nearly so.Some Sirk movies will, however, never be quite respectable, but in a way I love them for that. His period movies often dive headlong into Hollywood kitsch in a way that his once-despised weepies mainly avoid. There's a trio of movies playing with George Sanders which exemplify this in their different ways. Summer Storm (1944) was Hollywood's...

The authors wish to acknowledge with gratitude the venues in which some version of this article previously appeared: Cinema Scope 24 (Fall, 2005), Trafic 62 (Summer, 2006), and the late and twice-lamented The New-York Ghost (Dec. 26, 2006).

In the Place of No Place

Every movie contains its alternates, phantom films conjured variously by excess or dearth: textures and movements that carry on their own play apart from the main line of the narrative, an obtruding performance or scene, an unexplained ellipsis or sudden character reversal, the chunk life of an object seizing the frame in an insert whose plastic beauty transcends its context.

Though the extremes of pure narrative economy (in which each detail exists purely for transmission of plot) or utter dispersal (in which no piece connects to any other) can never exist, we can tentatively use the concepts as limit-cases to differentiate films which make room for their phantoms (or, in the worst case,...

Today is the centennial of one Lucille Ball, born 100 years ago on this very day in New York. Her most famous incarnation was obviously "Lucy Ricardo" on television's beloved sitcom I Love Lucy. But until I Love Lucy and intermittently afterwards, she graced the silver screen, too.

The earliest entry in her filmography I've personally seen is the wonderful ensemble comedy Stage Door (1937) which is an absolute must-see for all actressexuals. No matter where you look on the screen in that film aboard a boarding house for Broadway dreamers, there's a screen goddess for your eyeballs: Hepburn, Ball, Rogers, Miller, Arden. Ball's last film was the ill fated musical Mame (1974) which is often ridiculed for its liberal use of ye olde 'smear the screen with vaseline' de-aging technique and for the quality -- or lack thereof -- in the singing. But even if Mame isn't anything like a classic, if...

Lucille Ball, Easy to Wed Lucille Ball Centennial on TCM: Stage Door, Best Foot Forward Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Du Barry Was A Lady (1943) A night club employee dreams he's Louis Xv, and the star he idolizes is his lady love. Dir: Roy Del Ruth. Cast: Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly. C-101 mins. 8:00 Am Panama Lady (1939) An oil man forces a cabaret singer to work for him after she tries to rob him. Dir: Jack Hively. Cast: Lucille Ball, Allan Lane, Steffi Duna. Bw-65 mins. 9:30 Am Without Love (1945) A World War II housing shortage inspires a widow to propose a marriage of convenience with an inventor. Dir: Harold S. Bucquet. Cast: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball. Bw-111 mins. 11:30 Am Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949) An inept secretary goes to work for a bogus real estate firm thinking it's for real.

Unlike Robert Taylor, who would have turned 100 today, or Ginger Rogers, whose centennial was last July 16, Lucille Ball is actually going to be remembered on the occasion of what would have been her 100th birthday this Saturday, August 6. Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" series continues with 14 Lucille Ball movies. All of them have been shown before on TCM. [Lucille Ball Movie Schedule.] As an actress working mostly at Rko (1935-42) and at MGM (1943-46), Lucille Ball has been a TCM regular, as the Time Warner library encompasses films made at those two studios. On Saturday, TCM will also show the United Artists' release Lured, a crime drama directed by Douglas Sirk, and co-starring George Sanders, and two comedies Ball made during her tenure at Columbia in the late '40s: Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949), co-starring William Holden, and The Fuller Brush Girl (1950), a reboot of The Fuller Brush Man (1948), which starred Red Skelton.

So there's this meme going around that Paolo tagged me with. So why not? The idea is that you list 15 directors, mainly off of the top of your head, that contributed to the way you experience and think about the movies. This is not a list of my all time favorites though half of the list would probably overlap. This is the list I come up with when I think briefly on the formative masterminds and/or the ones that have or had some sort of claim on my soul if you will. Three of them I could definitely live without at this point but I'm trying to be honest about the exercize.

Wise with Wood ~ West Side Story So here goes in no particular order... 

Robert Wise (1914-2005)

When I was a kid West Side Story and The Sound of Music were the most Epically ! Epic !!! movies to me.