If you’ve ever wanted to make the change from blockbuster philistine to cinephile, now is your moment. Quarantine provides the perfect opportunity to beef up your watchlist (or finally catch-up on those films you’ve been pretending you saw in college).
If you’re a true beginner, we recommend starting with this more general and inviting list from Brian Tallerco at Vulture. It’s got all the greats, Belle de Jour, Breathless, Faces, Stalker, Tokyo Story, and more.
There’s also an awesome list from Slant Magazine that goes beyond the obvious 400 Blows – it even mentions one of my personal faves, History Is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937).
It’s encouraging that, about a year after its launch, the Criterion Channel remains with us. Less encouraging—from an end-of-days perspective—is that most of us now have an abundance of time to explore it. If self-isolating to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic has upsides, though, having time enough to poke around the varied corners and depths of the streaming service counts as one of them.
The selection of films on the Criterion Channel rotate quickly, making the films it highlights as “leaving at the end of the month” more vital than most other sites’ similar sections. In a sense, this makes the Criterion Collection’s streaming platform feel more alive than services that have more stable caches and their own in-house content. The new films that pop up at the beginning of the month—in March, the channel has included Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life and a number of German silents—are akin to special events. The shifting library of films functions like a vast,
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