More June Criterion Programming on FilmStruck

Just in time for Father’s Day, this double feature asks if a father and daughter can be too close. Yasujiro Ozu and Jacques Demy answer in wildly different registers: Ozu with a heartbreaking tale of devotion and loss, Demy with a visually dazzling riff on a Charles Perrault fairy tale.

This thrill-junkie pairing of art-action classics puts your boots in the bullring, matching Carroll Ballard’s short documentary portrait of the 1968 National Rodeo Finals in Oklahoma City with Francesco Rosi’s visceral bullfighting saga.

In this sun-dappled, beautifully acted ensemble drama, Olivier Assayas tells the story of a family through the objects it holds dear. Our edition includes interviews with the filmmaker and his cast (including Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling), as well as a documentary examining the film’s approach to art. For more Assayas on the Channel, check out the filmmaker’s introduction to our retrospective of Sacha Guitry, an underappreciated master of early French cinema.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

In our ongoing, Channel-exclusive series Observations on Film Art, film scholars David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith examine elements of cinematic style in the work of great auteurs. Our latest installment features Smith delving into Claude Chabrol’s La cérémonie and the ways in which it uses offscreen sound to reinforce its themes of class conflict and the protagonist’s sense of isolation. Previous subjects in this series include camera movement in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red, music in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, editing in Akira Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata, and landscapes in the work of Abbas Kiarostami.

London mods meet Parisian models in this week’s swinging sixties double bill. Photographer-turned-filmmaker William Klein’s irreverent narrative feature debut chronicles the travails of an American girl navigating the world of Parisian haute couture. Franc Roddam’s adaptation of the Who’s beloved rock opera captures the rebellious spirit of sixties London, with early performances by Sting and Ray Winstone.

The latest episode in our Adventures in Moviegoing series features the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies in conversation with Antonio Mondo, artistic director of the Rome Film Festival. Lahiri discusses cinematic experiences that have had a profound influence on her, sharing stories of how her mother introduced her to Bengali cinema and how she discovered that her maternal grandfather collaborated with Satyajit Ray. Alongside the conversation is a selection of her favorite films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1956), and Ray’s The Big City (1963). Previous contributors to the series include Jonathan Lethem, Mary Karr, Roger Corman, and Bill Hader.

This week, we’ve paired two documentary portraits of the immigrant experience in the United States: Nadav Kurtz’s 2012 short Paraíso and Louis Malle’s 1986 feature . . . And the Pursuit of Happiness. Set in Chicago, Kurtz’s award-winning film examines the daily risks taken by three skyscraper-window washers. Informed by the director’s own sense of being a new arrival in the U.S., Malle’s humane exploration takes a candid look at polyglot middle- and working-class communities across the country.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

Get ready to binge on twenty-four mesmerizing films by American avant-garde pioneer Hollis Frampton, whose formally radical works took the art of cinema into audacious and uncharted new territory. Highlights in this packed edition range from playful works such as Surface Tension and (nostalgia) to Frampton’s monumental, unfinished Magellan series, a calendar-based film cycle that was originally intended to be exhibited over the course of 371 days.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.

This week’s ominous double bill introduces viewers to two creepy couples. In British director Bryan Forbes’s 1964 supernatural thriller Seance on a Wet Afternoon, Kim Stanley plays an unbalanced medium who manipulates her husband (Richard Attenborough) into kidnapping a young girl to gain favor with the police. The 1969 true-crime drama The Honeymoon Killers, Leonard Kastle’s only foray into directing, serves as a gritty alternative to sexy, star-driven lovers-on-the-run classics like Bonnie and Clyde.

*Premiering on the Channel this month.