This April, Criterion is offering a thrillingly diverse slate of titles, encompassing nonfiction groundbreakers, contemporary art-house hits, and romantic dramas from the golden age. The revelatory sixties documentaries by verite trailblazer Robert Drew and his collaborators feature up-close-and-personal footage of President Kennedy, both on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office. German director Christian Petzold’s hugely successful and thrilling 2015 drama “Phoenix” transplants “Vertigo” to Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Howard Hawks’s brilliant Hollywood classic “Only Angels Have Wings,” starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, mixes comedy, aerial derring-do, and romantic passion. Whit Stillman returns to the collection with the clever and hilarious “Barcelona,” about Americans dating abroad in the eighties in that beautiful Spanish city; it’s the second part of a trilogy that also includes Stillman’s “Metropolitan” and “The Last Days of Disco,” and those three films are now available together in a brand-new box set. All this, plus a new stand-alone release of David Lean’s heartbreaking, iconic forties love story “Brief Encounter.”Barbara), perhaps the most important figure in contemporary German cinema.
April 12: Only Angels Have Wings
April 19: Barcelona
April 19: A Whit Stillman Trilogy: Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco
April 26: Brief Encounter
April 26: Phoenix
April 26: The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates
